Proposing FSCIConf as a more Free Software aligned national conference
Pirate Praveen
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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.
Poll Created Mon 29 Sep 2025 12:52PM
Would you like to volunteer for ConfCommittee ? You have until Mon 13 Oct 2025 12:30PM to participate.
What is the team, working group or event you are inviting people to?
(FSCI's) ConfCommittee would be similar to DebConf Committee and their role is encouraging local teams to bid for FSCI Conf, setup guidelines / checklists and then evaluate and select bids.
Why is this important?
We don't have the resources to hire a big place like Nimhans Convention Center or paid staff to organize, so we need to depend on campuses and local teams like user groups or foss clubs to organize this.
What are you asking people to do?
Volunteer to be in the Committee to evaluate bids from local teams.
Select 'Accept' to participate!
Current results
| Current results | Option | Voters | |||
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Accept | 6 |
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Undecided | 262 |
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6 of 268 votes cast (2% participation)
Nemo
Mon 29 Sep 2025 12:52PM
I care about free-software, and strongly believe there should be more large foss conferences in India. (I'm also on the FOSS United GB, but don't think that's a conflict). I also organized the Open Data devroom at IndiaFOSS along with the Maintainer Summit this year.
I am happy to take any remote org roles.
Abhijith B
Mon 29 Sep 2025 12:52PM
I would like an FSCI conf organized that gives importance to free software philosophy and a platform to software that may not be on top in job market or industrial use.
However, I do not want it to be an echo chamber or an anti-XYZ event. There are more reasons for this event to exist even though the motivation for this poll is dissatisfaction with another event.
Akshay
Mon 29 Sep 2025 12:52PM
With the manifesto (even a noncontroversial draft) in place, I'm happy to contribute to this conference which is much necessary in a world and country where bad things are rapidly becoming "inevitable"
Pirate Praveen Mon 29 Sep 2025 2:27PM
@Akshay Lets draft this FSCI manifesto together. I'm starting this draft, everyone please suggest changes,
"When Free Software movement began in 1984 by Richard Stallman as a response to proprietary software gaining momentum as opposed to software being shared as a norm, the challenges were limited to the development / use of software itself.
Now that we have progressed greatly on that aspect when it comes to general purpose software, be it GNU/Linux operating system, Mozilla Firefox web browser, Libre Office / Only Office or VLC media player. But we now face different challenges that we initially considered to be important like,
practical difficulties with respect to modifying software (eg: poor documentation, large code-base, inaccessible code architecture, etc) — this is applicable to all software (especially web browsers and android / smart phone operating system which depends on companies like Google for maintenance).
network effect that prevents running modified versions of software (eg: signal, and any other centralized social-network based software) — this is why privacy and decentralization became as important as software license.
reliance on data or other pre-requisite that is impossible to procure (eg: LLMs) — this is why "open-source AI" is such a non-sense. (TODO: Evaluate how https://publicai.co/about fits into this situation.)
Being more welcoming to diverse set of contributors with different set of life experiences and social barriers in every day life. We need to provide a safe and respectful space for collaboration without allowing any kind of discrimination when participating in our communities.
So Free Software Community of India, want to be at the forefront of addressing challenges as they come up and take the community forward to achieve user freedom beyond just your own personal devices, but to platforms and public infrastructure as well. At the same time we acknowledge the newer challenges are harder and require more patience and understanding from all of us. We will use Free Software powered platforms of our own organizing and promotions and will be careful about presence on proprietary platforms - if we are present or bridged to such platforms, the primary goal should be to promote Free Software and decentralized replacements."
Pirate Praveen Mon 29 Sep 2025 2:40PM
Add to network effects section, "We have been providing communications and collaboration platforms for many years, but it has not been really sustainable without heroic efforts from a small number of people. So we recommend and promote better models like the Prav cooperative, where more people take responsibility / commitment (financial burden is more evenly shared and people's time/efforts are financially compensated) and manage it democratically as a cooperative."
I'm not personally satisfied with how we have been running our services (but still proud of what we achieved together as the challenge we also much higher - network effects and cost/effort of continued maintenance) - it puts lots of pressure on small number of volunteers, so we should recommend people to do better than what we have learned through our experience. Still what we did/doing is important since we have learned these lessons through our experience and can plan to mitigate some of these in future projects.
Pirate Praveen Mon 29 Sep 2025 2:50PM
@Akshay I'm moving this to a dedicated thread https://codema.in/d/mMBW5Py3/creating-fsci-manifesto lets continue there.
Pirate Praveen Mon 29 Sep 2025 2:45PM
For people who are new to organizing events, see https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/21/Bids/India for an idea of what all things we need for bids - though we don't need this detailed bid as our scale is much smaller. DebConf is usually 2 weeks and people from around the world attends it. We can create a smaller version of this https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/General/Handbook/Bids/LocationCheckList and probably reuse https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/General/Handbook/Bids/PriorityList
Nandakumar Edamana Tue 30 Sep 2025 12:00AM
@Pirate Praveen I really like the idea of a conference with focus on the Free Software Philosophy (without any dislike for IndiaFOSS). Quick questions:
Any plans to make sure this doesn't divide the community?
Any chance of convincing IndiaFOSS organizers to make Free Software Philosophy the main theme for at lest one edition? This will help us get an idea of participation, contributions, challenges, etc.
Akshay · Mon 29 Sep 2025 1:08PM
The last post I wrote about free software vs open-source is at https://asd.learnlearn.in/give-up-free-software-open-source-debate/
In it, I argue that just saying "user freedom" without defining it is equivalent to the open-source way of doing things.
User freedom is compromised due to various reasons. For example:
practical difficulties with respect to modifying software (eg: poor documentation, large code-base, inaccessible code architecture, etc) — this is applicable to all software
network effect that prevents running modified versions of software (eg: signal, and any other centralized social-network based software) — this is why privacy and decentralization became as important as software license. Please see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIvITu6OSHM for more context
reliance on data or other pre-requisite that is impossible to procure (eg: LLMs) — this is why "open-source AI" is such a non-sense. Please see https://tattle.co.in/blog/hot-take-on-open-source-AI/ for more context
We need a manifesto that articulates the difference between open source and free software more clearly. It cannot just be "user freedom". That's vague. And that's often overridden by everyone including stalwarts like RMS. Without such an explicit articulation of the philosophical difference, this conference will just be more of the same (at least for me).
Consequently, I'll respond to the poll after this is articulated.
I have left FOSS United community a couple of years ago. I have deliberately stayed away from IndiaFOSS and any efforts connected to FOSS United for the same reasons. The reason is simply that I believe this deliberately undefined open-source politics is even worse than this vaguely defined free software politics. Not just worse, the open-source politics is harmful, and antithetical to the idea of freedom (as we see with Nilekaniwarezz and other open-washing products).