Alex Jordan answers some questions from SeaGL staff:

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

My name’s Alex Jordan, but I generally introduce myself to people as “AJ”. I’m a senior in high school. My first experience with free software was when I installed Ubuntu when I was 10, but I only started getting seriously involved in the free software community about three years ago. I like Emacs, Arch Linux, and zsh, and I’m almost entirely self-hosted.

Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

So here’s the idea: when you’re working with free software, you can open up a terminal and type “python3” (for example) and get a working Python 3 environment. We all take that for granted, but in the proprietary world, there’s no equivalent. In my talk, I address the reason for this and the ramifications for the future of our community. Think about it: people teach programming with our stuff. So why are so many developers drawn to proprietary platforms?

Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

This will be my second visit to SeaGL. My visit last year was nothing short of wonderful. SeaGL has such a strong focus on the freedom of free software (as opposed to “open source”) which makes it a really unique environment to be in.