Software Freedom Day
1:33 pm September 30th, 2009A couple weeks ago I attended Boston’s Software Freedom Day event — a day-long meetup/conference for local free software users, developers, and supporters.
I’ve been using and thinking about and talking about and installing and writing about free software for a few years now, but this was my first experience meeting up with a group of people who I could already assume subscribed to the free software philosophy, understood the motivations behind it, and used free software in their daily lives. Which was awesome! The feeling of community in the room was quite cool.
The event was set up so that pretty much anyone who had something to say could give a short talk at some point; there were also pre-planned longer speeches and a keynote by RMS (which was pretty ranty and non-technical, and included a characterization of using “their” as a gender-neutral third-person singular as “absolutely disgusting” — I’ve been losing some respect for RMS lately). Most of the speeches were super-interesting; there was a talk about antifeatures, with some pretty egregious examples from a variety of fields, and I learned about OpenLibrary — psyched to have an API to access book info without being forced to use Amazon’s API!
There were also a heartening number of women there &mdash about 20% of the audience, and a few of the speakers (only about 1.5% of F/OSS participants in general are women — way fewer than even the small number of female programmers in general). I got to talk to FSF membership coordinator Deb Richardson about some of the interesting initiatives being taken to increase women’s participation and comfort in F/OSS, which I definitely hope to get involved in!
