Hackers Congress Paralelní Polis 2023

Panel discussion | The Economics of Free Software
10-01, 12:00–13:00 (Europe/Prague), Studio 1

Free Software has been wildly successful, but it is also heavily infiltrated and captured by hostile predatory corporations. The biggest issue facing the movement has been the lack of funding. Computing itself which once was about interlinking systems has started looking into where users are trapped on spying devices slaves to content delivered by "the cloud".

How do we formulate and orient the modern vision of computing towards society? How can we construct a collaborative p2p paradigm that empowers users rather than making them farm animals for surveillance megasystems? How can we utilize modern cryptocurrency and token-econ techniques to enable value capture for provisioning services?

Join this panel where the father of free software and GNU/Linux reflects on these topics together with YOU the audience.

As part of the forming Bitcoin community, Amir became an early Bitcoin developer, author of the BIP process, and the Libbitcoin implementation. With contributions to many free and open-source projects, he collaborated with Cody Wilson on launching Darkwallet and laid the foundations for OpenBazaar. Later, he spent nearly 2 years in the Rojava revolution, first for nearly 4 months fighting in the YPG and then working for the administration on economic projects. Today, Amir is focused on the DarkFi project, a network bringing anonymity to decentralized finance, and is still working towards building an agonistic revolutionary hacker movement.

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Dr. Richard Stallman launched the free software movement in 1983 and started the development of the GNU operating system in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, with or without changes. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award and the ACM Software and Systems Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as many doctorates honoris causa, and has been inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

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