Good afternoon. Are you ready? Martin, how many times did I tell you not to sedate the
audience when we give a presentation? I think this was a marketing ploy, wasn't it?
Let's try this again. Are you ready? Much better. Welcome to our presentation on Linux
in loss. This is us. More like a talk than a presentation because
there's only one slide. This is us. Yeah, so if you like knowledge or madness,
either is good. Welcome. So just of curiosity, how many people of you
listen to podcasts? Very good. Pretty much everybody, right? Wow. How many people have
heard prior to this gig about Linux in loss? Okay. Our two listeners are here. Wait. Martin,
Martin, Martin. This is all planned. Ah, yes, yes. Did you win the bet,
by any chance? Because Martin now just won officially the bet. So how many people actually
have listened to one of our episodes prior to the presentation? This one gets the bottom
up. After the presentation, please collect your price. Indeed, indeed. Well done, that man.
Okay. On with the show. Yes. So thank you all for coming. So today is really about getting an
idea of what our podcast is like, which is generally very free-flowing and well-prepared.
Yes, but maybe before we go into the details, maybe we should kind of introduce ourselves
more formally. Yes, yes. I'm Chris. I'm Martin. Actually, it's the other way around. This is
Martin Visser. My name is Chris Simmerman. You want to say something about you? Sure,
sure. So, yes, as you, well, some of you who may know that listen to our podcast,
we've been doing some IT stuff for a bit. Chris is retired now, so he just does it as a hobby.
But yeah, this is us. Martin has about 20 years of international arms trade, drug-crafting,
and other professional activities, but no jokes aside. My name is Chris Simmerman. I have been
using open source for the last 30 plus years. And I also run Lurken in Germany. The Lark Frankfurt
have been doing community events for 10 years, and about three years ago, but more about that in
a minute, we decided to start this podcast. So, Martin, what did you do prior to the podcast?
Prior to the podcast. Well, so yeah, like yourself, been in IT since the year dot, messing around
with PDP11s and all that kind of stuff. If anybody knows what that is, but yeah. So yeah,
in short, we've been around for quite a while and been playing with open source software,
which you will hear all about today. Exactly. And we should probably say where we actually
met the first time. We can do, we can do. Probably in a bar somewhere, no? Well, we did.
Just prior to that, basically, I was working at a company called Redis. Redis, if you're
listening, if you're watching this on the stream, the email is a sponsor at Linux Inlast on you,
in case. And no, this is where we met. And Martin decided to join that no secret
database company. And this is basically where we met about three years, four years ago.
You're forgetting COVID on you. So we were doing technical sales at the company. And now on with
the history of the podcast, it is November 2019. Yes, a rainy, cold Prague. What even was the
event? The event was actually sales kickoff. Ah, yes, of course, of course. Or business review.
I can't remember. Who knows, you know, some corporate nonsense. Exactly. Yes. But yes,
out of that was some craft beer places visited. And where we discussed all things open source
between us. Indeed. Martin was choking on hot chicken wings. And so was I. And after a few
years, basically, we both discovered that yes, we were heavily into open source. And we always had
this intention of doing a podcast. And then we said, why not do it together? And actually the
first episode that was published in 2020 in February of 2020 actually is aptly named or the
second episode is actually aptly named for them. Because where mostly I talk about 2020 for them.
You went there at the time. I did. Yes. I give a presentation in the rest of room on. What is
it? Okay, cool. Done. Make closer. Make closer. Yes. Okay. No, there was, yeah, there was a
deaf room presentation. And then basically that was our second episode that we did. So yes, we
kind of stumbled upon a format that we both like as in discuss topics like operating systems,
rust, programming languages, stuff like that. And in between that, we do various interviews of
people that are notable in the open source community. The format is loosely modeled on
something called Floss Weekly. I don't know if that rings a bell. Twitter TV is the publisher. But
they do weekly shows with just interviews. And the idea that we had at the time when we kind of
originally devised the podcast to share the episodes between knowledge transfer for one
or for better expression. But also livening up the whole format with actually interview guests. It
took us some time to come up with the exact format. It was also loosely based on, well,
as the name says, some of you may have recognized Linux Outlaws. That was a podcast a while ago
that had a similar kind of format, right? Almost. Who of you knows Linux Outlaws? Ah, okay. Yeah,
about 15 years ago, FAPSchafter and Dylan shared the idea of actually doing, I think,
a weekly format talking just about current events. Something that we started with too.
Yeah, we did that, didn't we, for a while. But it's, yeah, with the delay between publishing and
talking about current events. It wasn't that relevant because the podcast came out like three
months later, right? Exactly. So, yeah, go ahead, man. Yeah, well, this kind of brings us to where
we started as well. Our podcast was first on Hacker Puppy Radio, which you may be familiar with as
well. They have a booth. They do. Well, Ken has a booth here. Yes. Ken has a booth called Free
and Culture Podcast. And this is what we use originally to bootstrap ourselves. That was
actually, I spoke to Ken, I forced him in 2020, and he said, we're more than happy to bootstrap you
in terms of host you to get us initially off the ground. And that's exactly what we did before we
changed this, but more on this in a minute. Yeah, so for anybody thinking of doing a podcast, very
easy to get started. We have an episode on this as well. We do, yes, we do. So, yeah, personally,
I like the interviews. I don't know about yourself, but we have some quite very good guests in the
past that we've had, which you may know as well, like the likes of recent one we had to run Levy
from. Religious life. Religious life, yes. So we had various people supporting open source like the
FSFE. Which is actually in the audience. In the audience, indeed. And we had various people on
programming languages, operating systems. We, yes. For those of you who are now becoming interested,
we do have a back catalog. The website is linusinlows.eu. For example, we had a kernel maintainer
panel. We did the same with BSD, of course. Program language panel, yes. Yeah, program language
panel and all the rest of it. So the idea is basically to get people on the podcast, and not
just one, ideally, but more than one, and talk about projects, political issues, that sort of
thing. Ah, political issues. Is there the particular episode you're thinking of from the Georgia? Yes,
we have the Electronic Frontier Foundation on the podcast, but also, of course, the Free Software
Foundation Europe. Yeah, it's well worth listening to that one. As is the one by Paul Ramsey,
would you remember that one? Vately, remind me. I mean, we've been doing almost 80 episodes by
now. Yeah, so Paul Ramsey is a push GIS maintainer. I don't know if you, those of you familiar with
Postgreps will know push GIS, but he's also very much a speaker on things open source. And he
kind of raises a lot of points around, you know, open source is free and available, but, you know,
you get just a few people maintaining it. So there should be more funding for open source
contributors in a way, but specifically in government, right? Because government uses a lot
of open source software, but they're not actually contributing, and the code should be free as well,
things like that. So we had a lot of discussions about this. True, yes. I think it's fair to say
that we keep a, or we try to keep a well balanced middle ground between technical stuff and also
political stuff. Yeah, that's a good point. Probably fair to say. But it's about raising that
profile as well, right? For open source and the people that make that software is part of what
we want to do. Absolutely. And this is basically why we came up with the podcast in the first place.
Yep. All those years ago. Well, all three of them. So having said that, we do bi-weekly
episodes, right? So it's got a busy schedule. And yeah, we alternate between a topic and an interview.
Now, we should probably mention something called the dark side, Martin. The dark side. Do tell.
Martin and myself, when we set out doing the podcast, we had this idea of providing a little
of color to the podcast. So you've been sort of a bit of a dark color. Exactly. So who knows
something called the bastard operator from hell, BUFH? Okay. Matthias, this is nothing okay for
enough. No, the BUFH was, I think about a format about what, 20 years ago, maybe less, maybe
more. That's where actually a system administrator talks about his trials and tribulations has
put it this way. And so we took this original idea and the dark side is loosely modeled on the
bastard operator from hell, but turned this into a much more comedy-oriented format that's put it
this way. Yeah, for sure. It's a bit of dark humor. Let's put it that way. And yeah, these are also
the only parts that are scripted in the podcast. Yes, good point. Good point. Everything is
normally very ad hoc apart from that. Yeah, it's free flow. Normally, we do these dark sides, bits
and pieces as part of a Halloween special, for example. Halloween, Christmas, Easter. Yes. Any
other religious holiday you may want. And do you want to talk about Dutch's fladesa, maybe? Some
teaser? Well, okay. So we have this, you're particularly talking about the Halloween one,
right? Yes. Those of you who've heard this one, we have a yearly Halloween episode where various,
we have a friend of ours who participates and does a very good, let's say, female vampire
impression. Yes. If that's possible in the podcast. Yeah, actually, she's from Macedonia,
right? And there, essentially, she's our voice model. She's our voice actress. And mostly,
these Halloween episodes, of course, have a Halloween topic. So essentially, the episode
that I was referring to, and again, we normally do these kind of around Halloween, that sort
of thing, refers to the tribulations that a certain Transylvanian Duchess encounters when
her workforce decides to unionize. It's that sort of black humor, and I won't give away too much.
You have to listen to the episode. It's that sort of black humor that drives the dark side.
In addition to kind of, and the people basically who... Slightly more serious,
a subject in other episodes. And apart from the humor that is woven into the interviews,
into the other sessions. Definitely, definitely. On that subject. Yes. Clearly, we make this
podcast partly for ourselves because we have a bit of fun making it. True. But it's clearly
aimed at listeners. So we have many ways for people to provide feedback. Yes. Carry on.
The email address is, of course, FeedbackLinux.eu, but since we should probably talk about the
hosting aspect, too. Yes. We publish normally on archive.org. So if you have an archive.org
account, you can also leave a commonly feedback there. We do not do it Twitter for obvious reasons.
Yes. No, we haven't done Twitter any time to be making of the podcast because never
much of recent. We started on the on HBR for a long time, right? And only recently kind of,
on other podcast media, you'd be able to find us on most of those. Yes. Of course,
when we were still on Hacker Public Radio, you could leave comments on Hacker Public Radio, too.
Yes. And I mean, these comments are very important to us, really. I know it's something that,
yeah, more feedback we get, the more they... Exactly. I mean, yeah, the podcast is done for
you listeners, not for us. Certainly not for our sponsors, because we don't have any. No. What we
also do is actually, we also invite people from other podcasts on the podcast. For example,
the Linux Lads, if Shane or anybody else or Conan is here, but I don't see them. Also,
but we should also probably talk about the Grumpy Old Coders, right? Grumpy Old Coders,
yes. Another set of podcasters that have a... Well, not a similar format, but they have... Yeah,
they're more on the technical side, right? They publish less frequently. But it's again,
it's some friend of ours that we occasionally have some banter with. Exactly. Yes. What else
is there to talk about Linux in-laws? Well, you should listen to it. That's the main thing.
Yes. Yeah. So why should you listen to the Linux in-laws, right? That's your cue. You put
your spotty on. Well, why would you listen to the Linux in-laws? If you wouldn't be making it?
Personally, yeah. It's mainly because we do intermix the detect stuff with a bit of fun,
right? That's the main thing. And personally, I like the interview pieces generally very much,
because you get so many people from different parts of the world, from different projects,
and they all have clearly an open-source link, but they all have different stories to tell.
And about open-source and why it's good, and they're part in it, really. Very true, yes.
What about you? Well, I've been doing open-source for the last 30 plus years, so... This is why
you run an Apple Mac. Indeed. But as we all know, underneath is a well-hidden BSD system, right?
So no worries. Do we not have an upcoming episode on Tuxedo computers? We do,
but I don't think they're listening, so it's not worth mentioning that as a sponsor. No,
no worries. But no, because we touch on, I reckon, subjects that move people in terms of open-source
is more and more used across industries, countries, planets. I mean, whoever has a mobile phone
running Android, but also running iOS, is essentially running open-source software.
Android is powered by Linux, as probably most of you know, and beneath the iOS is something
called BSD, both widely used open-source operating systems. And I reckon with doing Linux in-laws,
we are providing a platform for projects to voice themselves, to make themselves heard.
These are not just Linux subjects, right? We also, as mentioned, touch other parts of open-source,
whether it's software and hardware occasionally. And politics. Politics, yes. Society topics,
and all the rest of it, yes. Yeah, not to mention, yeah. The showering situation in Germany is a
common topic. Yeah, I mean, we normally reckon, we normally open with a little bit of humor. I
normally slag off the United Kingdom, and Martin returns these jokes with dire descriptions
of the situation in Germany. That's probably fair to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yes. So, yeah. If you
want to, no. In short, Linux in-laws, you want to learn a little bit, you want to listen to
people that have things to say about open-source, and you like a bit of fun, just come and listen
to us, really. That's the... Absolutely, yeah. Well, what's our slogan, by the way? You come for
the knowledge, but stay for the madness. This is something that marketing came up with before
you fired them, right? Marketing? What is marketing? The department that you... Is that the people that
make the t-shirts? No. So, who makes the t-shirts? The people with graphically designed capabilities
I suppose. Fair enough, fair enough. No, we should talk about the logo, actually, no? You can talk
about the logo, yes, yes. Oh, how many stickers have you brought, actually? Yes, you can find
stickers, actually, at the Free Culture Podcast booth. Oh, you didn't have any photo listeners here?
I do, yeah. Only about four or five. You find the rest, actually, at the booth. It's a prototype.
Yes. So, yeah, very, very, very, very, very... Like the t-shirts. The first batch, yes. So,
the logo, Martin, why did we need a new logo? Well, mainly because the previous logo was based on
some pictures of us of 20 years ago. True, true, true. It's not that representative anymore.
But, yeah, certain podcasts, let's say, publishers also didn't like the format, so...
So, we had to change this. And after about 20,000 focus group sessions, quite a few...
This is without marketing. Debates, exactly. Quite a few debates. Debates,
due to various sessions, we came up with a new logo, which I hope you will find on most podcasting
platforms also. By the way, yeah, although Ken is not in the audience, I think we should probably
talk about metrics. Okay, go ahead. Metrics in terms of basically how many people...
Well, metrics, metrics. We had done some metrics in the room today, so we could...
About what? 150, maybe 108 people in the room. We host our episodes, our MP3s, on now,
Ark of the Rock. And the download stats for an average one episode, just on that platform alone,
clock in between 2,500 downloads per episode. But if you type Linux in-laws into your search
engine of choice, you come up with a syndication left, right, and center. So it's probably...
Or even your podcast app of choice, right? Yes. So it's probably fair to say that, on average,
we are listened to by more than 8,000 people per episode. Give or take a few.
Yes, unfortunately, they don't all feedback today. It's just a shame. Shall we interview
someone in the room? Where is that listener? Where'd he go? You want to... Okay, he doesn't.
Okay, fair enough. He's too shy for that. That's a shame. We should get him framed.
By the way, when did you start to listen to Linux in-laws, if I may ask?
Okay. Did you get that? Something about feedback. Sorry. Okay, let's talk later on this, sorry.
Okay, no, we were just curious because... We get feedback at times, but the more we get,
the better, obviously. Exactly, because essentially, we do the podcast for you in terms of, okay,
this is our show, but we live on feedback because if you think, and that goes for anybody listening
to us, if there's a subject that is of interest for you, feel free to give feedback so we can get
that project on the show, talk to these politicians, whatever. And we're not kind of fixed on one
particular topic, right? If you take the Ran Levy example with Manish's life, they're very much
focused on security. Very true, yes. We'll do an episode on security, but we won't do a whole
bit podcast on that. We'll do anything around open source. Exactly, needless to say, an open
source angle would help. Yes, that would do. But at the end of the day, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation is more like about civil rights. And when we did the episode with the
Georgian chapter, I think one of the focus points of that interview was actually gun laws.
Yes. For example. So the point that I'm making here is, yes, open source is important for us,
but so are the politics and the civil rights aspects behind this whole notion, behind this whole
revolution. Well, this is the part about free, isn't it, really, that we have in free and open
source software that we also have talked about. Absolutely. And that's exactly the reason why
we try to maintain a balance between technical and non-technical subjects. Ah, yes. And also,
if you do have trouble sleeping, there is an episode on licenses, if I'm not mistaken. Yes, an open
source license. But we didn't have guests on this. So yeah, it has many uses. We should probably
talk about the road ahead, right? I mean, we've been doing this for the last three years now.
Yeah. Where do you want to take this one? Apart from the usual world domination, making lots of
money, how is yet to be determined? The objective is already kind of met, right? We're spreading the
word and supporting the projects and the people that make open source. So we continue doing that,
in my opinion. True, true, true. But maybe there's something more. Is there? Probably. Do tell. Some
people have suggested, when we still have the focus groups, that more humor might be in order,
for example, as in more dark side stuff. Okay. Well, we'll have to get some feedback on that,
won't we? Indeed, indeed. Yes. What happened? I need to say, if our listeners have more ideas,
the modern area. Indeed. Well, we have, I mean, the whole year is planned out pretty much, but
there's always room for, of course, stuff for sure. Like today. And I mean, if you are maintaining a
project that you, that you, as in you in the audience, that you would like to see feature on
Linux in-laws, free to talk to us after this talk goes without saying. Yes. Now, this is exactly
the point, right? If you have things that you want to be vocal about or talk about open source
related, whether it's a project or your community efforts, come talk to us and we'll put you on
the podcast. And with us, it's probably time for our interview guest. Oh, interview guest. Yes.
We do have an interview guest. Right. Welcome. Welcome. Matias, why don't you join us on the stage?
It's a little bit ahead of time, but more than Maria anyway. You'll get a bit of an
appeal for how we do that episode. For those of you who do not know Matias Kirschner,
why don't you introduce yourself? Yes. My name is Matias Kirschner. I'm the president of the
Free Software Foundation Europe. That's my day job. And yeah, beside that, I did some volunteer
activities, which is probably the topic of this interview. Absolutely. So hands up. Who does not
know what the Free Software Foundation Europe does and is? So everybody knows the FSFE. You can skip
that question. Fair enough. That was what she was getting at. Okay. Of course, that's also an
episode from something called links and loss on the FSFE. But yes, why don't you tell us a little
bit about how you came into the open source world? Put you on the spot right now. Oh, I first,
the start was that I asked my father to subscribe to more newspapers so I can inform myself from
more sources to see who is trying to accomplish world domination. And my father said, oh, that's
too expensive. But I read something about this internet. And I will make sure that you get this,
which was at that time probably more expensive and long run with the modem there. But yeah,
I started with that. And then I had a second computer at home. And I tried to connect them.
And I wanted to send emails to them without connecting to the internet. And it didn't work.
Also, both of those computers had an email program on them. I complained at school. Someone said,
I have something for you. Brought some floppies, brought some CDs. And then I installed my first
GNU Linux distribution. And a few months later, I had a mail server. And from there on, then I
read more about technology. I organized meetups to install parties for in the local groups,
went to events. And then I read more and more about that it's also about political, social
beliefs. And that's how I get interested in FSFE. Yeah, I understand the technical background,
but there's clearly more to it for yourself than just the tech side with open source.
I mean, at that time, I wasn't able to say, to formulate it this way. But in the end, for me,
it's free software is a way to distribute power in our society. I think, I mean, democracies
depend on distributing power. And we also need a distribution of technological power. And free
software is an important tool for that to make sure that there is not one entity has too much
power in our society. And I think that's the main part which is driving me for the work there.
Very good. Very good. Did you want to take the next one?
And why did you decide to join, eventually, the Free Software Foundation Europe?
So at that time, then, I mean, there was, at this point, I had this political interest,
I had this technical interest. I thought there are so many people on the internet,
when you have questions about technical issues, you can ask. And there are so many
bright people who will help you to figure it out. But about the political stuff,
I was not able to figure it out myself. So I studied politics and management then.
And we had to do a seven-month internship. And I asked some people, some DBM developers,
I knew, where could I do that? And one of the suggestions was the FSFE. And then I read about
them and applied there. And after a long or back and forth, because they didn't have
interns before and didn't have an office at that time and didn't have money to pay.
In the end, I ended up there in the one-room apartment of the president at that time on the
sofa. He had a desk. And from there, I then worked and attended Free Software events,
including my first FOSSTEM, then in 2005. Very nice. Very nice. So there's clearly,
yeah. What's next after that? Is there some other will-domination plan for yourself?
I think the one that is running is the topic we... I don't know what you want to say already about
your next episode. Tease it away. Now is probably a good time to feature an upcoming presentation
today, or reading rather? Yeah. So I will do a reading of this new book, which I wrote. It's
called Ada and Sangamann, A Tale of Software, Skateboards, and Raspberry Ice Cream. It's about
encouraging people to tinker with computers. It's about software freedom in a way that is
hopefully encouraging them to think on their own how they want to use technology. It will be at
six o'clock now. I have to check the room again in UB 2147. And there I will do a reading of the
book in 30 minutes. And afterwards, answer some questions about how to write a book with under
free license. Get that published by O'Reilly for the German version and No Start Press for the
English version, plus other language versions. Clearly you have an objective with the book,
right? It's not just, oh, let's write a book for a bit of fun, but there is more to it than that,
if I'm not mistaken. I mean, at the beginning, my main idea was how can I explain this topic
to my own children? And I asked if others have some ideas about that, and if there are some
existing books, and they were either for older children, or they were about a bit complicated.
And then I started to tell some bedtime stories myself, always a bit improvised, and then depending
on the feedback, I was then just changing the stories at that time, and then in the end, this
came out of it. Is this your personal kind of initiative, or is this something that the FSF
is trying to promote in terms of, you know, making awareness amongst younger people? I mean,
at the beginning, it was a personal project of mine, and I was also writing this on my own time.
Then at one point, I talked to someone and told him about this plan, and he said, well,
if you will write a book about free software, then I will buy 1000 copies and give that to
customers. And then I talked with the FSF and then I got the confirmation that I can spend
a few hundred euros to get an editor on board, so that I can get someone with experience how to
actually write a children's book. And yeah, when we had this, then we could also hire an illustrator
to do the illustrations for the book, and get an illustrator to understand Creative Commons licensing,
which is very unusual for this area, and then we were also quite lucky to get two publishers
on board who also understand free licensing, and agreed to publish this as commercial publishers
under CC Buy, share like. Excellent, excellent. So where can people find the book? So the
German one, you brought some with you today. So this is the commercial part, or at the German
version, you can already buy that everywhere. The US version, the English version, you can at the
moment just get that from the US publisher, because the worldwide distribution just starts in May.
So the FSFE, we got some of the books and brought them through customs, which was a pain,
and we have them at the booth, and so we have a few amount of those here. And yeah,
else from now on already, you can order that at every bookstore and pre-order will be shipped in
May. And tonight you're doing the first, let's say, reading of the English version, right?
Yeah, that was one of my wishes, that FOSSTEM will be the place where I do the first
reading of the English book, and yeah, I will do that there, and for everyone else, you would like
to do that. I mean, you can first try it out, and one of my recommendations is it's a really great
tool to talk to children about our topics. I did several readings with the German version
at schools with 30 people, 40 children, or even once in a cinema with 150 children,
talking with them about that, answering their questions they have, or having some discussions
about what they want to invent, how computers work, and so on. And so we have all the slides and
the text and where to change slides and all kind of other information, how you can do that on our
git repository, it's all freely licensed, you can make changes to it, let's see what's coming out,
you can make a sequel. Yeah, it's, I think that's something we will also discuss in the show,
probably a tool for world domination. And for those of you who cannot make it at 6 p.m.,
there will be a reading on something called Linux Inlass in an upcoming episode, more than
likely in April. So if you missed this reading tonight, feel free to tune in or download that
particular episode. Okay. Anything else we should discuss with the president while we have him on
the stage, Martin? I think we still have some minutes left. No, I think we have some minutes
left. So I mean, I think the subject has been beaten to death, but anywhere I would like still
to have your opinion on this. Richard M. Salman, just two sentences on this, just to wake up the
audience once again. I mean, it's history for enough, but it's been a while, but I think he has
made a rebound in terms of he's back on the board now, right, of the Free Software Fund. I know that
the FSFE issues a statement after the Holy Barclay, but I reckon he's back on track now at least
in the U.S., no? I mean, any views on this that you would like to share? Oh, that's very complicated.
Okay. And we still have, I think, 10 minutes left. The abridged version.
Yeah. Now I was cornered here on this topic. Now, I think that's a really complicated
discussion, and it's also a discussion which, at the moment, I also prefer to have some
personal conversations with other people involved in this before this is going public. So I'm sorry,
but this is a bit too difficult to discuss. Very diplomatic answer. Back to much more
safer grounds. Where do you see the Free Software Foundation Europe going?
I mean, what I see is that the topics are going more and more mainstream, and so
one of the big challenges there is how can we make sure that this topic doesn't stay at
FOSTA and at some Free Software conferences, but that we are going to other conferences
and connect with other topics which are ongoing and which are very much influenced by our topics
that we are usually discussing here. So when we talk about, there are discussions in the
sustainability area, which when you, there's a huge dependency on can you really make changes
to hardware, software, and how is technology developed? There are questions about who should
have control over the computers. Like, I mean, we have net neutrality. On the other hand,
it's very important that we also have device neutrality so that every one of us has the right
to install or remove software on our devices, that we can change web browsers, that we can change
app stores, that we can change the services which are connected to our devices, and that's
something which is, I mean, at the time when the movement started, it was small and we had some
desktop machines and some laptops, and now we have the computers everywhere, and now, I mean,
there are so many people who have questions about this topic, so it's more and more important to
translate this to a more general audience, people who don't have such a knowledge about
technology, and that's something which was, the FSFE always was doing this, but that's
something where we have more and more demand about that, and it's now not anymore that you
want to talk with people about free software, and most of them say, oh, I'm not interested,
it's now more the problem that there are so many people who have questions about that, and we just
have a limited amount of resources, so the important thing is how can we enable more people,
more volunteers to also work on these topics, that's also why, with this book, I mean, I'm
invited to do a lot of readings at schools, but I will not be able to fulfill this, that the demand
there, so we need to enable others to also do that and do this, and that's also for the,
for all the other topics, with device neutrality, with sustainability, with public money, public
code, one of the campaigns we are running, where there are so many governments which are interested,
and public administrations that are interested, yes, I'm totally convinced, but how do I do that,
and so that's one of the big challenges there, how do we enable that, and I mean, during the last
three years, it was very difficult to motivate volunteers to get in contact with new volunteers,
that's why something like FOSTA now is very important there, I mean, public money, public
code was the first campaign where I came across the FSFV all those years back, at the moment,
you're running a sustainability campaign in the era of mobile devices, if I recall correctly,
that was upcycling Android, where we help people to install other ROMs, other operating systems
on their mobile devices and also explain people that it's important that you can install or
remove software from devices and repair devices, so that's one other area. Okay, and would you go
as far as kind of associating these campaigns with the right to repair that you all, that you
almost touched upon a minute ago? Yeah, I mean, the right to repair is definitely one part of this
whole device neutrality area. Any future campaigns that you want to tease now? I mean, there are
several things that will come up, but one thing that for me is very important at this time of the
year, so it's February, and on the 14th of February, we are always running the iLoveFree
software day, the idea at that time was I thought that the flower industry is benefiting so much
from this day. Why can't we have something where the free software community is benefiting from this?
Yeah, so and I think in our community, we give each other very open feedback, very direct feedback,
but sometimes we forget to say thank you to all those amazing people here at the conference who
help others with their knowledge, who share their software with others, and so at the 14th of February,
we always encourage everyone out there to thank other free software contributors out there,
buy them a beverage, send them a letter or a postcard, or I mean, just in general, say thank
you to them, because it's something which in the end, I mean, all of those people, they are doing
such a great job, such an important contribution to our society, which we often forget about,
and so do this on the 14th of February, add it to your calendar, and the next day you can continue
to write feature requests, bug reports, complain why this programming language is used and not the
other, and why this approach is bad and yours is better, but yeah, don't forget to say thank you
once a year, at least. Also, there are, at least in Germany, there are a couple of events taking
place, for example, one of the Frankfurt user groups, I think it's even the CCC, as in the
KS computer club, has an event at the headquarters celebrating this free software day, so if you
want to take part in this, check out, is it on the website? So yeah, on the website fsv.org,
in the news section, you find an entry there about I Love Free Software Day, and several local
groups are also organizing events, where we are inviting free software contributors, make sure
that there are some pizzas, some cake, and there are people who can thank the others. We have,
in Berlin, also, at Seabase Hacker Space, we have a DJ there, we have an event in Crees,
we have an event in Frankfurt, and there are others there, and if you want to organize that on
your, something like that, on your own, let us know, so we can also list your I Love Free Software
Day event, it's an event where we hope that many of you here, many of the people visiting for
them, will receive a thank you for your work, and well, if you want to organize something there,
let us know. We can also help you a bit when you register there, that we could cover like the pizza
for this event or so, and just write us an email, and we will see that we can also financially
support when you want to organize that, so that, because we think that if every euro that is invested
in such a nice event, and some nice cake there, that this will benefit Free Software in the long
run a lot, because it's so motivating to receive, yeah, some appreciation for your work.
Sounds like a bit like the dark side, really, we have cookies, don't we, cake in this case.
So people, this has been almost a live session of something called Linux in-laws,
this is the format that we normally do every, every, every month, as in bringing guests on stage,
putting him or her on the spot, and then having a little bit of fun. If you like this, the feed
address is on the, is on the, is on the screen, I think we have time for one more question
from the audience. Is there any question that you would like to get answered right now,
preferably from a foster, from a, from a free and open-source software background?
If there isn't, thank you very much for listening, I'm tempted to say,
there will be a session tonight, as in you can ask us anything, you also find the address on
the website, it's just a little bit of fun. At that pub, we're going to start at about 8.30,
the place isn't too big, so just make sure that you are there on time in order to,
to avoid, to avoid disappointment if you can't get in. So 8.30 at that address,
you also find this on Linux in-laws, you just click on the foster tab. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. Thank you.