After cherishing the discourse that surrounded his talks “BSD for Researching, Writing, and Teaching in the Liberal Arts” at BSDCan 2023 and “Summa Tetraodontidae: Thomas Aquinas Explores OpenBSD's Medieval Orderliness” at BSDCan 2024, the nutty scholar and lecturer in the traditional Western liberal arts Dr. Corey Stephan returns to BSDCan excited for another great conversation at the nexus of ancient learning and modern computer science.
Stephan will model this talk after the timeless Dialogues of the great(est) Greek philosopher Plato, cheekily adopting many elements of Plato's beloved style. Stephan will depict Fred, Puffy, and Beastie as engaging in an imaginary conversation based on Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave.
Instead of staring at a mere shadow of reality, as those who are stuck in the cave do in Plato's Republic, NetBSD's man, OpenBSD's blowfish, and FreeBSD's daemon will discuss how persons are trapped in software non-freedom -- with spyware, malware, and all the rest -- unless they can embrace open licensing and orderly communal coding.
Stephan’s guiding thesis will be that the BSD operating system family is overtly liberating in character, inherently allowing users to live outside of the twenty-first century iteration of Plato's Cave that is software oppression. BSD is, after all, both free and open.
Stephan aims to discuss NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD nearly equally in this talk. He will explore attributes that are shared across these three operating systems -- including licensing, communal fundraising, and more -- and special features of each one. The collaborative friendliness of the NetBSD project, the intense orderliness of the OpenBSD operating system, and the freeing reliability of the FreeBSD operating system are examples of topics that he will imagine Fred, Puffy, and Beastie as discussing in their platonic dialogue.