[[!meta title="How Emacs made me appreciate software freedom"]] [[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2021 Protesilaos Stavrou"]] [[!inline pages="internal(2021/info/freedom-nav)" raw="yes"]] # How Emacs made me appreciate software freedom Protesilaos Stavrou The theme will be "how Emacs empowered my software freedom". I will outline the key moments in my transition to a GNU/Linux operating system and mark those which eventually contributed towards me becoming an Emacs user, maintainer of a—dare I say—popular package, and contributor to upstream Emacs (among others). By alluding to personal experiences, I will draw generalisable insights and connect them to what I believe are irreducible qualities of Emacs qua software and Emacs as a community of like-minded people. The talk will be theoretical in nature: there won't be any code-related demonstration nor technical references that only people with a background in computer science would likely recognise. Personal anecdotes shall be tangential to the point and considered as ancillary to the thesis of what Emacs represents from the standpoint of software freedom and user empowerment. The presentation is intended for a general audience that is interested in GNU software in general and Emacs in particular. My formal educational background as a social scientist (i.e. not a programmer) and later as a philosopher informs my approach to this topic. The presentation shall be 40 minutes long. Its text will be in essay form and shall be supplied as complementary material to the video. The notation will be in Org mode. I cannot provide an outline in advance, as it will most likely not be consistent with the actual presentation. If, however, this is absolutely required for administrative purposes I shall furnish one regardless with the proviso that I am in no way bound by it and thus reserve the right to modify it ahead of the main event. [[!inline pages="internal(2021/info/freedom-schedule)" raw="yes"]] [[!inline pages="internal(2021/info/freedom-nav)" raw="yes"]]