Thursday
We held a protest march from the Moscone Center to the Burton Federal Building, with a pretty sizable police escort (I'd guess about 15 or 20 officers involved at some point). I think we peaked at 100 people, which was fewer than I'd hoped for, but we were certainly still an impressive sight.
We marched from Moscone along Howard, up 4th, along Market, up Golden Gate, and stoppied and rallied and chanted at the Federal Building. The folks from Berkeley showed up with the signs midway through, so we had a nice collection, and I held a "Svobodu Dime" for a while, and later held my big "Free Dmitry" sign.
We did give out over 1,000 flyers at the conference and then another 1,000 or more along the parade route. It was fun. Richard Stallman was a special guest at the rally, and he urged people to boycott movies that they didn't think were good, as opposed to all movies. (But, he added, it was probably almost the same thing.)
Thanks to Don, Tabinda, and Duncan, as well as everyone else who marched.
On return to the conference, I attended Bill Schoolcraft's talk on the Unix filesystem. He spoke a bit about differences between various flavors of Unix (wow, the device names for disks on some Unixes are really scary!), and he told his personal story of how he came to Linux, starting as a steelworker and finding himself impressed with computers. Bill is a friend of mine from the old CABAL days, and I remember when he first came as a novice to user group meetings. He and I were hired at Linuxcare on the same day, and he's still working there (so he's been there well over two years).
I think the crowd was very appreciative of his story and his sense of humor; he was an inspiration for some of the novice users in the crowd, and he gave some advice on how to do tech support without alienating or frightening people (which is actually quite difficult sometimes!).
Coming back to the EFF booth, I talked to a number of EFF supporters, collected some more donations, and poked my head around the corner to talk at the FSF booth for a while with the new FSF VP, Bradley Kuhn. I see that the FSF is still pushing pretty hard on the ideological front! I'm afraid that they're always looking to see what's wrong with things: for example, at a previous show, Duncan gave Richard a BBC, and Richard immediately said "This doesn't say GNU/Linux!" -- so we went back and made our LNX-BBC say "GNU/Linux", and when Duncan gave Richard the new version at the party (and Dmitry Sklyarov was also a recipient), Richard said "This doesn't say GNU/Linux!".
"Yes, it does, Richard." said Duncan.
"Oh. Thanks!" said Richard.
At the booth, I gave some to Bradley; he worried about the suitability of the source code availability offer. I pointed out that the FSF's own stickers, which were supposed to be "free as in speech" (and under a license which allowed duplication), did not have bear any copyright notice at all!
But anyway, the good folks from the FSF are extremely skeptical and extremely critical. And I think we need that, and it's a benefit -- but as many people have noted, it can't be helping their public outreach.
I bought a nice shirt from Bradley ("FSF: Welcome to the GNU age!"), and then a programmer from Microsoft came by, and Bradley immediately started talking about how bad Microsoft was. Well, yes, we don't expect the FSF to be fond of Microsoft; are they bad enough that this is all we have to talk about with Microsoft staff?
I asked the Microsoft guy whether he'd like a BBC, and he said yes, so I got him to come around the corner to the EFF booth, where I gave him three, and he said he'd heard about the BBC and that his boss was actually hoping to get one. We talked about how to use the BBC to rescue Windows machines (like Gwen's laptop!), and about why there was no good current NTFS support in the Linux kernel.
Then the Microsoft guy told me that lots of engineers at Microsoft supported the EFF. That was really nice to hear. I'd just heard that lots of technical people in the military support the EFF. So there was a strong suggestion that technical people all over the place care about what we're doing; the question is, how about the general public? People who buy consumer electronics, people who have a small personal web site or zine, people who go to school or use a public library?
Given that the EFF does not have a position like the FSF's that software inherently ought to be free (although we share many positions and concerns with FSF), our reaction to Microsoft is naturally a bit different. But Microsoft is doing things that concern us, like the Secure Audio Path, Microsoft's eBook software, and other DRM work. (I have had a bit of a DRM focus so far. This is not supposed to be an exhaustive list of Microsoft initatives that can attract EFF attention.) So I'm hopeful that the people at Microsoft who like what EFF does can have a positive influence, and that we can talk to them about things like DRM and the DMCA. Microsoft -- like the armed forces, as I once said to a friend who was about to enter USNA -- clearly has a lot of power which it could use for good or ill.
In other situations, having employees with a concern for civil liberties is one of many checks on an organization's behavior. For example, Adobe employees' support for Dmitry Sklyarov was one of several incentives for Adobe not to continue to press for his prosecution.
