Eben Moglen’s keynote address at Plone Conference 2006, “Software and Community in the Early 21st Century” was hands-down the most inspiring speech I’ve ever heard in my life.
In just over an hour, he traced the connections between the free software movement, the One Laptop Per Child project, and the past three hundred years of modern industrial economic development, and placed our work into the larger context of the ongoing journey towards freedom and equality for all people. There was hardly a dry eye in the standing-room-only house when he was done.
Thanks to my good friend Grace of Versant Media, Eben’s talk is now available for your online viewing pleasure at YouTube.
Now is probably a great time to thank Eben for all he’s done over the past 15 years to advance free software, and to thank Jonah Bossewitch, Paul Everitt and Ian Sullivan — and of course Eben — for bringing us the magnificent gift of this talk. I’m so pleased to be able to share it with the world.
Share it with someone you love who wonders what you do and why it matters. 
(A high-resolution version of Eben’s talk will be available for downloading from Archive.org under a Creative Commons license in the next week.)
I’m with you brother! Eben Moglen is such an amazing speaker and this speech is one of his best. This holiday break I’m going to have my family sit down with me and listen to it again. He’s talking about software, but he eloquently explains key concepts of sharing non-rivalrous goods that can equally apply to music, my field. Here’s to Free Culture!
[...] speaker, makes you seem smarter and more interesting. But really, I don’t think it does. The best talk I’ve ever seen about open source is the one in which Eben Moglen weaves the stor… Context is [...]