An author, technology and copyright researcher, activist, and consultant, Hill's remarks showcase the free software movement and open source software as innovation through collaboration.

Great. So I come from, again, from a very different space, I come more from the free software movement. I'm currently a director of the free software foundation and active in a series of projects including mostly free or open-source operating systems, including a project called Debian and another project called Ubuntu - it's a relatively young project about four years old, which is now used by several tens of millions of people so - reasonably successful and I mean I guess I'm going to continue what Fernanda was talking about democratizing access to technology as the source of innovation and work because that's sort of where I'm coming from.

Free software as I approach it, free software or open source, is very much about the control of technology and it's sort of articulated at least early on as a social movement for control of technology. And the way that I like to think about it is actually based more around communication technologies. Ss people who design technology I think that there is an understanding of the power that technology has and if you look at the communication technologies you can understand the degree and the way in which technologies mediate communication that gives the designer of the technology a huge amount of power, right? A particular technology, communication technology, that you're using controls in a very sort of explicit way what you can say, how you can say it, who you can say it to, right? If you're looking at a beautiful sunset you want to communicate that to someone else with a telephone it ends up being communicated very differently than if you have a camera or the ability to send a picture. In that case it's just the nature of the technology - it's a set of design decisions or it was just a set of technology limitations that led to empowering people in a certain way and allowed them certain affordances and disallowed certain others.

But the effect is very powerful and in many other situations the technological decisions are made for a whole set of reasons, some of which may be good, some of which may be bad. I think that in that case free software becomes, is a social - I meant early on to say that control over technology that is: the ability to decide how a technology is used, the ability to change the technology itself, the ability to collaborate to work on it - it's something that belongs not only with the designers but also with the users of every technology, right? If it's a piece of software, people need access to the source code and they need the ability - whether it's the legal ability or the technological ability as given by source code, to modify the way that the software is used to collaborate with people, to share in that sense and to empower the people in the process.

So that's sort of where I come from. What's important here, I think, in the context of this - is not just the fact that this was done as a social movement. That's a good thing that we're glad to see - but more important has been the effect of it. The effect has been, in a certain sense, the pushing of the process of design out from a set of certain designers, manufactures and firms, to everybody else - right? So if you look at where it comes from and what the result has been that the people who create the most innovative aspects of free technologies, free or open source technologies, are not the people who we might expect. There's been a series of empirical studies, a couple of which I've been involved with, which have actually taken and looked at a piece of free or open source software, checked and taken a set of the major innovations in a year and followed through and saw who produced them.

There was a good one that was done in MIT at the business school and Harvard business school which was looking at database software and seeing where it was coming from. In fact, very few of the major technologies - very few of the major innovations in this one year period came from people who were major contributors to the project. Some these innovations when they were originally put out weren't even written in the same language of the project because the person who built it had never contributed before and wasn't familiar with the technological basis. But they built something that was compelling, that was interesting, and over a period of time as a series of other people who were in the community were able to integrate it and put it in to a product and get out there. In that sense the innovation came from a very different place.

This is something that we've seen in a whole set of other places, whether its software or whether its other types of technology. If you look at medical devices people have done this as well. Who produced these? It's not firms, it's doctors, it's users of technology and by explicitly making, democratizing access to that we see a whole set of new types of innovations - important types of innovation and there's a whole set of reasons why that's happening.

These are not things that free software anticipated. The first is that the users of technology anticipate their needs better than the manufactures or designers of technologies in many cases, right? It's hard for many users to communicate their needs, as people here know very well, it's hard for users to communicate their needs very explicitly but access to control over the technology allows people to tweak or manipulate in order to reinvent technologies in ways that make them more successful. Additionally users have less outside liability in the same way that many firms do, which is something that's sort of important. And then the things that are changing recently and which have really been the basis for free software's success and opensource's success in the last 20 years are the fact that there's been, with access to the internet and computers, the ability for users to communicate and collaborate more effectively with each other and to share ideas - also to prototype build, tweak, and so on and so forth.

There's been an important technological evolution in that people - the tools for designing technologies, whether in software or in other things as well, are laptop computers. You walk into any design house, you walk into any engineering house and there is a bunch of people sitting on laptop computers, right? The users of software are using the same tools that the producers of software are using. As a result with access to technology that a producer uses, and that licenses make possible, that licenses make manipulatable - people are empowered to work in important ways.

The result of course has been this rapid success over the last ten years, that's really in many cases where people place the real birth of 'open source.' I guess less than ten years ago Netscape sort of released their browser. We've seen in that period of time, we've certainly seen if you look at the mozilla web browser, a free project that is now in use by half, more than half of the population, of a whole set of countries and in use by a rapidly growing number of users.

And there's space for work from outside all sorts of traditional sort of work environments. So the example that I know and where I can sort of end with is the discussion of - is looking at operating systems. I build operating systems, it seems like a very boring thing, it seems like it would be exciting to some but... but it is something that's sort of very, very basic. But if you look at the Debian project which is this sort of free operating system that anyone can tweak - there are, there have been hundreds of derivative distributions which are maintained and which are working together, right? Something as basic as an operating system, if it is malleable, in fact it is manipulated and used by a variety of different people.

To give you some sort of idea - parents have said "hey it would be great if I had a version of this operating system that was tweaked and designed for my kids", so there are half a dozen different versions of the Debian os, not including other linux distributions, made for children. In Italy there was a version created for dentists, OdontoLinux, it's a version that is specifically geared with lots of different pieces of software and a configuration that's good for running a dental office, right? There are similar ones for doctors, a little bit of collaboration between them but each is based on the fact that these communities of dentists, or parents, understand their needs and are able to know better than people outside and through the ability to manipulate the source code as the basis of their work, and the ability to collaborate with others, are able to produce great things.

The result is not a single player, I think this is something that we're seeing lots of other places as the ability to do the same level of prototyping and tweaking happens for lots of other types of technologies - it's not centralized in a firm or even in an individual, or a set of experts, it's distributed into an ecosystem of participants. And sure there are some players who are more central than others and that's powerful and it allows firms who want someone with that ability to step in and provide it, but the result is that together the group of people are better.