Free Software Hasn't Won

Summary

This is a translated version of a talk I gave at P.I.W.O in June, with cleanups and adjustments for the blog form. # Free Software hasn't won …that doesn't sound right. I made the slides in Inkscape, on a computer running KDE and Linux, I use Firefox regularly. But maybe that's just me. What about you, are you using Free Software? Hands up! [hands go up in the audience] Of course! What nonsense, "Free Software hasn't won". Someone replaced my slides, hey conference staff! **Staff:** *The other folder.* [Browsing to a directory named "other folder", opening file called "your slides dimwit.pdf"] Now, those are finally my slides. Hello audience, my name is Dorota, and I'm going to talk about how # Open Source has won. And that's not recent, the news has been out in 2008, and has been regularly repeated since by reputable press: ZDNET, Linux Journal, Wired, and so on. Those press articles list a multitude of examples to prove it. Linux, Ruby, Red Hat, uh, GitHub? Does that mean I can download GitHub and run it on my own server? Microsoft? Come on, that's some kind of a joke. Those slides are manipulated! So what else do they contain? Oh, this quote is all right: > Open source won. It’s not that an enemy has been vanquished or that proprietary software is dead, there’s not much regarding adopting open source to argue about anymore. After more than a decade of the low-cost, lean startup culture successfully developing on open source tools, it’s clearly a legitimate, mainstream option for technology tools and innovation. Oh, the name of the quoted person is wrong. Looks like an attack on my reputation! Anyways. The point is, if we want to build something new, using Free Software is not a hindrance. And thats super important, because software is eating the world. What does it mean? It means software keeps appearing in areas where there used to be no software before. That, in turn, means that we're slowly giving up control over more and more areas of life to those who made t...