Towards the end of March, I attended LibrePlanet 2013 in Boston,
MA. This was a weekend conference put on by the Free Software
Foundation that was all about free software and bringing together
members of the various free software communities. It was a
fantastic weekend! I attended a few talks, and a workshop/install
party, and learned a bunch.
Thursday evening, I met some people for dinner that I had only
ever know from IRC. Little did I realize that this was going to be the case all weekend!
Friday morning I explored Cambridge, Harvard’s campus, and MIT’s
campus. Then after a quick lunch, I took the T downtown to work
out of the Free Software Foundation’s office. While it was kind of
strange to putz away on my day job work from a place that would
frown on what I do for my day job, it went very well, and I met
even more people in person that I had only known from IRC.
Friday evening there was a meet-and-greet at the FSF office, where
once again, meeting IRC people in the flesh was the order of the
day.
Saturday began the "actual" conference, and I walked to the
Harvard Science Center with much enthusiasm. After a breakfast and
some quick conversations, it was off to the talks and workshops!
One of the talks that I attended was on the recently passed MA
Right-to-Repair law. The talk was generally about the free
software that may (or may not be) in cars, and how recent
legislation is driving more people towards free software.
Another talk that I attended was on IceCat and LibreJS. IceCat is
a GNU project that is a web browser based off of Mozilla Firefox
with all the Mozilla branded stripped out, and added privacy
features. LibreJS is a Firefox/Icecat/Iceweasel plugin that allows
users to avoid the “javascript trap” of running non-free
javascript on their machines. These two projects are near and dear
to me as I hack on them, but it was very nice to meet my
collaborators in person.
I also attended a talk by Stefano Zacchiroli, the current Debian
Project Leader, about what the Debian Project is doing to become a
Free Software Foundation endorsed distro. This talk, and some of
the discussions afterwards, were the catalyst that made me change
from my beloved Arch GNU/Linux to Debian GNU/Linux on my main
machines.
Then of course there were the Free Software Awards, preceeded by a
talk from rms (Richard M. Stallman, Founder of the GNU Project and
FSF). The talk was what I expected, and the awards were given to
deserving projects.
I also went to the workshop/install party for Replicant and
Coreboot. Replicant is an Android fork that has of the non-free
parts taken out, as well as all the Google specific parts. The
end result is a cell phone that runs on (mostly) free
software. There are still some non-free firmware bits, but that is
almost unavoidable. The second part of this install party
pertained to Coreboot. Coreboot is a BIOS replacement that is
entirely free software. While my machine is not able to run
Coreboot, it was pretty cool to talk with one of the developers of
Coreboot and learn more about how BIOS’s actually work.
In the end, LibrePlanet 2013 was a great experience. I learned a lot about various free software projects and free
software in general. I will definitely be going back next year.
