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Home / News / Blog
Why You Should Speak At & Attend LinuxConf Australia
byBradley M. Kühn
on August 4, 2016
Monday 1 February 2016 was the longest day of my life, but I don't mean
that in the canonical, figurative, and usually negative sense of that
phrase. I mean it literally and in a positive way. I woke up that morning
Amsterdam in the Netherlands — having the previous night taken a
evening train from Brussels, Belgium with my friend and colleague Tom
Marble. Tom and I had just spent the weekend
at FOSDEM 2016, where he and
I co-organize
the Legal
and Policy Issues DevRoom (with our mutual friends and colleagues,
Richard Fontana and Karen M. Sandler).
Tom and I headed over to AMS airport around 07:00 local time, found some
breakfast and boarded our flights. Tom was homeward bound, but I was about
to do the crazy thing that he'd done in the reverse a few years before: I
was speaking at FOSDEM and LinuxConf Australia, back-to-back. In fact,
because the airline fares were substantially cheaper this way, I didn't
book a “round the world” flight, but instead two back-to-back
round-trip tickets. I boarded the plane at AMS at 09:30 that morning
(local time), and landed in my (new-ish) hometown of Portland, OR as
afternoon there began. I went home, spent the afternoon with my wife,
sister-in-law, and dogs, washed my laundry, and repacked my bag. My flight
to LAX departed at 19:36 local time, a little after US/Pacific sunset.
I crossed the Pacific ocean, the international dateline, left a day on
deposit to pickup on the way back, and after 24 hours of almost literally
chasing the sun, I arrived in Melbourne on the morning of Wednesday 3
February, road a shuttle bus, dumped my bags at my room, and arrived just
in time for
the Wednesday
afternoon tea break at LinuxConf Australia 2016 in Geelong.
Nearly everyone who heard this story — or saw me while it was
happening — asked me the same question: Why are you doing
this?
. The five to six people packed in with me in my coach section on
the LAX→SYD leg are probably still asking this, because I had an
allergic attack of some sort most of the flight and couldn't stop coughing,
even with two full bags of Fisherman's Friends over those 15 hours.
But, nevertheless, I gave a simple answer to everyone who questioned my
crazy BRU→AMS→PDX→LAX→SYD→MEL itinerary: FOSDEM and LinuxConf AU are
two of the most important events on the Free Software annual calendar.
There's just no question. I'll write more about FOSDEM sometime soon, but
the rest of this post, I'll dedicate to LinuxConf Australia (LCA).
One of my biggest regrets in Free Software is that I was once — and
you'll be surprised by this given my story above — a bit squeamish
about the nearly 15 hour flight to get from the USA to Australia, and
therefore I didn't attend LCA until 2015. LCA began way back in 1999.
Keep in mind that, other than FOSDEM, no major, community-organized events
have survived from that time. But LCA has the culture and mindset of the
kinds of conferences that our community made in 1999.
LCA is community organized and operated. Groups of volunteers
each year plan the event. In the tradition of science fiction conventions
and other hobbyist activities, groups bid for the conference and offer
their time and effort to make the conference a success. They have an
annual hand-off meeting to be sure the organization lessons are passed from
one committee to the next, and some volunteers even repeat their
involvement year after year. For organizational structure, they rely on a
non-profit organization, Linux
Australia, to assist with handling the funds and providing
infrastructure (just like Conservancy does for our member projects and
their conferences!).
I believe fully that the success of software freedom and GNU/Linux in
particular has not primarily come from companies that allow developers to
spend some of their time coding on upstream. Sure, many Free Software
projects couldn't survive without that component, but what really makes
GNU/Linux, or any Free Software project, truly special is that there's a
community of users and developers who use, improve, and learn about the
software because it excites and interests them. LCA is one of the few
events specifically designed to invite that sort of person to attend, and
it has for almost an entire generation stood in stark contrast the highly
corporate, for-profit/trade-assocation events that slowly took over our community in the
years that followed LCA's founding. (Remember all those years of
LinuxWorld
Expo? I wasn't even sad when IDG stopped running it!)
Speaking particularly of earlier this year, LCA 2016 in Geelong, Australia
was a particular profound event for me. LCA is one of the few events that
accepts my rather political talks about what's happening in Open Source and
Free Software, so I gave a talk
on Friday
5 February 2016 entitled Copyleft For the Next Decade: A
Comprehensive Plan, which was recorded, so you can watch it, or read the LWN article about it. I do
warn everyone that the jokes did not go over well (mine never do), so after I
finished, I was feeling a bit down that I hadn't made the talk entertaining
enough. But then, something amazing happened: people started walking up to
me and telling me how important my message was. One individual even came up
and told me that he was excited enough that he'd like
to match
any donation that Software Freedom Conservancy received during LCA 2016.
Since it was the last day of the event, I quickly went to one of the
organizers, Kathy Reid, and asked
if they would announce this match during the closing ceremonies; she agreed.
In a matter of just an hour or two, I'd gone from believing my talk had
fallen flat to realizing that — regardless of whether I'd presented
well — the concepts I discussed had connected with people.
Then, I sat down in the closing session. I started to tear up slightly
when the
organizers announced the donation match. Within 90 seconds, though,
that turned to full tears of joy when the incoming President of Linux
Australia, Hugh Blemings, came on
stage and
said:
[I'll start with] a Software Freedom Conservancy thing, as it turns out.
… I can tell that most of you weren't at Bradley's talk earlier on
today, but if there is one talk I'd encourage you to watch on the
playback later it would be that one. There's a very very important
message in there and something to take away for all of us. On behalf of
the Council I'd like to announce … that we're actually in the
process of making a significant donation from Linux Australia to Software
Freedom Conservancy as well. I urge all of you to consider contributing
individual as well, and there is much left for us to be done as a
community on that front.
I hope that this post helps organizers of events like LCA fully understand
how much something like this means to us who run a small charities —
and not just with regard to the financial contributions. Knowing that the
organizers of community events feel so strongly positive about our work
really keeps us going. We work hard and spend much time at Conservancy to
serve the Open Source and Free Software community, and knowing the work is
appreciated inspires us to keep working. Furthermore, we know that without
these events, it's much tougher for us to reach others with our message of
software freedom. So, for us, the feeling is mutual: I'm delighted that
the Linux Australia and LCA folks feel so positively about Conservancy, and
I now look forward to another 15 hour flight for the next LCA.
And, on that note, I chose a strategic time to post this story. On Friday
5 August 2016, the CFP for LCA
2017 closes. So, now is the time for all of you to submit a talk. If
you regularly speak at Open Source and Free Software events, or have been
considering it, this event really needs to be on your calendar. I look
forward to seeing all of you Hobart this January.
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