"It's free as in speech, not free as in beer." How many times have you heard people define free software this way? But free speech, as important as it is, is only one kind of liberty. When we think of freedom only in terms of freedom from restraint—the restraint of government censors, or the restraints of proprietary licenses—we miss out on whole other categories of freedom.

"Positive liberties" are those we enjoy through the support of others. They are "freedom to", not "freedom from". Positive liberties tend to be harder to define and harder to realize than negative freedoms. For example, if a piece of FOSS is difficult to modify, the user may have "freedom from" prosecution for modifying the software, but no real "freedom to" modify it. And not because the maintainers don't want to give them that freedom! But "freedom to" is often complicated, messy and contextual.

This talk charts a way forward through the complications and the mess: friendship. The words "freedom" and "friend" come from the same root, the Proto-Indo-European "prī-", meaning "to love". It is love and friendship that allows us to navigate the complex ways that we depend on each other, without turning dependency into coercion—in other words, without turning our efforts to achieve positive liberties into violations of negative liberty.

This talk focuses on a particular conceptualization of friendship from relational psychology, called "intersubjectivity". We will discuss what intersubjectivity is, how it helps protect us from coercion and enables us to flourish, and how we can practice intersubjectivity within FOSS projects and within all our communities.