Thank you all for coming and staying so long. I'm positively surprised and impressed. A
bit nervous. I hope I entertain you better and don't make a mess out of this. Who of
you thought that this title was clickbait? That's fair. It's clickbait a little bit.
I'm also serious about it. I think it's a serious issue. A quick introduction. I will
not read this to you and you already heard it. I think the key point, I work at Rathead.
Yes. My motivation for this talk is informed by my experience at Rathead, but really I've
been an open source free software for a long time and I'm really committed to that. That's
the reason why I work at Rathead, not wise-worthy. Also, I have to give this disclaimer. Nothing
I say here is an official position of any of my former current or future employers, although
it may be the same things I tell my employer. Take that as you wish. Let's get on the topic.
Why do I say that the cloud is a threat to free and open source software? Because while
free software has democratized the access to code address, so code in a repository, taking
that code and actually operationalizing it, running it, has become the new proprietary
differentiator, even on top of free software. In my experience, that is undermining both
the usefulness and the sustainability of free software. Let me explain that a little bit.
Why do we do free software? I trust everyone here in this room knows the definition of
free software, so I'm not going to believe in that. I'll use open source free software
force synonymously. We can discuss that over beer later if you want. The point is that you
have the freedom to use software and it matters. It's important because before free software,
code was a major proprietary differentiator. Proprietary code was also the major entry
hurdle for accessing technology. It incentivized centralization involved gardens and thus became
an inhibitor or was an inhibitor to innovation. It created and maintained dependencies and
lock ends. You were dependent on the decisions of someone else who had authority over the
code that you used. Back then, that was annoying. Maybe it wasn't as big of an issue as it
today, but the world has changed and they'll get to that. Free software, in contrast to
proprietary code, levels the playing field and democratizes the access to technology.
It incentivizes open collaboration and offers a base for technical sovereignty. Sovereignty
being the state where you have authority over your technology. That's my own path to open
source. I got to open source because I was in high school and I needed a compiler. I was
using, I was using OS 2 at the time. Guess my age based on that. I was using OS 2 because
DOS and Windows were not my thing. But the Tobos C compiler I had used on DOS didn't
work on OS 2 and IBM wanted a lot of money for a compiler. Luckily, there was this guy
DJ Delori who had ported GCC to OS 2 and that is what saved me. Let me use a compiler on
OS 2 and what got me into free software. The key point here was that I was excluded from
access to technology. I was excluded from being able to use something to write my own
code on that platform that happened to be running. Could have switched platforms but
would have run into similar problems. There were other compilers that were maybe cheaper
but the problem became obvious to me because of the pricing that made it inaccessible for
me. So that removed the hurdle. And as sovereignty is a big topic right now, for me it starts
with individual sovereignty but that becomes an issue for any organization. If as a business
you are dependent on other people's decisions or in Europe that's a big topic nowadays even
as a state or union of states you become dependent on other people's technology decisions, that's
creating major risk. Free software is the antidote for that. It provides you an environment
that lets you control your own technology and it creates an environment where access
to technology is fully democratized. It provides incentives for collaboration and creates a
better innovation model that's based on collaboration. And it, well now I'm repeating myself, apologies
for that. It creates this level of sovereignty and control over your code. That's why it
matters and that is something that in the cloud is becoming harder to do. What happened
is that software aids the world. Everything is software defined now. An example I often
use is the connected mousetrap I have in my basement. Mousetraps is a pretty old concept
doing something very physical. And now I have a mousetrap that has a microcontroller,
talks to my network and tells me through a cloud backend with a front end on my mobile
phone when it did its business so I don't find it weeks later. So that's software defined
now. And I bought this one because it has software features. So that shows how integrated
our lives become, I mean it's a silly example, but it shows how integrated our lives have
become with software. How things are defined by software. I always go back to Laurenz Lasek
book in late 1990s or early 2000s that he wrote called Code where he argues that code
becomes law because it defines our ability to interact with the world increasingly. I
came across it in the context of the fight against software patents in Europe in the
early 2000s. And I think that's become more and more reality. Everything we do is more
defined by code. And that is not defined by code at rest anymore. It's not defined by
code in a repository. It's defined by code that's running somewhere. And the software,
open source is a base for that, right? The cloud is built on open source. The software
has the complexity of modern software. The integration of the world has left interdependencies
that everything now has on that has led to a model where users, commercial users, private
users increasingly just built on top of services provided by someone else, right? And it's
just a function of the complexity with the utility of something. If I need a database,
I can click a button, I get a database. I don't have to become an expert in deploying
databases myself. I don't need to figure out how to find the right infrastructure for it.
I just press a button. It works. And I can focus on the top 10% of my solution stack
where I implement my, as a business, I implement my proprietary differentiation. I will use
that. But the price for that is a dependency on a service that in itself may be based on
open source code, but the step from taking the code that's in a repository to putting
together multiple pieces of code into a running service, and running that service, keeping
it running, keeping it secure, and integrating these other things increasingly becomes proprietary.
And it becomes the proprietary differentiation to the degree that less and less people can
actually run services on their own. And why is that? Because the knowledge of running things
in this complex interconnected world gets harder. It's hard to keep things secure, even
configuring them secure, which you can see in the news, basically daily base, is hard.
People fail. And all kinds of data shows up in places it shouldn't be. And that becoming
a new, that knowledge, right? So it's not just, it's not the question whether in this
respect is a definition of free software. My complaint is not that I may have to pay
for a service, right? My complaint is that the knowledge on how to go from code in a
repository to a running service, that knowledge in itself has become a proprietary differentiator
that's creating walled gardens and that removes access to technology. And I'm guilty myself
in actually falling into that trap. I mean, I don't run my own mail server anymore, which
has been a, I don't know how many of you are in that camp, who runs their own mail server?
Yeah, that's sad really. I mean, in this audience, I was wondering whether I should dare ask this
question because I would have felt really silly if all of you would have raised their
hand and say, I run my own mail server, Daniel, you idiot. But in reality, why don't I run
my own mail service because I can't, I don't have the time to do it and keep it secure and
keep my family on it and deal with the support requests of that and provide the same access
from every device that I get if they are just on Google mail, right? But that's a compromise
I make for the ease of use, the utility of it, and in the end, it creates a dependency.
Now I have the situation, I'm going a bit off script here, but I just like now they
are scanning my mail for certain legal violations, right? And they will forward certain types
of violations automatically to the police and lock you out of your account. I think
that was, that wasn't Google. There was a case recently where a family got into trouble
for a photo they had of their kid, like traditional family photo that was flagged as inappropriate
and they lost access to their mail account. I don't say which vendor that was, but you
can Google that in the US, right? And they're locked out forever because algorithm decided
that that was not acceptable. And that might, it's all well intended, right? But it shows
what it means to not be, not have technology sovereignty, right? You're now dependent on
an algorithm that might be very, very badly implemented that then decides whether you
lose access to your own data because it recognized a violation with the best intentions, but
sometimes dangerous consequences. And we'll see more of that, right? Because there's a
whole different thing I'm not talking about today that's happening with artificial intelligence
and the further integration of these systems into cloud services. So my point here at the
end comes down to that, like the question, it's great that we have free software, right?
It's great that we have revolutionized the access to technology, access to code. We have
revolutionized the business where free software has won. It's a base for all modern software
development to some degree, right? There's always something like proprietary differentiation
in code. Right now, I would say is limited kind of to the top of the code pyramid, right?
When it becomes like the things that one company writes in-house, right? Their own business
differentiations, that's always proprietary, right? That's where your trade secrets are.
And that's okay, right? It's always shaking the head. It's a separate divide, but you
will like at a point where something becomes so unique, right? You get into the question
with a... We can debate that in a question and answer. I see it, but I think so ultimately
I respect people doing that, right? But then you get down to something is domain specific.
Maybe there's some proprietary stuff in there, but latest you're like outside of like one
specific industry, you get into free software frameworks that everyone is using because
all the stuff on the business side that's common, their free software is a huge advantage
because it gives you the ability to collaborate among competitors, to not reinvent things
all the time, to get to common standards in a very practical way, right? Because it's
code is better than a standard. So that works. But how much use is it really if you cannot
run it anymore on your own with a dependency, without a dependency on someone who is a big
centralized provider? The issue here that goes into that is true for individuals, that's
true for organizations, that's true for civil society, that is true for companies that are
not as big as some other companies. You always create these dependencies because of the talent
gaps and just the knowledge gaps and the risk included in it. And this has allowed the leading
cloud providers to create centralized economies of scale based around their proprietary operational
knowledge, right? And it's really useful. You click a button, you get anything you need
in infrastructure. You know, this sometimes includes unfair strip mining of free software
projects, right? We've all seen that. They can do that just because of the scale of operationalization.
There's nothing to do with the code. It has led to a situation where sometimes code itself
is actually commoditized, right? Your challenge is not writing the code. You can get enough
people together to write the code. Really the problem comes running it and creating
the economy of scale and adoption that makes it successful, right? And that is a dynamic
that basically goes back to the main frame, right? We went full circle and now we are
running black box services on someone else's hardware. It's a convenient model, but it's
really creating lock-ins. And it's the same kind of lock-in and access hurdle that code
used to be when I was in high school, right? It was impossible for many people to get to
that level of technology, even if they knew how to code in a sustainable way. And now
we are getting back there. And there are plenty examples how this goes even into how we create
free software, right? This is not just a problem in using or deploying it. It affects our
own creation, right? If you write modern cloud-native software, you aggregate existing services
and you focus on the last 10% of what you really care about. You don't have to worry
about anything else because you can use it from the cloud provider. If you are doing
free software, then you have to run everything yourself because we haven't expanded free
software to solve this problem, right? And we also, I mean, we can take prominent examples
of who uses GitHub. Does it include GitHub issues and things like that? Who thinks that
GitHub is open-source software, free software, right? And it's great. It's a great service.
It's a great tool. Git is free software. GitHub and everything around the code management
itself. You go into issues, actions, integrations. It's owned by Microsoft, yes? Yeah. Now, I'm
not going to go there. I have a sitting comment who I work for, so anyhow. I think I don't
want to have prejudice against, I don't want to single out Microsoft there, right? Because
that wasn't my point. Slack is not on, I think, I don't know who owns Slack, but same thing,
right? So much user. We can go around and around, and we will find that even the development
of free software depends more and more on proprietary services, software as a service.
And it's, this is not necessarily criticism in these companies, right? I believe that
everyone has a choice to offer their software and their service under the license in terms
of service they see appropriate. But it's a problem for me where I think, well, there
should be an alternative, right? We need to think about how sustainable this is in the
long term. And, you know, can we get to a model where free and open-source software development
can be integrated with other free and open-source software development in a consistent model
end-to-end, where it regains its utility all the way to running code, right? That is the
underlying problem is that when you, you know, having code and they're not being able to
actually offer the service or run your own mail server or, I mean, big topic that everyone
here is probably aware of is like the switch towards the Fediverse right now, which is
great, right? Which brings more attention to this issue. People are trying to run their
own instances of a decentralized social network now, and that, they're finding out that's
actually really hard, right? And, and it's, we haven't, like, that's going to get ugly
before it gets good if people don't run back to the centralized wall garden because it's
too hard, right? But that makes a point. Ultimately, right now, while the Fediverse, I think, is
far ahead, right? It's one of the areas where I see hope, because, you know, it's fairly
easy to run. A lot of people are running and it's a, it's this decentralized, centralized
where you have hubs and people are running them for others as non-profits or, you know,
I think where you have, you know, direct contribution, but it's not a walled garden. That's hope.
I see hope with projects like in, in the home automation space. I personally use Home Assistant,
but they're, you know, other great projects, but a lot of them go deep into actually giving
you something that just runs, right? So operationalizing it isn't hard. It's actually often out
of the box. You can download an image. It just works. Sometimes there are even services
and the integration into services works out of the box, right? You can actually aggregate
things. Sometimes it's a bit, you know, part of the problem is that there's no differentiation
between integrating into other open source components and services and some weird proprietary
or very weird proprietary cloud-based things that maybe upload your security camera images
to places where you don't want them, right? So there's that. But on the other hand, it's,
it's progress in the sense that part of the open source project is to actually solve this
problem. And, and that is, I mean, this is a problem. Again, I think this is a problem
for everyone, right? Even if you're, if you're building on top of the cloud, even if you're
a company building on top of the cloud and you have like very little code that is your
own code, where you put your business differentiation, like your UI to control the microcontroller
code that controls the mousetrap, you still need to figure out how to operationalize it.
That means you need to have that knowledge from somewhere, right? And that, that's becoming
increasingly a problem because it's hard to do that securely. So, you know, open source
as one is only half right. That's my, my takeaway. You know, open source is a preeminent software
development model at this point, but it's not the operations model. And this limits
how useful free and open source software is for users, whether it's individual users,
private users, nonprofits, or, or, or civil society organizations, companies, or even
governments that try to have sovereignty in their technology and data use.
You know, the GitOps is a nice example here, right? It's great to have a GitOps model,
but if you GitOps, you're free software, how free is it when the GitOps part is actually
proprietary, right? So my, my thesis is that we need to expand the concept of free and
open source software from code at rest, from code in a repository to really include the
operationalization of the code. And we need to create a collaborative, decentralized infrastructure
model for that, where we can use the same approach of aggregating existing services
that are run maybe by other organizations, by other projects, without having to rerun
everything on our own, right? We need to create an exchange on operationalization knowledge
and we need to create a practical capability to build applications in that way. And I think
it's, it's important to really take this also in the, in the, you know, something I hadn't,
hadn't thought about before as much. I spent some time at an open forum event on Friday
about where sovereign cloud, cloud sovereignty in the EU was a big topic, right? I think
as a, as a free and open source software community, we need to also make sure that this point
gets pushed into the cloud sovereignty discussion, right? Because if you end up with cloud sovereignty,
many people and talk about how, oh, we're going to use open source cloud code, but at
the end it's going to be in itself just a black box service. Maybe it's just a data
center that happens to be in the EU, but otherwise it's following the same existing proprietary
cloud centralized cloud model that wouldn't be sovereignty, at least not in my, in my
definition of sovereignty, which means you have actual control over your, your destiny.
So what I'd like to see is what, what we need to do here, you know, expand the model, create
a collaborative model around, around actually running things, focus on the sovereignty aspects,
and I think we need to consider technologies without bias. What I'm really concerned about
is for example, when I see discussions around web three, there are a lot of people who have
now a mindset where blockchain, web three, that's tainted by either scam affiliation
of similar technologies, perceived or real, or by political affiliations. I don't know
how big that is in Europe, in the US, that's like a big topic where you can talk to someone
and they will say, no, web three, that's something that the crypto gross use. I'm, I think we
need to be agnostic there. We need to look at technology that's utility. I'm, I'm skeptical
on each individual technology, but ultimately it comes down to how can we solve the problems.
And there are areas where a distributed ledger is going to be the right solution. There's
going to be areas in my view where, for example, something like Filecoin is the right solution
because you need to find a way how to monetize offering services on a peer-to-peer basis.
And we need to be careful not to put everything into the same bucket as maybe other things
like, you know, some, some scam coin and snowball model because they are not just because he's
the same technology. They're not the same thing. So I want to give a concrete example
of what can be done. This is something we are trying at Red Hat, but it's an open source
initiative. Well, it would be silly to talk about it in this context if it wasn't. So
we call it operate first. And I should explain the term. So Red Hat has internally in, in,
in our Linux group and I think for most other groups, but there where it comes from, we
have a core principle that, that's called upstream first, which says that we will never
try to differentiate from upstream code on a technology base. So if we implement a feature
in our product, we try to get it into the relevant upstream projects before we ship
it as a feature to customers. It's not always true. We ended up maintaining Zen kernel patch
for a long time because it was never accepted upstream, but we also regretted that quickly
and switched to KVM because it's painful, right? And this is not, this is not altruism
per se, right? The, the reason why Red Hat doesn't try to differentiate on the technology
level from our upstream open source code is because it would make our whole development
model really painful and almost useless because you lose the main point why a company should
use free software. It's the development model that allows you to collaborate and achieve
better, better solutions than anything you could come up with in-house, right? You lose
the corrective and I mean most, most modern issues that you have in complex systems in
the, in the lower layers of your, of your software stack, you're never going to solve
on your own, right? Like any big kernel issue, any big security issue, it's always a collaborative
effort and that's why they get solved. I mean that's even true for most proprietary software
at this point because someone else finds it, right? So, so Red Hat has this principle called
upstream first which features go upstream before they go into the product, you know,
exceptions are always there, but that's, that's a goal and it's motivated by core business
requirement not by altruism. Now we need the same for creating services, right? It is now
as much service, software as a service company as it's a, we ship code company. All our services
are based on free software. Not all the glue code gets developed in a free software open
source development model. Not all the glue code is publicly available yet. The point
there is we have the same problem, right? And so this is not only, this is not speaking
about our use of services, right? We can't force and we don't have the capacity to build
everything ourselves, right? We have to offer services on proprietary cloud, for example,
right? There is no way around that. But for the things we create, we were also drawn into
just like everyone in the culture of DevOps and cloud native development, we have created
things that are proprietary in the productization step and we have lost the ability to collaborate
on that which hampers ourselves, it hampers our customers that, that then try to do things
on-prem or try to create a hybrid environment. And at the end, we believe strongly in a hybrid
cloud model for whole different discussion would be its own talk. But so we created this
initiative to change our own dynamic, but invite others to join it. And it comes down
to approaching the creation of our own services from a model where we start with making the
upstream code operational, right? So we make sure that what we put into the software repo
is not just theoretically runnable code, it's actually everything you need to run it. So
open source service, first of all, means something that the average person can instantiate as
a running service. Second, drive the knowledge on how to operationalize it into the same
community or overlay community because things aggregate into bigger services and create
communities to have an exchange on how to operationalize the software and make that knowledge
available under free software licenses in a free software exchange model and development
model. And then also try to create actual running instances that our projects can reuse
without having to run component services on their own and invite others to participate
in that. We collaborated with some universities, and this is not new, right? To be fair, Matt
Miller from Fedora Project is sitting in the first row and reminding me, which is present,
Fedora has done things like that all the time, right? Like Linux distributions, of course,
have run what nowadays would be called a cloud service, like build systems and so on in a
collaborative fashion, right? So this is not net news. The problem is we have to expand
that into everything, into databases that we need to run, we need to make reusable,
to any kind of software that we ship, we have to include the operationalization. So that's
the pitch. And we have 10 minutes for questions, discussions and answers. 15, I did some quick
talking there. Do we have questions online? Maybe we can start with these then. Yes, no.
Nothing online, so questions. Yeah, I will take the first one then and then.
I'm not going to hackle you. Closer, okay. There we go. So a lot of the public discussion
I've seen kind of about cloud services and open source has come from a different direction.
It's like companies who have open source software and their business model will support around
it and then some other much larger company suddenly runs their software better than they
do and they say, hey, that's not fair. That's not why we open sourced it. We wanted something
else out of that. And there's been a kind of a fight over licensing and some new licenses
basically meant to restrict that kind of running things. And there's been a debate about those
fit under open source. I think you're talking about something entirely different. And is
there a licensing approach we can take to drive software towards this operate first
model? So I'm not convinced that code licensing itself will solve the issue of strip mining
code. Like the problem when a larger company takes your code and runs a service and monetize
or it doesn't have to actually be a service, right? They could just ship the code into
it better, which is always, there's always like a risk like that. It's a dynamic that
always existed in a Linux distribution, right? We ship something that undermines the ability
to sell the same thing unless you find a way how to make you're selling the same thing
either better or an add on, right? So in the tradition sense, I always like, I was a product
manager for RHEL a long time where we ship components that other people try to monetize
because it's expected from a Linux distribution to bring certain things out of the box. Now
what we always said is, look, we have a very generalized solution here. We will help you
upsell your specialized support, right? So that solved it in that sense. But if you go
into the strip mining by, for example, cloud providers, it takes the same piece of software,
run it, compete with you, and they can operationalize it much better than you then when also have
more reach and have a better customer model, they have a marketplace where they can promote
their solution over years. I don't know if a code license can solve that because part
of the problem there is that they could also rewrite and when that was done, they rewrote
a code, right? Or forked an earlier version when you change the license, right? So this
didn't work. What worked, however, I think is creating the awareness, creating specialization
and creating a dynamic around the integrations, right? Embracing that you're not selling actually
the code, right? Now, I still believe that it's probably better to license a code on
a copy left license and license your operationalization under a copy left license to minimize
the abuse, right? Versus a license that's too liberal and allows people to take it proprietary.
But the successful countermeasures I've seen were not based on licensing primarily. They
were based on a business model and engagement with the customers. How do you copy left the
operas? I can't say that word. Well, you get into it. We just found out, luckily, that
game rules cannot be copyrighted. So D&D will live, despite Hasbro. But I think the code
you implemented in can, right? And at the end, it comes down to how much of a hurdle
is writing new automation code and actually that becomes a fairly big hurdle to reinvent
automation code. And then copy left helps. It doesn't help you against the reach and
economy of scale. There you need awareness of your benefits, a good business model, and
awareness of the problems of world gardens, right? I mean, and the Twitter versus Fediverse
situation is a great experiment of that. You know, I think we should all try to help make
that successful, right? How do you feel about decay of self-hosted infrastructure? For example,
servers or domains disappearing and in general, being less reliable than, for example, GitHub?
I couldn't. Okay. How do you feel about decay of self-hosted infrastructure? For example,
servers or domains disappearing? That wouldn't be the case with GitHub. How do you feel about
the decay of self-hosted infrastructure like servers and domains disappearing and in general,
less reliable than, for example, GitHub? So that's a huge issue, right? Self-hosted infrastructure
always decays, right? And I mean, that's true for anyone who does something. You're interested
at the beginning, and even if you're still around, you move on to the next interesting
topic. That is at least true for me. I'm very happy with Home Assistant. I wouldn't want
to run a security scanner on my Home Assistant device. Now, that's fairly okay because it's
so isolated and doesn't control, well, it controls the heating. So there's a risk there.
So yeah, that's a problem. I mean, and I think, my impression is, for example, as a Home
Assistant community, and again, that's just the one I'm using. I don't want to like single
them out and I haven't had time because, I haven't had time to try others. There might
be better ones, but what I'm seeing there is that there is out of the community, actually,
people start offering the services commercially, right? And nothing I said today is an argument
against commercial offerings, right? It is an argument against proprietary offerings.
It's totally fair to charge for something, right? Developers want to eat. So does admins
need to eat, right? We can sell services. And so I think professional free software infrastructure
is the answer to the decay of self-hosted systems and, you know, a reasonable approach,
and some of us, we have to figure out, a reasonable approach to decentralization where multiple
people can offer things without making you to choose proprietary lock-in is the answer.
And that's why I think we need to look at web three without the bias because that is
one way that could work, right? If I look at Filecoin, IPFS as an example, that actually
is working right now, not economically for the people who are offering it because the
hardware is too expensive for the money you can get with it. But if you're using Filecoin-based
storage, that is actually pretty cheap and very reliable, right? And the cost, like the
problem is that the compute capacity, or the specialized compute capacity needed to offer
it is too expensive right now. But that's just, you know, that's going to be solved with
progress in technology. And I'm sure that we'll see some risk-5-based specialized Filecoin
systems in the near future that makes this affordable. And then we have a way how you
can have, you know, at least for storage, you can have distributed infrastructure with
good funding model. Other ways are foundations or other peer payment models or small companies,
right? Decentralized small companies. We have three more questions. There was someone
over here, there, and then there, and then over there. So what do you think is the way
or the sort of gold standard or endpoint for packaging up operational capability with the
code and with the application when shipping to end users who are not software developers
and who don't have servers? I agree with everything you said before. My thesis so far has been
that it's straight peer-to-peer, you know, stuff like BitTorrent or Tor or old-school
file-sharing apps would be an example where when you got LimeWire, you got the app with
the data. But, you know, it could also maybe be Web3 something. But what do you think that
looks like for the 2 billion people who don't have servers and aren't software developers?
So I have an example of right now a piece of software that I think is doing this really
well and that's a sync thing. It's a peer-to-peer file synchronization system that I use between
my mobile phone with Android, Linux machine, bunch of servers, and I now use it for everything
where you use it for everything where you need the full copy everywhere. At least last
time I haven't checked for new features. It was a debate. They don't have like on-demand
replication. I didn't have that last time I looked for it. So I use other things when
I want to have things like the Google Drive type thing, right, where you have something
in the cloud and you only download it when you look at it. For that, it wasn't the right
thing last time, but I use it for my, you know, key pass replication, things like that
for backup for all documents I want everywhere. And it's super easy. It just works. And so
my 11-year-old daughter uses it. Now the poor kid also has to run a Linux laptop because
I refuse to do anything else. I can tell you of the pressure to go into a proprietary
ecosystem of a specific company that sells laptops and phones primarily, I think, to
what they do and watches. It's a fashion business I hear, but like the pressure on
kids to be on that because all the other kids have that is enormous. So, you know, poor
kid is in trouble, but she has something and some other cool things. And Roblox works
in wine, just like if you're struggling with this.
Hi. Thank you for your talk. I'm wondering whether this might also come as a problem
because of sometimes a need for centralization. I myself moved to Mastodon, but I still push
all of my toots to Twitter. And I would move to GitHub, to GitHub, I mean to a local GitHub,
but if I want to have users on my code, I still need to push all of my code to GitHub
as well. So, what's the solution with that?
I mean, I'm in the same boat, right? Like, of course, I have a Mastodon account. I'm
not super active on Twitter. I tried to do all my code projects on GitLab, which GitLab
is slightly better, right? As a more hybrid model, although it's not perfect, but I like
them. But yeah, I think it's a cultural change in awareness, right? People need to understand
that you need decentralization and we need to create code and infrastructure and culture
that works in the federation to give you the reach, right? The problem is reach, right?
And that's, it's really a cultural question at the end. I mean, the perfect example is
the switch from IRC to Slack as a dominant, like, interaction for developers in many places.
I mean, there are, there are really limitations with IRC, right? That become problematic.
Technology-wise, Slack isn't fundamentally different. It's nicer UI, some additional
features and the ability, like the persistence that you had to do extra steps to get with
IRC, right? But it's primarily kind of like minor improvements like threading and the
web UI and persistence. And then the critical mass effect and the reach it created. Really,
the answer is a cultural change where people appreciate the, the, and do the extra work.
And it, and it goes back to the earlier question, right, about, like, what's a gold standard
for creating such an app? It's us here who have to drive that and then make it usable
for all the others, right? Like, and that's, that's not different than what happened with
free software in general. We, we've been through this cycle and I think it's truly equivalent.
I mean, using free software 20 years ago was hard, right? I mean, when using software
was hard, but when I installed my first Slackware, that was painful. And then nothing was available
and then you had to recompile it and it behaved randomly whenever you compiled it. So we have
to do that.
This has to be the last question. Okay. So I agree with what you just said about cultural
change and to give an example of that, um, for me, Microsoft, uh, acquisition of GitHub
with the last straw and I closed my account, but that means that if I want to contribute
to free software projects, it's increasingly hard because I'm expected to have a GitHub
account and it seems to me that anyone here who agrees with what you've been saying and
yet who still uses GitHub or other proprietary software and particularly proprietary software
that they allow to be at the heart of the development of the free software is being very hypocritical.
And so it's up to us surely to, as you say, take on that pain, but that includes a lot
of people in the room who put their hands up when you asked who has a GitHub account.
So I put it to you. Should we not change? We have to go through that pain.
Thank you. Yeah, I agree. We have to change. And I'll be honest, my presentation, part
of the reason why I was struggling, I couldn't read my speaker notes because I created it
in what's the default at Reddit with this Google presentation, Google docs, and then
downloaded it because I didn't want to look super silly in front of you.
So yes, it's a hard right. Like, and what I honestly believe in, I don't know who recognizes
this t-shirt. All right, people, you have, you're not watching enough TV or the wrong.
Watch the expands. Best show ever. But that's from the TV show. No, that's the TV show.
They changed it. Next time I'll do a tattoo or something.
Anyhow, so I believe in the power of subversion and not the not to get pretty assessor. I
do not. I do not believe that was great at the time and stick with it. But my point is,
so for example, I kept my GitHub account. I do contribute to projects where I need to
because I don't want to put too much of a burden on people I'm trying to collaborate
with that I depend on, right? Like it's hard. But I do try to problematize it, bring it
up, and they do everything I can on alternative platforms, right? And I think, and you know,
I think that's really like adding that extra step of advocacy and pulling people, trying
to pull people over is the best we can do. I just created my, and I had that on the first
slide, I'm sure I've put it right. I just created a Nostr key, and now I'll do Nostr
instead of Twitter because that's a fully decentralized thing. But I'll cross post,
but I'll point out that you find me on Nostr, and if you want me to reply, you have to talk
to me on Nostr, right? Things like that. I don't know if we all do it. I think if everyone
who comes to foster starts behaving like that, I think we can change things.