Pieter Hintjens In Memoriam
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| Number of Parts | 611 | |
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| License | CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/42263 (DOI) | |
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| Production Year | 2017 |
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DistanceStandard deviationThread (computing)Multiplication signNumberWikiAddress spaceGateway (telecommunications)Information managementModule (mathematics)Universe (mathematics)Online helpDomain namePoint (geometry)SoftwareProjective planeDirection (geometry)Radical (chemistry)Physical systemPlanningSemiconductor memoryComputer virusPresentation of a groupEmailOpen setProduct (business)Speech synthesisGoodness of fitKey (cryptography)Hand fanArithmetic meanPosition operatorVideo projectorFiber bundleOctahedronDivision (mathematics)Visualization (computer graphics)AuthorizationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Machine visionAdditionDomain namePrisoner's dilemmaGroup actionWordChemical equationSystem callCausalityDemosceneMetropolitan area networkGame theoryXMLMeeting/Interview
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Group actionComputing platformEngineering drawingXMLUML
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Group actionMultiplication signSpherical capKeyboard shortcutError messageRadical (chemistry)EmailSystem callXMLUMLJSON
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NumberWindowServer (computing)Web 2.0Goodness of fitFormal languageMultiplication signNeuroinformatikPresentation of a groupBuildingTouchscreenMachine visionResultantMereologyPoint (geometry)Execution unitOrder (biology)FamilyProjective planeLibrary (computing)Service-oriented architecturePhysicalismMessage passingFitness functionReverse engineeringView (database)Data managementAreaPhysical lawMedical imagingMoment (mathematics)System callSource codeLattice (order)Graph coloringAuthorization1 (number)Process (computing)Core dumpSoftwareEndliche ModelltheorieElectric generatorCartesian coordinate systemStandard deviationVideo gameComputer networkMathematicsMetropolitan area networkDecision theoryClient (computing)LastteilungFocus (optics)BlogOpcodeFrustrationKeyboard shortcutTracing (software)Java appletMultiplicationPolygon mesh2 (number)Latent heatOffice suiteCommunications protocolCodeCellular automatonOperator (mathematics)FrequencySoftware testingSource code
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Maxima and minimaThomas KuhnMathematicsTwin primeExecution unitService (economics)Physical systemResultantMaxima and minimaField (computer science)Machine visionAuthorizationLimit (category theory)Goodness of fitElectronic visual displayMereologySocial classArithmetic meanLine (geometry)Barrelled spaceLevel (video gaming)EvoluteMultiplication signFingerprintFormal languageWordUniverse (mathematics)View (database)Address spaceProcedural programmingComputer wormTwitterVideo gameRow (database)Event horizonInternetworkingEndliche ModelltheorieNatural numberPoint (geometry)Streaming mediaRaw image formatBitFamilyVideoconferencingComputer configurationYouTubeSpacetimeBlogKey (cryptography)SI-EinheitenSource code
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Covering spaceCASE <Informatik>Virtual machineData conversionHidden Markov modelProjective planeQuicksortBitSurgeryMultiplication signRight angleSound effectCurveEstimatorFood energyComputer configurationError messageComputer clusterDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Compact spaceFilm editingAnnihilator (ring theory)Procedural programmingWordVideo gameFamilyMoment (mathematics)Goodness of fitCommunications protocolGroup actionAreaMassSystem callDemosceneResultantPhysical systemDecision theoryLie groupGraph coloringOrder (biology)Computer virusRow (database)Water vaporMeeting/Interview
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Software developerOpen sourcePosition operatorQuicksortCore dumpGame controllerSoftwareBlock (periodic table)Projective planeVideo gameBuildingNP-hardOpen setSoftware maintenancePoint (geometry)Rule of inferenceClosed setFamilyBitMultiplication signComputing platformElectronic mailing listWordOperational amplifierLine (geometry)Service (economics)Different (Kate Ryan album)Quantum stateNeighbourhood (graph theory)AuthorizationGraph coloringSign (mathematics)2 (number)Office suiteSource codeAdditionEvent horizonView (database)VotingAverageSocial classTotal S.A.Metropolitan area networkBarrelled spaceShared memoryMeeting/Interview
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User interfaceMaxima and minimaTwin primeMultiplication signMessage passingNetwork topologyBuildingWordWebsiteTwitterFormal languageInternetworkingFigurate numberField (computer science)Remote procedure callOptical disc driveCausalityWell-formed formulaRandom matrixDecision theoryGSM-Software-Management AGCommunications protocolInformation securityComplex numberOpen sourceComputer programmingDesign by contractSoftwareOnline helpBroadcasting (networking)Process (computing)CodeMeeting/InterviewSource codeXML
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Maxima and minimaThumbnailCore dumpEmailUser interfaceWechselseitige InformationSoftware bugProjective planeFilm editingWave packetBitPlanningLoop (music)MereologyInformationDecision theoryUniform resource locatorSoftwareAuthorizationCodeLibrary (computing)Internet der DingeFamilyProcess (computing)Goodness of fitCommunications protocolComputer virusPhysical systemCycle (graph theory)Beat (acoustics)WebsiteCausalityGroup actionRule of inferenceBuildingBridging (networking)TwitterResultantVideo gameMultiplication signSequelMathematicsSource codeXML
01:03:05
Core dumpComputer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:07
Hello. I think I can start now. Yeah, if you just want to start, Benjamin.
00:22
So, it's 18 o'clock. Let's go. Thanks. My name is Benjamin Henry. I'm Belgian. I worked with Peter. I knew Peter since 2005. I met Peter somewhere around the European Parliament.
00:41
We were fighting the software patent directive and Peter was running a company, i.o.X, a budget company based in Brussels. And the company was doing a gateway to do SMS to e-mail. And they received a thread letter from a patent show
01:01
who was claiming a patent on matching a telephone number to an e-mail address in a database. And they did basically the concept of an e-mail to an SMS to e-mail gateway. So, i.Matic was developing a product for value account proximity at the time.
01:23
And the patent show sent thread letters to any, basically any telco in Belgium or any company that was doing a gateway for SMS to e-mail. And so Peter had a project with Proximity to Belgium
01:44
for events, for like a short SMS. And Proximity was threatened and they said from basically after a week that they gonna drop the project where Peter invested quite a lot of resources in people.
02:05
And at that time it ended up as the termination of the project and he fired five people at i.Matic. And that's where he came to the software patent debate because at the time the European Parliament was debating it quite heavily.
02:24
And when I went there, where he was speaking around the European Parliament he was like an hotel with MVPs. And the EPO and other enemies were trying to destroy any presentation from our side.
02:43
Destroying the projector, destroying the presentation, making noise, whatever. And Peter was so upset and said, okay, this is my turn. I'm gonna make it and destroy this whole thing. He was so upset and for me he made the best speech I've ever seen on the topic.
03:04
He was a victim of patent trolling, which was not called patent trolling at the time because patent trolling came in 2006 with RIM and NTP in the US.
03:23
So I met him afterwards and we successfully managed to stop the directive in a way where the large companies basically asked to drop the directive and that's what the European Parliament did. And they did that to better push for what is called the community patent
03:44
or now the unitary patent, which is being currently ratified in all the EU countries. So the fight we had was very intense. I was spending most of my time on this and I had to delay my university final examination
04:10
and at some point he said, being the new president of the FFI, the association, he said, I need your help in Brussels, we're gonna work together.
04:21
And that was 2006 and basically six months after the rejection of the directive in July, the Commission announced that they're gonna relaunch the community patents and the attempt to create a patent system for Europe.
04:41
So it gave us a lot of work. We worked on EUpaco, which is the European patent conference. And then at some point I set up a website called noxml.org where I set up a petition against the standardization of open XML, which is docx and xlxx and so on.
05:04
Microsoft tried to standardize xlxx because they saw that ODF was already in xlxx standards and all the governments were trying to impose ODF as a reference standard. So Microsoft could not be in any public court for public markets, which are big markets.
05:30
And then we had this big fight, about week seven, which is now ten years, it's gonna be the ten year anniversary this year.
05:41
So I set up this petition and it was Friday and we were testing the new wiki.platform, which is a wiki farm I invested in the company in Poland. We were testing the new module for the petition and so we put up this petition online. I put it up and I booked a domain named noxml.3.0.
06:03
And Peter said, it's never gonna work. There are three O's, nobody's gonna type. And then I launched the petition like on Friday night and when we came back on Monday morning, we had like 10,000 teachers from Linux Russia or something. So that's how we started to work on this.
06:21
We didn't have really any plans but we got hooked up and at some point, I think a lot of people had good memories of crazy stories with Microsoft's gold partners stuffing the committees, corrupting the process and at the end, at the end we put a price
06:42
for the best team who was fighting the OpenXML standardization and we put out a prize money of 3,000 euros and at the end, we were looking at who was the best team. Again, OpenXML, Peter came with the idea that Microsoft itself
07:00
was the best team to fight against its own standard. So he cracked out the prize, the Kayak award and gave it to Microsoft. And later on, Peter was invited to talk on a podium with a Microsoft speaker and the Microsoft spokesman was a bit irritated
07:23
because he asked Peter, is that you who gave us this fucking award? And after that, he made a nice song. This song for all those brave men and women who spend their lives
07:41
looking for the truth. This is called Microsoft.
10:31
This is one of the flyers that Peter wrote in a sarcastic way. I was given out before in a platform in a train station to politicians
10:44
and this one created some controversy inside our group because it was sarcastic. So we agreed and we were trying the engine to make campaigns
11:08
and Peter had the idea to design the best keyboard. So he was upset with his caps lock to go in uppercase which actually comes from a long time ago when you had a terminal error
11:22
and he wanted to get rid of it so he made a contest for the best keyboard design and I think there was some winner for some layout or that was pretty fun. So in the history, I don't know if there are still users of Xitami in the room.
11:45
So I had a friend who was using this web server in the 90s under Windows and actually that was the number one web server in around 1997 or 8.
12:01
It got many awards and that was like the best. Before Apache, it was one of the best web server and I think there were a lot of users, especially in Windows for that.
12:21
I'm going to quit the slides. Actually, Peter didn't like much when you have slides. So I worked with Peter for three years from 2006 to 2009.
12:49
Then at the end, I worked on OpenMQ with MQP standardization workgroup where there was Red Hat, IBM, all the others.
13:04
Peter developed very interesting concepts around code generation. Most of the Xitami web server was based on code generation with tools like GSL, Libero, where basically you define model in XML which defines your application and then GSL is going to generate C code.
13:27
I think he was one of the few persons in the world to adopt this methodology with a focus on C threading with the, let's say, have the best usage of all your resources.
13:55
After this period, I worked on OpenMQ which was the broker.
14:01
Basically, in the messaging world, you have the client, the server and basically you put the broker as a server and you talk to it. We had a client in New York where we were trying to optimize the speed and get the highest number of messages per second we could get with the broker,
14:25
OpenMQ broker. Basically, after a while, it took me a while to realize that we were working on high-frequency trading. So we had this model, we had this standardization work as well
14:42
and at some point, Peter was very upset about Red Hat. Red Hat filed a number of patents around the MQP. Red Hat, also one of the chairmen of the committee, tried to basically buy his credit
15:01
or put his name as the main author of the specification which made Peter very upset and very upset about this whole standardization process. So at some point, I spent a lot of money on trying to participate in the standard process
15:24
and it just went out of the process and looked for better solutions. So this search for speed came to the simple model which is point-to-point.
15:41
So we have two points. Without the broker in the middle, the third broker and the third point, you remove the broker and you have messages between A to B and try to remove the broker in the middle.
16:02
And that gave birth to ZeroQ. ZeroQ was bought by Imatics from a Slovakian company, Martim, somewhere in Slovakian. And they basically focused on that aspect for a while and they managed to get the highest performance.
16:22
I have seen graphs, but basically they were destroying all the other competitors on the market with a million messages. And so the frustration with opening QGivers to ZeroQ, which at the beginning was really like a network library for developers, which it still is.
16:47
But with the time, there were many more people coming. So ZeroQ is done in C++ and that's a core library and there are bindings for, I don't know how many languages on top,
17:03
but basically whether it's Rust, Python or Java or OCaml, or I think we used the one which is on top. We used funny languages on top.
17:21
So you have this big community trying to make things connected together, talking together. Typically you need to load, to load balanced things across multiple servers. You would use ZeroQ for that.
17:41
So, and then I think 2009, 2010, Peter had a project with Samsung in South Korea. Not North Korea. But the goal was to make two phones, two smartphones, top to each other. And they worked on some kind of a mesh with Wi-Fi.
18:04
And at some point I think he went to some sushi restaurants. And he came back from South Korea with some yellow skin. I visited him at the hospital at the time. He had yellow skin.
18:22
And apparently when you eat sushi and fish that is not very fresh fish, but with some kind of parasites in there, the parasite develops something in the genome and this creates some kind of cancer cells. So the yellow color was coming from this area which was damaged by growing cancer.
18:50
So he got an operation out of that. They removed part of the genome. And from that moment in time I think his life changed.
19:02
He started to take more time with his family, write some books about programming, about ZeroQ. And he was a different man. He took the decision to totally drop any effort in writing operative code anymore.
19:27
And he focused on building the ZeroQ community and writing only free software and promised to never write operative software or closed software again.
19:41
And looking at it from the outside, you can understand that someone wants at some point when his life might be shortened in the near future to leave a trace. So the trace now is mostly the ZeroQ community where we had a hackathon this weekend.
20:05
Last year in the same period we had a hackathon in his garage. And I think a month after he had his last conference in Munich. And he came back very sick. I told him to visit the doctor and the results coming from the doctor,
20:24
coming from the test were that he had metastasis in both lungs. He was coughing a lot. So I thought we were working in the garage. That was our new office that we keep it warm. And I thought it was something else but it was his cancer that was back.
20:45
And the diagnosis was really pretty much saying there's no chance to get out of it. So that was in April and we organized a big party in his garage in June.
21:14
And so from there we tried to visit him as much as I can.
21:25
And he made a very important blog post about the protocol for dying.
21:53
And this blog post went viral on the internet. To the point where the TV in Belgium, the newspaper in Belgium,
22:10
both in the north or the south, were interested in his story. Which is basically saying when someone is dying, don't try to cry on the phone.
22:24
Try to remember the good times. This was translated into many languages. Many people got touched by it.
22:43
It's a reference. And basically they tried to say what was the diagnosis,
23:00
what were the recommendations to talk to a dying person, what you should say, what you should not say. And I think at some point he got a desk which is different from the normal way.
23:24
Which in a sense he could clean things up before leaving. And he used his Twitter account as a meme for communicating with other people.
23:41
And I think his father died in April. And his father chose to use eternasia, which is a negative invention. And he said he's going to use the same method for deciding when he's going to leave.
24:16
So I'll let you read. I'll give you one minute to let you read.
24:45
So now I don't know what time is it. 23. So I recommend you... He talks about those YouTube videos and recordings of conferences where he went.
25:09
So I prepared part of the video. It's an interview made by someone from Binstock in Vancouver,
25:24
where he interviewed him in July. And I think we could recognize...
25:42
It's a long interview, it's like one hour. But the introduction is going to... We have about one hour to finish. It's not good, but my keys today are back. Okay, great. So maybe a good start would be just to explain why we are where we are.
26:04
You wrote the protocol and maybe a little bit of the history of how that unfortunate event happened, just so other people are aware that these kinds of things exist. Are we recording that? Yes, we are. So, yeah, the model is not too cheap sushi.
26:24
It's expensive, I think. There's this... There are a lot of people in the world still. A lot of them have diseases which are dramatically bad, in which I don't know about the rest, because they're not worth much money. They're not really in the focus of research.
26:41
Companies prefer to invest their time and effort in diseases for wealthy, not the poor. And one of those diseases that is at the stage where it's a little parasite, a little worm which lives in the... In the Giardina, which is the life cycle, it basically lives in fresh farmed fish. And if you eat the fish raw,
27:02
and this is our delicacy as a fermented raw fish or something like that, then the little worm attaches into your Giardina, and it sits there for quite some time. And at a certain point in time, it gets to produce little carcinogens, which produce germinates which the worm feeds over, because it likes it, because nature is weird like that.
27:23
And so there's this... There's this high risk category, which is men at the age of 50 or so, who just, basically they turn yellow and they die. And that's the symptom. Your skin goes yellow, your eyes go yellow. You start peeing yellow and then a few etcetera, as much as you're dead.
27:41
And it's cost of business, basically. If you're poor, male, it's at the stage where they eat fresh fish. So I suspect that there is a growing stream of cheap black market fresh fish coming into sushi and cheap sushi restaurants, which are used to live cheap sushi restaurants.
28:01
And so five years ago, I began turning yellow, and I'm male at 50, roughly. And my eyes go slightly yellow, and I'm like, okay, this is not good, you start checking to the events. And they do a scan and find no blockage in my gallbladder, and my liver is fine. And so the only red brother option is a tumor in the bile duct,
28:22
which is determined to be a cancer, fairly aggressive and fairly far along the way, but not yet metastasized, but still sitting in one space. And so they come open and remove this thing. It must have been lighting them. This thing from the alien, this thing with many tentacles, and this is an amazing procedure called a whippoora.
28:43
It's a replonable internal system. And that was pretty horrendous. But anyway, I got out of that and recovered from that. And we do, and most of us are pretty robust when we get a chance to be. And the medicine is pretty good. I'm impressed, I have to say, by medicine, what a mess.
29:02
And especially in Belgium, when I got involved, this is where I said that, you know, I'm going to pay for this stuff. The safe covers that. You do pay, but it's not going to bankrupt you ever. And that was awkward. I had this kind of very freaky few years where I was, you know,
29:21
I should have been dead, but I wasn't dead. Many of us should have died, because it was really very close to those times. I mean, from the surgery it was very, very dangerous, and the cancer was really aggressive. So I spent the next few years in a kind of a state of food, running around saying, wow, I should be dead that Monday. And still, I'm going to die at some point, but I might as well make the most of it.
29:40
So I decided to come back to it, began writing my books, and I broke dates from that point in time. And we had some interesting projects, but I began to work more and more from home, and spend time with my kids. I think everyone noticed that you had pretty much a solid green contribution. Yep.
30:01
It was shocking to see it sort of stop, obviously, in the last couple of months, but it was amazing to see just a contribution from one person. Well, actually, the problem with the GitHub thing is it's setting itself up for a big game, so if it's a few days, then you're right. So I go back to a project, and we can actually use the date option to backdate that.
30:23
It's straight up in particular, and we give people this kind of thing. I guess we all cheated, so that was my little advice. That's why I was basically destroyed the whole thing with the Pac-Man. Oh, right. What was the name of that project again?
30:41
I don't know what I called it. Wacka-wacka, that's right. Yeah, that's it. Yes, that's what we were looking at. It was kind of good, because we got to read the old contributions and build up new values. We got to build them up so they come to a constant, because otherwise you get these very bizarre, bizarre effects holding you at it on top. Ah, silly stuff. Yes, so then we ended up doing it this year,
31:02
I guess, around Easter, and it got sticky again, and I'm like, oh, hmm. And it was a bit of a chaotic moment in our family because my dad had just died, so we were obsessed by that. We're still figuring that one out. Death is a mess generally, I noticed that. And there's a lot you can do to make death less of a mess.
31:22
You know, doing things like preparing, just, you know, getting rid of your stuff before you die. I mean, it's stressful, but you get rid of stuff that you may appreciate before you die, and then when you're dead, no one has to argue about, you know, who gets it, what you do with it, that kind of thing. So then I got a scan, and I got biopsies,
31:41
and I got another scan, and I got blood tests, and they were like, yep, you have cuts in both lungs, and it's the same cancer, a compact pile of cuts in your lung, which is pretty awful, really, because there's no chemotherapy for bowel cancer. Like, no one has really spent much time on this.
32:01
They didn't tell me quite how experimental it is or quite how much data they have, and they said that to me, I was having pneumonia from the biopsies, I got pretty sick from that. They're poking holes in the lungs, you know, some bacteria that were around shouldn't be there. So I got very sick from that, and then they were looking for a week and a week and a half,
32:20
what kind of chemo could we use, and they found some data somewhere suggesting that chemo which is used for colon cancer, called 4-phox, actually might work for bowel cancer, with a bit of luck. So that's what they're getting in, and it turns out that it's actually working. Whether it's working or it's doing something, I'm actually absolutely dead by that, by my own estimate.
32:41
Yeah, from your initial, the news was sort of to hear how aggressive it was, so, you know, I've always told you to accept my fingers constantly. Don't ever give up on anything, and putting faith in what we want to use that word into, you know, what's out there,
33:02
the science that's going on. So I'm very happy, ecstatic, I'm sure everyone else has took care of that. Well, the science is very good, but the science doesn't care about individual cases. No. Science is focused on data and collecting statistics, and, you know, there's a lot of gaps in there, all you have.
33:20
Even in this case, I don't even have statistics, I don't know what the chances really are, so I'm very happy to not be getting worse. I'm getting a little bit better, slowly better. I mean, even in the worst possible sort of outcome, that doesn't work anyway, I mean, like you said before, there's more data, at least,
33:42
that's what you said. Yeah, quite critical, right? Right, right, right. And the medical machine works by massive, massive, massive, primarily local trial and error. It has these procedures that it applies very, very systematically, and they can be wrong in individual cases, but it applies them. And when it gets data,
34:00
it shows that they're wrong, it will improve them. And over time, it's, you know, people keep sending me these emails suggesting, you know, I should try this, I should try this diet, and this alternative, and acupuncture, and I don't know what else, smoking weed would do me a good deal. I'm like, all that stuff is fun, but you can't compare a handful of individual cases
34:21
against the medical machine. It's just like, this is not a fair fight, you know? And I don't trust you. Yeah, you did give up sugar, correct? Or is this something you did right away? I gave that up a long time ago. Well, excuse me, I realized that. I did, myself again. Yeah, I'm actually getting sugar again now
34:41
because I really, really need the empty calories. Like, that's my protein, we need to eat that right now. I don't have energy at this point, just to be able to get through the treatments. I've got to add, one of the key notes is quite interesting, so it's basically one terrible week, one great week, and you're just losing yourself.
35:01
Is it every two weeks? Are you going back in? Two weeks. Like this week? Yeah, Wednesday. Okay, so you've got a couple of good days left to enjoy it before. What? A little bit to take effect, and you're still okay on a Wednesday and a Thursday. It's a time curve. Not too bad. It doesn't make any difference after a couple of days,
35:21
and then it's just, oh, I sleep all the time, I'm vomiting and I'm not eating. If you touch my stuff, oh, it gets into your mind, and you don't sleep well. You're tired, and then you get better and better, and you can still, you know, things come back, it's color increasing, it's tasty, can you taste what's sold?
35:42
A lot of the benefits of you needing to go through this in your life is the protocol for dying, which was a huge critical and had a worldwide impact, I would say, given the fact people have interviewed you about it on television and other places.
36:01
I was on television twice, once in French, once in Dutch. It seems, I'm a little bit affected by it. You already wrote an article, correct? Yes, regarding it, yes. Lots of conversations. Everyone is touched by this. Of course, dying is a very, it's a very general thing we all experience, it's like an accident for a time.
36:21
One way or another, and it's, as I was with my dad in the time, it was very difficult to know what to do as a family. There's very little advice out there I've had to, had to even organize, had to even, you know, deal with it. I'm sure there are lots of blocks on someone you could look for, but simple things like,
36:41
you know, get a list of all your assets and bank accounts and stuff before you die, don't wait until you're technically stuck hunting and stuff, die. Don't make bizarre rules unless you want your family to fight you. And he had euthanasia, which was a good thing he needed to do, it was very, very old. He really had no, no life except lying in bed,
37:00
losing control over things. And as a family, we were able to use that to kind of try and handle things, it was very healthy, I thought, it was very good for us. Not to have to just wait passively until in fact actually able to, you know, hold a party and come together and have the children there and, you know, do this, and then he, then he died, and it was a very,
37:21
very tidy and also, I think, very healthy way to, to have control. So that's also what I wanted to like about it, the positives of it. People are very afraid of death panels and, you know, assisted suicide. It's, it's really not that, I mean, it's really about taking control. But we're wired,
37:40
we're wired to fear death of the species, keep ourselves going. Yeah, exactly. It's just a little bit in the brain, it doesn't want to die, but once you realize that it's really not that whether or not it dies, I mean, if it just might, which is pretty important. We tend to regret that.
38:00
Yeah. So it's inspirational words. It's always inspirational words, and from my point, I've obviously followed a lot of what you've done because of, sort of, sort of how our paths, I came across all your work, and to have met you last year was, was tremendous,
38:22
tremendously not that hard. I mean, I've experienced because, you know, of everything that I thought was more than really forced about how amazingly outgoing, you know, everything you write about, about how you, how you live, about the social aspects where you were an introvert, or like, I was myself,
38:42
you came from a broad system, believed, et cetera. I really identified with everything that you, sort of, said, and how you turned out because I also find a tremendous stimulation about, you know, social things. So, what you wrote about the community is incredible.
39:00
We had a great time building this. It was fantastic. Yeah. It was very good. And what you, I, Yeah. When you realize that when you meet 12 people, I spent the last five years doing a lot of conferences, and I've done that before, but not, not quite so focused, and what you realize is that most people are lovely.
39:21
I mean, it's, it's kind of confusing. We have many broad generalizations. You know, all these are that, and all these are this, but it turns out that most people are lovely, and most people are, are, are great to work with, and are always motivated to be, you know, good actors. And that's kind of the core philosophy
39:41
of our community, is it's not to trust everybody. It's just to, like, you know, we have the data. We know that this essential people are going to be good for the community, and that essential is going to be bad for the community, and we want to filter them out rapidly, bring them the good, and then freedom to do the right thing. I, I see a lot of that in,
40:01
in a little open source, so I, since you don't get, you know, open source, and a lot of other endeavors that don't have an open source, and, you know, one of the things, how it would be nice to, to get from you is your outlook, just the philosophy, having you found the patent system, the edge network, you've started, done a bunch of other things,
40:22
I think the edge network, kind of, sidetracked the business core initiative, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but maybe we can dive into a little bit of, you know, the open source side, and what drives you, you know, why does, why does Peter, not have to use, his, he now knows developers, but the MacBook Pro,
40:40
sitting there, hacking away at Ruby on Rails, he's a guy that's got some interesting tech behind him, and maybe go into that whole philosophy of why, as a consumer, you chose to make these choices, to use certain equipment, and use certain tech, we're not going to use certain tech. So I guess we all have a general opinion,
41:02
we don't make, sometimes we can make big decisions, but I think they're always, they're always built into small steps, so first of all, open source, that's a choice, and I realize that clearly, at a certain point, maybe that was like, 40 years old, that all of my closed search projects were dead,
41:20
like literally, you would get money from a customer, you would build stuff with them, they would use it, and then they would die, and you're a supplier, and their goal was to replace you, and I have a very, very few customers whose goal was to build a long-term relationship and pay maintenance, and I wanted to pay maintenance for 15 years, but they were the exceptions, and the majority of the customers were working, you're our plumber,
41:41
you're our lawyer, you're a pure cost, and you come in, you build the stuff, and we will use it, and then you will go away, and as soon as you can, you will replace yourself with something else, because that's what companies do, they like spending money, and, the open source stuff that I made before, when I was so ideologically motivated,
42:00
survived, and I'm making tools open source, because, it wasn't really hydrology, I wanted to use it in my work, and I couldn't install them, so I said, okay, I might as well bring it home, so before that, it was freeware, and shareware, and then I realized, okay, GPL, and I would use these tools, tools like Reaver, and then GSL, because they were really, really necessary for the work they wanted to do,
42:21
they made me a good consultant, and a much better developer, so the tools themselves were free to share, and then GPL, and then other licenses, and then I came back, and I had a lot of, you know, you build a company, you make money, you have to earn money, you have to pay yourself, so I went back into commercial software development, and I realized afterwards, it was just years in my back that were lost,
42:43
I guess my ego doesn't like that, my ego likes to think that the stuff I make will survive, I thought I have good ideas, which is kind of true, not to a point. I should have touched on this, some of them are good, some of them are really bad, but there were some that we stopped, just this traction, it was temporary, it was kind of offensive,
43:01
I thought we could do better, and so I began really deliberately saying, open source is the only way to grow, and then if I were away from this, I would get a sharp reminder that a company in Poland, Wikidog, which still survives, but the company never really became a success, and the core reason was that the platform was closed source,
43:21
and so we have this small company, and all this money goes into software development and customer support, and that's lethal. If you're building your own software by yourself, you can't compete. And the irony is that, of course, the whole stack is based on open source, but it's not open source. Great.
43:42
Hope you enjoyed. It's 42, and we still have five, ten minutes. Leave the floor to people.
44:04
Peter, personally, you might have some anecdotes.
44:22
I met him five years ago, and made this silly decision not to meet him again for five years, and so I had a crazy time with him five years ago, for one evening, then decided to wait, wait, wait until last hackathon that Benjamin mentioned,
44:40
and I was so impressed by looking at him working inside his community that he was actually applying the principle that he was speaking about. Most people don't do that. They speak up, but they don't do it, and he was really, really doing it, and that really got me impressed. And so I kept some contacts in general last year,
45:02
which was unfortunately too late, but that's how likely it is. At least I learned something. I just want to point one, or two things that are related. I was really, really impressed by the tweet storm when he announced his death on October 4th.
45:24
I mean, for 24 hours, maybe more, all over Twitter, people were really thanking him, and I thought it was very impressive to see that what he just told about people being good for each other has some impacts in each other's life.
45:44
And related to that, two months later, I met a girl over the internet, and we were speaking on the project, and she invites me to do programming over the internet, which was the first time for me, I guess, most of you have done it before, but for me it was the first time. And we started to get some contacts,
46:02
and I mentioned that I'm looking at her software because I looked at GSM from Peter, and I saw her software because at a Peter event, I met someone that mentioned help to me, and help is a language that picked my interest. And suddenly she is really touched because she says, oh, you know, I met Peter,
46:22
he was such a great guy, so we had no relationship at all. So I just wanted to point this open source stuff and huge stuff, two months after he was dead, because he was still there among us, so I guess that his ego must be taken care of in a way.
46:50
Yeah, I met Peter like a few years ago. I was really in trouble building my security systems,
47:00
and well, not very experienced in it. And I met him for a very long time, and you know, I can talk a lot about this technology, and Peter was really a mentor in that field. But yeah, what struck me most was,
47:22
even now Peter, his personality is a huge personality. But it was not about technology. It was really about humans. Humans really have never been so welcomed by somebody in a community. And this really struck me, like, whoa,
47:45
like there was something happening. And this was such an inspiration. And yeah, I think he kind of bundled it in this C4 collective code construct,
48:04
I actually don't know what it is. Four C's are four actually. I think it's, he was, yeah, when we talk about technology, then it's with this programming, but he was really about protocol support,
48:21
but a contract, and this is also a social contract. And yeah, I think that's a huge legacy. When I heard that he was going to die,
48:41
I was really like, we're going to lose a big thing here, keep this going. And I'm really happy that I'm here again with lots of people from the zero impute community. Anyway, we're doing it. He just wrote a protocol on how to do it.
49:02
We have a very open and very welcoming community, and that's solving the problems of communities, which are always there. So yeah, for me, Peter was a big inspiration,
49:23
and I think that's his legacy, that this is something everybody can pick up, because it's a contract. You can just follow it. It's just an advice. It's not only about technology, it's even for life,
49:41
and it's protocol for dying was translated in so many languages, and broadcast on television. I work for a television in Holland now, and even on there, they knew about Peter. They had seen his work, and I was like, okay, amazing.
50:01
So yeah, Peter. I settled in Belgium 20 years ago, and I knew Peter at that time,
50:22
less than one year after I arrived. And since we were in contact, not in contact, and so I see all the innovations, and of course I'm not so technical anymore now, so I didn't follow the end,
50:41
but of course regarding the social process to collaborate, it's a great inspiration. Also what a good message I missed,
51:05
that he was always challenging. When we discussed with him, it was always challenging. He was always challenging you, so it was a great inspiration.
51:25
So yes, at the end, he wrote all these books, and you can agree with some of his writing, particularly when it's not technical, but it's always challenging, so it's a great thing.
51:40
I guess we can thank you, and we'll try to pursue some of his initiatives, and also maybe something that's difficult, and he would like to make them.
52:09
Yes, thank you Peter.
52:21
I met Peter about three years ago during my bachelor studies, and we were trying to build a PHP Dropbox, and basically we were just trying to use it,
52:40
and suddenly I was in the SerumQ community doing pull requests on a language I didn't even know that much at the time. Just because the process he built, working with the community, working in the community,
53:00
was so much fun. Actually, working remote in the community with all of you guys is one of the greatest experiences I had in my life, and it worked really, really, sometimes,
53:22
most of the times, way more efficient than working with colleagues at a company. I'm not sure how that's possible, probably because of his protocols. Peter had always great advice, and I really, really liked working with him.
53:45
I only met him last June at his wake, which was far too late because I missed a couple of opportunities. But I'm glad that I knew him.
54:19
Although I met people three years ago,
54:27
knew him for three years, the experience was really intense. We all started at three years ago, we decided to build a system,
54:42
and we were looking for SerumQ, and we made a decision, our team that we are going to invite, and we'll see what he has to say. This turned out to be one of the best decisions.
55:05
I can say now that he managed to change in ways that I can't begin to describe. This is basically what I consider to be Peter's legacy. It was not just about technology.
55:22
Maybe the experience you would have with Peter would change anything for myself. He made me a better developer, he made me a better person, a better father, and he would talk about basically any topic with you.
55:41
He was so smart. His mind was so, like, cutting through a little bit of the stuff that could be a part of any discussion with you.
56:15
Thank you so much.
56:29
Hello. My name is Michael. I met Peter at the same location as Caro because we are working in the same team. We were really lucky when we chose SerumQ
56:40
and decided to invite Peter for the training because, I mean, the plan was that we will learn the technology. It turns out the technology is the least important information we get. We got a lot of things from the beginning, how to write code, how to test it, how to build and how to train, how to feel fast, how to improve yourself.
57:03
I still remember our discussion about the problem solution, which was, this is something trivial to think about. You have the problem and solution. This is not how most people operate. And he focused us a lot about that. It turns out that the most important information we learned
57:22
was the collaboration, the community, and about the back actors, which is, especially the physical part of the book, is something I personally started to read recently and realised that this was the most important thing we learned about the social aspect, how to organise,
57:41
how to deal with the people which are not able to work in this process. So I'm not going to repeat all those. Peter, thank you.
58:01
Please allow me to speak. Even though I did not know Peter personally, I've met, I've seen him here once live on stage. He was here in Boston, I think it was in 2011, and since then I was so intrigued by him. I followed his online persona and he was called one of the real intellectuals of our community,
58:20
out of which the people like him are indeed very rare. And I just remember that in his last tweets, he wanted to be remembered mostly as an author and his legacy is there. His books are there, they deal about software, but they deal about people, they deal about the good things and people about fostering communities, about societies, and about the bad things too in the design background.
58:44
I find these books tremendously valuable, readable, full of creative insights, of disruptive insights, of intriguing ideas. And these books are there, one can buy them, but one can also just download them. They are as free licensed as the software was.
59:01
It's all there and by reading his books, plenty of people can still get plenty of insights of Peter.
59:21
So my story is similar to the others, other people have told. I started working in the supermarket community a few years ago because we needed to work, and I found a small bug. So I sent a pull request, but in other projects that I can contribute to,
59:41
normally I expect my pull request to stay there for weeks, maybe months, and be ignored. And then when someone finally looks at it, then the back shedding starts and no, do it red, no, do it green. But when I sent the pull request to Citizen Cube, it was emerging about five minutes.
01:00:00
And that was Peter's C4 process. It removed all the bullshit, all the back shedding, all the arguing from the community. And it liberated us to start writing our code and make something better. Because in the end, as others have said, the code might rot, it might be broken,
01:00:22
it might be fixed, but the community matters. And as long as we survive as a community, the libraries and the kind of things and everything else will also go on. And this is, I think, as others have said, Peter's most important advice, so thank you.
01:00:45
I know nothing about codes. I'm Peter's sister, and I just want to thank you all very much for being here, and for Benjamin for organizing it. I saw the kids this afternoon, they're looking healthy, they're fine.
01:01:00
And I think my brother would have been very happy that you honored him in this way, so thanks so much, really appreciate it. That's it. And I'm a lecturer, that's why I speak loudly. Okay. Originally, this should have been a small reminder
01:01:23
on the IoT dev loop very shortly. And then they asked me to make a long talk, and I really appreciate all the contributions. I think what is important is there's a lot of legacy
01:01:42
around Peter, trying to carry his spirit around.
01:02:12
To buy his books on Amazon, I think there's also a PayPal account where you can donate for the kids.
01:02:22
So think about small kids that don't have, and so if there is a least thing you can do, is to buy his books and donate, thank you.
01:02:45
Thank you very much for listening to host him. This is the last talk here. Thank you. See you tomorrow.