Keynote: Lock it Open: What FLOSS Taught Us about Being Our Best Selves - Cory Doctorow, Journalist, Activist, Blogger & Science Fiction Author

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Presented at LinuxCon 2016 by

Cory Doctorow

There are many FLOSS licenses, but one stands out: the GPL, which has the curious property of "locking code open," so that we are protected from our own human frailty, desperation, and poor judgment. Your FLOSS company will probably fail (because most companies fail, and they all fail eventually), but no matter how dark things get, your CEO will never be able to put the GPLed code back in the bottle. Economists call this a "Ulysses pact," and it's a bargain you make with yourself when you are strong to protect yourself when you're weak -- it's why we throw out the Oreos when we go on a diet, and why we draft constitutions when we found new nations. The web is at a turning point. There is a concerted effort underway to make a new, decentralized web that undoes the concentration of the past 20 years. If this succeeds, we must learn from the GPL and devise instruments that allow our principled present-day selves to protect the world from the people we might someday become.