Presented at
Still Hacking Anyway (SHA2017),
Aug. 6, 2017, 11:15 a.m.
(45 minutes)
FLOSS seems to be a natural choice for NGOs and not formalized entities (groups of activists, etc) -- evading vendor lock-in, harder to place a back-door, community support, and no licensing costs. And yet many NGOs continue to use closed-source software, even in areas where FLOSS tools are available and considered stable. Reasons are many; one of them can be tracked to papercuts -- small, annoying quirks and imperfections making FLOSS awkward, hard, or impossible to use in a given setting.
#Society #Community
SHA2017 participants are no strangers to the virtues of Free/Libre/Open Source Software, as are they familiar with many problems that plague FLOSS and emerge from the open, often unstructured development model. Most of us can work-around most of the quirks of free software we use. The same quirks grow to become unsurmountable obstacles for the less technically inclined.
This creates a peculiar gap between the tech-savvy users advocating FLOSS use based on its virtues and the regular software users who just want to get their jobs done. The tech-savvy, being able to work-around the issues, do not have a strong incentive in fixing them properly; the regular users, frustrated by the issues and not able to fix them nor work-around them, turn back to closed-source software.
This gap is clearly visible, for example, in the software used on the back-end/server vs. software in use on user devices (desktops/laptops) -- while the former is often dominated by FLOSS, closed-source usually prevails in the latter.
Truth be told, fixing bugs (especially annoying but small ones) is "not sexy", and often considered by Real Hackers™ to be beneath them. This seems to be a broader issue within the FLOSS community in general.
Having managed software and hardware in different activist, journalistic, and NGO settings, the speakers would like to offer their perspective on the importance of these underappreciated small bugs, and how much both the FLOSS community on one hand, and NGOs, activists, and journalists on the other, are missing out because of them.
Presenters:
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Michał "czesiek" Czyżewski
czesiek is a proud member of <a href="https://hackerspace.pl/">Warsaw Hackerspace</a>. He develops tools for investigative journalists at <a href="https://www.occrp.org/">Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project</a> and helps <a href="https://panoptykon.org/">Panoptykon Foundation</a> fight surveillance. He is a discordian pope.
czesiek (IPA: tʂɛɕɛk; English: cheshek) is a human living in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. His seldom used full name is Michał Czyżewski.
For the better part of his life he’s been doing full-stack web programming and operations engineering. He’s a Free Software evangelist and cryptography enthusiast.
czesiek loves tea, coffee, wine and vegan food. He’s an avid cyclist. He sometimes makes art and plays music.
If you want him to talk about software, internets, cybersecurity, privacy, hacker culture, deep web and/or other stuff, he’ll be glad to do that.
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rysiek
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