Sumana Harihareswara

As a teenager arriving at university in the fall of 1998, Sumana Harihareswara was about to meet the free software movement and dive in. Free software taught her engineering principles and political truths. It snuck myths into her head that she'd have to take several years to scrub out. And it gave her lenses, models for understanding the world, that she would reuse in her work, relationships, and activism. For the first time, Harihareswara sums up this two-decade diff into what she wishes she could tell her younger self.

I'll discuss aspects of our behavior and jargon that stop or slow down some new users and contributors in free software, so that in outreach efforts, we can be better at bridging the gap. These include git's terrible UI, our in-person conference structures, and widespread scorn of and dismissiveness towards team sports, Top 40 music, patriotism, religion, small talk, and Microsoft Windows. In getting rid of unnecessary barriers, we need to watch out for disrespectful oversimplification, so I'll outline ways you can know if one of our weirdnesses is necessary. And I'll talk about how to mitigate the effects of an inessential weirdness in your outreach efforts.

The GPL restricts freedom to redistribute, for some developers, to preserve and expand freedom for all users, including developers. This is a tradeoff we free software aficionados accept. What other tradeoffs around freedom are we accepting, when it comes to user experience (including developer experience), codes of conduct, and our financial structures? When we compare those policies and assumptions to licenses like the GPL, we learn unexpected lessons about our attitudes towards governance, and we consider where our decisions place us on the liberty-to-hospitality spectrum.

When we compare community anti-harassment policies to licenses like the GPL, we learn unexpected lessons about our attitudes towards governance. In this talk, I discuss the similarities and differences between codes of conduct and a set of agreements that our communities are more used to: “copyleft” or other restrictive software licenses. I also draw out some ways that the kinds of acts and artifacts that these policies cover reveal different attitudes towards contracts and governance.