Breaking away from Big Tech
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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. | |
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:05
Everyone, we have Boris and Reto here, and they will be providing a talk on breaking away from big tech using open source infrastructure in a convenient way. Thank you. Thank you. So, as mentioned, today we'll be talking about how to break away from big tech,
00:23
and we will be focusing mostly on small and medium teams, but what we're talking about applies more broadly as well. So a little bit about us. My name is Boris. And I'm Reto. Yep. We've been open source activists for a couple of years, involved in different projects, and
00:42
yeah. Okay. So to start off, let's talk about big tech. So any fans of big tech here? Show of hands. Okay. No? This was not expected. So, okay, there are many issues with big tech. I think we're going to focus on some of them really fast and will not say probably annoy
01:05
you with things that you already know or hate. But one thing that stands out is the amount of money these people have. It's like, in the beginning it was millions, some decades ago, now it's trillions. It's billions now, and millions, billions, and now it's trillions.
01:22
So it's probably the market accumulation or wealth accumulation is more than the entire GDP of France if you gather all around all this. And that's just in the first quarter of 2021. 2021, one year ago. So probably more money are printed and they are not going anywhere close to here,
01:43
And money is not the issue here. But money also brings power, which is a major problem. And in the beginning of the 70s, as you know, the big oil companies were the ones who had all this market capital and growth. Of course, Disney with its nice copyright lobbying issues and Warner Brothers, just like
02:04
Disney, but less efficient in terms of copyright things, as you know. But again, we're talking about trillions. And one thing that concerned us a lot is that we've seen many of open source organizations or companies that are in open source, that they do not use, they don't do the one thing
02:26
called that we say it's dogfooding. They don't use other open source tools for their own infrastructure. And they do this out of convenience, as you know, because when services like Gmail started, they were giving away this service for free, free as not as in freedom, which
02:45
brought a lot of people into these platforms. Gmail is only one of them, right? And this was the main problem because they could afford, because all of this market capital that they had, they could afford giving all these services for free.
03:01
And of course, they also killed a lot of innovative stuff. I'm not saying that Instagram is innovative, but as you know, they bought, Amazon is one of these good examples. They're buying everything that is around and which they consider a threat, which might be a very innovative product at some point.
03:22
And one of the scholars, Tim Wu, mentioned that this kind of formula, but by purchasing other companies that can be considered competitive, this is anti-innovative, right? And create oligopoly kill zones. OK, you know all of this. So, but the question is, why do a lot of these organizations, small teams or medium
03:44
teams, continue to use this kind of big tech platforms? And even more specifically, how come that in the open source community, we are so reliant upon big tech infrastructure? And there is a couple of different reasons for that.
04:00
For sure, one of them is the fact that they are free as in freemium and not free as in freedom. And this makes it very convenient to sign up with them. Also, the fact that they integrate their services with one another very tightly at first makes us believe that it makes us more efficient in what we want to do.
04:20
But in reality, this just leads to a vendor lock-in, where after a few years, it will be very hard for you to migrate to something else. So in our daily job, we work on providing digital infrastructure using open source tools. And we've seen this, that these organizations that are, again, are into the open source,
04:42
open science, or open knowledge world, these organizations started by using the freemium model of these platforms. And because they couldn't move in easily, now they are locked, right? Which is, and that's why they keep using these platforms. Okay. Yeah. So the solution, we think, is we're going to talk about it in two parts.
05:05
The first part is the ideological side, and the second part is the more hands-on and practical one. So there are proposals for this. One of those, we are just mentioning, because we don't have much time, we are just mentioning one of them. Usually, we say big tech, but why should everybody go big, right?
05:23
So we should use small tech, small companies, which use open source tools. There is a small tech foundation founded some years ago. And they say that small tech should be easy to use, private by default, peer-to-peer, zero-knowledge, non-colonial, personal, share-like, interoperable, non-commercial inclusive,
05:44
a lot of stuff. Again, I'm pretty sure there are other approaches, but this is only one of them that we want to mention. And part two of the solution, or the solutions, is hands-on, the hands-on approach. Okay, this is good.
06:00
We want to move away from big tech, but how to do it technically. And the good, but also maybe a little bad thing is that you have a lot of choices as to how you do this migration. So we listed the five most important ones that we've seen,
06:20
and we want to go over each and every one of them to talk a bit more about them. So the first option is what we believe will be an ideal world, and as a sysadmin I definitely want this to be real, will be where everybody is able to host their own stuff on their computers. And this means that everybody does their own deployments,
06:43
their own maintenance, their own security optimizations, and so on. This can work quite good, especially for personal projects, but when we're speaking about infrastructure for organizations, it can be a bit harder to maintain as compared to your own personal data.
07:00
Case in point, an instance should not be down for an organization the same way it can be down for you. So with more users, there is more complexity as well. And also it depends on who is using it, like doing it yourself. For example, I don't have the time to do it for my parents, for example, right? But I can do it for myself.
07:21
And the idea is sometimes it's a very good scenario, sometimes it doesn't work. For the punk movement in the late 70s, 80s, it worked doing a DIY. We need to see if it's also going to work for us as well. But when we talk about DIY, you need to be a bit careful about what we call the Dropbox problem. And what the Dropbox problem is, is that when Dropbox was initially launched,
07:44
one of the first comments on Hacker News was... This is quite famous, by the way. Or for some people. One of the first comments was saying, I don't understand why Dropbox needs to exist, because you can host your own FTP server and use this and that library to do it. And yeah, from a technical perspective you can,
08:02
but I think time has shown that most users will not want to host their own FTP server. Is the person who commented this here? So if not, please don't have this approach. Don't have this approach when... Because this is one of the reasons we have so much big tech right now.
08:21
We say, yes, we can do it. And if you do all this and if you have your own server at your own place and you do this and you update, and you have SSL certificates and FTP and all that stuff, that works. But for the wider audience, that's a major issue. So we need to have a different approach when we propose this.
08:42
So the second approach that one can take are what we call no-code platforms. So these are platforms like joingardens.com or Unihost. And essentially what they do is that they lower the barrier needed to start self-hosting because they automate a lot of the processes. And this is a really great way to not only set up
09:03
but also maintain your infrastructure. However, depending on your specific needs, if you want to do some custom features, it might be a bit trickier to get them to work exactly the way you want. But as long as you don't want something very custom,
09:20
they're a very great way to get started. And it makes you win a lot of time from the first solution, which is self-hosting, because you have lots of the tools that you need to do in order to automate stuff. The third option is having an internal team. So again, if you are an organization promoting open knowledge,
09:45
you might either do it yourself and get all the know-how, but you might also have one system administrator or team inside. This is good because you can deploy things as you want and customize them. Obviously, there are costs for the hardware
10:02
or if you go to the cloud, also for the team that you're going to go. If you have the budget, that's good. If you don't, that's a tricky one. You should either go to option one or two or to the other two ones that are option four or five. Hosting collectives are, if you know Chateau,
10:22
lots of small hosting collectives from France. They are mainly in France, and they are mainly focused on the collective side of it, which is great because it's also a very good approach of providing solidarity. Some of them are not for profit.
10:42
Some of them are collective. Some of them are small companies, but the idea is to provide a good step, a very easy step for other collectives or other small companies to have open-source infrastructure on their own. And some of them that we know,
11:02
they also provide some training so that it's easier the migration from all these evil platforms to the new platforms that they're using. We usually tend to, lots of people who are technical know how, we tend to underestimate how hard it is to change the routine
11:21
from one platform to the other, and these setups, these collectives are great in doing that. And the solution number four and five are kind of very close together. But the solution number five is that recently there has been an increasing number of providers that focus on open-source infrastructure.
11:43
For example, there is a GitHub repository on Nextcloud called providers, and these providers are not officially endorsed by Nextcloud, but they take care of setting up Nextcloud and maintaining it for you. This is great because, for example,
12:02
the Nextcloud ecosystem has also official partners of Nextcloud. So if you're a big organization, you just go there. If you're a small one, you just go to the list and research and do your own. Or you can do it yourself, as we mentioned before. Having all these options in a clear way makes it easier for people to just migrate,
12:22
for my parents to start using Nextcloud for their photos on their Android phone, which, by the way, I should update at some point because they asked for me to help them. But it's important to keep in mind that it's not necessarily a one-size-fits-all, and even if you find something that fits your need,
12:43
your needs might change in the future. So it's important to think of these solutions as different alternatives and different steps that you can take on the journey to have open source infrastructure. So about managed service providers, as we mentioned, we think it should be very important to focus on platforms that are open source,
13:05
so therefore open platforms. And with such service providers, usually you don't need to have technical knowledge to get things up and running. You need to have, though, some knowledge, which is legal, but also from the provider that you are choosing,
13:22
of where your data are, if it's compliant, and all these things. So you need some basic knowledge to understand what the other side is doing with all your infrastructure that you are managing, right? And these providers should also offer you with not just technical support when something is down, but we believe also with user support,
13:42
because if you have an infrastructure but nobody uses it, what's the point? And because managed service providers should not be the end goal. The end goal is for everybody to self-host, right? But until then, we should be able to understand the terms of service, to read them, because somebody else is doing the maintenance
14:02
and they can do something. They might have higher expertise, but there are also mistakes that people do usually in these cases, right? And so in this case, terms of service are very important. Not in this case, always. And also to understand the legal coverage, as I mentioned before, where the servers are, where they deployed, et cetera, et cetera.
14:20
And of course, very important, service continuity. There are many such service providers that provide open source platforms as managed service that they popped up, especially some years ago, pop up, they are there, and after like two years, they say, oh, didn't work out for us, the pricing that we calculated was bad,
14:41
and they shut down. So you also need to review your service provider if they seem to have a business continuity and sustainability plan. So one example is, for example, Mastodon, right? There is a lot of talk about hosting Mastodon these days, et cetera.
15:01
So you need to know where to deploy it, and you can do it again. You can do it yourself, but you can choose someone else to do it for you. You need to have technical know-how with all the platforms. Platform-specific know-how. What does federation mean, for example? Or what's a toot? Legal implications and who does the moderation. All these things are very, very, very important for you to know.
15:25
And five more seconds. So that's why, for example, for us, it took us months to understand and read a lot of legal paperwork and also research the platform before deciding to offer it to other people,
15:42
which we are planning to do this week. And this is something that we are announcing just here today. Something to keep in mind is that regardless of the option that you choose Very quickly. Yeah, very quickly. Be careful to not be vendor locked in, because that's a very important aspect.
16:04
And if you want the sticker, we have it around with us so you can get it later. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.