FLOSS Weekly 740, Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Doc Searls (00:00:00):
This is Floss Weekly. I'm Doc Searls this week and our technical director and I interrogate our normal co-host, great co-host, really interesting guy, Jonathan Bennett, about all kinds of stuff. I mean, <laugh>, the show title is Baking the Printer or a Bad Face for Radio. You will see if you watch it. He does have a bad face for radio, but he has other stories, lots of stuff, lots of interesting things. And that is coming up Next

Leo Laporte (00:00:32):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. It's,

Doc Searls (00:00:40):
This is Floss Weekly, episode 740, recorded Wednesday, July 12th, 2023, baking the Printer or a Bad Face. For radio

Leo Laporte (00:00:54):
Listeners of this program, get an ad-free version if they're members of Club Twit. $7 a month gives you ad-free versions of all of our shows Plus membership in the Club. Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for twit listeners. And finally, the Twit plus feed with shows like Stacey's Book Club, the Untitled Linux Show, the GIZ Fizz and more. Go to twit tv slash club twit and thanks for your support.

Doc Searls (00:01:20):
Hello again, everybody everywhere. I am Doc Searles and this is Floss Weekly. Our, our guest today is in fact a co-host. We're, we're gonna have a series of these where our co-hosts, which are all more interesting than me, are going to be the guest. And, and so here we go. And this, this one is Jonathan Bennett, himself, host of the UN Hey Doc Linux Show which runs on weekends on Club Twit <affirmative> and for Club Twit listeners and viewers. Are they viewers too? I, I don't really, I'm not even sure.

Jonathan Bennett (00:01:55):
We we went, we went with video. I kind of had to talk my way into it. But I do the video switching, just using o Bs and so, you know, it's not, it's not quite, doesn't work quite the same way as one of the, the, you know, professional shows that we do. One of the, one of the full fat shows.

Doc Searls (00:02:11):
Well, you need to be in video cuz you got a bad face for radio. I gotta tell you that. Thank you. I've got a good, I've got a good face for Radio <laugh>. But yeah, and that's you know, maybe worth bringing up because for an extra seven bucks a month, you could get Club Twit and and it's valuable because if you've, if you're on Club twit, you will, you might be able to see what we just talked about <laugh>. Yeah, and which I'll bring up here because I, I, it was about storage. I have I have a whole pile of drives laying around on my desk here in the basement in my basement cell in Bloomington, Indiana, where in order to plug in the ethernet, I yanked out the other plugin sent to the floor, a portable drive a spinning, a spinning media drive that clunked hard on the floor and I fear maybe dead and has every movie I've ever <laugh> dumped over, which made me make a bad face.

(00:03:11):
But anyway, club twit worthwhile. So, so Jonathan I know I should say also, we normally have a co-host for these as well, but there's news going on right now that's involving the co, our chosen co-host for this, who's Simon Phipps, who will be the subject of a future show. You know, I think I've known longer than anybody else on this show. And he's busy dealing with the news that's going on with Red Hat right now, and yes. So while that's live and still fresh, Jonathan, why don't we start by talking at least touching on that before we get into your life, which is really the important thing here.

Jonathan Bennett (00:03:49):
Okay. We wanna start with Red Hat. So the big news,

Doc Searls (00:03:52):
What that's about without, without up staging Simon, should he show up at, at any point, show

Jonathan Bennett (00:03:58):
I I'll give you the 30,000 foot view. Red Hat got bought by IBM back several years ago. Red Hat decided to kill CentOS and turned it into Sentos Stream, which would not have been a terrible thing except they killed Sentos in the middle of a release cycle. And so we thought we had about 10 years of support on Sentos, and it turned out to be one on, on Sentos eight which that frustrated a lot of people. And then here recently red Hat had been distributing, I guess, I guess we should do a tiny bit more background than that. So Red Hat has Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is their kind of flagship product, their Linux distribution. It is GPL LD because it contains GPL software and, but it was still behind a paywall to make that work with the G P L. Red Hat was distributing all of the sources, every bit of it on their I think, I think it was was it get dot sent to us.org or sources dot sent to us? Yeah, I forget the exact url, but it was something like that. All of the sources they're distributing

Doc Searls (00:05:08):
There. That's what you put in the article. You wrote about it on Hack a Day, which for those watching the visuals see it. There it is. Yeah. So yeah, go ahead. Sorry, <laugh>

Jonathan Bennett (00:05:18):
A couple of weeks ago, well, so after they decided to end CentOS proper, you had various groups popped up their own repackaging of rhel, of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The two big ones were Rocky Linux and Alma Linux. Not the only ones, but those were kind of the two leaders. Alma Linux by the way, being the one that Simon Phipps is involved with. And that's actually where he's at. Having a meeting with the Alma Linux guys. Well, red Hat then a couple weeks ago said, we're no longer going to distribute those sources in the clear. And the only way going forward that you can get a copy of the sources is by getting a Red Hat license and grabbing it from the developer console, which, you know, is kind of a weird move. And then you get to looking though at the end user license agreement that comes with that Red Hat console, and it essentially says, I'm paraphrasing, it essentially says if you share anything you download from this webpage, we are not going to continue to do business with you in the future, and you're not going to be able to renew your Red Hat Enterprise Linux license, which puts Alma and Rocky in a very strange place where they could get Yeah.

(00:06:36):
They could get blocked from doing business with Red Hat for just continuing their distribution. That's, that is very much the 30,000

Doc Searls (00:06:44):
Foot view. That is, that's good. And that's a good tee up for your, as Simon, if he comes in and if he doesn't come in, we'll go back to it. Because it's, it's important and very much out of alignment with open source principles going back to forever. So, so with that teaser lemme just, lemme just take a pause here right now and then we're gonna come back to to talk about your life. So, so <laugh>. So Jonathan, I'm advantaged by knowing everything I know about your life I've seen in this little rectangle. So I really, <laugh> I know you've got kids, I know you're in Oklahoma, I know you're right for Hack a day, and I know, and I know you're employed in the business somehow, but there are lots of pieces I don't know there. So, so with, without going into an hour's worth of stuff tell us a, tell us a a bit about yourself and where you come from and where you're headed toward and

Jonathan Bennett (00:07:41):
The trip. Goodness. Yeah, so I grew up moving around about once a year. My dad worked construction. He worked, he worked as an accountant for a construction company and they called him a field accountant, which means that they moved us to the place where the job was happening. So I, I ended up being homeschooled throughout all of those years, which I'm very thankful for because bouncing from school system to school system would've been terrible. And I had a penchant. I wanted to know how things worked. I loved the idea of taking things apart and seeing how they worked on the inside. I just, Hey, are you done with that? Can I take it apart? Can I try to figure out how it works? And at some point along the way, way, they

Doc Searls (00:08:22):
Got IES everywhere, right? Yes.

Jonathan Bennett (00:08:25):
Oh, yes. Oh, yes. At some point I got to the point to where I could actually start putting some things back together and making them work again. That was fun. And then we moved to, we moved to Oklahoma. Actually dad transitioned jobs and started working for, of all of all places, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, which one of their large plants is right here in Lawton, Oklahoma. So that's how I ended up here. And I met a couple of, a couple of friends, one of which really got me started on the whole audio video thing video editing and all of that. And then the other one introduced me to this weird thing called Linux. And I had, I had already known that I enjoyed computer programming. Like I, I loved the idea of being able to tell a computer exactly what to do and getting, you know, exactly predictable results.

(00:09:17):
Hadn't really done a whole lot with it, but I, I, I knew I enjoyed that process. And then my buddy introduced me to Linux and it's like, oh, wait a second, this open source thing. This means that the computer itself, it's open. You can, you can open it up and see all, how all the parts work, and then you can put it back together, whatever way you want to and make it work. And it's like, oh, this, this is it. This is the ticket. So that was, that was really kind of an eye-opening thing. Shortly after that, I kind of made the dive, I got frustrated by, it was Windows xp. I got really frustrated by Windows xp because every time you do an install and you try to go into your Windows folder, it has this big scary message warning, viewing this, like even viewing these files can totally wreck your computer.

(00:10:03):
I was like, man, that's the most ridiculous thing. I'm done with this want Lennox. Only at that point. So that's been, oh my goodness, like 20 years ago, 15 to 20 years ago have been since then. And then, oh, let's see. My buddy, the one that introduced me to Lennox went off to college at this it was a Christian college and they had kind of a very locked down school internet. And there were some, I think there were mostly like technical sites even, but things that he wanted to get to that they just didn't have unlocked on their school internet. And so we spent some time and put together a a a way to, let's see, were we using tour? No, we were using Open VPN at the time. We found a way to tunnel open v pn through their firewall and get him access into my system, which he could then bounce out into the open internet.

(00:11:01):
And, and that was kind of a touchstone too, getting into networking and understanding like how some of the, the real background plumbing bits of networking and code works to be able to do that. So had a lot of these things kind of come together. I went off to college for three years, got more involved with audio and video there. Didn't go to college for that, but that's, that's what I learned and played with while I was there. And then kind of came to the conclusion that, well, I'm not all that interested in the thing that I'm going to college for. So maybe going back for that fourth year isn't worth it. <Laugh> came back I worked the job then doing telephone systems for, oh, how long did that last? About a year. I worked there for about a year, something like that.

(00:11:49):
And finally that came to an end. And so I'm, I'm at this point in life where I go, man, I know how networking works. I can program. I know how telephone systems work. I can pull ethernet cable, I can do audio and video. It's a lot of skills, but they kind of all fit together. So just open a business, put up my shingle, tell people I can do it, see if I get any hits. <Laugh> did that for a while. Still moved with my parents. Did that for a while. And finally the, the kind of breakthrough with the business was I walked into this doctor's office, you know, gave 'em my business card and the receptionist that was sitting there, so this was when would this have been? 2009, 2010, somewhere around there when netbooks were still a thing and walked in, headed to my card and she's like, well, we don't need anything here at the office.

(00:12:42):
But then she pulls out her netbooks, do you know anything about Linux? I'm like, yes, yes I do. And her, you know, her wifi driver was all messed up. Because at that time, wifi on Linux was terrible. Anyway, I got it fixed for her and brought it back. And then she's like, the next time they had something go wrong at the office, she's like, oh, no, no, this is the last guy that, that we used and handed the doctor my card. So I got called out for that. And with that I was able to meet one of the business sales reps for the local I S P. And from then I was just set because every time the Issp would have something go wrong in somebody's network, they would just call me in. Like, we don't deal with people's networks, but we got a guy and I was their guy, <laugh>.

Doc Searls (00:13:21):
So the guy,

Jonathan Bennett (00:13:22):
Yeah, that was, that was all fun. And that's kind of where the, the business came from. And that's where I do still a lot of work here in town today.

Doc Searls (00:13:29):
So I, I wanna ask you more about the work, but I want to rewind back to the, your homeschooling days. Cause homeschooling has fascinated me. I, I have a friend, it's a quick homeschooling story. It's my favorite story on the topic. A friend who's a PhD in statistics, among other things, he has another PhD as well. Mm-Hmm. and he teaches and, and he was on a plane. He's sitting next to a very fascinating woman talking about her offspring who were all adults. She's an older woman, and they all were high achievers and all kinds of things. And she talked about how she credited homeschooling with, with their achievements. And and he said, being a statistics guy, well, don't you think that at least some of that has to do with heredity? And she said, well, I would've thought that too, if they weren't all adopted.

(00:14:17):
So, so, and I'm wondering, so two things. One is now you, you have kids, we need to learn a little bit more about that. And are you gonna homeschool them? Are you like a, did, is that a a choice facing you yet? And where, where do you, where do you go with that? Because it, let me put that in a little more context. Almost everybody I know in the Linux world who's a, a serious hacker, didn't learn it in school. <Laugh>, you know, they learned it on their own, like you did or from each other including Colonel Hackers and Linux himself for that matter. So that's adult homeschooling as it were. But still,

Jonathan Bennett (00:14:56):
Yeah. That's interesting. And Linis is an interesting case too, because he was going to college studying computer science, but the whole linnux thing was just, just a side project that had nothing to do with his, you know, his degree. And then eventually he went, was it his master's or his doctorate? He was able to finally do some Linux work for the education. But it was very, it was very much parallel courses. So yeah, you, you're right. A lot of us did just pick it up on our own. Although this is kind of a tangent, but the world has kind of changed since then. And in some educational places, particularly higher education they have embraced open source. And you can go to some colleges and even some high schools and learn about, you know, how open source works, how to use Git, how to run a project.

(00:15:44):
And I think that's great. There is, there is not just one way to get from, you know, being a four year old to being an 18 year old with a good education. There are, there are great private schools. There are great public schools, and then there are, there are parents that are great at homeschooling. And then there's even things like co-ops where you may not, as a parent, you may not be great at teaching every subject. You can get plugged into a homeschooling co-op, which is, some of them are almost like little private schools, but they're not, they're not quite, and so they're not under the same regulations. They're able to run a lot cheaper. So there's, there's all kinds of options out there. My son is four and we have been doing pre-K with him right here at the house.

(00:16:33):
He knows all of his letters and numbers and we're working on, you know, what sounds the letters make. And he is, he's right on the cusp of having that breakthrough. You know, I, I, I kind of think of it that you, you know, all of these facts and that at some point the facts just kind of collide together in your brain. You have the light bulb moment when it's, oh, that's what that means. And he's right on the cusp of that breakthrough for really being able to start reading. And I'm very much looking forward to that day. Cause he's gonna be so fun to let him loose on the world of books and all the things that are out there.

Doc Searls (00:17:05):
And I can tell you as the parent of now three adults that were all different, they all are. They do that on you. The youngest one went to a school, it was called a Waldorf School, where they don't push reading on kids until really the first grade. And even then, they're very gentle with it. And so we wouldn't, we didn't do anything with reading. We had a few of the letters that went under refrigerator and stuff like that, but nothing really. And then one day my wife was driving and our son, who was then like five or six says, mama, what's so and so refrigeration? And she said, what do you mean? She said, said, that's what's, that's what it says on the back of that truck, <laugh>. It turned out he told us later, we did, he learned to read what, what, where, how, what, and it was by watching We, we played music on the TV where the cable had like the music channel and they had the, the name of the song bouncing like in Pong around the corners of the screen. Yeah. While the song ran. So if it was fun, fun, fun by the Beach Boys, it would say, fun, fun, fun, beach boys, something records. And you just watch these over and over again and put it together somehow. And my my point there is a, you don't know, I mean, you could do all the curriculum you want and they go sideways on you and ways you don't expect and that are good like you did with, you know, tinkering with, you know, your dad's tools in the garage or whatever else, you know, whatever else worked

Jonathan Bennett (00:18:37):
When, when homeschooling is done, right? That's one of the real strengths of it is cuz you've got parents, they're plugged into their kids and they understand how they learn and can really kind of give them a guided step-by-step through how things work. And sometimes in a school setting, it's hard to do that. So that, that can be one of the big advantages of, of homeschooling. And you get, you get the same thing in small classroom sizes and all of that. But I, you know, I I, I said during one of, one of my monologues that I was, I was glad not to go to public school because we moved so often. And so I, I just think particularly my learning style, bouncing from school room to school room once a year and not necessarily on, on, you know, not, we didn't move during the summer every time. Right. So it would've been halfway through the year, quarter, way through the year, all it would've been terrible. It would've been so hard to, to go through that high school experience that way. So I'm, I'm thankful for it. I think it was a good experience for me.

Doc Searls (00:19:33):
And, and I wanna ask one more personal question about where you live and in Lotton, Oklahoma, I notice is the Museum of the Great Plains is there, which must mean you're in it. And you're on the shores of Cache Creek, which runs into the Red River. It keeps you away from Texas. Yes. So, so how is life there? I mean, as, as is, is there a I'm just, I'm I I I'm just curious what, you know, how, how would, how would you sell Lawton and your part of the world?

Jonathan Bennett (00:20:10):
The way I would sell pretty much anywhere these days is you can get internet there <laugh>. And that has, that has changed the world.

Doc Searls (00:20:18):
It's on the shores of the internet.

Jonathan Bennett (00:20:20):
Yeah. Like, well, so there, there used to be kind of this stigma against small towns, right? Like, there's nothing to do in small towns. You're so disconnected from the rest of the world. And then the internet happens, and we've got fiber in small towns, and you can, you can have a conversation across the internet with using video and 10 80 p with anybody, right? You have, you have Netflix, you have, you have access to GitHub. I mean, so anywhere that you can get on the internet, you're not really limited to your small town anymore. And so then the things that you think about with where you wanna live is totally different. Cuz you can have a social life and not know anybody in your town. I don't recommend that by the way, but you can. And so then you start looking at places like, well, okay, what's the, what's the property value there? What's the cost of living? And I will tell you the cost of living in Laton, Oklahoma is remarkably low. We bought this house and over 2000 foot square house for $70,000. Now it needed some renovations but it was livable at $70,000 <laugh>. And I know people from California, you all, all of your brains just exploded because you would pay at least oh, probably 20 times that for the same house in California place, places in California.

Doc Searls (00:21:39):
So, so I wanted to say that, I mean my wife and I found she's from la I'm from New York, more or less less being in New Jersey. But, you know, looking at New York across the river and found in, in a certain way, we found those places and Boston and even Santa Barbara too big. We're now in Bloomington, Indiana, which is, you know probably similar in size to Lawton and hugely appealing. And we have internet here too, <laugh> as, as you see. Yeah. And fiber is rolling out all over the place's. A and, and we own the house that I'm sitting in here, which costs, I won't give you the price, but it's less than one 10th what it would cost in Santa Barbara, you know, or Los Angeles. It's it was, it was actually too good not to buy, you know, it was kinda like, wow. Yeah, yeah. We'll go get that. You know? So so anyway <laugh>, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, we're gonna take a break here and after this we may have, since you brought it up, an XP versus Linux question <laugh>. So a technical director has this question. Do you wanna jump in verbally or do you wanna just <laugh>

Ant Pruitt (00:22:55):
Or not? Sure, sure. You

Doc Searls (00:22:57):
Do. Good. I'll pop in and he's almost visible. I'm

Jonathan Bennett (00:23:00):
Almost these turn lights

Ant Pruitt (00:23:01):
On. I'll face the lights right here about that

Doc Searls (00:23:04):
<Laugh>. Oh man,

Ant Pruitt (00:23:06):
You, you, Mr. Bennett, you were, you were, when you were talking about a little bit of your background and you mentioned jumping into Windows and XP and, and it, it sort of like tripped the trigger to, to really dive more into Lennox. And I had to say that that's pretty much what, first off, I'm not you when it comes to using Lennox. I'm not like any of our TWIT listeners when it comes to using Lennox, but XP service pack two put me over the edge. Was that, was it the same for you? Was it service pack two that did it for you? Or was it another previous version?

Jonathan Bennett (00:23:41):
I don't remember if it was service pack two or not. I, I had been, I had been kind of straddling the fence for a couple of years at that point, but I had been, I had been getting more and more into kind of the open source hacker ethos reading, reading some of the old stuff from guys like Eric Raymond. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and even well, you know, a lot of the, the lore of, of open source and I just, one of the other things that I was doing at the time, and I don't know why this was the case, but on my laptop that I took to school, I had to, I had to wipe the hard drive and reinstall Windows XP about once a year because it would just slow down to the point to where it was crawling.

Ant Pruitt (00:24:21):
That's, that's what I wanted to get at because Service Pack two pretty much put me in that state and it seemed like it, it was just killing my computer. And at the time I couldn't afford to buy new hardware, but I still needed something at the house to, you know, do research or, or, or get some other stuff done. And I was like, I, I gotta try this Leonards thing. And I eventually jumped into Good or Latu, cuz it seems like that was the default for newbies to at least fire up a buntu. And I stayed on that for probably four years, three, four years, something like that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> cuz it, it just flat out worked other than the, the issues with graphics drivers and X org and all of that. But for the most part, my family, I remember my kids, they were able to just hop over there and if they wanted to get to the browser, it was right there. And they didn't have to think twice about it. It just, it just worked. But yeah, when you mentioned XP earlier, my, my PTs d fired off. Oh gosh. And I just had to throw that out there. Sorry, I won't interrupt the show. Oh, wait a minute. I did have one more question. I did <laugh>. You were talking about homeschooling and Uhhuh in, in small towns, and I grew up in a small town.

Jonathan Bennett (00:25:38):
Mm-Hmm.

Ant Pruitt (00:25:38):
<Affirmative>, I gotta tell you, I couldn't have been homeschooled my relatives, my families. I wouldn't have trusted them with my education. And I love y'all, but I wouldn't have trusted y'all with my education. So I had asked in the Discord there who, who handled your homeschooling, because it, it seems like that makes a big difference too. Okay, now I'm cutting my mic. Bye

Jonathan Bennett (00:26:00):
<Laugh>. Yeah. You know, I was, I was kind of lucky in that my parents actually both both went to college to college degrees and worked in little schools with little private schools themselves before I came along. And so they were, they were both pretty adapt at the teaching thing, and I think that helped some too. I think part of it though was just my personality. I, I love I, I love learning and understanding, like I said, I have understanding how things work, so learning new things is just kind of par for the course. I, I did find out a little later in life, particularly trying to go to college that I, I don't do very well with sort of the classic academic approach to that. But I, I will, I will definitely grant you that not everyone has the entire skillset to be a good teacher. And that can be a problem trying to homeschool

Doc Searls (00:26:54):
<Laugh>. An interesting thought about that too is that you know, I was not homeschooled. I went to public schools through the ninth grade, which is freshman in high school, but I didn't go to high, it was a three year junior high in the same school system where my mother taught. She taught third and fourth grade. And the whole time my mother got so much grief because how can you be such a great teacher and your son is so lame. I was a terrible student. I did not like being in school. I looked out the window, I wasn't paying attention. I was, what would they call an a d D case. But back then the, the diagnosis was a one word bad. I was a bad student. You're bad like a dog, you know, bad dog down, you know. And my test scores declined roughly to nothing by the time I was in the eighth grade.

(00:27:48):
And, and they had to send me away to a, what turned out to be a Lutheran academic correctional institution for high school. But it was <laugh>, it was a seminary for boys committed to the ministry. It's either that or a, a military school. That's where they sent you back in those days. Like go to religious school or a military school. You won't get into one of the good, you know, prep schools. So Right. It turned out this one was actually a good prep school, but still I didn't get good grades, but I still learned a lot because what did I do? I poked things with screwdrivers and took them apart too. You know, it was kinda my Yes, yes. My background. I, I was pre, you know, pre pre ics, so it was all ham radio things and mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So we've had shows about ham radio before and I was one of those but a similar thing and an interesting thing my mother told me she was regard as a great teacher and, but she said the best school she ever taught in was the one room schoolhouse she taught in at age 18 to 20 in rural North Dakota.

(00:28:46):
And she grew up in a town called Napoleon in North Dakota, about which it was said, it's not the end of the world, but you could see it from there. And <laugh> and <laugh>,

Jonathan Bennett (00:28:57):
We have a, we have a similar saying in Oklahoma that we don't live in the middle of nowhere, but that town is in our state <laugh>,

Doc Searls (00:29:05):
It's, it's like that, you know. Anyway, she but she said that was the best school she ever taught in. And part of it was that she could kind of feed the information into the top end, the demographic top end. Cause the older kids taught the younger kids. Cause the younger kids wanted to know what the older kids were up to. And the older kids liked being able to teach the younger kids and work with the teacher on the younger kids and work with the older kids on the younger kids, provided the teacher was gifted enough to make that whole thing work. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I think it also made a difference because this is very rural farm country where everybody actually did have to work <laugh>, you know? Yes. In whatever it was they did. There was actual work involved, but she described that as the best school she ever taught in.

(00:29:43):
And I think that's sort of meaningful in a way. Yeah, so, so let's, let's get back up to, not all the way up to, I'm still hoping Simon can join us at some point. So I'm gonna hold off on the red hat stuff for now. Okay. But but go, go into some of the issues around open source. That's, and there's one in particular on our, our show fairly often, which is a kind of clash of cultures. And it's not a clash of cultures, it's just sort of a, a, a further dividing of cultures within the broader community where you kind of have the alpha hackers that listen to and watch this show who do still poke things, still take things apart, still, still compile their kernels and, and, and you know, and, and live in a command line and help fix other people's things.

(00:30:40):
And then there are people that are living farther up the stack. They're working on max or PCs and they're in a, they may drop into the command line on this or that, but for the most part they're, they're, you know, open source is part of their life, but they're not, it's not their religion as it were. And I think it's still a religion for some of us <laugh>. And, and that's sort of, you know, how do you see that dividing out? Because you probably meet it in your work. You know, there are the people who are like, oh man, we can make jazz on this. And other people are saying, just make it work. And I'm, I'm outta here and or make it work with my, with we we're full, we're full of max in this school system. Let's say. That's a, that's one of your clients or in this, in this business, like the, the business is like Max and PCs and we don't do Linux here, but you don't know they're doing Linux cuz they have servers over there that actually are running Linux. Correct. Or they've got networks that are running on Linux or have a server over here, or they're in the cloud and need to deal with that. I'm wondering, what are you seeing trend-wise around those issues?

Jonathan Bennett (00:31:39):
It depends. You see a lot of different things. So I, I was out at a customer's site yesterday. It's the first time I had met them. It was a referral from another customer and they were still running Windows seven machines on their little, probably a five machine network. And they, they <laugh> they had some interesting requirements. So they're like, we, we have QuickBooks running on this machine and we're currently, we have it unplugged from the internet and we're currently using a u SB drive to transfer the QuickBooks file around. Well, okay, that sounds a little like a pain, but I see advantages with that. But we want to be able. And so they wanted to be able to do a little tiny network. So, you know, I set 'em up with folder sharing, created a new user only put the, put that computer on the internet set another computer up with that user and, and set up QuickBooks file sharing for 'em so that they could a access and edit that QuickBook spot from two different computers at once.

(00:32:34):
And you know, when I was talking to the, the guy that owned the business afterwards, he was fifties or sixties, something like that. And he was telling me, he was like, you know, when I first started this, I was a computer whiz. I would get in there and do all this stuff myself. And he goes, but somewhere along the line I got old and I really just got tired of everything changing. So we're pretty much just gonna stay on Windows seven on these machines until I either retire or die <laugh>. It's like I'm tired of things changing <laugh>.

Doc Searls (00:33:03):
I I I, I have a cousin who worked, had a very high up position in the North Carolina state government. He described himself I actually, somebody who knew him professionally said about him, that boy is a stone dirt bureaucrat <laugh>. And when I said, I said to my cousin, he said, somebody called you a stone bureaucrat. He said, oh, that's me. I'm totally that, you know. But he, his position, this is just goes back to several decades, so to, to be fair to him, he said the next two decades maybe, he said, I don't want to do anything that needs a password <laugh>. Now he has a blog now. So he obviously he does use <laugh> use passwords at this point, but he, you know, hes, I think he's still sitting there back on Windows something or other on, on his thing or whatever he needs to do. Would you so let's say that guy who's going to over his dead body is gonna get off of windows seven. At some point somebody buys the business or, or his son takes over or daughter takes over and they, they wanna bring it up to stuff. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, whatcha gonna do it? You gonna help 'em with on Windows, whatever it is now? Or are you gonna gonna say, okay, here's the simplest form of Linux and just know this. What's

Jonathan Bennett (00:34:25):
The, I I have done a couple of Linux deployments and they occasionally work really well. But most people are not willing to give it a try. And I've not quite put my finger on why I, I do know that there are still some rough edges, particularly with, with programs like QuickBooks that's, that's usually gonna be where you run into problems. Cause these businesses, they'll have, you know, two or three of these kind of specialized you know, bookkeeping or payroll or whatever. And if you can't guarantee that they're gonna run really well under Linux under something like wine, well that's kind of a showstopper for 'em. So for the vast majority of people, what I, what I find that works is, unless a computer is just for web browsing we'll put Windows Pro on it one of the later, you know, one of the newest versions.

(00:35:19):
If I can put Linux on a server somewhere, I will. I like doing that. That tends to work pretty well for their file sharing. But it's, for most people, it's not worth the effort to learn something new. And it's kind of the same deal as him staying on Windows seven versus going to something like Windows 10 or Windows 11. Like, he's doing better, he's making more money, his time is better spent with the thing that he does as a business, rather than investing a bunch of time into learning the it side of it. And that's kind of what my whole business is around, is it, it's more efficient, it's more economical for them to pay me to come in, answer those questions, give 'em recommendations, set things up for 'em, and that way they can get back to, you know, spraying, spraying people's houses for weeds or putting roofs on places or, you know, selling, renting and, and selling real estate, you know, the various businesses I take care of. For most of 'em, it just doesn't make sense to spend the hours and hours to learn something new or learn how to set it up themselves.

Ant Pruitt (00:36:19):
Mr. Bennett, you would

Doc Searls (00:36:20):
Not, oh yeah. Go, go Grant, go for it. Grant an, an Ann's here. Ann has a question.

Ant Pruitt (00:36:24):
Actually I have two cuz I only had one, but then his response just now made a second pop in my head. So if you, if you're, you just mentioned putting Lennox on some servers for those businesses. What version of a distro of Lennox are you putting on those servers? Oh, good one. Those. And my other question relates back to the culture because you're talking about converting potential small businesses there from a window shop to alen shop and getting some friction. What about regular normal people out here that aren't running SMBs? Prime example, my mother and my sister a handful of months ago told me they needed new computers without a thought. I gave them a link to an M one MacBook because the M one MacBook is ridiculously fast. And right now you can get them for next to nothing and for what they're gonna be doing at home, that computer's gonna work like a champ. And last for a while, I could have easily said, huh, you need to get a Lennox laptop, and they look at me sideways. But how would someone like you, who is, who is deep into this culture, be able to, for lack of better term, sell switching to Lennox to someone in the home? You know, asking your cousin to switch to Lennis asin, your, your uncle, your aunt, you know who, whomever.

Jonathan Bennett (00:37:51):
Yeah. So I, I will give you the short answer first. And that is, historically on servers for small businesses, I've, I've put Sentos on them. And when Sentos stopped being, I've done I think one with Alma and the rest of 'em, I kind of went with Rocky Lennox. I've, I've sort of tended to use Rocky Lennox more than Alma. And that's pretty much where I'm at. Although every time something comes out in the news that Red Hat does, I, I think about, well, I should try open suse <laugh>, I should give them a try <laugh>. And, and then the idea of of moving individuals over to Linux. So I've done that a couple of times with, with my wife, it was just, Hey, you need a desktop, I'm gonna build it for you. But we're not gonna put Windows lights, it <laugh>, I'm not paying for the Windows license. <Laugh>

Ant Pruitt (00:38:39):
That ok, that makes sense there. King of the Castle. Yeah, sure. <Laugh>.

Jonathan Bennett (00:38:45):
But there's been a couple other people I've, I've helped with that. And really the cell is, we've got this really old hardware and I've, I've kind of come to the conclusion that for a while now, so long as you've got a 64 bit processor and at least multi-core, so two cores or more, and you can get at least four gigs of Ram on it. I can make that into a fairly decent Linux machine for you. Windows 10, windows 11 is not gonna run very decent on there, but I can make Linux run on it. Okay. For, for most of the things you would wanna do. Now, Netflix might not be a great experience, but checking your email, checking Pinterest printing off recipes can make that work with that system. So that, that has been one of the cells is just I can in some cases, hey, I've got old hardware laying around that I don't need. And rather than me just taking it to Staples to recycle it, let me install Linux on it for you and it'll be a decent system. That's pretty much the sell that I have made.

Ant Pruitt (00:39:44):
So it's been more so about getting them to use the hardware they already have. You haven't really said, Hey, you should probably try this, this machine here from System 76 to just regular folks.

Jonathan Bennett (00:39:58):
Not very often. There's gotta be, when when you go to convince somebody of something like that, there ha kinda has to be a value proposition. And most of the people that I know are not like, interested in getting into programming or system administration or any of that stuff. And so there's not a whole lot of value sell to get off of Windows when it's what they already know. The, the one exception to that is that it's harder to get viruses on Linux than it is on Windows. But on the other hand, like a majority of the calls I get for, I've got a virus on my machine, that virus only exists in the browser, right? So it's either you've gone to a webpage and it is now full screened itself and refuses to close, or you've gone to a webpage and an ad convinced you to install an extension that is doing weird things to your browser. And those will happen in Linux too. So the, the whole Linux doesn't get viruses thing. It was never true. It's sort of been true, but the reality of the situation is because Chrome is everywhere, it's less true now than it has been. So <laugh> you do.

Doc Searls (00:41:14):
So, so I wanna stay with this a little bit, a little bit further because I'm remembering back when oh, there two, two things worth remembering. One is this wonderfully giant argument I had with Phil Hughes who started Linux Journal and ran, it was in the late nineties. And my position was that at that time, the desktops are k d E versus Nome alone. And that was sort of the main thing. And k d e was, to me a pretty obvious kind of knockoff of the, of, of the windows user interface and experience. Or it came as close as it could to that. And, and Phil was saying, no, it's not, it came first or something like that. And Phil loved to have an argument if everybody else cringed in the corner because two people were yelling at each other. He considered that validation <laugh> like afterwards he said that was great, you know, it was sort of, anyway but the other thing is that, and I put it in our, in our chat, but maybe we could put it in the show notes.

(00:42:16):
Ian's Neil Stevenson of, of the, the author and fame famous for many, many great books, snow Crash and others wrote a little book that actually is small enough to be just a single webpage called, in the beginning was the Command line. And there's the one that's at Stanford, it's just, it's pure text and it's in there. And his case was that it's kind of like there's a crossroads and there are four car dealers, and one, one car dealer is selling really fancy station wagons and, and they do lots of stuff and, and they all fall apart and they need a lot of work. And and that's what, that's, that's basically Microsoft and Windows. Another one is selling fancy, you know fancy beautiful cars that are kinda like BMWs. But they also need a lot of work. Now he wrote this like 1996 or something and they also need a lot of work and you have to go to them to get it done, but it's fancier than the other one.

(00:43:14):
And, and in a third one, and there was something called B that was out there and he called that a Bat Bill. It was done by Sean Lu essay. It was, now this is an operating system, almost completely forgotten, but it was very slick in its day. And the fourth were a bunch of people giving away tanks, <laugh>, and come here and get a free tank <laugh>, and if you need a fix, we have people who work on tanks here and they could help you fix your tank. And nobody wanted the tank, you know, no ordinary people wanted the tank and that was Linux. And, but I'm wondering, are any of the, like the inheritors of K D E way back in 1999 that where you can emulate the, the Windows experience are any of those appealing to people still? I mean, are you selling, is that part of the cell that might still be there? I mean

Jonathan Bennett (00:44:04):
Close,

Doc Searls (00:44:05):
If somebody coming close enough,

Jonathan Bennett (00:44:06):
If somebody's coming from Windows, I'll put 'em on K D E for sure, just because it, it uses that. I don't know that I would say k d ripped off windows necessarily, but they both have that same classic desktop paradigm of, you know, you've got a start button, you've got Windows, you've got icons, you've got a task bar at the bottom. And, and they both use that same, that same paradigm. So yeah, it's so you try to, if if somebody is gonna switch you, try to put 'em in something familiar, don't just throw 'em in the deep end. Now, I, I've tried, I've tried making the argument to people that, well, this free software, you actually get to control what happens on your computer. And most people just shrug at me. They, that argument is not very compelling to, to a lot of people.

(00:44:52):
They just want their computer to work, right? They just wanna be able to get to Google or play a video game or what have you. Like I said, I, I've made a a little more progress when it, particularly in helping someone recover from a virus, I have a little more progress saying, Hey, there's this operating system that really doesn't get viruses unless you do something royally dumb and that works a little bit better. And then of course, if you've got somebody that's really a tinkerer or wants to be a developer or wants to work on websites, you know, you can, you can make this argument that says, Hey, if we put Linux on it, you can host that website right from your desktop to be able to work on it. And that, that could appeal to some people. But my, my list of friends that, that is the kind of thing that they want to do, they're already running Linux, you know, either as their main desktop or on a server somewhere or, or using the Windows subsystem for Linux. I mean, it's already there. So I, I don't know, it's, it's almost like the Evangel, the Linux evangelism that's gonna work has already been done <laugh> as far as, that's a good point as far as my experience. Yeah,

Doc Searls (00:45:59):
That's an interesting point I was thinking of. I mean my my youngest son is now 26, but he lives and works in New York. He worked for three startups there both when he was in school and going and working for those startups. It was entirely using Max. That's what there was. Again, this is New York. And, but at the same time he did build his own machine and he and his buddy are machine builders, but they are also gamers and they built Windows machines, right? That's his, yeah, so on his desk are the Mac laptop over here and the, and the game machine here and is not interested in Linux at all because he wants to do gaming and the whole gaming world is kind of sitting on, sitting on on Windows. And so I I'd like to ask, I mean, is there, is there a gaming future of that sort? On, on Linux? I mean, I would think you could do more, you could put fancier stuff in your machine and so

Jonathan Bennett (00:46:55):
All that, so it's interesting that you ask that and I I would be curious to go back and ask him what he thinks about it now that the Steam deck is out. Right. So Val produced this little handheld computer it's got a decent battery life. It's got a decent ish screen on it, and it runs Linux by default. And they have been, Val has been working for years now on making that experience better of, of running games, mainly made for Windows over on Linux machines through through wine. Valve has their fork of wine they call Proton. And it has gotten to the point, you know, it used to be for those of us that ran Linnux full-time, the way it used to work is, oh, hey, this game looks cool. Let me go to the wine game database and see if it works on wine yet. And at some point in the last few years, that step has just fallen. You don't have to do that anymore. You just buy the game and it's going to work on proton Wow. Or on wine. And if it doesn't, well just give it a few months and the engineers from Valve are gonna make it work one way or the other. Right. Cause it's, it's quite a, it's quite a different experience than it, than it was even say two years ago

Doc Searls (00:48:08):
Because I mean, wine in the oldest days is kind of the slow way to do a Windows thing, right, right. Yeah. wow. Well, I, we had the world's longest tease, at least the longest tease for the show by bringing up the whole Red Hat thing at the beginning, winning for Simon to come in, and he hasn't come in yet. So right after this, we're gonna come back and return to the Red Hat subject. Okay. So, so, so you were at the 30,000 foot level of what was going on with, with, with Red Hat and and ibm. And, and I'm wondering just to, to bring that closer to ground, do you see that as a problem caused by IBM owning Red Hat or just something that tends to happen as a company forgets its history and where it came from and who its core constituency is and what its values were in the first place?

Jonathan Bennett (00:48:59):
So that is a difficult question. I don't have any insight into like the corporate structure at Red Hat. I don't have anybody there that's feeding me information. And so I'm pretty much on the outside taking guesses. I would've told you that. No, I think this is entirely IBM pushing this down from the top until an article came out by the Software Freedom Conservancy and, you know, that's, that's one of the premier groups that helps with G P L and open source license you know, lawyering, working, working through that, making sure that those are followed, helping companies get to compliance. The F f SFC put out this article where it, it basically said, look, we've been helping Red Hat try to stay on the right side of the G P L for a long time now. And there's actually been two cases in the past not even the recent past.

(00:49:55):
So before IBM bought them, where Red Hats rulings on things was in violation of the G P L. And we tried to help them through that. And I, I don't, I don't remember exactly how those turned out, but just, it was an interesting mm-hmm. <Affirmative> anecdote that in years past this has been a problem. And so the SFC basically said that the best thing that we can say about Red Hat is that for most of the time that they've been a company, they have just barely not been in violation of the G P L, which is quite the statement to make. And so it kind of makes me think that maybe Red Hat lost that kinda open source as a religion spark, if you wanna put it that way, a long time ago. And then getting bought by IBM was maybe what just pushed them over the edge to, to kind of embrace the idea of we need to maximize profits now.

(00:50:55):
Which that's, that's what I, that's what I see this as. You know, it's, it's a, it's a short term. It will, it will be a short term win for them. I am, I'm pretty confident because you're gonna have shops that have used, well, it, it happened first with CentOS. Cause you had shops that were using Sentos when CentOS went away, those shops, many of them would've said, okay, fine, we'll spring for an actual Red Hat license. And quite possibly the same thing now. But particularly if Rocky Linux and all Linux and the various others begin having problems pushing patches. Companies that rely on having up-to-date rel clones will of course say, okay, well I guess we need to spring for the license. And so yes, it will be, I suspect a short term win for Red Hat. But I also think that in the long term, you know, the next time an engineer goes to build out a new system, rather than just reflexively grabbing for a RL clone or RL itself, they're gonna go, huh, red Hat has burned me twice now in the middle of release cycles with using one of their products.

(00:52:04):
Maybe I should try Debian, maybe I should try openSUSE. But after getting fooled twice, I'm not gonna fall for that again. So I I think long term it's gonna be a, a real problem for Red Hat.

Doc Searls (00:52:18):
Yeah, there's a there's an expression in, in in the car world OT DC off Top Dead Center. It's at that point where you are steering wheel is neither going right in our left. Mm-Hmm. You know, and so there's a lag in there, you turn this way and it doesn't quite happen yet. And part of handling is you want really tight OTB off top dead center and, and what are you driving toward, right? So as you steer right and left, I think it feature the G P L is that where you're aiming toward is freedom. That's what that is. And you want to embody the freedom for the use of that that code base. And the freedom, freedom for the, for not just the use, but the development of that code base that retains freedom within it. Now I've talked to business people.

(00:53:15):
One in particular comes to mind. He's gone now or I'd have him on the show. Cause his thoughts were really very pro open source in a lot of ways. But look at the gpl. He kept saying, I don't know what to do with that. And I think, I think Bob Young, when he started red Hat a long time ago, knew what to do with that. And I think as management turns over and over and over, people forget, you know, I'm dealing with one institution right now. There's busy forgetting why I won't go into the details because it's too kind of close to home for me. But, but it has to do with preserving preserving something on the net and why. And and not 4 0 4 and everything that's there. And it's, you know, people turn over and one thing that doesn't change is the company has to make money and money talks and lawyers talk. And lawyers are almost always, you know, trying to, you know, protect the company, not protect the principles that created the company in the first place. Whatever those are, you know, and Doc

Jonathan Bennett (00:54:23):
Are, are you familiar with Purnell's Iron Law of Bureaucracy? Is is that a, is that a thing that

Doc Searls (00:54:28):
You Yes, but but go ahead. Repeat it for us.

Jonathan Bennett (00:54:30):
Okay. In any bureaucracy in the strip companies too, <laugh>, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control. And those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence and sometimes are eliminated entirely. And this was, this was Purnell's observation on governments on

Doc Searls (00:54:53):
Companies. The Jerry Purnell, Jerry Purnell himself

Jonathan Bennett (00:54:55):
Science fiction author.

Doc Searls (00:54:56):
Science fiction author, best known

Jonathan Bennett (00:54:58):
For

Doc Searls (00:54:58):
Yes. Wrote, wrote, wrote the Mode in God's Eye and other books that Larry Nivan outstanding. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, great guy. Love him. So sorry. He is gone too.

Jonathan Bennett (00:55:06):
Yeah. And, and I, I kind of suspect that we're seeing maybe this play out at Red Hat, or just like you say, the guys that started it got open source and they had the vision for how they were going to make money with open source and we're successful with it. But those guys are now gone and you have, you have lawyers and bureaucrats who just see the bottom line and have lost that vision for how it works with open source. And I think it's very apt.

Doc Searls (00:55:33):
Yeah, I, I, I think so too. And I think is, I mean, it's actually one of the reasons, I mean, one of the outcomes of Linux now being at everything and open source actually being part of the world and people understand it and they understand kind of mechanically how it works and why in a general way, having open source like that is open source code you can look at and do stuff with, not necessarily the licensing with it. Lose track of the fact that it was the licensing behind it. That is a big part of why it's succeeded as well as it has. And the GPL in particular, I mean I, I remember back in the earliest days B S D BSD has been around longer than Linux. But BS BSD didn't take off the same way Linux did because it broke into rival camps as net free and open bsd I think it was.

(00:56:22):
And there was no line in there and there wasn't, you know, a line that I guess Bill Joy could have done that, but he didn't. And and it, it didn't happen in the same way, but the principles do get forgotten. And bureaucracies, we need bureaucracies. Bureaucracies do it, bureaucracies should, and you always have them there. And but the bigger a company gets, the more it, it gets what, and I can't say it entirely, but it's what Cory, doctor o calls Yes. <Laugh>. And I'll call, I'll, I'll translate it and purification. Okay. We're, it goes, it goes to poop because we, we call it certification here at twit in, just so you know. Sure. There you go. In certification. Why? That's a bad word. I don't know. I mean, you know, CACO works in Spanish and Mare works in French and she works in Doc Deutsch, but that word doesn't work in English cuz it's bad. Like nobody uses that. Anyway I, I got on the edge of that a little bit anyway yeah, I mean, big companies tend to do that and, and you do have the people in top that tend to forget it. And I don't know what to do about it except you move to somebody else. I mean, that's what's happening now with with Twitter versus Mastodon versus Blue Sky versus the others. And I think,

Jonathan Bennett (00:57:43):
Yeah, go ahead. So there was, there was another, there was something else that happened that is similar to this back a few months ago. And in my mind the, the parallels are striking and we're, we're gonna talk about open source, but we're gonna talk about open source with tabletop gaming. So Dungeons and Dragons.

Doc Searls (00:58:04):
Oh, right, yeah.

Jonathan Bennett (00:58:05):
Had the Open Gaming license, which does not, so technically does not fulfill the requirements of being an open source license. It's too restrictive. But when, when the, I forget the name of the guy that worked on it, but when at Dungeons and Dragons, they wrote the Open Gaming license, they were very much trying to tap into the magic of Open Source and bring it to Dungeons and Dragons to Tabletop Gaming. And it worked, it worked really well. Well then you had places like Pazo came along and literally forked Dungeons and Dragons and made the Pathfinder game. So back a few months ago, Dungeons and Dragons said, Hey, we are going to do away with the Open Gaming license. Well, no, we're going to to, to bump the version and write a new one. And Dungeons and Dragons is owned by Hasbro and very smart Hasbro lawyers, Doug and Doug through that open gaming license.

(00:59:07):
And they found this tiny little loophole where the Open Gaming license says that only, oh, what's the term that's used there? Like only approved that's not the exact exact word, but this is essentially what it means. Only approved licenses are enforced. And so the done, the, the, the lawyers said, well, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna write a new license and then we're going to unapprove the old license and we're gonna make everything fall under the new license. And of course, the new license was terrible. It was, it was just garbage. And I, I don't know if you know this, but Dungeon Zoo Dragons, like the player base is huge. When you count a, oh, particularly when you count in Pathfinder and every other fork that's out there, and all the, lots and lots of people love Dungeons Zoo Dragons, the community exploded, like big time hate mail. People were boycotting it. I I wanna say that the Dungeons and Dragons purchases just fell off a cliff. And, you know, they had that d and d movie that was gonna be coming out soon, right? There was, right. I remember

Doc Searls (01:00:12):
This

Jonathan Bennett (01:00:12):
Movement to boycott the movie. So it got, it got Hasbro's attention. There was enough noise, it got their attention, and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Maybe we messed up. And in the end, they actually ended up moving a lot of their a lot of their content to an even more permissive license that the OpenGL was. They moved it over to a Creative Commons license and basically just gave it away. You, you could, okay, this, this stuff, the mechanics of the game, you could just do whatever you want to with it. We're, we're not gonna try to reli it or anything. It was a huge win in my mind, at least. It was a huge win for that sort of open source idea in the gaming community. And I see a lot of parallels to what Red Hat's doing. You know, they've, they are now owned by the larger company. They're making these changes, they're kind of moving away from the roots of what that license was supposed to do. And there is a huge community outcry against it. And so one of the big questions is, is the outcry going to be big enough that it causes Red Hat to change course? And unfortunately, I don't think so <laugh>

Doc Searls (01:01:17):
The parallel

Jonathan Bennett (01:01:18):
End there.

Doc Searls (01:01:19):
An interesting thing is that for me anyway, is that back back when I BM got open source religion at the end of the nineties mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, there were a bunch of people inside of IBM that really moved them toward that. Now of course, their engineers moved em toward us, says, wait a minute, we've got nothing but Sam service where there used to be Windows ones, right. And stuff like that. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but they kind of went into compliance with their own own engineers, but they, there were high up people at IBM that really cared about open source and and it was kind of a selling point for them. But then again, that was 20 years ago. I don't know what's going on with that or for that matter with Red Hat. Cause I've, I've been kind of out of the business of covering that as a, as a matter of course that, you know, but be it, it'll be interesting. I I I'm wondering whether or not, I mean, I think it would be a really great ending if it goes the way of goes the way of, of, of Dungeons and Dragons, that would be really dramatic. See, yeah. So

Jonathan Bennett (01:02:20):
Quick, quick side note here. Quick. Yeah.

Doc Searls (01:02:22):
We're, we're kind of past time. So Yeah, go ahead. Yeah,

Jonathan Bennett (01:02:24):
No, I, I think, I think this will be appropriate though maybe even to end with as far as this goes, the reason that I always wear the, the suit and either a white or blue dress shirt is cause of ibm. So in doing reading, yes, in doing reading about the beginning of hacker culture, one of the things that was set up in like levies hackers here, the heroes of the computer revolution was this whole IBM versus the model train guys really is who kind of started it with, with getting on the PDP 11, right? The first one wasn't at 11, but the p DP machines and, you know, you had the hackers who were just kind of dressed however they, however they wanted to. And they all, all sorts of things that could be problematic happened there as far as, you know, living conditions and all that.

(01:03:09):
And then you had the IBM guys who were very closed to this hacker mentality, but always came out dressed in a white dress shirt and looked very, very professional. And so in reading through this, and I also had a coworker at the time that he always wore jean shorts no matter where we were going or what we were doing. Jean shorts, that was his, that was his outfit. And that kind of annoyed me at the time. So I reading through these two things, I had this idea planted in my mind. What if somebody were to present themselves very professionally so that they could walk into a lawyer's office or a doctor's office and fit right in, but yet have a bit of that hacker mindset of let's make it open, let's make things work. Let's not close the source. Let's not make it a closed system. Let's embrace this openness. And that was sort of the ethos that I built the business around. And so I, I try wherever, you know, floss weekly, the Unto Linux show, even writing's over on Hackday. I try to have that mindset of be professional about this, you know, let's present ourselves well, but let's embrace the openness at the same time. And that's where that came from. So thanks IBM tip of the hat <laugh>.

Doc Searls (01:04:16):
Yeah. Yeah. And I noticed that now maybe consistent with that, you have a pale blue shirt on <laugh>, your, your support is paling. So we're at the end of the show. You've already kind of promoted Hackaday a bit and we also promoted the Untitled Linux Show. You can

Jonathan Bennett (01:04:34):
Promote it more. Don't forget, don't forget. You have to ask me what my favorite text editor and Oh

Doc Searls (01:04:38):
Yeah. I, I I, shoot, I was thinking of that the whole show. Gimme, gimme your favorite text.

Jonathan Bennett (01:04:42):
We get so much trouble. So for the longest time, and I, I think still favorite text editor is nano. And I think the reason it's nano is because some of my very, very early programming experience was in Microsoft's Qba. And QBasic is sort of built on the edit.com appearance and the old Microsoft editor and nano just looked very similar. So when I first got started on Lennox, nano is the one that felt most home. And then when it comes to I'm gonna say Python for almost everything, it's Python. I, I do enjoy JavaScript, but there, there are problems, there are problems with running JavaScript everywhere. So I'm not a full scrap, full stack JS coder. That, that ecosystem would have to get better and change a lot before I would be willing, willing to do that. But I, I really enjoy actually doing a project where the back end is Python and the front end is JavaScript. I think. I think that actually works together pretty well. So, so, so

Doc Searls (01:05:51):
You we're actually way over time, but yet you, you always wanna end the show with with a guest. Like what is the most strange and unusual or thing you haven't talked about? And I don't know if you have any of those in your back pocket or not.

Jonathan Bennett (01:06:03):
Yes. So this, there, there is a go-to story. I have several, I have several of these. I'll tell you, I'll tell you two actually, I'll give you two. As far as the hardware side of things, the weirdest thing that I've done is a customer had a printer that is an HP printer that just started acting weird and then just started refusing to print. But the, like, the l e d codes, it was giving, none of them made any sense. And come to find out, HP had changed their solder formulation cuz they wanted to go to a lead free solder. And most lead free solders are terrible. They just don't work very well. So the solution for getting this HP printer to work again, was to take the motherboard out of it and put it on a cookie tray and put it into your oven for 450 degrees or 400 degrees for like 10 minutes.

(01:06:47):
And then you turn the oven off and just let it cool down naturally. And it reflows all the solder on the board and made the thing come up and work again. So we, we baked the printer to get it working. <Laugh>, that one was fun. And then I went to a doctor's office one time as, as a, as an IT guy and they had this old legacy system that was running their old back office stuff. They had already migrated over to something new, but of course they had all the, the old data still saved on this machine. Come to find out it was a it was a SCO O Unix machine. It was a SCO O machine. And I was like, oh. And they, they, they needed to be able to back it up and they needed to get it on newer hardware and some different things.

(01:07:28):
And I'm like, well I bet you we could virtualize. And so I built a Linux machine for them set up virtualization and it took some doing, cuz you actually have to recompile the SCO kernel to be able to put new hardware on it. But I virtualized that SCO server for them and then set up a script that like every morning that the, the Linux on it would check and see if there was a D V D in the DVD drive. And if there was, it would pause the SCO server, it would write a copy of the image out to that DVD and then resume execution on the SCO server so that they would have a D vd Wow. That we could get it back up on a new machine. And that, that was the other really fun, really quirky thing that I've had to pull off.

Doc Searls (01:08:08):
So I, I, I remember Esco was Santa Cruz operation who actually went to their headquarters in Santa Santa Cruz itself. And it was still that and before they got evil, they got evil at some point. Anyway, we, we are pretty much outta time. I wanna say that next week we have Jonathan no, that's I'm looking, yeah, no no that's the next one. That's where Jonathan's around and that is July 26th. I'll skip that one. Go back to just July 19th, which is the next show. But I will be in either Boston or New York, I'm not sure which. Hans Christophe Steiner and he's gonna be talking about The Guardian Project. So that's what's coming up. And I'm Doc Surles. This is last weekly and we'll see you then.

Rod Pyle (01:08:55):
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-Chief VAT Astor magazine. And each week I joined with my co-host to bring you this week in space, the latest and greatest news from the Final Frontier. We talk to NASA chiefs, space scientists, engineers, educators and artists, and sometimes we just shoot the breeze over what's hot and what's not in space books and tv. And we do it all for you, our fellow true believers. So whether you're an armchair adventurer or waiting for your turn to grab a slot in Elon's Mars Rocket, join us on this weekend's space and be part of the greatest adventure of all time.