Recently I had the good fortune to be invited along for a special evening celebrating, publicising, and enthusing about the One Laptop Per Child project organized by Mita Williams  of The Leddy Library at the University of Windsor. I had been asked to speak on the significance of free software and to inform those assembled about the eIFL-FOSS program. A perfect opportunity for me to enthuse about subjects dear to my heart. But also - since an OLPC laptop was given away to an audience member during the proceedings - a chance to think a bit about what it means to create new possibilities.

I spent a lengthy drive to Windsor thinking about just what the relative significance of free software is. I wondered to myself (okay, maybe I was actually talking aloud to myself in my car; it happens!) what were the important breakthroughs in the past 100 years. The discovery of penicillin was certainly important. Is the creation of free software through the means of appropriate free and open source licences more or less important than the discovery of penicillin? I just don't know. But the fact that I don't know means I think it is at that level or beyond.

No doubt I spent too long in my talk enthusing about the possibilities created through the application of a legal instrument (in this case, the GNU General Public License) as a means of preserving four freedoms concerning software: 0) the freedom to run the program for any purpose, 1) the freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs, 2) the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour, 3) the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. It was these four freedoms that Richard Stallman sought to preserve when he drafted the first version of the GPL. And in so doing, he changed the world.

I don't know how often people do things that change the world. Change it fundamentally. Fundamentally because the very possibilities of that world are substantially altered.

Is the OLPC project going to have that kind of effect? Maybe. Maybe some day we will look back on it and say that it was as important to the world as the discovery of penicillin. Or free software.

And what is the connection between free software and the OLPC? Well, this exciting device runs entirely on free software. The operating system is based on Fedora Core 6 Linux. The activities (OLPC-speak for programs) it runs are themselves all free and open source software. And for most them you can press a button and actually see the source code for the program.

I kept wondering as I drove to Windsor through the cold Canadian winter whether those geeky free software developers who contributed a line or two, or made dozens of lines, of code to the Linux kernel ever guessed that some day someone would be creating a whole new range of educational and social possibilities, in part due to the free software they had helped to create. I suspect not.

That's the thing about creating new possibilities. You just can't tell where things will end up.

It was a lovely evening surrounded by librarians, students, and researchers all fired up by the advent of possibilities. For which I'd like to thank Mita Williams, my co-presenters, Art Rhyno, Systems Librarian at the Leddy Library, and Dr. Dragan Martinovic of the University of Windsor Faculty of Education. And of course also the two sponsors, The Leddy Libary and  The Essex Free Press.