News
Free Software Foundation staffer Georgia Young will speak at SeaGL this
weekend:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
My name is Georgia Young. I am the program manager for the Free Software
Foundation and live in the Boston area. I joined the FSF in January as
outreach and communication coordinator, had previously worked on
LibrePlanet in 2014, and took on my new role this past summer. My job
includes event management, writing about free software issues,
connecting with the free software community, and fundraising to sustain
the FSF’s work. I’m also a musician.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
This is my first free software talk, and I wanted to introduce people to
a great free software program that is licensed under the GNU General
Public License, a free software license written by Richard Stallman and
administered by the Free Software Foundation.
I discovered Scribus around 2009, when I was in graduate school. Much of
my professional experience is in the publishing industry, where nonfree
programs reign. I wasn’t consciously thinking about Free as in Freedom
when I chose Scribus, but the idea of software that was effective but
not created by huge corporations like Adobe or Microsoft inherently
appealed to me.
Twelve years after its initial release, I feel like Scribus deserves
more attention than it gets. My aim is to get people interested in using
this program for their own documents, and to get them thinking about
freely licensed fonts, and other free software programs that can be used
in concert with Scribus.
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?
It’s my first visit to SeaGL, to Seattle, to the Pacific Northwest in general!
I’m looking forward to seeing a few familiar faces, meeting lots of new
people, and hearing other great ideas arising from the free software
community.
Q: If attending your talk inspires others to present at a conference, what
can they do?
A: Talk to me or visit the Free Software Foundation table in the exhibit hall
for more information about submitting a proposal to LibrePlanet, the FSF’s
annual free software conference in the Boston area, March 19-20, 2016!
Speaker Gareth J. Greenaway talks SaltStack and ChatOps:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
Absolutely! I’m Gareth J. Greenaway, I’m a semi-native Southern Californian.
Semi-native because while I’ve lived in SoCal most of my life I was born in
Auckland, New Zealand. I’ve been a member of the free & open source community
for just over 20 years. The two major contributions I’ve been able to bring
to the FOSS community are being one of the co-founders and organizers of the
Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) and the 2+ years I’ve been actively
contributing to the SaltStack project.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
I’m going to be talking about SaltStack and how it can fit into the ChatOps
movement. Chatops, like DevOps, is a very subject term and means something
different to everyone. I’m a fan and a believer of the definition that
originally came out of Github, putting the tools in the middle of the
conversation. Because of the way SaltStack was designed, it’s extremely
flexible and extendable. It lends itself to fit nicely into this paradigm.
The talk will, hopefully, illustrate a lot of these concepts to the attendees.
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 year attending and speaking at SeaGL. As an event
organizer it’s always a unique experience attending events that you’re not
responsible for. It’s definitely a good experience being able to watch the
organizers run around like crazy making sure everything goes off how it show,
especially knowing what it takes to do so. Knowing all this, I was impressed
with SeaGL as a show ad the organizers. It made my nostalgic for the past
SCALE events and I’m excited to see how SeaGL continues to grow in the coming
years.
SeaGL speaker and staff member Deb Nicholson talks software patents:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
My name is Deb Nicholson and I work at the Open Invention Network
OIN. OIN is a defensive patent pool for
lots of free and open source projects, including Linux, GNU, Android and a ton
of other tools. I also serve as the Community Manager for
GNU MediaGoblin, a decentralized media-hosting
project, and as a board member at OpenHatch https://openhatch.org/, which we
like to call “Free Software’s Welcoming Committee.”
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
Well, we’ve seen some really big changes to the patent landscape in a short
amount of time. In the US, we went from almost no software patents to an
exponential increase in patenting in computing which lead to a huge uptick in
software patent aggression. For a while, it seemed like nothing could be done
but there’s been lots of progress; both in community awareness and
understanding what can be done. Finally, the Supreme Court addressed the scope
of patentability twice last year and I’ll talk about how that is affecting
cases around the country.
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?
I’ve been to every single SeaGL since I’m also one of the organizers, which
is a little weird since I live in Boston. I blame the rest of the amazing
SeaGL team and the ridiculously good Seattle coffee. So I’m probably a little
biased, but I think we put on a great conference for beginners, hobbyists,
activists and long-time free software users.
Q: Aren’t legal issues sort of boring for the layperson?
A: Not at all! Software patent cases involve actual people trying to change
the way the law treats our community and our industry. Some of those people
are heroic, others are craven bullies, and some are just trying to make the
best of a bad situation. Toss in ridiculous piles of money and there’s easily
enough drama for a TV show.
SeaGL talks with speaker Corey Quinn:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
Sure! I head up the DevOps group at FutureAdvisor in San Francisco. I’m fairly
active in the open source community personally – I helped run the freenode IRC
network for over five years, I was one of the (very) early developers behind
SaltStack, and I’ve made it a point to build my team around the ethos of
giving back to the larger community. To be more direct, a job requirement here
is to contribute in some way to the larger community, be it through
contributions to open source software, writing blog posts, or tricking people
like you into letting people like me speak at community-oriented conferences
against your better judgement.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
I’ve seen a lot of talks over the years that are fantastic technical
resources, but the audience wasn’t particularly engaged, either due to a lack
of understanding of the material, or a lack of ability for the presenter to
paint a picture of what their technology actually did. To talk about a complex
subject like git almost requires that the talk be entertaining first, and
educational second. So let’s just say that my talk is likely to be…
nontraditional.
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?
I was at SeaGL last year, and it was absolutely one of the best conferences
I’ve had the privilege of attending. People were extremely welcoming, the
talks were interesting, and it was just a first class event all around.
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.
SeaGL speaker Paige Peterson talks privacy, security, and
freedom:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
Paige is an advocate for open standards, user privacy and decentralized
technologies. After receiving a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art
practicing experimental tech art with a strong focus on complexity in
nature, her interests were drawn towards decentralization as a concept
that would bring reliability and sustainability into existing
human-designed systems. Her job with mesh networking startup, Open
Garden and becoming an organiser of the San Francisco bitcoin meetup put
her at the center of the newest technologies with decentralization at
their core. In early 2014, Paige met Scotland-based company MaidSafe,
who are building a peer-to-peer Internet using the very principles of
natural systems which she became attracted to many years prior, and she
has been working on various communication efforts for them since.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
For almost a decade, a small but growing team based in Scotland has been
researching and developing what it would take to build an Internet with
privacy, security and freedom for all its users. It was observed that
servers were the primary points of vulnerability in the existing
Internet and that while there is no one central point of control, they
not only allow but incentivize major points of centralization and
dependency. By drawing inspiration from the resiliency of systems found
in nature, MaidSafe has built an open source peer-to-peer network and
developer framework with inherent properties of privacy, security and
freedom for users and their data. I’ll be talking about how this system
works and what to expect as a user, developer and node operator.
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?
I have not been but am very much looking forward to experiencing the
free/libre culture from this part of the world. I attended LibrePlanet
earlier this year and had a great time bonding with folks who value
freedom in software.
SeaGL asks Jeremy Lindblom a few questions:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
Hi, I’m Jeremy, or @jeremeamia on Twitter and GitHub. I’m a software engineer
and have been doing PHP/LAMP and web development for about 10 years. I
recently started working at McGraw-Hill Education, but I was working for
Amazon Web Services prior to that, which is what brought my family and me up to
the Seattle area. I’m a big fan of open source and have contributed to a
number of projects in the PHP community. I’m passionate about the PHP
community and have been running the Seattle PHP User Group for a few years and
also the Pacific Northwest PHP conference, which debuted last month. I am also
a frequent speaker at PHP conferences around the country.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
My presentation is called “20 Years if PHP”, and I want to talk about PHP and
how it has evolved over time. This year is PHP’s 20th birthday, and the PHP
community is stronger than ever. In the latter part of last decade, PHP
dwindled, but there were some very important events that led to a renewal of
PHP, both in the language and community. I want to talk about all of that and
showcase the cool features, tools, and practices that are a part of modern
PHP.
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 first time at SeaGL. I’ve been trying to get involved in more
events outside of just PHP-themed ones. This event sounds awesome, and I’m
excited to attend.
Q: How can people get involved in the PHP community in the Seattle area?
A: The Seattle PHP User Group meets monthly to socialize and host technical
presentations about PHP topics and related technology and tools. Come hang out
with us. You can find us on Meetup.com (https://www.meetup.com/seaphp/) and on
Twitter (@seaphp).
Benjamin Mako Hill shares some thoughts with SeaGL:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication
at the University of Washington and a faculty affiliate at the Berkman
Center for Internet and Society and an affiliate at the Institute for
Quantitative Social Science — both at Harvard.
By night, I’ve been a hacker and contributor to a bunch of different
free software communities over more than a decade. Most visibly, I’ve
contributed to the Debian and Ubuntu projects. I’ve written several
best-selling technical books, I’m a member of the Free Software
Foundation board of directors, and I’m an advisor to the Wikimedia
Foundation.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
The free software movement has twin goals: promoting access to
software through users’ freedom to share, and empowering users by
giving them control over their technology. For all our movement’s
success, we have been much more successful at the former. I will use
data from free software and from several related movements to explain
why promoting empowerment is systematically more difficult than
promoting access and I will explore how our movement might address the
second challenge in the future.
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?
I attended last year’s conference and I had a fantastic time. I love
that it’s a real community driven conference. Back when I first
started playing in the free software world in the nineties, GNU/Linux
conferences (like the Atlanta Linux Showcase) were places for excited
newcomers to get together with other likeminded folks. Between then
and now, most have become big corporate affairs. SeaGL reminds me of
why I loved going to conferences in the first place.
Andrew Kane will speak about contributing to projects:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
I’m not very interesting in my own right. My personal background is both
boring and depressing.
I became interested in computing early on, and had a Commodore 64 when I
was a small. I heard about Linux in 1994 from a person I worked with, but
didn’t have and couldn’t afford a computer at that time. After
hitchhiking to Washington in 1995 and living in the woods for a year, I
moved to Seattle because there were no computers where I was. Also I
wanted to participate in this Internet thing I’d heard so much about
(later I realized I’d already been on it via GOPHER, but that’s another
story).
I first installed Slackware in 1996 and have run GNU/Linux on all my
computers since. About this time I learned about the GNU Project and the
idea of Free Software and I wanted to be part of this new way of doing
things.
More recently I worked with and helped to destroy Free Geek Seattle, and
am working on another project to help make such an organization live
again. I decided that another layer of abstraction was needed. During
this time I switched to using Debian for all my computers, and am trying to
help that project.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
The talk is about how newcomers can contribute to Libre projects. Since
the talk is itself Free Software and I’m a Debian booster, the talk will
use itself and Debian as example projects. There will be some discussion
of technical topics (how to submit patches, etc.) and some discussion of
interpersonal topics (since ‘politics’ is a dirty word) including but
not limited to the thickness of skins as a hidden requirement for
participation in some projects.
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?
I have attended the previous two SeaGL events as a table anchor for Free
Geek Seattle (and incidentally for GSLUG also). I’m very impressed with
the growth of the event and the quality of the information presented
there. I’ve also enjoyed interacting with the organizers. Good times all
round thus far.
Q: This is an optional question. If you have a question you’d like to ask
yourself to answer, put it here and then answer it:
The question: “Does it matter who you are?”
The answer: For the purposes of this presentation, not at all. If this
talk is only accessible to people like me, then it will be a complete
failure. If it cannot be successfully repeated by someone who is not me
nor similar to me, then it will be mostly a failure.
Free Software cannot work without radical inclusion. It must be open
to all or it isn’t really open at all.
Free Software projects are collaborative projects. Without collaboration
there is no reason to publish your code. When people work together they
must be able to communicate honestly and openly. This means that
barriers to communication must be addressed and overcome.
Garrett Honeycutt talks with SeaGL about Test Driven Development:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
I’ve been hacking *nix based systems and spreading the word about free
software for over fifteen years. Previously I’ve worked on such things
as building core internet infrastructure at Speakeasy, creating mobile
media distribution platforms and as a professional services engineer
with Puppet Labs. At my company, LearnPuppet.com,
I consult and teach people around the world about automation with Puppet and
DevOps processes. At Transforia, I am co-founder
and CTO where we lease fully managed, secure, GNU/Linux based laptops
and desktops. Besides submitting patches, I give back to the community
by speaking at user groups, conferences and co-organizing
FOSSETCON in Orlando.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
Developers have long been using Test Driven Development (TDD) for
building applications. Now that SysAdmins are treating their
infrastructure as software, we must look to best practices in
development. This talk will explain how to implement TDD and gain
confidence through testing for system administrators.
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?
I had the good fortune to speak last year with the talk “Intro to Puppet
and Why Configuration Management is Important”. I enjoy the atmosphere
of the conference taking place inside a school and the exceptionally
high quality of the other speakers.