Free Software, Free Society

This slogan was always the last sentence of my presentations introducing free software.

Presentations whose topics were coordinated to be held at the global #LibrePlanet conference (https://libreplanet.com/) at Shiraz University (https://shirazu.ir/).

But destiny turned out this way, and this conference was planned and executed in Shiraz Prison instead of Shiraz University.

Of course, at that time, Shiraz Prison served as a university for us; a space full of artists, engineers, doctors, and educated people, each of whom was imprisoned on charges of acting against national security or political activity.

It was a joke we always made. We used to say that with this many restrictions and warnings from regulatory and governmental bodies, we would eventually be forced to hold the conferences in prison.

I have signed undertakings regarding the margins of events many times, and on several occasions we were prohibited from attending relevant centers by judicial orders.

It was the accumulation of these very incidents that moved our venue from universities and innovation centers to coffee shops and parks.

But in the end, that same bitter joke of ours became reality, and this time it was prison's turn to host free software events and conferences.