Why Hackers Will Save the World

Speaker: Glyn Moody

The achievements of free software are already extraordinary. As well as running most of the Internet's infrastructure, and powering many of its leading companies, free software is beginning to find wide use in the server rooms of enterprises and on the desktops of general users. It is also increasingly deployed in embedded systems, and for mobile phones. But that's just the start: inspired by the ideas of free software, and building on its innovations, a wide range of other movements have been founded that aim to introduce freedom, openness and transparency to some of the most important areas of human activity. This talk explores their impact.

Glyn Moody is a writer, journalist, and blogger. After receiving two degrees in maths, he became a journalist, and started writing about computers in 1982, the Internet in 1994, and free software in 1995. In August 1997, his feature "The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was" appeared in Wired magazine; his history of free software and open source, "Rebel Code", was published by Penguin in 2001. He now blogs at opendotdotdot.blogspot.com, and is @glynmoody on Twitter and identi.ca.