[PLUG] Why I won't be speaking at FOSSsumMIT 2104

[Thin Rhino]

On 12 August 2014 01:50, Sudhanwa Jogalekar <sudhanwa.com at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 11:57 PM, ThinRhino <thinrhino at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Folks,
> >
> > I was scheduled to give a talk at FOSSsumMIT 2104, but I was asked to
> use a Open
> > Source License compliant operating system to give the talk. I have
> blogged about
> > it in detail here -> http://adityalaghate.in/no-to-symbolism.html
>


> The conference being a FOSS conference, everything needs to be under
> FOSS. It is as simple as that.


The organisers have all the right to put in whatever restrictions they
want. I agree.
But, when these restrictions are informed to the presenter at the 11th
hour, the organisers
should not be adamant about enforcing them. It just conveys, that the
organisers have no
respect for the time & effort the presenter has put into preparing the talk.

wrt FOSS, many of the laptops come with broadcom chips or other devices for
which open source
drivers are not available. Almost all people install various video codecs,
which are also not open source.
The popular browser, Chrome is not open source.

The question is, where do you draw the line? at the hardware level, the
kernel level or at
the GUI / presentation level? What should be FOSS compliant? No hardware is
FOSS compliant.

In OS X, the kernel is open, device drivers are open. The presentation
layer and part system is
closed source.

I hope in the future, whatever the restrictions, are informed to the
speaker at the time of
inviting them and/or before they are required to submit their proposals.

Regards
Aditya