Full notes and links: http://lifeofaudrey.com/2016/06/23/third-wave.html In thirty years, free/open source software has gone from being an ideological challenger fighting the mainstream software industry, to being a central part of nearly all software currently released. How did we get here? Does that mean the FOSS movement won? We’ll step through the historical context of the formation of the Free Software Foundation, which created the GNU General Public License that all other open source licenses grew from, to the ways that the aims of the Open Source Initiative shifted that movement into an explicitly for-profit corporate direction, and how these directives have led to certain crises around the use of unpaid labor, the failure of the “meritocracy”, and critical infrastructure being underfunded. The talk will conclude by talking about the most promising aspects of the emerging third wave movement, including efforts to build software in the open in a way that supports all contributors, and to address long-standing sources of social homogeneity and inequality.

1. Creating a Third Wave
of Free/Open
Source Software
Audrey Eschright / Open Source Bridge 2016

3. First wave: 1985

4. By Gah4 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38604047

6. Four Software Freedoms
• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose
(freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it
does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the
source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your
neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to
others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole
community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to
the source code is a precondition for this.

7. GPL
The license agreements of most software companies try to
keep users at the mercy of those companies. By contrast,
our General Public License is intended to guarantee your
freedom to share and change free software--to make sure
the software is free for all its users. The General Public
License applies to the Free Software Foundation’s software
and to any other program whose authors commit to using it.
You can use it for your programs, too.

8. Meanwhile…
By Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F077948-0006 / Engelbert Reineke / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://
commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5471855

9. Second wave: 1998

11. 1. Free Redistribution
2. Source Code
3. Derived Works
4. Integrity of The Author's Source Code
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
7. Distribution of License
8. License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software
10. License Must Be Technology-Neutral
The Open Source Definition

15. We build our industry
on open source…
technically.

16. Now: 2016

17. computers are everywhere!
billions of people have
access to the internet!

18. we’re feeling the pain
of earlier choices

19. sustainability

20. burnout

21. “meritocracy” just isn’t

22. the diversity problem

23. We need to be paid

24. So how do we
build software?

25. Active, intersectional
inclusion

26. Fair compensation
of labor

27. Healthy people,
healthy communities

28. Effective business
structures

29. Participation
agreements

30. Licensing, maybe?

31. Does the source code
even matter?

32. What will we call this
next wave?
I have no idea.
I know we can build it
together.

33. Thank you!
• contact me: audrey@lifeofaudrey.com
• read The Recompiler: recompilermag.com