Jon "maddog" Hall

The world is being wracked by stresses we could not even _imagine_ a year ago. Global pandemic, massive economic downturns, social unrest, political unrest, yet _Debian goes on_. This could be the time for Free Software and its communities to come into the limelight, with _employee-owned_, _socially-conscious_ companies practicing _sustainable business models._ Debian, a world-wide organization, could be the key to this happening. The audience for this would be Debian community members, Business, Government, Non-profits, or unemployed, who may get inspiration for starting their own organizations, or helping others to start them.

Project Caua is a project to allow qualified students to earn money to help them go to university. Starting with seniors in high school Project Caua teaches them how to create their own business supplying support to customers on a part-time basis. While students are interested in the service business, they would also like to have "products" that they could sell to their customers, then offer services on them. We have identified several "solutions" that can be created with an inexpensive Single Board Computer like the Raspberry Pi or Caninos Loucos Labrador plus some common hardware. Already identified are multi-media home entertainment center plus first connection to the Internet using Kodi. Another product would be a Point-of-Sale and ERP system using ODOO. Creating an easy to administer server using Freedombox. There are more than 400,000 software products on the Internet, so we are looking both for more ideas for products plus people that might help to make these things closer to distribution.

There is a not-so-definite link between Free Software and the pianola, also known as a "player piano". maddog has been collecting automated musical instruments for years, and has noticed, and documented, this relationship. This talk will be illustrated with some of maddog's instruments and will also supply sound clips from his collection. This is for a general audience, hopefully seeing links between patents, copyrights and other IP issues.