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Hundreds explore ways to Fork the System with free software at LibrePlanet 2016

by Free Software Foundation Contributions Published on Mar 23, 2016 06:03 PM
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, USA -- Wednesday, March 23, 2016 -- The 2016 LibrePlanet free software conference drew nearly 350 activists from around the world to discuss issues of freedom, privacy, and security in computing. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and ACLU technologist Daniel Kahn Gillmor discussed "The last lighthouse: free software in dark times" in an opening keynote before a brimming audience at MIT's Stata Center, with hundreds of remote participants tuning in online.
Edward Snowden on the screen talking with Daniel Kahn Gillmore at LibrePlanet 2016

Edward Snowden talks with Daniel Kahn Gillmor at LibrePlanet 2016.

At a ceremony on Saturday, March 21st, Free Software Foundation President Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF's annual Free Software Awards. Two awards were given: the Award for the Advancement of Free Software was presented to Werner Koch for his work on GNU Privacy Guard, the defacto tool for encrypted communication, and the Award for Projects of Social Benefit was presented to the Library Freedom Project, a partnership among librarians, technologists, attorneys, and privacy advocates which aims to make real the promise of intellectual freedom in libraries.

Software Freedom Conservancy executive director Karen Sandler closed out the conference with "Companies, free software, and you," in which she urged free software developers to push their employers to allow them to retain copyleft on their code.

Karen Sandler speaking at LibrePlanet 2016

Software Freedom Conservancy Executive Director Karen Sandler closed out LibrePlanet 2016.

A video of the opening keynote conversation between Edward Snowden and Daniel Kahn Gillmor is available now at http://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/libreplanet-2016-the-last-lighthouse/. Videos of all the conference sessions, along with photographs from the conference, will soon be available on https://media.libreplanet.org, the conference's instance of GNU MediaGoblin, a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run.

LibrePlanet 2016 was produced in partnership by the Free Software Foundation and the Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) at MIT.

About the Free Software Foundation

The Free Software Foundation, founded in 1985, is dedicated to promoting computer users' right to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer programs. The FSF promotes the development and use of free (as in freedom) software -- particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants -- and free documentation for free software. The FSF also helps to spread awareness of the ethical and political issues of freedom in the use of software, and its Web sites, located at fsf.org and gnu.org, are an important source of information about GNU/Linux. Donations to support the FSF's work can be made at https://my.fsf.org/donate. Its headquarters are in Boston, MA, USA.

More information about the FSF, as well as important information for journalists and publishers, is at https://www.fsf.org/press.

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Georgia Young
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Free Software Foundation
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