IDLELO 5 Conference to be in Nigeria

The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa is planning their 5th African Conference on FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) to be held in Abuja, Nigeria

IDLELO 5 will consist of hackathons, awards, tutorials, hands-on trainings, demos, field visits and presentations on key FOSS and information technology areas. It will welcome a diverse number of parallel events, an exhibition and a business round table. The conference will welcome FOSS and IT keynote speakers, project, companies, solutions and innovations, not just in Africa, but across the global FOSS community. IDLELO 5 will mark the 10 years of the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA)

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IDLELO is a Southern African word meaning “Common Grazing Ground”.

The maddog keynote from IDLELO 4 is reprinted in Linux magazine

People sometimes have a problem understanding “software freedom”, so I use the term “software slavery” to show the opposite:

Software slaves are told:

  • when to upgrade their software
  • how many computers they can put their software on
  • how many users can use the software
  • how the software will or will not work
  • what languages the software will support
  • when they will receive needed bug fixes or enhancements

Ironically only the richest peoples can afford software slavery. Poor people are persecuted as “software pirates”.

This is obviously far too broad a definition. Maybe it’s meant to be provocative rather than useful. After all, it’s a keynote speech in Africa.

The first thing that comes to mind is software as a service (SaaS) could easily be defined as slavery even if it runs on FOSS. Even FOSS users in their own environment are told what to do and when (e.g. ubuntu-security-announce).

The difference between freedom and slavery does not seem to be just about being given instructions. It is about a user becoming a property of the software company — penalized for any attempts at liberty.

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