H2HC - Mike Ossmann - Keynote Notes.txt

I am the founder of Great Scott Gadgets, an open source hardware company
that makes tools for the information security industry.  Before starting
Great Scott Gadgets, my background was in information security and, in
particular, wireless communication security research.  I'm a hacker.

I am also the designer of HackRF One, an open source hardware platform
for Software Defined Radio.  Basically it is a test instrument that can
transmit or receive arbitrary radio signals.  I started the HackRF
project because I wanted a better tool for wireless communication
security research and education.  The thing that I've enjoyed the most
about the HackRF project, however, has been seeing people use HackRF One
for diverse applications that I never imagined.  It turns out that
low-cost, uncalibrated RF test equipment is useful for a lot of
different things.  I've seen HackRF One used in physics research.  I've
seen it used in biological research.  I've seen it used to cheat at
video games by spoofing GPS signals.  Of course, I've also seen it used
for things like hijacking simultaneous translation systems in
conferences like this one.

I frequently speak at security conferences around the world, and I
recently had the opportunity to speak at an experimental physics
conference.  It was very interesting getting to know those scientists
and their work and to see how excited they all were to share their work
with each other.  The opportunity to address that audience got me
thinking about similarities and differences between the scientific
community and the hacker community and the ways that we share ideas.  I
wrote this talk for both audiences.

Raise your hand if you are an inventor.  Maybe you've created some
software or some hardware.  Maybe you've invented something in your head
but haven't actually produced it yet.  It could be mechanical or
electronic or visual or even virtual; it doesn't matter.  It could be
large or small.  It's just something that didn't exist before or that is
in some way better than things that existed before it.

How many of you didn't raise your hand at first because you didn't think
your creation qualified as an invention or because you don't fit your
own preconceived image of an inventor?

When I was a child people often asked me what I wanted to be when I grew
up.  I usually answered an electrical engineer or an inventor.  Somehow
it has turned out that I am now both those things, more or less, though
I took a circuitous path to get here.  I didn't study engineering or
anything technical in school.  I didn't pursue a career in the creation
of technology.  I didn't learn how to design electronics until I wanted
to build tools in order to accomplish other things.

When I was young I had a distinct image in my head of what an inventor
was.  Recently I've tried to recall how this image may have been formed.
What role models created this impression? Edison? Frankenstein? Dr.
Bunsen Honeydew?

In school I learned that Edison invented the light bulb, Bell invented
the telephone, Ford invented the automobile, Marconi invented the radio,
and the Wright Brothers invented the airplane.  I've since learned that
none of these things is true, exactly.  A century from now, I honestly
expect that schoolchildren will be taught that Gates or Jobs invented
the computer.

For a wonderful case study, I recommend Bruce Boyes's presentation at
the 2015 Open Hardware Summit titled "What the Wright Brothers Can Teach
us About Open Source vs. Closed Source".  Bruce presented compelling
evidence that challenged what I learned in school about the invention of
powered flight, even showing how Orville and Wilbur Wright, through a
series of questionable legal actions, actually harmed the progress of
aviation more than they helped it.

Bruce argued convincingly that the Wright brothers set back the aviation
industry in the United States 20 years behind other countries.  The
Wright brothers had a patent which they interpreted very broadly,
claiming that it covered all manned, powered flight when, in fact, the
text of the patent was more specific.  They were relentless in their
pursuit of outrageously high licensing fees from fellow aviation
pioneers.  At the start of the Great War, the United States had only a
few airplanes while European countries had thousands.

There were many inventors of flight around the world, all of them
learning from each other and making incremental advances.  The Wikipedia
article on the history of flight mentions many of these but repeatedly
cites the Smithsonian Institution's assertion that the Wright brothers
were first in flight.  What the Wikipedia article does not mention is
that after Orville Wright's death, the executors of his estate sold the
original Wright Flyer to the Smithsonian for one dollar under a contract
that stipulated that the Smithsonian would never make any statement or
public display suggesting the capability of manned, powered flight
before the Wright brothers' successful flight in 1903.

I learned in school in the United States that Eli Whitney invented the
cotton gin, an achievement credited in large part for setting the stage
for the industrial revolution.  (Overlooked was the fact that the device
more directly resulted in a large increase in slavery in the US).  I
also learned that someone else invented the cotton gin independently and
that Whitney's patent was later disputed.  This was described to me as a
shocking coincidence.  Surely the probability of such simultaneous
invention is minuscule because it violates our mythology of invention.
In our mythology, the inventor is a man, which is stupid.  The inventor
works alone, which is stupid.  Sometimes the inventor has one assistant,
but the assistant is not acknowledged as a contributor, which is stupid.
The inventor spends a tremendous amount of time in his laboratory or
workshop, which is the one part of the mythology that is probably
correct, yet it disagrees with the greatest myth of all, that the
invention is the result of a single, transcendent moment of inspiration:
EUREKA!

The eureka moment is the core of the mythology of invention.
Breakthroughs arrive, supposedly, not by climbing one step at a time but
by leaping to a great height all at once.  The capacity to achieve such
acts of genius is what separates inventors from us mortals.  It is why,
I think, most of us hesitate to call ourselves inventors.  We don't want
to be seen as arrogant, self-proclaimed geniuses, or worse, as crackpot
practitioners of pseudoscience or chasers of the next big consumer
craze.  We don't want our creations compared the light bulb.  Neither do
we want them compared to the "Jump to Conclusions" Mat.

I don't know why the eureka myth is so powerful.  It seems to be
something we want to believe despite all evidence.  It extends beyond
inventors to all sorts of creative people.  Mozart, it is said, held in
his head the entire Jupiter Symphony, his longest, in a single moment.

"The Eureka Myth", by the way, is the title of a book by Jessica Silbey.
As I developed the ideas for this talk, I started calling the whole
mythology of invention "The Eureka Myth".  Eventually, I looked it up to
see if anyone had used the phrase before.  It turned out to have been
independently discovered more than once, most notably as the title of
Silbey's book that presents evidence that challenges the mythology of
invention.

"Simultaneous invention" or "multiple discovery" is, in fact, the normal
way that inventions happen, not the rare exception I thought as a child.
If you take the time to investigate the origin of almost any
technological breakthrough in history, you'll find that the mythology
doesn't agree with reality.  Progress is made in small steps by many
people, not in great leaps by a solitary genius.

Eli Whitney was involved in patent disputes, with not only one person,
but several.  Some were independent discoverers of similar technology;
others made incremental improvements to Whitney's cotton gin - which
was, itself, an increment improvement to existing technology.  If you
were somehow able to go back in time and identify all the independent
inventors of the cotton gin, you would probably end up with a long list
of names, and it is possible that Eli Whitney would not be among them!
It is moderately likely that he took the idea from a woman he knew or
from a black slave he owned, but women and slaves weren't granted
patents in those days.

When I was young, I dreamed of one day holding my own patents.  I hoped
that I could be one of those special people with the gift of inventive
inspiration, that my "eurekas" would somehow make the world a better
place.  I didn't realize at the time how absurd the patent system is.
Patents confer a government granted monopoly to the single genius
creator of a great new technology.  The system makes sense, however,
only if you believe the mythology of invention.  The supposed benefits
to society are that patents incentivize invention and that they result
in the publication of ideas that would otherwise be kept secret.

The publication benefit is easily refuted.  I have heard that it is
common in the technological industries for commercial engineers to be
advised not to read patents for fear of accusations of willful
infringement.  I do not read patents; the benefit just doesn't outweigh
the risk.  If the creators of new technology actively avoid reading the
patents of other creators, then their publication can have only a
negative impact, not a positive one, on the progress of technology.  If
you choose not to read patents, you won't miss much.  In general,
technology is pretty easy to reverse engineer.  We all took things apart
when we were kids to see how they worked.  It is literally child's play.

The other benefit of patents, that they incentivize invention, is easier
to believe.  Our mythology tells us that invention is a rare occurrence,
that inventors are special people without whom we would languish in a
dark age.  The reality, of course, is that invention is a normal thing
that humans do every day.  Ask yourself why you invent things, small or
large.  If the people sitting near you raised their hands earlier, ask
them later today what motivates their creativity.  I bet you'll hear
things like,
"I enjoy being creative",
"I like finding better ways to do things",
"I try to give back to those who create technology I use", or
"It makes my job easier".

I bet you won't hear people say, "I patent my inventions, and that's how
I got rich".

There are a lot of people these days talking about patent reform.  They
usually point to software patents or business process patents, and they
propose reducing the reach of the patent system in some way.  I do not
support patent reform.  Patents are harmful to society in my opinion,
and they should be abolished.

The harm caused by patents is easy to see.  By restricting new
technologies to just one producer, they slow the adoption of technology
and make it harder for others to make incremental improvements.  The
only justification for the patent system is that it produces more
benefit than harm, but the benefits only appear to exist if you believe
in the mythology of invention.

Around the turn of the century I had an idea that might have been
patentable.  I had recently moved to the mountains of Colorado.  Driving
on a windy road one dark night in my mountain town, I nearly hit a deer
that was standing in the middle of the road.  I didn't see it at first
because it was standing just past a fairly tight turn, just to the left
of my headlights until I had completed the turn.  Fortunately, I was
able to stop quickly enough to avoid a collision, but the moment of
fright got me thinking.  Why were my headlights pointed the direction my
car was facing, not the direction my car was turning? Wouldn't it make
more sense to have headlights that swivel from side to side as the
steering wheel was turned?  I thought that my idea from that moment of
inspiration was pretty good, and I thought that, instead of messing with
my existing headlights, I could experiment with a third headlight
mounted on the car.

I never did retrofit my car with an experimental headlight, but a year
or two later, I saw an advertisement from Lexus touting the exact same
idea.  What if I had already applied for a patent for the idea? Or what
if I had started a company to develop it, holding the idea as a trade
secret? Would I have been justified in assuming that Lexus had stolen my
idea? Would I have felt compelled to sue? As it happened, I don't think
I ever told anyone about the idea, so I easily concluded that it was
independently invented by someone else.

My idea may have been good, but it was not unique.  Over the past few
years, several automakers (BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, Volvo) have been sued
by Adaptive Headlamp Technologies, Inc. for infringement of a 2007
patent for headlights that swivel when the steering wheel is turned.
Adaptive Headlamp Technologies, Inc., is a subsidiary of an
"intellectual property licensing company", which is a euphemism for
"patent troll".  When I heard about the lawsuits, I recalled that old
Lexus advertisement and did a quick search for other prior art.  Guess
what I found? A car called the Tucker 48 had a third headlight that
swiveled as the steering wheel turned - in 1948!  Automakers today are
actually spending money defending themselves from recent patent claims
about technology invented more than half a century ago!

My moment after almost hitting that deer was a eureka moment.  I think
we've all had eureka moments in our lives, we just haven't had the big
one yet.  We're like gambling addicts, convinced by our small wins that
we'll someday have the big score, and I think that may be one of the
reasons we want to believe the eureka myth.  But the big score, the big
eureka, is a myth.  The eureka that is a big idea, not a small one, is
something that doesn't happen in real life.  It's a story we concoct
when we tell the tales of past inventions.  Small eurekas do happen in
real life, and they occur to many different people at roughly the same
time.  Eurekas can be wonderful experiences and can lead to great
things, but don't be fooled into thinking that a eureka is unique.
Society will not be deprived of an invention just because one person
didn't follow up on a moment of inspiration.  The better the idea is,
the more likely it is that someone else will have - or already has had -
the same idea.

When I tell people that I support abolishing patents, I get some strange
looks.  Evidently, this is considered a radical notion, but it seems
pretty obvious to me.  Even if I can convince someone that, ideally, we
would be better off without patents, my listener typically suggests that
an abrupt transition would be too difficult, that there would be
unintended consequences.  It's the same argument that many people make
when opposing marijuana legalization.  I live in Colorado, one of the
states leading the way toward marijuana legalization in the United
States.  Let me tell you about unintended consequences:
 - Tourism is up
 - Tax revenue is up
 - Teen marijuana use is down, and it is below the national average.

Admittedly, there have also been some negative consequences.  I've heard
that we're having a problem with unemployment among prison guards.
Sometimes what seems to be a negative consequence to an individual is a
great benefit to society as a whole.  I haven't been able to confirm the
prison guard unemployment rumor, but what I have found out is that
prison guards are among the major opponents of marijuana legalization.
Do you know who else opposes legalization? Pharmaceutical companies.
Apparently they are more concerned about the sales of their patented
drugs than they are about sick people feeling better.

When the Nobel Prize is handed out, it is increasingly given to more
than one person.  I've heard some folks say that this is due to the fact
that science has progressed to the point at which no single person is
able to make major achievements. "There just isn't any low-hanging fruit
out there anymore." In certain areas of research it is true that groups
are required, but in general I think it is nonsense that individuals are
less able to contribute to science than they were in the past.  History
is jam-packed with people claiming that all the discoveries have already
been made.  They're always wrong.

Sometimes multiple Nobels are given to independent discoverers of the
same thing.  It isn't uncommon at all, and it may be that modern
communication technology makes it more apparent when multiple discovery
occurs.

Sometimes Nobels are given to a team of collaborators.  If scientists
are collaborating more than they once did, I think that's great, but it
is probably a sign that modern technology has made collaboration easier,
not that collaboration is more necessary than it was in the past.

Another possible reason for the increase in multiple Nobel winners is
that collaborators may be more likely to be acknowledged today than they
were in the past.  Have you heard of Rosalind Franklin? Perhaps not, but
you probably have heard of Watson and Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for
their work on DNA that was based on her data.

I have mixed feelings about the Nobel Prize.  I think it is great to
honor those who advance science, but the Prize seems to perpetuate the
mythology of invention, especially by having a policy that a prize
cannot be given to more than three people.  It is a disservice to
humanity to insist that the most important scientific contributions
cannot come from groups of four or more people.

The folks who somehow produce idea after idea are my favorite people,
not for the value of any one idea but for their spirit of inventiveness.
Most of them will never even be considered for a Nobel Prize.  There may
be Nobel winners or future Nobel winners in this room.  Would you like
to be one of them?  There is one way to make absolutely certain that you
will not, and that is to refrain from publishing any of your ideas.
Hold your best idea in your head.  Keep it secret.  Don't let anyone
know about the precious gem you've stored in there.  Except it's not
precious.  Your idea has no value until you do something with it or tell
someone about it.

Part of the Eureka Myth is that you only need the right idea to make a
million dollars.  It could even be something simple like the pet rock or
the bread climp.  The truth is that implementation matters.  No investor
in the world is going to fund your startup based on an idea alone.  How
are you developing your idea? Who are your customers? How have you
proven that you are capable of delivering something your customers want?
What makes you more likely to succeed than your competition? An idea is
a seed, but seeds are all over the place.  Successful businesses are
seeds that have been planted in fertile soil and have found the right
amount of water and sun over a long period of time.  It takes work to
turn an idea into a product, and it takes even more work to deliver that
product to satisfied customers.  Thomas Edison famously said that genius
is "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration".  I've recently heard Edison
called the Elon Musk of his day, but somehow, despite that quotation, my
childhood image of Edison was more Doc Brown than Elon Musk.

Jessica Silbey, author of The Eureka Myth, wrote that:

"When they describe how and why their company succeeds, it is not
largely or solely because of intellectual property.  It is because of
loyalty, relationships, reputation, a copacetic workplace, the
excellence of their products and services, first mover advantage,
private agreements, an attentive and understandable market, and a
constantly evolving offering of complementary products and services
built around identifiable marketplace needs or desires."

My company makes open source hardware tools for the information security
industry.  Something I did not anticipate when I started my business is
how difficult it would be to explain to people what I do.  The elevator
pitch for Great Scott Gadgets requires an unusually slow elevator.
First, I have to convince people that hacking is a worthwhile endeavor.
Then, I have to explain open source hardware.  It turns out that this is
the significantly higher hurdle.  When I started making hardware, it
seemed perfectly natural to me that my hardware should be open source.
I spent many years in IT starting long before it was called IT, and,
without exception, every single thing I did in my career that I was
proud of was something that I accomplished with the help of open source
software.  I wanted to give back to the community that had given me so
much.  For me, making everything I produce open source, software or
hardware or whatever, isn't an option; it is simply the right thing to
do.

Elevator people often ask if I have patents.  I ask them if they'd like
to join me on a longer elevator.  Usually, though, I avoid the subject
of patent abolition and of the ethics of open source.  Instead I tell
them how ineffective patents are, especially for small companies.  Every
successful product gets cloned these days, patented or not, open source
or not.  By making my products open source, I disseminate my inventions
as widely as I can.  I give my ideas the greatest possible chance of
having a positive effect on the world, and everyone who hears about me
and one of my ideas is a potential customer even if they were exposed to
my creation through a clone.  Sure, you can buy a HarkRF or any number
of other HackRF clones from China, but if you hear about HackRF and
search for it online, you'll find my company as the first search result.

The marketing angle has the elevator people half convinced by the end of
the ride.  I think the reason they are only half convinced is that they
can't let go of that old myth.  They think that great ideas have great
value and that by giving away my ideas I'm losing value.

When I'm away from home I enjoy traveling with a toy guitar to entertain
myself.  Let's say you were to sit down with me to try my guitar.  You
like it, so you steal it from me.  I would be sad because I wouldn't
have my guitar anymore.  I would be deprived of my ability to play it.
But let's say that you sit down with me to try my guitar and do not
steal it.  Instead you leave having learned a song that I wrote.  I
would still have the guitar, and I would still have the song.  I would
be deprived of nothing.

I reject the notion that scarcity increases the value of ideas.  The
opposite is in fact true; ideas have value in proportion to how much
they are shared.  If I ever decide to stop selling open source hardware
and instead pursue a career in music, the popularity of my songs would
be directly related to my ability to sell tickets to performances.

This is exactly what the elevator people don't understand: Ideas have
value in proportion to how much they are shared.

Your ideas are worthless until you share them with the world.

This notion is hardly anything new.  Don Lancaster wrote in his Hardware
Hacker column in 1988:

"I would like to be able to report to you that ideas are still worth a
dime a bale in ten bale lots.  It is only when an idea is both converted
into a form that people can use and in fact are actually and
aggressively using it, that the idea gains any value."

In the following issue, he wrote:

"I am sorry if I did offend one or two patent attorneys and one or two
others who do seem to be personally profiting from this very sorry state
of affairs.  I also extend my apologies to their BMW dealers."

In the debate between soft science and hard science, the experimental
physicists I spoke with seem have the advantage.  Hackers do science
too, but it is a mixture of both hard and soft.  We study computing
systems, creations not of nature but of humans.  Much of what interests
us is how humans use computers and how there are strengths and
weaknesses in whole systems that include both technological and human
elements.

A growing segment of the information security community, however,
studies harder aspects of computing technology.  For example, in recent
years there have been great advances in formal verification of computer
programs.  It is now possible to mathematically prove the correctness of
many programs.

Researchers in the LANGSEC movement are taking a language theoretic
approach to computer security.  They look at information systems and see
interfaces between various components.  An interface could, for example,
be a user interface that accepts input directly from a human, or it
could be a network interface that accepts input from another computer,
or it could be an application programming interface that accepts input
from some other code running on the same computer, even if linked into
the process that is handling the input.  Anywhere input is processed,
LANGSEC researchers point out that the input can be thought of as a
language and that the language's complexity can be classified according
to a hierarchy that has existed for decades in the field of linguistics.

More complex languages require more complex input processing, and it has
been shown that only the simplest languages can be processed with
computer programs that can be proven to terminate on all possible
inputs.  The halting problem, known since the early years of computer
science, tells us that more complex languages require input processing
that may never end.  If you can't prove that your program terminates on
all possible inputs, you can't possibly prove that it correctly
processes all possible inputs.  The security of every computing system
therefore depends on simplicity of input languages.

The astonishing result of this work is that, by simply combining decades
old linguistics research with decades old computer science research, we
can see that most modern information systems have no hope of ever
providing any security guarantees.  If you want security guarantees you
must, at a minimum, specify input languages throughout your system that
do not exceed a certain complexity.

It may seem strange that the application of linguistics, the study of
natural languages of humans, to computer science, the study of machines
created by humans, yields a hard result regarding the provable
correctness of computer programs.  I am frequently astonished by this
myself, but it is a result that I cannot refute, so I encourage everyone
who creates information systems to pay attention and to define protocols
and interfaces with a grammatical simplicity that will allow for future
security guarantees.

The information security community includes both hackers and academic
researchers.  The reason I mention the LANGSEC movement is that it is to
me the most exciting research happening in the field and because it was
started by a small number of people at the intersection of those two
groups, hackers and academics.  I don't believe that this was an
accident.  I believe that there are some things that hackers do well and
that there are other things academics do well.  We have much to learn
from one another.

Hackers are good at finding one provable aspect of a system with many
unprovable characteristics.  When presented with a security claim,
hackers like to show how the claim is false.  "You say your software is
unbreakable?  Well, here is one way it is already broken."

There is a saying in the hacker community: "You can't argue with a root
shell."  This means that when someone points out how your system is
broken, it is an irrefutable proof.  Sergey Bratus, one of the key
members of the LANGSEC community, has pointed out that an exploit is
proof by construction of the vulnerability of a system.

Hackers are terrible at writing things down.  We enjoy sharing
information, but we often share our most important results in
presentations at conferences without any written paper.  When we do
write things down, it is often in a blog post or in informal
publications like Phrack or PoC||GTFO.  These are wonderful
publications, but they lack the rigorous peer review of academic
journals.  I am often bewildered by the fact that much of the most
important knowledge of the hacker community is perpetuated in an oral
tradition.

Hackers are not always good at citing past research.  In the information
security community, hackers often cite other hackers, and academics cite
other academics, but neither group is very good at citing research from
the other group.

Hackers are good at open source, and this is perhaps the most important
thing that academics can learn from hackers in my opinion.  Hackers
created the infrastructure of the Internet out of open source software
and open documentation, and they have called the Internet home for as
long as the Internet has existed.

Open source software and now hardware is a tremendously important part
of hacker culture.  When we share, we share deliberately, and we do
everything in our power to ensure that others can take advantage of the
work that we share.  One thing we do not do is publish findings behind
paywalls.

When I was invited to speak at the physics conference, one of the first
things I did was to look for papers from the previous conference in
2015.  Even though I did not find the full text in any central
repository, I was pleased to be able to find every paper I looked for,
complete with a creative commons attribution license, available on the
Web.  I was delighted to find this because somehow in 2017 this is still
not the norm.

Sadly there are still many notable journals that do not provide open
access to scientific research.  In my opinion there is no excuse for
this in the 21st century.  The most important thing you can do to
advance science is to disseminate your findings as widely as you can.
In this century that means you must make your work freely available
online.  If you are publishing research in 2017 behind a paywall, I'm
not sure what you are doing, but you are not doing science.

Another important and often overlooked aspect of science is the
repeatability of experiments.  If you publish your results but hide your
data, if you don't share software that is central to your research, if
you don't describe your equipment in sufficient detail for someone to
reproduce your experimental apparatus, you aren't doing science.

These words may sound harsh, but I hope you will give them thought.  We
live in a world today in which the value of science is disputed.  There
are political voices growing louder every day telling people that
science is a system of beliefs, not a mechanism for finding truth.  Even
well-educated people who think they have an appreciation for science are
not immune to pseudoscience crazes.  Just look at labels in any grocery
store in the United States to see what I'm talking about.

There is one great thing that you can do demonstrate the value of
science and that is to do the best science you can.  Share your results
as widely as you can.  Share all the information necessary to reproduce
your results.  Convince your audience how you've avoided fooling
yourself into believing a false conclusion.  Share all your evidence.
If you don't, you will plant seeds of doubt that undermine confidence in
science itself.

Some of you may think this advice doesn't apply to you because you don't
think of what you do as science, but hackers do science all the time.
Every time you find a new type of bug or a new technique, every time you
learn something that other people haven't figured out yet, every time
you share this knowledge with your peers, you are doing science.  In
fact, if you share as effectively as you can, you may be doing a better
job of science than many of the people who call themselves scientists.

I recently reread Cargo Cult Science, the famous 1974 lecture by Richard
Feynman.  In this wonderful lecture, Feynman explored the difference
between science and pseudoscience and pointed out that a lot of people
who think they are doing science actually aren't.  He encouraged
scientists to do a better job of sharing their research and making their
experiments more repeatable, making the excellent point that honest and
thorough publication is essential to scientific integrity.

Lack of this kind of integrity is nothing new.  Feynman discussed bad
science done throughout the 20th century.  In the 21st century, however,
we have an opportunity to establish better standards for science.  It is
an opportunity created by the Internet, a tool which has enabled better
sharing of information.

This opportunity is also created by open source culture that has shown
the value of licensing, not just publishing information.  Our new
standards for science should combine the best of hacker culture with the
best of traditional science.

Every contribution you make, every paper you write, every line of code
you publish, every hardware design you place under an open source
license serves to advance science.  If there is one thing that should be
apparent to everyone here at this conference it is that you are a part
of something greater than yourself.  The achievements of this community
are made by the combined efforts of many people.

The progress of science and technology is made in small steps, not giant
leaps, so remember that your contributions, no matter how small, are
important.  Remember that they will have the greatest impact if you
describe them thoroughly and honestly and if you do your best to
disseminate the information as widely as possible.

Your ideas are worthless until you share them with the world, so share
them in every way you can.

Copyright 2017 Michael Ossmann
License: CC BY 4.0