Hi I'm Jeremy Allison
with Google's Open Source Program Office
and I'm here at the Free Software Foundation's
LibrePlanet conference here in Boston.
And I'm very lucky to be here with Karen Sandler
who is the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation.
Welcome Karen.
Thanks Jeremy. [laughs]
So Karen originally was a lawyer
at the Software Freedom Law Center
and then moved over to being the Executive Director
of the GNOME Foundation
taking over from Stormy Peters
who I interviewed a few years ago.
So Karen, could you tell us
a little bit more about the GNOME Foundation
and what it is that you do for
Free Software?
Sure, and actually I am still a lawyer
so you made it sound like I was a lawyer
and maybe people would like me better
if I weren't still a lawyer
but I am.
Actually the legal work that I do now
is almost entirely pro bono work
at the Software Freedom Law Center still
even though I no longer work there
and also for Conservancy
and also for QuestionCopyright.org
and I've also just recently have become
an advisor of the Ada Initiative
which I'm really excited about.
But you asked about the GNOME Foundation
which I'm the Executive Director of
and I'm the luckiest lawyer in the world
to have that job. [laughs]
What exactly do you want to know about it?
You asked a good question and I got distracted
by talking about my legal background.
OK, so, for people who may not know
GNOME is a Free Software desktop for, um,
it shipped on most Linux distributions as the default desktop
or as I am at the LibrePlanet conference
[laugh]
perhaps I should say GNU/Linux distributions.
— as the default desktop, and
it's, if people are used to it
it's the visual interface that you would see if you're using the desktop
so it's what drives the windows
the mouse etc.
It's the visual look of it.
So what makes GNOME different from other desktop software?
Yeah, and I'd also add that GNOME is also the backbone of
quite of number of GNU/Linux distributions.
There's a lot of GNOME in Ubuntu and also Linux Mint
and the OpenSuSE distribution
has GNOME 3 as a default.
Don't forget Fedora!
And Fedora has GNOME —
yeah, well I mean I'm going through it —
And also — so Fedora and also
Debian uses GNOME 3 as default as well.
So it is actually ah pretty well deployed.
What makes GNOME different
from other desktops, you ask,
is, well, it's just so pretty!
So when I was sitting there as a lawyer
at the Software Freedom Law Center
and GNOME 3 came out
I was astounded.
I hadn't really thought too much about
the step before except to be frustrated
that it was hard to explain to non-GNU/Linux users
why I cared so much that
I was using kind of an uglier desktop
or you know I used my old computer
and why freedom mattered so much.
And when I saw GNOME 3 I was bowled over.
It was so sleek and pretty and beautiful
And I felt like it was exactly the thing
that we need to bridge the gap to new users
and to users who are just coming into this space.
I mean, through my medical devices advocacy
— and we may talk about that after, I'm not sure —
I come across a lot of people
who are Mac users
or people who don't really know too much about
Free and Open Source Software
and the biggest complaint that they have
when they start looking into it
is that it's so difficult to use.
And so what GNOME, and GNOME 3 in particular, has
is that it's just so easy and so beautiful.
So I'm really proud to be affiliated with it
and I think that it's a great strategy.
And we're about to release GNOME 3.4
probably by the time this is posted
3.4 will probably be out, since it's just coming out on Wednesday
but there are a lot of amazing improvements
that are coming in with 3.4.
And it's only going to get better from there.
So I believe the GNOME 3 slogan is
'made of easy'
I thought it was made of software.
So one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions,
or Linux distributions, is Ubuntu.
And Ubuntu has chosen to use its own separate interface
called Unity rather than sticking with the GNOME 3 shell.
So what was the— what's behind that?
And is there a chance that Unity can be unified
as it were? With the GNOME desktop?
I think that's a great question
and I don't mean to turn the tables too much here
but a lot of the decision to go to Unity
happened before I became Executive Director of GNOME.
I've only been Executive Director of GNOME
for seven or eight months now and
you I believe were an advisory board representative
during that time.
[laughter]
Well thank you.
But what I guess what is going on in the GNU/Linux space
is that we're realising just what I said before
which is just that we have a real challenge
to reach new users and to reach unsophisticated —
er, I think saying 'unsophisticated'
that's really talking down to these users.
I don't mean it like that, I mean non-power users.
Not — you know, users that aren't developers
and sort of understanding the fact that if Free Software is going to be successful
we have to reach a much wider audience.
And I think that's also what Canonical is trying to do with Unity.
And so both of these efforts are actually
building on the same technology.
So Canonical is still very active in the GNOME community.
They're still a member of our advisory board and
you'll see that the GNOME 3.2 press release
had a quote from Canonical on it as well.
So there's a lot of work being done together,
and there's a lot of you know a lot of sharing
and a lot of combined efforts
which I think is really good.
And at the end of the day
there are two different competing desktop experiences
but that share a lot of technology.
So there are actually three different competing desktops.
Well there's more than that!
Well this is true, but the other popular one is KDE
which I believe these days just stands for
the K Desktop Environment.
Is there a chance do you guys work together with
the other Linux desktop which is KDE
and do you colloborate on technology?
Well actually I would think that if we're going to
talk about the main desktop environments
I think we if I mean we talk about GNOME
and we talk about Unity
we should also talk about Linux Mint
which is built on GNOME 3 technologies
but is a distinctive environment.
And then there are a whole other, a whole other host
of desktops that people like because
they're tailored to their particular needs.
And that's great. That's one of the benefits of Free Software
is that we can take the technology that people make
and refine it and make it into something that we want.
KDE actually pre-dates GNOME as a project.
There was a licensing problem when
KDE was originally launched about 15 years ago
and after about six months the — Miguel de Icaza
and Federico and other early GNOME developers
decided that they wanted to fix that licensing problem
and make a truly free desktop.
And so two ultimately free desktops were born
and they've been competing ever since.
We do work with KDE quite a lot.
We've had a couple of desktop summits,
we do some hackfests together.
We're trying to increase areas of collaboration
whereever we can.
So um here's an interesting thing:
the desktop, the Linux desktop, is getting really pretty,
very easy to use, and yet
on the plane I was flying out here
I went to the bathroom and looked around.
There was one old guy using a laptop,
myself, who also had a laptop which I wasn't using,
another old guy who was using a laptop.
Every other person using a computer on that plane
was using a tablet PC, mainly an iPad.
What is GNOME doing to address the complete change
in computing that appears to be taking place
that desktop computing is for old people
and everyone else uses tablets?
That's a really good question.
I would actually say that a few years ago
if you looked around on a plane,
not that many people had laptops.
Some people had laptops but not that many.
And I think that largely, and this is actually just
I'm sort of stepping away from talking on behalf of GNOME here
I'm just saying that as an observer of technology in our society
that I think what a lot of these tablet devices are doing
are replacing a niche that we haven't had before.
So I think that people are doing things with those
with tablet computers that are not necessarily
replacing laptops but they're sort of you know
addressing a whole new need
that phones were sort of starting to get at
but weren't quite, so I think that that makes it a little more complicated.
I do think that are— that technology is changing
and the way that we think about it is changing.
And the number of people who expect access
to it have changed.
Which is why you know all of these pushes
in the GNU/Linux environments to make all of our interfaces
very easy to use are coming from.
Because we perceive the fact that people
and again my mother hates it when I talk about her
but five years ago she would have never used
a computer for anything!
I kept, every year I would try to do something
"Mom, let's put our recipes in, you know,
let's share information, you know!"
And nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing.
Now, she does everything.
I mean, it's just, basically technology has gotten to a point
her friends are started using it, everybody's started using it.
She, you know, so people who didn't use computers before
are using them and that means there's a whole
different kind of computer usage
that's being represented in these tablets.
And it's still early days for GNOME 3.
So basically we have gone and rebuilt GNOME as GNOME 3
and created this awesome beautiful desktop environment
and we'll have to see where it goes from here.
So I know there are efforts to bring it on to tablets.
There are efforts to bring it on to mobile space.
And hopefully we'll make sure they get somewhere.
But it takes time.
And Free Software unfortunately sometimes
because of its very nature
because they're community development
because often they're non-profit driven
takes a little longer sometimes.
But I hope we'll get there.
So your talk today was actually about
accessibility on the GNOME 3 desktop.
Could you describe for able-bodied viewers
what accessibility on a desktop means?
Yeah well as somebody pointed out in the question section of the talk
accessibility means a lot of things
and it means a lot of different things
to a lot of different people.
Accessibility to me means that people can use
computers regardless of disability.
So in the GNOME world or the things that GNOME is
most focused on, are visual impairments.
So, and that's partly for historical reasons
but we have a lot of effort in trying to get the
desktop much more usable by visually impaired users.
And I would say that that's a very large portion
of the accessibility efforts that we do.
But we do other efforts as well.
Actually we have a testimonial on our website now
because we've launched an accessibility campaign
with GNOME where we want to make
2012 the year of accessibility at GNOME
so you can donate on the GNOME website
and give to our campaign.
But along with the campaign to explain it to people
we've launched these testimonials
from people who are, who you know have disabilities
who are using GNOME for every day.
And one of those is a person with visual impairment
who uses GNOME to you know
basically to use a computer and make a living
but — as a developer —
but we also have somebody who I think
I should have looked this up before today
I think he has cystic fibrosis and he's severely disabled
and he's just thrilled that GNOME 3 makes it possible
for him to use a computer at all by himself.
So with GNOME 3 he can, he says he can,
you know he can search on the Internet
for music videos and talk with his friends.
And he never thought that he'd be able to do that by himself.
So accessibility means a lot of things.
For us it means you know we will, we definitely
want to push forward making our desktop usable by everybody
partcularly people with particular disabilities like blindness.
So the other thing that you're very interested in
is women in computing
and I believe that’s the Ada Initiative
that you’re associated with.
Could you tell our viewers
a little more about that?
Yeah I’d love to and
it’s actually two things
and I think one led me
to the other. The first one is
the GNOME Outreach Program
for Women and Google is a sponsor
of the program and we’re so
grateful that Google sponsors interns
in our community
because what our program does
is we specifically invite women
to apply and take on —
it’s inspired by Google Summer of Code actually
— and it encourages them to come into projects.
They don’t need to be [into?]
development although many of them are
we have marketing interns,
design interns, you know, documentation interns.
And what these women do
is that they come in,
and in order to apply
you must have made contributions already
into the project so basically
it specifically invites women to come
and participate in our community
and tells them how to get started.
And in order to even submit the application
you have to make contacts with people,
talk to them, figure out, you know,
what the needs are in the project
and make a real fix.
So the program’s been really successful
and what we’ve done is basically systematically addressed
all of those reasons why
we think women are excluded
or have traditionally not been present in the
Free and Open Source Software community.
And at GNOME it’s been tremendously successful:
a very high percentage of the women
that participate in our programs
stay in our community.
I think, there’s a number that —
I think it’s something like
40% of the women who participated in, uh,
two rounds ago
and the round before that
— not only stayed in our community
but were active in outreach.
So they were mentors,
they were speaking
on behalf of GNOME to get more people involved
because they had such a good experience.
And so it’s this kind of thing and
the GNOME community has changed so much since I first became involved in it
many years ago where now I go to a conference
and there are women there.
And not only that, there’s a supportive community
where, you know, sometimes when
I have a bad day
I posted a blog recently where I had spoken
on a panel at South by Southwest [SXSW]
and my discussion was so intellectual and high level
— but I posted a photo of me
and the other three panelists and
somebody commented on a specific part of my anatomy
oh
and it shocked me and I remembered —
That is gross.
“Oh! That is why I don’t post photos of myself generally!”
But it was like
“I’m already a seasoned member of our community,
one bad comment isn’t going to turn me away.”
But five years ago,
I maybe would have just gone away.
But I knew that I could go to the
women’s outreach forum on the GNOME server
and I — you know, on the IRC channel —
and we all talked about it and
three other people said
“I had that happen to me last week”
and it’s unfortunate that it’s so common
but we’ve created infrastructure,
we’ve created ways that we can talk about it
that allows women to cope and understand
that our community is more valuable and
not just represented by the few bad actors.
So the GNOME Outreach Program which is the fantastic
and Marina who is actually at Red Hat
and she does this and she’s amazing,
she’s the one who spearheads this effort,
it’s incredible.
You’re laughing?
No, I’ve actually interviewed Marina,
if people want to look back
you can find an interview with her
on exactly this topic.
Oh OK, so I’ll skip to the Ada Initiative.
Yeah.
which is — so I’ve just become an advisor
to that because I went to a conference
in Melbourne when I was there for Linux Conf Australia
They had this — it’s called AdaCamp
and I was astounded by
how many articulate amazing interesting women
there were who had so much more
information about women in technology
than I ever had.
I’ve been interviewed as a woman in Free Software
in the past and [laughs] —
following the old axiom that
in order to be an expert
about women in Free Software
you just had to be one.
Yeah.
[laughs]
So they — but these women had statistics
and they had real knowledge
and they had amazing recommendations of things that
Free Software projects and software companies
can do to make sure that
they’re actually encouraging women to participate.
And so that’s why I decided to affiliate with them,
and to support them.
Their work is incredible.
They’ve helped create
codes of conduct for conferences,
they’ve helped deal with problems as they arise,
they’ve helped draw attention to the issue
in the field, so it’s great,
the Ada Initiative.
That’s really good,
so that’s the search term if
people want to find out more about it.
Because we could do with
more women in engineering,
and in the Free Software communities.
So the other interesting thing that
you deal with is you have a very interesting
perspective on Free Software
as it relates to medical devices,
why that's really important.
I don't want you to go into any specific details
but maybe you could explain to our viewers
a little bit about how important that is.
Yeah, I don't know how to explain it
without at least getting into
the specific story of me
but I'll make it really short
and it's that I have a heart condition
I have a very big heart
and I'm fine, I have no symptoms
but I am at a very high risk of suddenly dying.
And I was already a lawyer
at the Software Freedom Law Center
when I was told that I needed
a pacemaker/defibrillator
so — and I'd been a programmer back in college
— so my first question was
"Well, what is the software on the device?"
And the doctor not only had no answer for me
he'd never thought about that question before.
The medical device rep came in
who happened to be there that day
had also never thought about that question
and had no answer.
And so I began this big discovery that
to make a long story short
brought me to the realisation that
actually the Food and Drug Administration
is not reviewing
the source code on these devices
because they're not asking for the
source code to review it,
they actually don't even keep a copy.
So there are all these issues
with the fact that we're all relying on these
medical device companies
for creating and testing their own software.
Which, you know, these companies
have an interest in making sure that
nobody dies
but when you have something that's
being implanted into your body
and being literally screwed into your heart
Yousort of start to realise that
"Well, why can't I look at the software
that's on this device?"
And not only that, I actually
even offered to sign an NDA, I wasn't even
asking "please publish it to the world"
I was just saying
"I would feel a lot better personally
if I could take a look at the code."
And that was a non-starter with these
medical device companies.
So what I've started doing is
in addition to the research about the
legal ramifications and what the framework are
are to just sort of start talking about it
and sort of let people know
that this is really a problem that
the medical devices that we have right now fail.
They're great, they're amazing devices
but they have software in them
and software has bugs.
So over time they will fail and
you know, just because software is available
for review doesn't mean it will be 100% safe.
It will also have bugs.
But the chances are that if there are problems
they'll be caught faster
that anyone can fix them;
all of the reasons why Free Software
is so great to work on and so great to have
in your company's products
are exactly the same reasons why
it makes so much more sense to have it in medical devices.
But on top of that
it's just an issue of public safety.
So, you know, you can come at it
from either just the sensible
"these devices fail and instead of —"
There are all these think tanks that
are going around researching these devices
and they are finding ways to
show that they're maliciously hackable.
And those same think tanks would be reviewing
the source code line-by-line and finding problems
so that they could be fixed.
You know there's a tremendous amount
of interest in this.
And once you start thinking about your
medical devices you think about all the software
you rely on, it's not just my medical device,
what about our voting machines?
What about our cars?
Our cars have been — there was a
security exploit on cars where
they could be remotely hacked into
through the most amazing of ways
and controlled: steered and accelerated
and — just amazing stuff.
So, you know, it's everything that we rely on,
and all that software interacts together.
So we need our software that we rely on
to be, you know, to be Free and Open.
We're building just so much infrastructure
both, you know, in our hearts, in our bodies,
but also in our society, our financial markets.
The only way we'll create a good society
going forward is by making sure that
it's freedom and —
As I like to often say
eventually your doorknob is going to have a processor
[laugh]
running software and who controls the code in that?
It will end up being extremely important
going forward.
So there's one final question I'd like to ask
— thank you so much for your time —
but what I always like to ask people
is for viewers who might not be currently in the
Free Software community,
who might be thinking about it:
how did you get to where you are?
So, you know, imagine that you're a young woman
in your late teens or early twenties
what advice would you give to someone like that
to be able to end up in the august position
of Director of the GNOME Foundation?
People actually do ask me — especially law students —
how they can emulate my career path
and I tell them that I wish I was as organised
as they are to even ask about it.
I kind of, to be totally honest,
just stumbled into these jobs.
I would say that interest in technology for women
happens very early.
So I would say to all of you
if you know of a little girl
try and introduce them to some kind of technology
because once you get past a certain age
for many girls it's too late.
At the AdaCamp we had a session
where we talked about how we could get
more high school girls interested in technology
and I was like "hang on, let's stop for a second
and let's go around the room really fast
and say what we think our earliest positive
technology experience was that we think was
the most formative."
So that we could sort of think of how to
create that for other girls.
And almost everybody as I went around
had a parent, notably a father,
who had been interested in computers
and who had encouraged us at a very early age.
So I would say that that — I had a father
who was an engineer
and he encouraged me from the get-go
and I'm very old in Free Software terms
so he encouraged me on Prodigy and Compuserve
and I had a computer from the earliest days
where I was running BASIC
and he looked at my 10 PRINT "KAREN RULES"
and said you know
— and GOTO 10 —
and he said "you know what else you can do with this?
You can do this, you can do that."
So I would say that was the earliest thing
and then I went to engineering school
because I was on this technology path
and I worked in a computer lab
where there were no women
and I went into the director and I said
"You have no women in this lab and all these women
are walking in and it's so hostile
and they just leave! It's horrible. Can you do something?"
And he said "You're hired!"
And that's how I wound up learning about computers
and spending all my time in the computer lab.
And so it's quite lucky in part.
And then I went to law school
and I didn't even know who Eben Moglen was
and I happened to be in his class
on perspectives on modern legal thought.
And I was so moved by — he's an incredible speaker
and I was just so moved by his teaching —
that he was my favourite professor in law school.
And then I went off and did securities law!
And I decided — I got fed up and I quit
and he heard I'd quit
and he'd started the Software Freedom Law Center
and asked me if I wanted to learn about non-profit law
and I was like "yes!"
But I hadn't actually thought about Free Software
that much since the 90s.
Even though I thought it was cool.
And then all of a sudden I had the opportunity
to be in the best spot in the world.
And over time I became really passionate about Free Software.
And then I had the medical issue happen to me.
And all of a sudden my personal and professional
were all combined.
And I've just been very very lucky.
So I would say as an advice to someone
who's starting out:
I would say "First, be open to new experiences
don't think that the next choice you're going to make
is forever.
And try to do good work in the world.
It has good ramifications
and it helps you out in the end too."
Thank you so much Karen.
That was really kind of you to spend the time.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for interviewing me.
Thanks.