Join us at SCALE! SCaLE 18x – the 18th annual Southern California Linux Expo – will take place on March. 5-8, 2020, at the Pasadena Convention Center. SCaLE 18x expects to host 150 exhibitors this year, along with nearly 130 sessions, tutorials and special events.

SCaLE is the largest community-run open-source and free software conference in North America. It is held annually in the greater Los Angeles area. For ticket and info visit: https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/ Want a free pass? Save $85! Just send us an encrypted email to: sales at thinkpenguin com using the GPG key found on our about page.

* While supplies last.

Join us for the Porcupine Freedom Festival and Forkfest this summer from June 13-23rd. The two events are held back-to-back with each other for a combined total of 10-days of festivities at Roger's Campground.

Porcfest is a Free State Project camping festival that takes place each summer in northern New Hampshire. The Free State Project is an effort by liberty-minded people the world over to bring together 20,000 like-minded individuals to one region with the objective of creating a free society. That number was reached in 2016 and since then the overall migration movement has really picked up steam. Porcfest has been described as "Woodstock for rational people", that is freedom loving people who prioritize rational logical thinking over emotional reactions.

Over the years Porcfest has grown into a more family friendly event with lots of centralized organization behind it. The idea behind Forkfest was to do what liberty minded people do everywhere: When you don't like the direction a project is heading do something about it. Fork it! To that end Forkfest is a continuation of Porcfest, but without any centralized planning, tickets, or rules. It's up to the those in attendance to make of it what they like. So this year we have decided to promote Forkfest by sponsoring Porcfest.

That said you can't register for Forkfest, but you can reserve a camp site if you intend on camping (access to the camp ground is $5). For more info see Forkfest.party (and remember there is no official web site, but numerous forums, chats, calendars, and groups). Now if you intend to attend both events you will need to register for Porcfest. As Porcfest is a more centrally planned event that has been around longer there are still at least currently more things that have been officially planned for the festival like speakers, parties, and similar. Though that isn't to say Forkfest won't have much of the same on a smaller (even if growing) scale. Forkfest had 200-300 hundred people last year whereas Porcfest was in the 1,500-2,000 range.

Our founder and CEO Christopher Waid will also be giving a talk at Forkfest (see Alt Expo tent for schedule). Between being heavily involved in a number of talk radio shows including a major nationally syndicated radio show Free Talk Live and having launched a new decentralized freedom-leaning talk show Freedom Decrypted Chris is in an excellent position to talk about and will be talking about the methods and tools available to take control of media through decentralization and free software.

From free software friendly hardware to content creation software like Open Broadcasting Software Studio (OBS). The intent of the talk is to cover the different tools that can be utilized to retain control of ones speech in a censorship friendly speech hostile environment that has become the internet. From live-streaming using self-hosted servers to decentralized distributed tools like lbry for content distribution. We'll cover the basics of decentralized social media tools like Mastodon (a Twitter replacement) to more traditional tools like mailing list/newsletter software such as Mailtrain (but self-hosted so you don't need Mailchip, Google, Amazon, or somebody else in the way of your communications). Through decentralization you can help fight back against the censors.

LibrePlanet is an annual conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation for people who care about their digital freedoms, bringing together software developers, policy experts, activists, and computer users to learn skills, share accomplishments, and address challenges facing the free software movement. LibrePlanet 2019 will feature programming for a wide range of ages and experience levels.

We hope to see you at LibrePlanet 2019, March 23-24th in Cambridge, MA.

Register now to join us at MIT Cambridge, Massachusetts for the next LibrePlanet!

"This will be the very first annual International Copyleft Conference. Participants from throughout the copyleft world — developers, strategists, enforcement organizations, scholars and critics — will be welcomed for an in-depth, high bandwidth, and expert-level discussion about the day-to-day details of using copyleft licensing, obstacles facing copyleft and the future of copyleft as a strategy to advance and defend software freedom for users and developers around the world."

Representatives from ThinkPenguin and LibreCMC's lead developer will be in attendance and speaking so come check out the event if your in Europe!

https://www.copyleftconf.org/