Amanda Brock

The FOSS Communities have been debating how to manage security, sustainability and funding of FOSS for years but today a global and political lens is being shone on them.

Commercial debates over licensing and revenue models around FOSS based businesses peak in 2021 with the Elastic transition away from FOSS to an SSPL licence and the fallout and debate from this.

The European Commission's Digital Decade is clear that its basis will be a FOSS infrastructure and Europe has been passing laws and regulations to support its open first approach, as it seeks digital and data sovereignty.

The inevitable success and adoption of FOSS in our national infrastructures and recent security issues have the minds of Governments focused on FOSSS, to the extent that the White House plans a meeting to discuss FOSS security in January having issued an ordinance recommending the use of Software Bill of Materials.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has shared a 5 year software plan saying "software defines the world of the future, open source determines the future of software," as it plans global collaboration to improve its open source activities.

In the UK, hosting COP26 shone a spotlight on energy and the UK Energy Sector Digitalisation Task force which has already suggested Open Data, will consider the use of open source software by default in its recommendations to Government in January. Whilst the NHS' data strategy issued in 2021 requires that open source software should be the default in healthcare.

This talk will stitch together these global threads, laws and policies to take a holistic view on the insurmountable success of FOSS in the last decade and the inevitable challenges being faced as a consequence of that success and the very nature and heart of FOSS in the Commons.

Sharing some policy suggestions and thoughts this talk will consider whether it may be time to shift the landscape. Is 2022 the year to recognise the need for FOSS to be characterised as a public good and to secure the interaction not only of business but of the State in funding and securing FOSS in the long term? How can this ensure sustainability of FOSS through its maintenance and sustainability of the planet by elevating the role of FOSS within environmental sustainability?

With a deep consideration of recent economic and policy discussions this keynote talk with pull many strands together to start 2022 with a focus on FOSS, funding and a secure and sustainable future.

An overview of how businesses have developed models using open source software and how these have evolved in the last decade around the platform economy.

Amanda has spent considerable time researching this area and the economics of this for a book chapter and the open core wars as part of the response to allegations of strip mining by Cloud Companies.

An insight into the whys and how of the Open Core Wars.

Are the FSF's 4 Freedoms and the OSI's Open Source Definition out of date in 2020 and should be replaced.

Affirmative position: OSD/FSD is now irrelevant

1. First Affirmative Constructive (1AC) = 7 minutes a. Cross-examination of First Affirmative by Second Negative = 3 minutes
2. First Negative Constructive (1NC) = 7 minutes a. Cross-examination of First Negative by First Affirmative = 3 minutes
3. Second Affirmative Constructive (2AC) = 7 minutes a. Cross-examination of Second Affirmative by First Negative = 3 minutes
4. Second Negative Constructive (2NC) = 7 minutes a. Cross-examination of Second Negative by Second Affirmative = 3 minutes
5. First Negative Rebuttal (1NR) = 3 minutes
6. First Affirmative Rebuttal (1AR) = 3 minutes
7. Second Negative Rebuttal (2NR) = 3 minutes
8. Second Affirmative Rebuttal (2AR) = 3 minutes

Legal issues are at the heart of FOSS, and lawyers play an important role in the creation and adoption of free software. Around the world, legal practice is constrained and governed by different rules outlining who lawyers can represent, how they can interact with their clients, the nature of advice they can give, how they deal with conflicts of interest and what information they must keep confidential. This panel will talk about how legal ethics plays out specifically for free software.

Copyleft licences work by conditioning distribution of a work's binary on providing access to relevant source code. Under the European Computer Programs directive, once a copy of a computer program has been placed in circulation in the EEA by or with the consent of the copyright holder, the copyright holder can no longer control circulation ("exhaustion of rights"). Is the condition to provide source an attempt to control circulation, and is the exhaustion principle problematic for the GPL and other copyleft licences? Commentators have suggested that this is fatal to copyleft, but we argue these analyses are overblown.

Safety Critical Devices.

We rely on software more and more for critical functionality in our society. Medical Devices and Cars are two areas where our lives literally depend on the safety of this software. As more exploits are demonstrated on cars, pacemakers and insulin pumps that show them to be vulnerable, the industries are evaluating their technology and some are advocating for free software as partial solution to these problems. This panel will discuss free software in Safety critical devices. including the implications of different licenses, issues regarding warranties and indemnities and liability issues for manufacturers The panel will discuss automotive and medical devices and consider regulatory issues.

Most open source projects have chosen to build versions of their code for a variety of platforms. This helps the advance of software freedom, since people are frequently exposed to the reality for the first time when they try open source software on a platform where it's otherwise absent.

But in the case of platforms gated by app stores, the common wisdom appears to be to disrupt access to open source software by exercising the copyright holders' right to object to conflicts with the license they have used.

Is this the right approach? Should we be waiving our objections to app store terms so that software freedom is promoted on them? Or is it vital to object on principle in every case?

This "talk" will be introductory comments from Simon Phipps and Amanda Brock followed by an open discussion.