Preceded by a welcome address from John Sullivan, FSF executive director.

The effort to re-decentralize the web has been under way for a number of years, but what's really happening under the hood? Various projects like Diaspora, GNU social, GNU MediaGoblin , Friendica Red, and Pump.IO all exist, but not all these projects can talk to each other. How can we fix that? A demo of PyPump will be given, as well as a rundown on the progress of the W3C Social Working Group.

What if the classic horror trope of the good doctor who becomes a monster at night were reversed? Instead of the good Dr. Jekyll transforming into the rampaging Mr. Hyde, advocates of free who work in nonfree environments can feel as if they only get to put on their altruistic persona at night. For academics advocating free software and free culture in particular, libre ethics are often at odds with both administrative structures and expected teaching outcomes. This session explores the struggles of advocating free in both research and teaching.

TAFTA, CETA, and TISA are far-reaching trade agreements posing major threats to online freedom and creating legal uncertainty for all Internet players. They set forth an ever stronger protection of copyright and patents. They 'recycle' the most toxic parts of ACTA, the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement which was rejected in 2012. The presentation focuses on the software aspects of TAFTA, CETA, TISA. We will call for action against these global treaty projects and offer alternative proposals, which favour Free Software Everywhere.

This year a robotic certificate authority will start issuing publicly-trusted certificates, at no charge, by the millions. Called Let's Encrypt, this CA is an initiative of several organizations. Our free software and protocol will let sysadmins run a single command to turn on HTTPS on their servers in about a minute, helping eliminate obstacles to activating encryption for every Web server. I'll describe how it all works and give a demo. We need lots of testing and integration help!

Reusing works licensed under free licenses seems pretty simple, but it can often be quite time consuming. One image or a few lines of source code might be okay, but keeping track of the license and attribution of a thousand different pieces, or when quoting from massive data sets such as Wikipedia? Whoah! Don’t we have computers to do that for us!? We do, but there’s no widespread support for including licensing or author information when sharing or reusing digital works. This session will discuss how this should work in a free knowledge environment, and could it be that many problems regarding copyright and "piracy" in our digital society could be solved with free software?

In order to relate effectively to the digital works we see online, attribution (who made or built something) matters. Proper attribution is the start of being able to explore digital works online in their right context. This talk will focus on the philosophical background of why attribution matters, the benefits that free software can bring to the way we work with pieces of art (lolcats and Shakespeare alike), and where we're heading in the future.

The free software movement has twin goals: promoting access to software through users' freedom to share, and empowering users by giving them control over their technology. For all our movement's success, we have been much more successful at the former. I will use data from free software and from several related movements to explain why promoting empowerment is systematically more difficult than promoting access and I will explore how our movement might address the second challenge in the future.

Typically, GPL enforcement activity involves copyright infringement actions which compel license violators to correct errors in their GPL compliance, defending the policy goals of the GPL: the rights of developers and users to copy, share, modify and redistribute.

While traditional enforcement is often undeniably necessary for embedded electronics products, novel approaches to GPL violations are often possible and even superior for more traditional software distributions.

Recently, Software Freedom Conservancy engaged in an enforcement action whereby, rather than fight the violator in court, we instead provided resources and assistance to a vetted GPL-compliant fork of a violating codebase.

This talk discusses which scenarios make this remedy optimal and the lessons learned. The talk includes some licensing and technical content about vetting the licensing information of codebases.

What's going on in here? Computer parts laying all over the place... screws and ribbon cables scattered cross heaven's half acre. And who left this power supply in the refrigerator? Is that your dad's new impact drive? Don't you dare let me get up in the middle of the night and step on that motherboard in my bare feet. Just what in the name of Michael Dell is going on here?