The End of Free Software
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00:00
Cloud computingOpen sourceProduct (business)Digital rights managementDisintegrationArtificial intelligenceSocial softwareInclusion mapMaizePresentation of a groupElectric currentSoftwareObservational studyFreewareCodeCollaborationismData modelUtility softwareKolmogorov complexityAuthorizationDecision theoryFront and back endsContrast (vision)Connected spaceLevel (video gaming)MicrocontrollerCloud computingSoftwareUtility softwareContext awarenessFreewareComplex (psychology)Physical lawCodeEndliche ModelltheorieService (economics)INTEGRALDifferential (mechanical device)Position operatorPoint (geometry)WindowFunctional (mathematics)CompilerDatabaseExpert systemRight angleOpen sourceState of matterField (computer science)Turbo-CodeComputing platformCompilation albumBitMultiplication signSelf-organizationGame controllerCentralizer and normalizerCollaborationismIntegrated development environmentDiagram
08:31
Utility softwareKolmogorov complexitySoftwareCloud computingMainframe computerBitCloud computingScripting languageUsabilityCASE <Informatik>Software developerEmailType theoryCodeDifferential (mechanical device)FamilyINTEGRALFreewareService (economics)Utility softwareAlgorithmDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Point (geometry)Physical systemSoftwareEndliche ModelltheorieMainframe computerScaling (geometry)Digital photographyCentralizer and normalizerMultiplicationRepository (publishing)Civil engineeringOpen sourceDegree (graph theory)CircleLevel (video gaming)Black boxSoftware frameworkStandard deviationPublic domainServer (computing)Multiplication sign
16:57
Mainframe computerCloud computingFreewareThermal expansionOpen sourceFocus (optics)Cloud computingGame controllerService (economics)SoftwareEndliche ModelltheorieTerm (mathematics)CodeConsistencyEmailRight angleServer (computing)AreaSpacetimeInstance (computer science)CuboidPersonal digital assistantMereologyDigital rights managementDifferential (mechanical device)Software developerComponent-based software engineeringFreewareProjective planeINTEGRALOperator (mathematics)Cartesian coordinate systemRepository (publishing)Open setMultiplication signInternet forumPoint (geometry)Event horizonCentralizer and normalizerUtility softwareMedical imagingOpen sourceBuildingArithmetic progressionBlack boxData centerMicrocontrollerAxiom of choiceCivil engineeringInformation securityHypothesisInclusion map
25:23
Open sourceFreewareThermal expansionFocus (optics)Hybrid computerCloud computingCodeOperations researchSoftware testingIntegrated development environmentSoftwareKernel (computing)Level (video gaming)Point (geometry)CollaborationismDistribution (mathematics)Information securityRow (database)Endliche ModelltheoriePhysical systemService (economics)BuildingSoftware developerDatabaseSoftwareCodeProduct (business)Multiplication signChannel capacityForcing (mathematics)Right angleFreewareDirection (geometry)Exception handlingCore dumpView (database)AreaContext awarenessBasis <Mathematik>Software repositoryProjective planeGroup actionTerm (mathematics)Patch (Unix)Instance (computer science)Universe (mathematics)Component-based software engineeringOverlay-NetzCloud computingSimilarity (geometry)Open sourceComplex systemBusiness model
33:49
Public domainProduct (business)Server (computing)Right angleCodePhysical systemFreewareArithmetic progressionSoftwareCloud computingComponent-based software engineeringCASE <Informatik>Personal digital assistantInformation securityEndliche ModelltheorieService (economics)Scaling (geometry)Standard deviationQuicksortDigital rights managementGoodness of fitGame controllerMultiplication signCuboidParameter (computer programming)Operator (mathematics)Distribution (mathematics)Revision controlOnline helpPeer-to-peerMereologySoftware developerCartesian coordinate systemHypothesisMobile appComputer fileContext awarenessChannel capacityComputer hardwareBusiness modelTwitterOpen sourceSystem administratorComputer animation
42:14
Standard deviationMobile appMultiplication signReplication (computing)MereologyPhysical systemCycle (graph theory)MathematicsType theoryKey (cryptography)Default (computer science)Message passingRight angleInheritance (object-oriented programming)PressurePoint (geometry)LaptopTwitterFreewareSoftwareCloud computingCodeCentralizer and normalizerSoftware developerInteractive televisionSlide ruleLimit (category theory)Projective planeWeb 2.0Server (computing)Thread (computing)Computer fileSound effectPeer-to-peerSynchronizationComputer animation
50:40
Program flowchart
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:05
Thank you all for coming and staying so long. I'm positively surprised and impressed. I'm a bit nervous. I hope I entertain you well and don't make a mess out of this. Who of you thought that this title was clickbait?
00:23
That's fair, it's clickbait, a little bit. But I'm also serious about it. I think it's a serious issue. A quick introduction, I will not read this to you and you already heard it. I think the key point, I work at Red Hat, yes. My motivation for this talk is informed by my experience at Red Hat,
00:45
but really, I've been an open source, free software for a long time and I'm really committed to that. That's the reason why I work at Red Hat, not vice versa. Also, I have to give this disclaimer. Nothing I say here is an official position of any of my former current or future employers,
01:08
although it may be the same things I tell my employer. So take that as you wish. So let's get on the topic. Why do I say that the cloud is a threat to free and open source software?
01:23
Well, because while free software has democratized the access to code at rest, so code in a repository, taking that code and actually operationalizing it, running it, has become a new proprietary differentiator,
01:42
even on top of free software. And in my experience, that is undermining both the usefulness and the sustainability of free software. Let me explain that a little bit. So why do we do free software? I trust, like everyone here in this room knows the definition of free software,
02:00
so I'm not going to belabor that. And I'll use open source free software for synonymously, we can discuss it over beer later if you want. The point is that you have the freedom to use software, and it matters, it's important, because before free software, code was a major proprietary differentiator.
02:29
Proprietary code was also the major entry hurdle for accessing technology. It incentivized centralization involved gardens, and thus became an inhibitor or was an inhibitor to innovation.
02:43
It created and maintained dependencies and lock-ins. You were dependent on the decisions of someone else who had authority over the code that you used. And back then that was annoying, maybe it wasn't as big of an issue as it today, but the world has changed, and I'll get to that.
03:03
Free software, in contrast to proprietary code, levels the playing field and it democratizes the access to technology. It incentivizes open collaboration and offers a base for technical sovereignty, sovereignty being the state where you have authority over your technology.
03:25
And that's my own path to open source. I got to open source because I was in high school and I needed a compiler. I was using OS2 at the time, I guess guess my age based on that.
03:43
I was using OS2 because DOS and Windows were not my thing. But the Turbo C compiler I had used on DOS didn't work on OS2, and IBM wanted a lot of money for a compiler. And luckily there was this guy DJ Delorey, who also happens to work at Retin nowadays, so I point that out,
04:03
who had ported GCC to OS2 and that is what saved me, like let me use a compiler on OS2 and what got me into free software. The key point here was that I was excluded from access to technology, I was excluded from being able to use something to write my own code on that platform that I happened to be running,
04:24
I could have switched platforms but would have run into similar problems. There were other compilers that were maybe cheaper, but the problem became obvious to me because of the pricing that made it inaccessible for me.
04:41
So that removed the hurdle. And sovereignty is a big topic right now, for me it starts with individual sovereignty, but that becomes an issue for any organization. If as a business you're dependent on other people's decisions, or in Europe that's a big topic nowadays,
05:04
even as a state or union of states you become dependent on other people's technology decisions, that's creating major risk. Free software is the antidote for that, it provides you an environment that lets you control your own technology,
05:22
and it creates an environment where access to technology is fully democratized, it provides incentives for collaboration, it creates a better innovation model that's based on collaboration,
05:42
and it creates this level of sovereignty and control over your code. That's why it matters, and that is something that in the cloud is becoming harder to do.
06:02
What happened is that software aids the world, everything is software defined now. An example I often use is the connected mouse trap I have in my basement. A mouse trap is a pretty old concept, doing something very physical. And now I have a mouse trap that has a microcontroller that talks to my network,
06:30
and tells me through a cloud backend with a frontend on my mobile phone when it did its business so I don't find it weeks later.
06:42
So that's software defined now. And I bought this one because it has software features. So that shows how integrated our lives become, I mean it's a silly example, but it shows how integrated our lives have become with software, how things are defined by software.
07:02
I always go back to Lawrence Lessig's book in the late 1990s or early 2000s that he wrote called Code, where he argues that code becomes law because it defines our ability to interact with the world increasingly.
07:21
I came across it in the context of the fight against software patents in Europe in the early 2000s. And I think that's become more and more reality. Everything we do is more and more defined by code, and that is not defined by code at rest anymore, it's not defined by code in a repository,
07:43
it's defined by code that's running somewhere. And the software, open source is a base for that, the cloud is built on open source. The software has the complexity of modern software stacks, the integration the world has left,
08:05
and the dependencies that everything now has on that has led to a model where users, commercial users, private users increasingly just build on top of services provided by someone else. And it's just a function of the complexity versus utility of something if I need a database I can click a button,
08:25
I get a database, I don't have to become an expert in deploying databases myself, I don't need to figure out how to find the right infrastructure for it, I just press a button, it works, and I can focus on like the top 10% of my solution stack where I implement my, as a business I implement my proprietary differentiation, I will use that.
08:46
But the price for that is a dependency on a service that in itself may be based on open source code, but the step from taking the code that's in a repository to putting together multiple pieces of code
09:05
into a running service and running that service, keeping it running, keeping it secure, and integrating with other things increasingly becomes proprietary. And it becomes the proprietary differentiation to the degree that less and less people can actually run services on their own.
09:23
And why is that? Because the knowledge of running things in this complex interconnected world gets harder, it's hard to keep things secure, even configuring them secure, which you can see in the news, basically daily base is hard, right, people fail, and all kinds of data shows up in places it shouldn't be.
09:46
And that becoming a new, that knowledge, right, so it's not just, it's not the question in this respect to the definition of free software, my complaint is not that I may have to pay for a service, right, my complaint is that the knowledge on how to go from code in a repository to a running service,
10:07
that knowledge in itself has become a proprietary differentiator that's creating walled gardens, and that removes access to technology. And I'm guilty myself in actually falling into that trap, I mean I don't run my own mail server anymore,
10:23
which has been a, I don't know how many of you are in that camp, who runs their own mail server? Yeah, that's sad really. I mean, in this audience, I was wondering whether I should dare ask this question,
10:41
because I would have felt really silly if all of you would have raised their hand and said, I run my own mail server, Daniel, you idiot. But in reality, why don't I run my own mail servers, because I can't, like, I don't have the time to do it, and keep it secure,
11:02
and keep my family on it, and deal with the support requests of that, and provide the same access from every device that I get if they are just on Google Mail, right? But that's a compromise I make for the ease of use, the utility of it, and in the end it creates a dependency.
11:20
Now I have the situation, going a bit off script here, but now they are scanning my mail for certain legal violations, right? And they will forward certain types of violations automatically to the police, and lock you out of your account.
11:41
I think that wasn't Google, that was a case recently where a family got into trouble for a photo they had of their kid, like traditional family photo, that was flagged as inappropriate, and they lost access to their mail account. I don't say which vendor that was, but you can Google that in the US, right?
12:03
And they're locked out forever because an algorithm decided that that was not acceptable. And it's all well intended, right? But it shows what it means to not have technology sovereignty, right? You're now dependent on an algorithm that might be very badly implemented that then decides whether you lose access to your own data.
12:28
Because it recognised a violation with the best intentions, but sometimes dangerous consequences. And we'll see more of that, right? Because there's a whole different thing I'm not talking about today that's happening with artificial intelligence
12:45
and the further integration of these systems into cloud services. So my point here at the end comes down to the question, it's great that we have free software, right? It's great that we have revolutionised the access to technology, access to code, we have revolutionised the business,
13:05
free software has won, it's a base for all modern software development to some degree, right? Proprietary differentiation in code right now is limited to the top of the code pyramid, right?
13:23
The things that one company writes in-house, their own business differentiation, that's always proprietary, right? That's where your trade secrets are. And that's okay, right? Someone is shaking their head, it's a separate debate, but you will, at a point where something becomes so unique,
13:48
you get into the question, we can debate it in a question and answer. So ultimately I respect people doing that, but then you get down to something that is domain specific,
14:01
maybe there's some proprietary stuff in there, but latest you're like outside of one specific industry, you get into free software frameworks that everyone is using. Because all the stuff on the business side that's common, their free software is a huge advantage, because it gives you the ability to collaborate among competitors, to not reinvent things all the time,
14:25
to get to common standards in a very practical way, because code is better than a standard. So that works. But how much use is it, really, if you cannot run it anymore on your own,
14:43
without a dependency on someone who is a big centralized provider? The issue here, that is true for individuals, that's true for organizations, that's true for civil societies,
15:01
that is true for companies that are not as big as some other companies, you always create these dependencies. Because of the talent gaps and just the knowledge gaps and the risk included in it. And this has allowed the leading cloud providers to create centralized economies of scale based around their proprietary operational knowledge.
15:25
And it's really useful, you click a button, you get anything you need in infrastructure. This sometimes includes unfair strip mining of free software projects, we've all seen that. They can do that just because of the scale of operationalization, it has nothing to do with the code.
15:43
It has led to a situation where sometimes code itself is actually commoditized. Your challenge is not writing the code, you can't get enough people together to write the code, really the problem becomes running it and creating the economy of scale and adoption that makes it successful.
16:01
And that is a dynamic that basically goes back to the mainframe. We went full circle and now we are running black box services on someone else's hardware. It's a convenient model but it's really creating lock-ins. And it's the same kind of lock-in and access hurdle that code used to be when I was in high school.
16:29
It was impossible for many people to get to that level of technology, even if they knew how to code, in a sustainable way. And now we are getting back there.
16:42
And there are plenty examples how this goes even into how we create free software. This is not just a problem in using or deploying it, it affects our own creation. If you write modern cloud-native software, you aggregate existing services and you focus on the last 10% of what you really care about.
17:01
You don't have to worry about anything else because you can use that from the cloud provider. If you are doing free software, then you have to run everything yourself because we haven't expanded free software to solve this problem. We can take prominent examples.
17:22
Who here uses GitHub? Does it include GitHub issues and things like that? Who thinks that GitHub is open source software or free software? And it's great, it's a great service, it's a great tool.
17:43
Git is free software, GitHub and everything around the code management itself. When you go into issues, actions, integrations. It's owned by Microsoft, yes? Now, I'm not going to go there.
18:04
I have a similar comment to who I work for, so anyhow. I think I don't want to have prejudice against, I don't want to single out Microsoft there, right? Because that wasn't my point. Like, Slack is not owned, I don't know who owns Slack, but same thing, right? So much is, you know, we can go around and around
18:24
and we will find that even the development of free software depends more and more on proprietary services, software as a service. This is not necessarily a criticism in these companies, right?
18:44
I believe that everyone has a choice to offer their software and their service under their license and in terms of service they see appropriate. But it's a problem for me where I think, well, there should be an alternative, right? We need to think about how sustainable this is in the long term.
19:02
And, you know, can we get to a model where free and open source software development can be integrated with other free and open source software development in a consistent model end to end where it regains its utility all the way to running code, right?
19:26
That is the underlying problem is that when you, you know, having code and then not being able to actually offer the service or run your own mail server or, I mean, a big topic that everyone here is probably aware of
19:40
is like the switch towards the Fediverse right now, which is great, right? Which brings more attention to this issue. People are trying to run their own instances of a decentralized social network now and they're finding out that's actually really hard, right? And that's going to get ugly before it gets good if people don't run back to the centralized wall garden because it's too hard, right?
20:05
But that makes a point. Ultimately right now, while the Fediverse I think is far ahead, right? It's one of the areas where I see hope because, you know, it's fairly easy to run. A lot of people are running and it's this decentralized centralized where you have hubs
20:23
and people are running them for others as non-profits or, you know, as things where you have direct contribution but it's not a walled garden. That's hope. I see hope with projects like in the home automation space. I personally use Home Assistant but there are other great projects
20:44
but a lot of them go deep into actually giving you something that just runs, right? So operationalizing it isn't hard, it's actually often out of the box. You can download an image, it just works. Sometimes there are even services and the integration into services works out of the box, right?
21:02
You can actually aggregate things. Sometimes it's a bit, you know, part of the problem is that there is no differentiation between integrating into other open source components and services and some weird proprietary or very weird proprietary cloud-based things that maybe upload your security camera images to places where you don't want them, right?
21:21
So there's that but on the other hand it's progress in the sense that part of the open source project is to actually solve this problem, right? And that is, I mean, this is a problem, again, I think this is a problem for everyone, right? Even if you're building on top of the cloud, even if you're a company building on top of the cloud
21:43
and you have like very little code that is your own code where you put your business differentiation like your UI to control the microcontroller code that controls the mouse trap, you still need to figure out how to operationalize it. That means you need to have that knowledge from somewhere, right?
22:02
And that's becoming increasingly a problem because it's hard to do that securely. So, you know, open source as one is only half right, that's my takeaway. You know, open source is a preeminent software development model at this point
22:21
but it's not the operations model. And this limits how useful free and open source software is for users whether it's individual users, private users, nonprofits or civil society organizations, companies or even governments that try to have sovereignty in their technology and data use.
22:47
You know, the GitOps is a nice example here, right? It's great to have a GitOps model but if you GitOps your free software how free is it when the GitOps part is actually proprietary?
23:04
So my thesis is that we need to expand the concept of free and open source software from code at rest, from code in a repository to really include the operationalization of the code. And we need to create a collaborative decentralized infrastructure model for that
23:28
where we can use the same approach of aggregating existing services that are run maybe by other organizations, by other projects without having to rerun everything on our own, right?
23:43
We need to create an exchange on operationalization knowledge and we need to create a practical capability to build applications in that way. And I think it's important to really take this also in something I hadn't thought about before as much.
24:05
I spent some time at an open forum event on Friday about sovereign cloud, cloud sovereignty in the EU was a big topic, right? I think as a free and open source software community we need to also make sure that this point gets pushed into the cloud sovereignty discussion, right?
24:24
Because if you end up with cloud sovereignty like many people and talk about how are we going to use open source code but at the end it's going to be in itself just a black box service maybe it's just a data center that happens to be in the EU
24:42
but otherwise it's following the same existing proprietary centralized cloud model that wouldn't be sovereignty, at least not in my definition of sovereignty which means you have actual control over your destiny. So what I'd like to see is what we need to do here, expand the model,
25:06
create a collaborative model around actually running things, focus on sovereignty aspects and I think we need to consider technologies without bias.
25:21
What I'm really concerned about is for example when I see discussions around Web3. There are a lot of people who have now a mindset where blockchain, Web3 that's tainted by either scam affiliation of similar technologies, perceived or real,
25:43
or by political affiliations. I don't know how big that is in Europe, in the US that's like a big topic where you can talk to someone and say no Web3, that's something that the crypto growth use. I think we need to be agnostic there, we need to look at technology and its utility.
26:04
I'm skeptical on each individual technology but ultimately it comes down to how can we solve the problems. And there are areas where a distributed ledger is going to be the right solution. There's going to be areas in my view where for example something like Filecoin
26:24
is the right solution because you need to find a way how to monetize offering services on a peer-to-peer basis. And we need to be careful not to put everything into the same bucket as maybe other things like some scam coin and snowball model
26:45
because they are not just the same technology, they are not the same thing. So I want to give a concrete example of what can be done. This is something we are trying at Red Hat but it's an open source initiative.
27:07
Well, it would be silly to talk about it in this context if it wasn't. So we call it operate first and I should explain the term. So Red Hat has internally in our Linux group and I think for most other groups
27:23
but there it comes from, we have a core principle that's called upstream first which says that we will never try to differentiate from upstream code on a technology base. So if we implement a feature in our product we try to get it into the relevant upstream projects
27:45
before we ship it as a feature to customers. It's not always true, we ended up maintaining then kernel patch for a long time because it was never accepted upstream but we also regretted that quickly and switched to KVM because it's painful.
28:02
And this is not altruism per se. The reason why Red Hat doesn't try to differentiate on the technology level from our upstream open source code is because that would make our whole development model really painful and almost useless because you lose the main point
28:20
why a company should use free software. It's the development model that allows you to collaborate and achieve better solutions than anything you could come up with in-house. You lose the corrective. Most modern issues that you have in complex systems in the lower layers of your software stack
28:46
you're never going to solve on your own. Any big kernel issue, any big security issue, it's always a collaborative effort and that's why they get solved. I mean that's even true for most proprietary software at this point because someone else finds it.
29:01
So Red Hat has this principle called upstream first which features go upstream before they go into the product. Exceptions are always there but that's the goal and it's motivated by core business requirements, not by altruism. Now we need the same for creating services.
29:23
So Red Hat is now as much a service, software as a service company as it's a free ship code company. All our services are based on free software. Not all the glue code gets developed in a free software open source development model.
29:42
Not all the glue code is publicly available yet. The point there is we have the same problem, right? So this is not speaking about our use of services, right? We can't force and we don't have the capacity to build everything ourselves, right? We have to offer services on proprietary cloud for example, right?
30:06
There is no way around that. But for the things we create, we were also drawn into just like everyone in the culture of DevOps and cloud native development and we have created things that are proprietary in the productization step
30:21
and we have lost the ability to collaborate on that which hampers ourselves, it hampers our customers that then try to do things on-prem or try to create a hybrid environment and at the end we believe strongly in a hybrid cloud model for a whole different discussion, would be its own talk.
30:40
But so we created this initiative to change our own dynamic but invite others to join it. And it comes down to approaching the creation of our own services from a model where we start with making the upstream code operationable, right?
31:04
So we make sure that what we put into the software repo is not just theoretically runnable code, it's actually everything you need to run it. So open source service first of all means something that the average person can instantiate as a running service. Second, drive the knowledge on how to operationalize it
31:23
into the same community or overlay community, sometimes you can't because things aggregate into bigger services and create communities to have an exchange on how to operationalize the software and make that knowledge available under free software licenses
31:42
in a free software exchange model and development model. And then also try to create actual running instances that our projects can reuse without having to run component services on their own and invite others to participate in that.
32:00
We collaborate with some universities and this is not new, right? To be fair, Matt Miller from Fedora Project is sitting in the first row reminding me that Fedora has done things like that all the time, right? Linux distributions of course have run what nowadays would be called a cloud service
32:22
like build systems and so on in a collaborative fashion, right? So this is not net new. The problem is we have to expand that into everything, into databases that we need to run, we need to make reusable, into any kind of software that we ship, we have to include the operationalization.
32:43
So that's the pitch. And we have 10 minutes for questions, discussions and answers.
33:04
15, I did some quick talking there. Do we have questions online? Maybe we can start with these then. Yes, no?
33:21
Nothing online, so questions? Yes, I will take the first one then. I'm not going to heckle you. Closer, all right. There we go. So a lot of the public discussion I've seen kind of about cloud services and open source has come from a different direction. It's like companies who have open source software
33:44
and their business model will support around it and then some other much larger company suddenly runs their software better than they do and they say, hey, that's not fair, that's not why we open sourced it, we wanted something else out of that. And there's been a kind of a fight over licensing
34:01
and some new licenses basically meant to restrict that kind of running things and there's been debate about whether those fit under open source. I think you're talking about something entirely different and is there a licensing approach we can take to drive software towards this operate first model?
34:21
So I'm not convinced that code licensing itself will solve the issue of strip mining code, like the problem when a larger company takes your code and runs a service or it doesn't have to actually be a service, right? They could just ship the code and do it better, which there's always like a risk like that.
34:41
It's a dynamic that always existed in a Linux distribution, right? We ship something that undermines the ability to sell the same thing unless you find a way how to make your selling the same thing either better or an add-on, right? So in the tradition sense, I was the product manager for RAL a long time
35:01
where we ship components that other people try to monetize because it's expected from a Linux distribution to bring certain things out of the box. Now what we always said is, look, we have a very generalized solution here. We will help you upsell your specialized support, right?
35:20
So that solved it in that sense. But if you go into the strip mining by, for example, cloud providers, it takes the same piece of software, run it, compete with you and they can operationalize it much better than you and then win, also have more reach and have a better customer model, they have a marketplace where they can promote their solution over yours. I don't know if a code license can solve that
35:41
because part of the problem there is that they could also rewrite and when that was done, they rewrote the code, right? Or forked an earlier version when you changed the license, right? So this didn't work. What worked, however, I think, is creating the awareness, creating specialization and creating a dynamic around the integrations, right?
36:03
Embracing that you're not selling actually the code, right? Now, I still believe that it's probably better to license a code under a copyleft license and license your operationalization under a copyleft license to minimize the abuse, right?
36:22
Versus a license that's too liberal and allows people to take it proprietary. But the successful countermeasures I've seen were not based on licensing primarily. They were based on a business model and engagement with the customers.
36:45
Kind of my question is, how do you copyleft the operation? I can't say that word. Well, you get into like, we just found out, luckily, that game rules cannot be copyrighted, right? So D&D will live, despite Hasbro.
37:04
But I think the code you implemented in can, right? And at the end it comes down to how much of the hurdle is writing new automation code, and actually that becomes a fairly big hurdle to reinvent automation code. And then copyleft helps. It doesn't help you against the reach and economy of scale.
37:25
There you need awareness of your benefits, a good business model, and awareness of the problems of walled gardens, right? I mean, the Twitter versus Fediverse situation is a great experiment of that. I think we should all try to help make that successful.
37:48
How do you feel about decay of self-hosted infrastructure, for example, servers or domains disappearing, and in general being less reliable than, for example, GitHub? How do you feel about decay of self-hosted infrastructure, for example, servers or domains disappearing?
38:06
That wouldn't be the case with GitHub.
38:24
How do you feel about the decay of self-hosted infrastructure, like servers and domains disappearing, and in general less reliable than, for example, GitHub? Well, yeah, so that's a huge issue, right? Self-hosted infrastructure always decays, right?
38:42
And, I mean, that's true for anyone who does something you're interested in at the beginning. And even if you're still around, you move on to the next interesting topic. That is at least true for me. Well, I'm very happy with Home Assistant. I wouldn't want to run a security scanner on my Home Assistant device.
39:05
Now, that's fairly okay because it's so isolated and doesn't control the heating. So there's a risk there. So, yeah, that's a problem. I mean, and I think my impression is, for example, from the Home Assistant community,
39:24
and again, that's just the one I'm using. I don't want to single them out, and I haven't had time to try others. There might be better ones. But what I'm seeing there is that out of the community, actually, people start offering the services commercially. And nothing I said today is an argument against commercial offerings, right?
39:43
It's an argument against proprietary offerings. It's totally fair to charge for something, right? Developers want to eat, sysadmins need to eat, right? We can sell services. And so I think professional free software infrastructure is the answer to the decay of self-hosted systems
40:01
and a reasonable approach, and some of this we have to figure out, but a reasonable approach to decentralization, where multiple people can offer things without making you to choose proprietary lock-in, is the answer. And that's why I think we need to look at Web3 without a bias, because that is one way that could work, right?
40:22
If I look at Filecoin, IPFS as an example, that actually is working right now, not economically for the people who are offering it, because the hardware is too expensive for the money you can get with it. But if you're using Filecoin-based storage, that is actually pretty cheap and very reliable, right?
40:43
And the problem is that the specialized compute capacity needed to offer it is too expensive right now, but that's going to be solved with progress in technology, and I'm sure that we'll see some RISC-V-based specialized Filecoin systems in the near future that make this affordable.
41:05
And then we have a way how you can have, you know, at least for storage, you can have distributed infrastructures with a good funding model. Other ways are foundations or other peer payment models or small companies, decentralized small companies.
41:22
We have three more questions. There was someone over here. There, and then there, and then over there. So what do you think is the way or the sort of gold standard or end point for packaging up operational capability with the code and with the application
41:45
when shipping to end users who are not software developers and who don't have servers? I agree with everything you said before. My thesis so far has been that it's straight peer-to-peer.
42:02
You know, stuff like BitTorrent or Tor or old school file sharing apps would be an example where when you got LimeWire, you got the app with the data. But, you know, it could also maybe be Web3 something. But what do you think that looks like for the two billion people who don't have servers and aren't software developers?
42:23
So I have an example of right now a piece of software that I think is doing this really well, and it's a sync thing. It's a peer-to-peer file synchronization system that I use between my mobile phone with Android, the Linux machine, a bunch of servers, and I now use it for everything.
42:44
You use it for everything where you need the full copy everywhere. At least last time I haven't checked for new features. It was a debate. They don't have like on-demand replication. I didn't have that last time I looked for it. So I use other things when I want to have things like the Google Drive type thing, right,
43:02
where you have something in the cloud and you only download it when you look at it. For that, it wasn't the right thing last time, but I use it for my key pass replication, things like that, for backup, for all documents I want everywhere. And it's super easy. It just works, right?
43:22
And so my daughter uses it, my 11-year-old daughter uses it. Now the poor kid also has to run a Linux laptop because I refuse to do anything else. I can tell you of the pressure to go into a proprietary ecosystem of a specific company
43:40
that sells laptops and phones primarily, I think, to what they do, and watches. It's a fashion business, I hear, but like the pressure on kids to be on that because all the other kids have that is enormous. So, you know, poor kid is in trouble, but she has swing thing and some other cool things.
44:04
And Roblox works in wine, just like if you are struggling with this. Hi, thank you for your talk. I'm wondering whether this might also come as a problem because of sometimes a need for centralization.
44:24
I myself move to Mastodon, but I still push all of my toots to Twitter. And I would move to GitHub, to GitLab, I mean to a local GitLab, but if I want to have users on my code, I still need to push all of my code to GitHub as well.
44:44
So, what's the solution with that? I mean, I'm in the same boat, right? Of course, I have a Mastodon account. I'm not super active on Twitter. I try to do all my code projects on GitLab, which is, GitLab is slightly better, right?
45:08
As a more hybrid model, although it's not perfect, but I like them. But yeah, I think it's a cultural change and awareness, right? People need to understand that you need decentralization and we need to create code and infrastructure
45:26
and culture that works in the federation to give you the reach, right? It's really a cultural question at the end.
45:41
I mean, the perfect example is the switch from IRC to Slack as a dominant interaction for developers in many places. I mean, there are really limitations with IRC that become problematic. Technology-wise, Slack isn't fundamentally different.
46:01
It's nicer UI, some additional features, and the persistence that you had to do extra steps to get with IRC, right? But it's primarily kind of like minor improvements like threading and the web UI and persistence. And then the critical mass effect and the reach it created.
46:25
Really, the answer is a cultural change where people appreciate and do the extra work. And it goes back to the earlier question about what's the gold standard for creating such an app. It's us here who have to drive that and then make it usable for all the others, right?
46:44
And that's not different than what happened with free software in general. We've been through this cycle and I think it's truly equivalent. I mean, using free software 20 years ago was hard, right? I mean, using software was hard, but when I installed my first Slackware, that was painful.
47:09
And then nothing was available and then you had to recompile it and it behaved randomly whenever you compiled it. So we have to do that. This has to be the last question.
47:23
Hi. Hello? Hello? Hello? Okay, so I agree with what you just said about cultural change and to give an example of that, for me, Microsoft acquisition of GitHub was the last straw and I closed my account.
47:44
But that means that if I want to contribute to free software projects, it's increasingly hard because I'm expected to have a GitHub account. And it seems to me that anyone here who agrees with what you've been saying and yet who still uses GitHub or other proprietary software
48:02
and particularly proprietary software that they allow to be at the heart of the development of the free software is being very hypocritical. And so it's up to us surely to, as you say, take on that pain. But that includes a lot of people in the room who put their hands up when you asked who has a GitHub account.
48:22
So I put it to you, should we not change? We have to go through that pain. Thank you, yeah. I agree we have to change. I'll be honest, my presentation, part of the reason why I was struggling, I couldn't read my speaker notes because I created it in what's the default at Reddit, which is Google presentation, Google Docs.
48:42
And then downloaded it because I didn't want to look super silly in front of you. So, yes, it's a hard right. I honestly believe in, I don't know, who recognizes this t-shirt?
49:02
You're not watching enough TV or the wrong? Watch The Expanse, best show ever. No, but that's from the TV show. No, that's a TV show. They changed it. Next time I'll do a tattoo or something. Anyhow, so I believe in the power of subversion. And not the Git predecessor.
49:22
I actually do not, I do not believe. That was great at the time, stick with Git. My point is, so for example, I kept my GitHub account. I do contribute to projects where I need to because I don't want to put too much of a burden on people I'm trying to collaborate with
49:42
that I depend on, right, like it's hard. But I do try to problematize it, bring it up and I do everything I can on alternative platforms, right. And I think, you know, I think that's really like adding that extra step of advocacy
50:02
and pulling people, trying to pull people over is the best we can do. You know, I just created my, and I had that on the first slide. I should have put it back. I just created a Noster key and now I'll do Noster instead of Twitter because that's a fully decentralized thing. But I'll cross post, but I'll point out that you find me on Noster
50:22
and if you want me to reply you have to talk to me on Noster. Things like that. I don't know, if we all do it, I think if everyone who comes to FOSTER starts behaving like that I think we can change things.