>> SATISH BABU: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.  My name is Satish Babu.  This is workshop 8, this is about the free and open software, in the context of defending the digital freedoms of the future.  This is a breakout session as per the schedule.  We will look at the number of people in the hall before we actually break.  If it is not so many, we will prefer to continue in a similar manner with the three topics.  We have three topics, if we ‑‑ we will look at it shortly. 

      I would like my panelists to introduce themselves in about 30 seconds.  Sarah, can I start with you? 

>> SARAH KIDEN: My name is Sarah Kiden.  We're out of Africa working on the broadband performance and Internet measurements, getting different studies from several countries, providing it to the public and trying to analyze it.  I wear other hats, I am the secretary of the Africana. 

>> GLENN MCKNIGHT: My name is Glenn McKnight, I'm the complement to Sarah.  I have the at large organization.  My pedigree in open source is twofold, one on hardware that we work on with humanitarian open source solutions.  And involved well over 10 years for ICT certifications, and practicals whether Apache, postscript and Linux certification.  This is.

>> NICOLAS ECHANIZ:  My name is Nico Echaniz.  We work with open software community networks. 

>> MISHI CHOUDHARY: My name is Mishi Choudhary we work with the free open projects.  Open SSL, W, you name it, we represented them.  I am also the president of SFLI.IN, an organization based out of New Delhi in India. 

>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: My name is Olivier Crepin‑Leblond.  I have been an Internet user since 1988.  I have collected hats, among those are the chair of the Internet organization, the counterpart of Glenn.  And also chair of the U.K. chapter of the Internet society.  Also chair of the dynamic coalition on cor tenet values.  And board members of the European Internet ‑‑ and the Internet IGF.  I will leave all the others at home. 

>> SATISH BABU: My name is Satish Babu.  I have been working with open source since the late 90s.  I'm the founding director for the international sector for free and open software.  That is an organization in India looking at free software.  Me and another person, Judy, Judith Okite, who is not here today.  We have been running these open source workshops for four or five years.  Judy could not make it today.  But we have panelists ‑‑ a great panel here today.  I'm glad about that.  That's enough about me.  Thank you. 

>> PANAYOTIS ANTONIADIS:  My name is Panayotis Antoniadis.  I create physical and digital bridges, between the community networks and free software.  Free as in freedom.  Between different common initiatives, like the community networks, in terms of academia and civil society.  And for this, we work on two European practicals, one is meaning together in Greek and the other net common. 

>> MAUREEN: I am assisting here as a remote moderator. 

>> SATISH BABU: Thanks very much.  I will briefly outline the sequence of the workshop.  We will have Mishi introduce the topics.  An then break into three groups to discuss the three aspects we identified.  That is the relevance of free and open source software in terms of tools and technologies.  Methodologies, processes, best practices.  And policy.  So we will ‑‑ after the presentation on the topic, we will split into three groups.  There are three leaders for it this three groups identified, are Glenn, Sarah and Olivier.  The discusses ‑‑ discussions will be about 30 minutes and then we will come back and the group leaders will present the summary of the discussions and then open discussion and you can raise any topic or comment at that point and then closing comments by Sarah.  If Judy and another speaker who is to join us remotely Kuubuwa.  We're not sure if they will be able to do that.  Both are from Africa.  Depending on connectivity, we hope to get them to speak.  This is the outline of the session.  I request Mishi to talk to us. 

>> MISHI CHOUDHARY: I hope everybody knows this is free as in freedom, not free as in free beer.  As Satish said, he's been doing it five years.  It is never a time it is not relevant. 

      The social condition in which we can all be connected to everyone else everywhere with rich technical connections that can allow us to produce services for one another.  If it is a tool in social development, it is supposed to be providing us one indivisible opportunity for everyone connected to it.  As a tool of economic development, it is to allow people with little capital equipment, but plenty of ingenuity to build from zero.  There are all the promises, the Internet to educate every brain on earth.  To empower those left behind, to give a voice to the voiceless, alleviate injustices.  Basically a panacea.  What happened to it?  We build a net an Internet we do not want.  It seems so that we are stuck. 

      We wanted a net that increased human potential by increasing human knowledge and creativity.  Instead now we have a net that is dominated by the collection of behavior and it is used to stimulate artificial wants and artificial hatreds.  That process is currently going around the world. 

      I do not know and I would leave it for you to decide whether Internet has actually failed its promise.  But the problem be itself too large for a solution?  It is not just some arbitrary force, the net that is at fault.  You can blame something that Internet is and is all about it.  But it is basically about us, the human race, which has built it.  And the idea about using free software is I do think the ability and belief that free and open source software gives us a chance to rescue it. 

      I will ask you to challenge yourself, because I think you can.  I don't think that one can defend premiums in the digital future without free software.  Mostly because everybody now understands that if your devices, which include this device, this divide, your routers, any other device you rely on to get accessibility, if you do not have control over your own devices and if those devices are controlled by other people, then you won't have any digital freedoms in the 21st Century.  When I started working and some of the panelists here, free and open source software was geeky, esoteric, somewhat cool.

      I think now, it is not only essential, but the only thing that is standing between us and freedom.  Economically, we all know in professor Bangla's word, that private property and free markets are not the only way to organize our society efficiently.  The commons where the free and open source software comes from offers the most coherent alternative today. 

      Why I said that devices are the ones that will tell us whether we are free in the 21st Century or not is just by some example.  If a government chooses a policeman in every street corner in the province and required people to put spyware on their phones, forces them to download malware on their phones, there will not be freedom.

      I don't need to spell out the country I'm referring to, but the city and country where this is happening we all know.  Right to control the software that runs in your computers thereby becomes necessary for your own political liberty.  In the beginning of the free and open source software movement, people did not understand why we said that.  People thought opening the cord was the important.  But also important is the freedom and ability to control your own computers and not let them control you.  Without free and open source software, people assume that services also must be provided in a centralized way.  That is why you see the proper power these days is concentrated in a few players.  If all the e‑mail, for example, is handled by only two companies or one of the two companies, then there is only two places that government has to go to read everybody's e‑mail.  However, if everybody ran free and open source software to run e‑mail servers on single board computers, ras Perry pie, in their house, mass surveillance is much harder.  It doesn't scale at the same level.

      What I believe and I think what everybody who works in the FOSS community talks and thinks about is the more we empower citizens to run their own services and provide them to one another, the more we prevent governments from using the concentration of technology to create concentration of power. 

      The truth is, if these devices don't belong to you, you have no control over the software that runs them.  And all services are provided centrally, there is no freedom you can even think about or demand.  That's why everything which open source offers is not just about making better software, but also constructing a different society where we all can actually go back to the failed promise of the net and think about doing it a little differently. 

      That is why I believe that the workshop right now and I would urge you all to have that as an underlying theme of the three breakout discussions which we would have.  Talk about everything, what it has done to education.  What advertising has done to human mind.  What social media has done to how we perceive things.  How politics has been impacted.  What are the good and the bad things, which the machine learning of the neural networks is going to bring to us in our society.  How all of that can actually be used to get where we want it to be.  And not to stay where we currently are. 

>> SATISH BABU: Thank you, Mishi.  Olivier has a question about the one‑minute intervention and one more one‑minute intervention after that. 

>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thank you, Satish.  Olivier Crepin‑Leblond speaking.  The first ‑‑ actually the second implementation of TCIP for small computers that started to get the Internet to go out there instead of run by big organizations but having individuals and people in developing computers is KA9Q.  It was the radio handle of a gentleman nailed Phil Carn.  Many first Internet nodes in developing countries, running on a PC run KA9Q.  How many people have heard of Apache?  A few more people.  That came up a lot later.  That that is a web service software.  That used to power up to 70% of the world's web servers.  It is in decline, because there are other web server software now that are in use.  It still is the most prevailing web service software out there.  It is open source.  So that is the significance of open source to the Internet.  Thank you. 

>> SARAH KIDEN: Thank you Olivier, Satish for the transcript.  That is what Mishi mentioned, the whole issue of algorithms, mission learning, artificial intelligence and what that brings as a challenge to the open source community.  The open source community could defend our freedoms by reviewing auditing, modifying the source code.  Now, when you talk about the neural network, the engine that drives these algorithms are actually a combination of code and data.  It is data that primes the financial and continues to ‑‑ primes the engine, and continues to improve it over time.  This is not something we can review.

      For example, there is a racial bias in some of the algorithms used.  There is a claim that there is a racial bias.  There is no tweak or no button to tweak.  What will the community audit?  How will you ensure that we can uphold our freedoms?  There are neutralities being brought in.  At this point, I ask Sarah to tell us more.

we will break into three groups.  We are looking at comparing things, access tools, the (?) Technologies, anything that can enable the safe use of the Internet.  You will sit there. 

      Group number two with Glenn will talk about methodologies and processes in dealing with content generation.  So they'll sit somewhere here.  Looking at languages, view the content on mobile, desktop.  Group three will talk about policy initiatives that enable people to connect using open source technologies.  That is Olivier over here.  We will discuss for 35 minutes, then we will get a key highlight, about five minutes from each group. 

So group one is over there. Panayotis.  Tools and technologies.

      Group number two with Glenn.  That is methodologies, policies, best practices.  ‑‑ processes.  Best practices.  I'm sorry. 

      Group number three is over here, that is policies with Olivier here. 

 

(Breakout discussions)

 

>> SATISH BABU: Can we get back to the room, please. 

Please be seated. 

Can I ask the group leader, the first group which is Panayotis, to give us a summary of the discussions.  Each group leader has five minutes to present a summary. 

>> Panayotis Antoniadis: Hello.  We were a complementary group working around ideas of free software and tools in general.  So there were two people from Belarus that run a nonprofit organization that tries to activate and inform and train people in using open source software.  They do this both by presenting it as something better, more comfortable, easy to use, but about the freedoms of the future, et cetera.  They follow a fundamental approach.  They don't want to scare people.  This is what Sarah told us, from Uganda, they have a university that is today more than 90% of use of free software.  Exactly one of the lessons learned from this process, we don't have to be radical and say to people throw away your Microsoft and Apple, but build this knowledge and critical mass step‑by‑step.  It was a very nice example.  For example, that they focus on the (?) to be confident with this technology, for people afterwards to have people close by to help them. 

      We also liked having the group somebody that declared that the uses Windows, and it is from the NGO, it is positive to set technologies, but they don't have the skills.  And what they can do.  This is also what the organization from Belarus, it is called violence stead.  It tries to bring together NGO that use free tools with digital activists that create this complementary relationships.

      Then I talked about my project, that we try actually to try to focus on the idea of freedom, not as a binary, but something that is more or less free.  For example, there are some that are easier or more difficult to host and customize.  We want to combine this self‑hosted software with the networks, Nico will say more about them.  Combining them with the free network is creating net diversity.  We need net diversity as we need biodiversity. 

      The tools, because they can be rooted in urban spaces, because the network and software live together, it creates the right conditions.  There are two European project, one is net common, working on the network and working on the software, focusing on the customization and empowering people to use all the free software to find their own local hybrid spaces. 

      Another dimension is learning, another open source software, it is the pen key.  It tries to create the learning webs.  We will hear a lot about training the trainers.  So there is this tool.  It is new in terms of development that tries to facilitate this type of learning webs. 

      Another very important dimension is the language.  I am an advocate for the organic Internet, as opposed to the defined data that Facebook and other define.  It is important to create analogies.  As we have the five, we have modified data.  We should find ways to build data in a more grassroots, organic way. 

      Yes, and I forgot Elisa that came at the end, it is an example of good area.  It is in good with the public services in the community. 

      Very simply put, how we have this, and talk down the commercial software with the data and citizens.  But through free software that can be transparent and enable participation at all levels. 

>> SATISH BABU: Thank you very much for the summary.  We now move on to the second group.  Glenn will talk to us about the methodologies. 

>> GLENN MCKNIGHT: Thank you.  Thanks to all the people that are still staying with us.  We had an interesting dialogue.  At the very end, we said what is our purpose again?  Or methodology.  We had to circle.  I will talk more about our case studies in a second.

      I wanted to emphasize many of the same things that was just mentioned resonate with us as well.  And we kept going back to the fact, if we look in methodologies that actually will increase the possibility of adoption, we needed to look at the fact that FOSS has huge benefits.  The question is how do you market the benefits?  How do you convince people that there is something intrinsically valuable for this adoption? 

      One of the things we spoke about is investing in your local community.  The fact that when you spend money in FOSS solutions, it is actually staying in the community, building capacity in the community.  It is very patriotic in many ways.  It is not sending money to foreign I.T. companies, but it is basically keeping ‑‑ the person who is working on your computer that is doing this specialized programming is somebody who is perhaps teaching your children soccer in your local community.  It is a person who is maybe doing a small little business down the street where you buy your vegetables.

      It is really a pride of place in that we, as our best practice as a methodology, we need to realize that we need to give decision‑makers the tools to make decisions to overcome those inherent barriers that pop up.  They automatically say where's the support?  You know, you're not a big company.  If you ever read your EULA, you don't own that software.  They don't support it, really.  But it is a natural thing that they criticize us saying you're just small potatoes. 

      So I think we need to look at ways of overcoming that resistance.  I shared with everybody our experience over 10 years ago when Eva Libbovich and I ran an organization.  We were looking at open source software across the board.  The bureaucrats leaned back and said hell will freeze over before we adopt open source.  We knew we had a challenge. 

      We looked at best practices in different countries.  What Nico shared with us, who is the Libra router.  He's based in Argentina.  This is an extremely important solution.  It is a device that is used in mesh networking.  It has many other features that you don't get in your TV link, your ubiquity or other device, microtech.  I am have interested in seeing this. 

      It is going into the next phase of prototype by January.  Price points are comparable.  They're struggling with the license.  They don't know what ‑‑ but it is an evolution that one should bear in mind.  I shared with the group my project with IEEE.  We looked at humanitarian challenges.  What software ‑‑ we want to make all the solutions ‑‑ the best practices open source.  But they never really had an open source license before.  So we actually worked with a group called we pair solar.

      It is a solar suitcase with solar panel, walkie‑talkies, flashlights, it is for maternity wards.  Laura satchel is an obstetrician.  They would go and give the suitcase to the nurses and doctors in maternity wards.  It had a direct impact on the of lists of the woman.  It was an open source network that we worked on, we talked about open MOCO, none of us knew what happened with that.  Open mesh network Nico shared on that.

      Serge said in the Congo, he's working with small business, and getting computers from the oil company out of France and working on a grassroots kind of model, where the methodology is taking the computers, putting open source software on it, working with the community.  They identified different sectors.  Agricultural sector, Serge was saying, is one of the big things.  And we also talked with Regina, back there from Cuba.  And, you know, what do you do when you have a country which has been suffered an embargo for so many years that you know, what do they have?  They have clever techniques that are called sneaker ware.

      Pirated software is common.  It is good to have countries adopt open use software.  And then you have rampant pirated software.

>> Satish Babu: Thank you, Glenn.  We move to the third group.  Olivier Crepin‑Leblond. 

>> Satish Babu: Satish Babu speaking.  Most of the discussions churned around what governments are doing in our respective parts of the world.  There are two sides of this argument.  There are the governments that actively promote free software, and see that free software is important.  There are others that are a bit more cold towards the promotion of free and open source software.  Of course, because they might have stakes in the game as far as the industry is concerned. 

      Often you have countries that point in a certain direction until they receive lobbying of large corporations for the pushing that the market will decide at the end of the day.  We had several examples, digiconnect, the next gen Internet, which is very much pro open source software.  Others were asking for Europe to create the next unicorn.  We need big European software companies out there.  That doesn't work well with open source.  So we have this whole thing of open source costs that cannot be recouped when a commercial organization can undercut the software costs by actually providing free software as part of their big offering.

      We are talking about the likes of Microsoft, Google, the big global corporations that are able to basically offer a lot of services for free, because they're making money elsewhere. 

      Some countries develop their own monopolies to close off their market.  We have seen that in Russia, China, as well, where they develop their own software companies, services, so on.  Governments see the economic benefit for software.  They are sometimes lukewarm about open source because they can't see anything for their own industry.

      They see the potential to be able to control commercial software more than to control open source software.  Especially when it comes down to local implantation of the corporate organization.  Let's say Microsoft being present in Switzerland, for example.

The local government sees it that it is more ‑‑ it is easier to control whatever Microsoft is doing in Switzerland, because Microsoft wants to be there.

For example.

      We have example of Munich pushing for open source.  They're teaching the use of proprietary software.  The city rolled back the policy because of the public outcry.  Sorry.  Rolled back their policy due to commercial installation of large proprietary software.  Originally, they were promoted open source.  But that large company decided they were going to put some headquarters there and that would provide jobs and employment and maybe it was a good idea for the city at that point to roll back and say, hey, we'll use your software instead.  We spoke about hardware, perhaps as open source.  And with the tourist router being the good prospect. 

      We had a case in India for free laptops with proprietary software that were given over to schools and so on.  That was actually rolled back.  This is a case where we started with proprietary equipment that then got push back from the public and from the public outcry on that.  So that got specific officials in the government to look at this and to reverse their views, and therefore reverse the policy. 

      In Geneva, most people are pro open source and software.  The tools for the schools in Geneva, which are not run by the town itself, from the search engine to the other tools, they're all in the cloud.  They're all provided by single commercial provider.  That's of course they're free when provided in the cloud.  That is when we saw the individuals might be pro open source.  The reality is it is not being implemented because nonopen source is free.  Whilst open source is not, in many cases, which is really change.  Open source has to recoup costs.  The big companies don't have to.  The largest barrier is in some cases ‑‑ and still the case now.  It is the graphical GUI tools.  I will be quick.

      We found out in India, in fact, there was a lot of open source software being distributed in schools.  The teachers ended up being programmers and developing tools for the easy use for students. 

      We looked at commercial contract with big multinational corporations that include technical support.  That was seen as something that we don't have a problem with any more these days because the very large corporations don't do that much technical support, except when striking specific case scenarios.  Then we move to data.

      The money today is not made in software.  The money is made in data.  This is where there is no legislation or regulation.  There will be some with the general data protection regulations, but that is another chapter.  So far, the data is seen as where the money will be made.  The software is not that important any more.  We're hoping that this whole battle about open source will ease in some way.

      There was discussion about artificial intelligence and promoting the open data licenses.  And we then also had some discussion from GitHub policy with the work that took place over in the U.S., where there was a battle between Congress and the Senate with the sort of next level of software updates for the Department of Defense that originally did not have anything that was limiting the use of open source.  The official thing is we have to push for open source by default, but then it gave rise to some kind of compromise that the defendant of defense needed to follow general U.S. regulations of soap source, which is 20% of the code should be open source, the rest of it is can be proprietary.

      No legislation, so far, as I said, regarding data.  We will probably be discussing this next year.  Open data is probably one of the big topics then.  Ideally, we should make sure that everyone should be able to choose their own storage.  Where they want their stuff stored.  Information stored.  With local storage for data.  And licensing system for the cloud providers to point to the data without having control of it themselves.  It gets difficult to know where the data is.  We have seen that.  Free services are more difficult to address.  There is a potential for shaping a fairway to use computing resources.

      Instead of making money on the data, the companies could make the money on the spare cycles and computers.  It is an open case scenario.  We have to push for the diversity of services, rather than the localization that we often see. 

>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Olivier Crepin‑Leblond for the transcript.  Before we open up the discussion, I would like to request Nico to speak to us if are five minutes.

>> NICOLAS ECHANIZ: Okay.  What I have been mostly worried about or trying to work with in the past month is the concept of the right to cocreate the Internet.  Whenever I am listening to this kind of thing, I have come back to the same.  What is it?  What is this right to cocreate?  We're always discussing about access in this sort of forum.  And access is a concept that is looking at the users as consumers. 

      So you can access the service, you will download data.  You will watch video, et cetera.  You are not an ear in the network.  You are a consumer.  This is something that is so embedded, that for example, in network neutrality discussions, we never discuss the worst discrimination that already exists everywhere, which is the bandwidth discrimination or upload and download bandwidth. 

      So my concern is that even if we create more peer‑to‑peer software, even if we do more work for people to adopt locally hosted services in the devices, raspberry pie, they will have connectivity problems if to provide affected services and contents locally.

      So I think this is something we need to push for, hard.  Like I relate this ‑‑ I don't know if you are aware of the debate regarding food security and food sovereignty.  These are two concepts that are speaking about something similar.  It is people's food.  But one is top‑down.  Food security is top‑down.  We need to feed everyone.  Food sovereignty is speaking about empowerment.  Is speaking about our rights to self‑determination as to what food we're producing.  What food we're consuming, and how we do this. 

      And related to this is where I think the right to access is similar to the food security issue.  And the cocreate the Internet is related to the food sovereignty issue.  And I think that we grassroots organizations in the civil society need to push for this concept.  Because otherwise, most of what the working poor is disabled at another layer.  We can have success at many layers, but then the network layer is not enabling and we are not really able to do what we tend to do.  That is what I wanted to share.

 

>> SATISH BABU: Thank you, Nico.  That is an interesting iteration as well.  Now we're opening the floor for open discussions.  Any comment?  Or point we missed out.  Please introduce yourself as you speak.  Any questions?  Yes, please. 

>> QUESTION: Alfred Waller from Europe.  I would like to say, data sovereignty, data security, if you will. 

      I think the issue in the food, it is obviously an economic phenomena.  If you have food security, you don't have food sovereignty, you are flooded from the food outside, subsidized that kills the production.  In the issue of data, it is not the problem with producing, it is the problem of finding.  You have Google and Facebook, that narrow the access the data that is available.  You as an individual in whatever country you do have some data that is available, you are sharing it.  It sort of gets drowned in, you know, via these kind of filters.  I think it is more important to not just look at the creation side but the discovery side.  Make sure the tools that are available has to have a certain amount of features to enable discovery.  You should have the option, for instance, to say, you know, maybe restrict my search to whatever is in ‑‑ you know, 20 kilometers of where I live to support local artists.

you can generalize this to everything.  Concerts, music, art, goods, services, food, everything.  It only takes the fact that embed that feature.  The feature doesn't exist, you will never be able to use it.  It is about the feature that enable this discover are included in the tools we use to access. 

>> SATISH BABU: Thank you.  One, two, three, this way.

>> PANELIST: Thanks for the question.  It is important.  I think Nico, they offer a natural way to discover things as you mention.  Because some of them ‑‑ not some of them, all of them are physically constrained.  So you could have a natural way to find things that lead also digital services in the area.  In my case, I'm an advocate of bringing these to the ground.  I think it is very important, it is very interesting to create it face‑to‑face.  Exactly because they're addressing people that live close.  They have the chance the people that use and manage the network can meet together and see their faces. 

>> PANELIST: Yeah, thank you for the question.  I want to share with you on the data issue, Dr. Andrew Clemens, a university Toronto professor wrote a paper on national sovereignty issue.  Because all the e‑mail in Canada goes through Chicago.  So if your Canadian e‑mail goes through Chicago, it now becomes subject to the NSA, the national security act.  So from a national sovereignty point of view, that pisses us off, right, because you can end up having to be subject to U.S. law.  Which again, that is pretty annoying, from a small country like ourselves, we have to be subject to an NSA.  That is a whole issue we have to address.  And you guys in Europe are headed to the game on the right to be forgotten in the GTPR.  We have a long way to go on that one.

      I'm quite concerned about, you know, these data farms and very large U.S. corporations, they're in another game.  You know, Amazon service and whatnot.  And they're making money on your data.  Again, that is something countries have to start thinking about, seriously.

>> OLIVIER CREPIN‑LEBLOND: Thank you, Glenn.  Nico, please. 

>> NICOLAS ECHANIZ: I wanted to mention that I see the problem of Internet creation in layers.  Now you have this physical and infrastructure layer, the logical layer and content layer.  We should do work on all the labors and there are hindrances in every layer and we need to remove the barriers in every layer.  It makes sense for it to be more organic.  You have could Google software that will tell you about the music ‑‑ the musician that lives right next‑door, but it would really make much more sense if that a peer‑to‑peer network.  You just know the musician is next‑door through a network that connects you directly to him and through a logic that is deciding this peer‑to‑peer and Google doesn't know about it, doesn't need to know. 

>> SATISH BABU: Thank you, Nico.  Satish, for the record.  We have time for one more question, maybe.  Yes, please.

>> QUESTION: I just ‑‑ I arrived late, so sorry if this has been brought up.  Speaking of the DDPR, I like being ahead of the game in many things, there are also fairly worrying developments going on right now.  The copyright reform, which is currently in process.  And especially article 13, which is about requiring basically all Internet platforms, the definition is very vague.  As it stands, all Internet platforms that store large amounts of user uploaded contents.  As it stands, this will cover co‑chairing platforms, such as GitHub.  This means all the code anyone uploads to the services would be subject to automatic prescreening and filtering.

      So any reflections on this, possibly.

>> Thank you, could you please introduce yourself.

>> QUESTION: I'm (?) and I'm with a group advocating. 

>> SATISH BABU: Would you like to respond? 

>> PANELIST: I'm abbey with GitHub.  It is top of concern for us.  We're concerned about the language.  We have joined open ‑‑ I'm blanking on the name.  Open ...

No share code EU, which is open forum Europe and the free software foundations in Europe's effort to get together and impact the copyright source.  There is a white paper.  GitHub has a quote in there.  A bunch of other companies as well.  Look at that, learn more about it.  But I think I'll just take the opportunity to maybe reiterate the point I made in the group session.  More and more, we see a lack of full understanding by policymakers about the scope of the words they're using when they are trying to address issues related to technology.  So even though, you know, the traditional notions of copyright are probably aimed towards music and videos, that sort of thing, the language is sweeping up code.  So this just shows the need to really help people understand how technology works, and open source software is essential and shouldn't be compromised ‑‑ this targeted effort on other forms of copyright.

>> SATISH BABU: Thank you for that.  As I request Sarah to wind up the meeting, I would like to say that we're going to take a group photo of everybody in the room, just after Sarah finishes.  Over to you, Sarah. 

>> SARAH KIDEN: Thank you everyone.  I would like to say thank you to everyone, that stayed to the end.  I think we learned a lot from the discussions.  This discussion continues.  We cannot go back and say now we'll be open source.  The discussion continues.  You can continue to help each other so we all adopt open source technologies.  Thank you very much. 

(Applause)

 

(Session concluded 1:23 p.m. CET)