Proposing FSCIConf as a more Free Software aligned national conference

Many of us in the community felt IndiaFOSS is more aligned to Open Source philosophy (from the selection of talks and focus on products more than philosophy). So we would like to have an event that highlights Free Software philosophy - the idea of users controlling the software as a community, instead of developers building software collaboratively.

Why the philosophy matters?

You can think of the difference in both philosophies similar to the story of blind people describing an elephant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

Both philosophies describe the same software differently - they focus on different aspects. In Free Software, users Freedom is primary goal. For Open Source, creating better software is primary goal.

What this leads in practice is different types of responses to some challenges. One good example to illustrate this difference is TiVo, which allowed recording TV shows and used linux kernel, but you cannot install a modified version of the software on those devices since the bootloader is locked. Open Source supporters were happy since it used linux, but Free Software supporters were not happy since we cannot modify it.

A common mistake people make is thinking the difference is in the license, they think Free Software = copyleft/protective and Open Source = non protective/permissive, but that is not correct. What do you think? Since many of us are already committed to other projects, we need new people who have not yet taken lots of responsibilities to step in and organize this.