@aral @conservancy @davidak

I think that I understand the history of why Google sponsors various free software related events. A decade ago the company was seen as a big success for free software and open standards ("the most magnificent creature in the [software] ecosystem" - Eben Moglen) but especially in the last five years many things have changed.

I generally support Conservancy, but these days having Google sponsor your event is at a minimum a poor public relations choice. It'll be too late to back out now, but if the conference continues beyond this year the sponsors decisions should be revisited.

The reason why these big companies sponsor such events is primarily for recruiting and secondarily for brand recognition. Google's actual interest in copyleft at this point seems questionable. As far as I can tell they're on a path towards removing copyleft from Android.

I think we're actually at a rather critical time in which while Free Software and copyleft appears to be doing well its future is far from assured. The entire computing industry has been going beyond the personal computing era into a new dystopian phase of "warehouse computing" centralized on a global scale. With the rise of The Cloud there has been a lot of consolidation, and we seem to be heading back towards the mainframe paradigm. Can the user still retain meaningful control in a situation where any computing of importance happens in a warehouse owned by a megacorporation?