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Benjamin Mako Hill
Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Website | Attendee Directory Profile

Benjamin Mako Hill is a technology and intellectual property researcher, activist, and consultant. He is currently a Senior Researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a Fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, and an adviser and contractor for the One Laptop per Child project. He has been an leader, developer, and contributor to the Free and Open Source Software community for more than a decade as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects. He is the author of several best-selling technical books, and a member of the Free Software Foundation board of directors. Hill has a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab.

Sessions

10:45am Wednesday, 07/22/2009

With Software as a Service, Is Only the Network Luddite Free?

Emerging Topics
Location: Ballroom A4/A5

Bradley Kuhn (Software Freedom Conservancy), Benjamin Mako Hill (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Evan Prodromou (StatusNet Inc), Nathan Yergler (Creative Commons), Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.)

Average rating:

(4.33, 3 ratings)

At OSCON 2008, Tim O'Reilly raised in his keynote a new challenge we face: Software as a Service. This panel discusses the work spawned by autonomo.us to inspire the Open Source and Software Freedom Movement to address the challenge. The talk will discuss the AGPL, a license designed to address these concerns, and the federated service model that must exist to succeed in addressing this problem. Read more.

4:30pm Wednesday, 07/22/2009

Antifeatures

Emerging Topics, People
Location: Ballroom A3/A6

Benjamin Mako Hill (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Average rating:

(4.00, 3 ratings)

This talk provides a humorous description of an argument in favor of free and open source software based on what I call "antifeatures:" functionality that technology developers charge users to not include. From DRM to crippled OSes to digital cameras, I will show off many of the most egregious antifeatures and describe how open source both makes them impossible and helps users work around them. Read more.

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Benjamin Mako Hill Fellow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology