2021/talks/freedom.md


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[[!meta title="How Emacs made me appreciate software freedom"]]
[[!meta copyright="Copyright &copy; 2021 Protesilaos Stavrou"]]
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# How Emacs made me appreciate software freedom
Protesilaos Stavrou

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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&#x2014;dare I say&#x2014;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.


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