Screenshot from the panel of Right to Repair leaders at the 2023 LibrePlanet conference.
At this year's LibrePlanet, we hosted a handful of Right to Repair leaders.

Free software at the core of the right to repair

By Zoë Kooyman, Executive Director

In the beginning of 2021, we started our Fight to Repair campaign with our animated video of the same name. The right to repair movement is one that strongly aligns with our fight for free software. Today, the two movements have become even more intertwined, as many hardware tools include software. This raises the question: who owns your machine?

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A photo of Rubén Rodríguez Pérez and Ian Kelling, swapping out video cards during LibrePlanet 2023.
A photo of Rubén Rodríguez Pérez and Ian Kelling, swapping out video cards during LibrePlanet 2023.

Making of: How to create a hybrid conference

By Ian Kelling, Senior Systems Administrator

TFrom 2020 to 2022, the LibrePlanet conference was fully online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, we could finally have an in-person conference again, but we still wanted to offer speakers and audience members a way to participate remotely if they couldn't make it to Boston or didn't want to take an airplane for environmental reasons. If you're wondering how we made that happen — and to make it work with free software, here are some of the best parts of that story.

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Photo of a printed map taken within the command center of AKUT, Turkey’s search and rescue association.

Ground zero: Navigating in freedom

By Alper Atmaca, Hacker with Free Software Association (Özgür Yazılım Derneği) in Turkey

In the early morning of February 6, 2023, the southeastern part of Turkey was shaken with unprecedented tremors. As a personal rescue volunteer, I was ill prepared for my duties in the aftermath of this earthquake. However, my country was even less prepared for this moment. Major disasters bring a lot of challenges to anyone who tries to operate in the affected zone. Modern infrastructure, while having immense capabilities, can also be very fragile. Buildings collapsed during Turkey's recent earthquakes. The electric grid also went down, taking with it almost every utility, which we all-too-often take for granted, including the most fragile modern utility, the Internet.

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JShelter logo, which looks like a hermit crab.
JShelter logo.

Freedom and privacy on the web: Our interview with the JShelter team

By Greg Farough, Campaigns Manager

In order to catch up with development on the browser extension JShelter, which limits the degree to which JavaScript can control your browser, Greg from the FSF campaigns team (GF) conducted an interview with lead developers Libor Polčák (LP) and Giorgio Maone (GM).

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Image of licensing volunteers at LibrePlanet: Charting the Course
This year's LibrePlanet had one talk by the FSF's icensing and Compliance Lab and two licensing-related talks by other speakers.

Trademarks, volunteering, and code-generating LLM

By Craig Topham, Copyright & Licensing Associate

This year's LibrePlanet saw a large swath of fantastic talks on a wide variety of topics related to free software, including a track specifically dedicated to licensing. This track featured three talks: one about the free licensing of trademarks, another hosted by the FSF's Licensing and Compliance Lab, and a post-LibrePlanet presentation on the ethics of code-generating large language model (LLM) systems.

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