I'm tremendously happy (and more than a little anxious!) to say that my talk proposal for PyCon 2016 has been accepted.
I'll be presenting What You Need To Know About Open Source Licenses on Tuesday the 31st of May at 12:10 PM in the Oregon Ballroom 201–202, as part of track “A”. PyCon 2016 will take place in Portland, Oregon from May 28th to June 5th, and has a really excellent lineup of talks.
The talk aims to be a broad overview of the software licensing landscape. It will cover the essentials of software copyright, and how licenses are built on it. We'll look at several popular permissive and copyleft licenses, what their differences are, and how and why you might want to use them — without trying to promote any particular one. The primary goal is to learn about the basics of the system, how it impacts you, and why you need to care and be informed.
All PyCon talks are recorded and posted online (for example, here are the videos from 2015), and I will of course host a copy. Additionally, I'll do my best to provide a textual transcript and captions for the video, if possible (EDIT: Video, slides, and transcript are now available).
Those are the factual parts of this note. Beyond that, on a personal level, I'm very happy and honoured to have this opportunity. I've been attending PyCons (and even helping out a little behind the scenes sometimes) for several years now, but have never spoken at one before. I distinctly remember my impression of the conference and community at the first PyCon I attended. I was so very impressed with everyone: their conversations, their presentations, their work, their hobby projects, and how friendly, open, and welcoming they were. I really wanted to become a part of that community, and I've been back every year since.
I'm also anxious and nervous — after all, there will be a lot of people watching, and a lot of people submitted talk proposals for just a scarce few slots. For context, two of the people speaking just at the same time as me in other rooms will be Doug Hellmann (whose Python Module of the Week series was, in its Python 2 edition, one of the biggest helps to me when I first learned Python), and Alex Martelli (whose books are sitting right beside me at this moment. Oh, and he came up with the name “duck typing”). Needless to say, it feels like a big responsibility! I will try to translate this nervousness and anxiety into solid preparation to try to give a comprehensive, accurate, useful, and enjoyable talk.
And, yes, I acknowledge the title of the talk is incomplete/inaccurate due to calling them “Open Source” licenses — blame the length limit!
