FLOSS Weekly 754 Transcript

0:00:00 - Doc Searls
This is FLOSS Weekly. I'm Doc Searls. This is a special show because our guest was, is and will be again, maddog Hall, john maddog Hall, himself calling in from Brazil on a line that did not hold up, unfortunately, so we will have him back. We have him for about a third of the show, so the first third of the show is there and we forecast some stuff. He teed up a lot of great conversation between Dan Lynch and myself and Dan turns out to know an awful lot about the GPL and licensing and stuff like that. That was most of the rest of the show and it was good stuff. I think you'll enjoy it a lot. maddog will be back, but in the meantime, that show is coming up next. This is FLOSS Weekly, number 754, recorded Wednesday, october 18th 2023. Is he still on?

0:01:07 - Leo Laporte
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0:01:34 - Doc Searls
Hello again everyone everywhere. This is Floss Weekly and I am Doc Searls. This week, I think, joined from Liverpool. Dan Lynch himself Back for another week of fun. Red Theme was over.

0:01:48 - Dan Lynch
I am kind of red themed, as ever. I am kind of Halloween themed this week, I like that it's a bit of those on the video.

0:01:55 - Doc Searls
This is crew.

0:01:56 - Dan Lynch
So this is from an event called Odd Camp, which I run, and this is a very old t-shirt. It's Odd Camp 15, but it was a Halloween event, so we had a wonderful kind of 8-bit-ish Halloween pumpkin design for our shirts. But basically what happened was I had to buy 200 of these shirts for the crew and I've got about 100 left.

0:02:17 - Dan Lynch
I think.

0:02:18 - Dan Lynch
I can wear them and throw them away and just.

0:02:20 - Doc Searls
That's what they call a sunk cost, and you're weighed down by having 100 t-shirts in a box.

0:02:28 - Dan Lynch
It's great, though I like them.

0:02:30 - Doc Searls
Yeah, that's a good one. If I'm ever over there, give me one. I need an extra large at the moment, because I'm still in my second trimester, it looks like anyway. So our guest today is maddog Hall, the great and infamous and uh, magisterial. What do you get to be when you're an elder in the tribe? Paul is the maddog, by the way.

0:03:00 - Dan Lynch
You're older than maddog, right Okay?

I did this in someone in the chat before we started this show that I would enjoy being the young dog this week. Yes, you are. I'm a mere 43 years old, so you know I feel like the young dog, which is nice. Yeah, I mean, I'm really excited to talk to maddog because we've never spoken in person, but I've seen him speak a lot of times and I feel like you know, I've kind of conversed with him in a way, although it's more one way. He was talking at me, but I enjoyed it. Hopefully we'll enjoy chatting to each other.

0:03:31 - Doc Searls
Well, let's uh. So I want to introduce him, john maddog Hall. maddog Hall lowercase is one of the originals Pre-Linux, post-linux, more involved with Linux and with Linus himself than anybody else that I know or that anybody knows. A committed, capable and even charismatic leader for us in the community. And he's back. He's been with us before, but he's back for a return engagement. We like to have the best of our guests back, so welcome to the show, maddog.

0:04:14 - Jon "maddog" Hall
Thank you very much. I'm very excited about this.

0:04:18 - Doc Searls
We are too. So is our back channel, say, for those of you watching, which is a minority of you, but some of you. The reason that maddog is very still in the picture is because we don't want to risk losing him out of a fairly tenuous connection in Brazil. So start by telling us what you're doing in Brazil. I know you spend a lot of time there. You're really committed to the community there. What's going on?

0:04:48 - Jon "maddog" Hall
Well, I mean right now I'm in an event called Latino Wear. It's been going on for 20 years. It is major sponsored by the Typeu, which is one of the largest hydroelectric plants in the world, and another side of that is PTI, which is a research group that's associated with the Typeu, and 20 years ago they some people started saying, hey, you guys should be supporting free software. So they started up this event called Latino Wear and it's very well positioned because it's right at the border of three countries Paraguay, brazil and Argentina. In fact, the three countries come together right here and so we have a lot of university students from all three countries come here. They come in what they call caravans and they could travel for like 15 or 20 hours in a caravan to come to Latino Wear and listen to speakers and, you know, just enjoy each other's company and things like that. We also get a lot of students who are into computer science, who aren't necessarily into free software They've heard about it but they want to get more exposure. So this is a very good event to come to and I have been coming for over 20 years. I've actually been here for 20 years, since the 20th anniversary, and I enjoy coming here, I enjoy talking with the students and things like that.

So now, how did I get involved with Latin America? I first visited Caracas, venezuela, in 1994. Which I can assume that some of your listeners are always going 1994. Such a long time ago, true, and I was there because of Antigua. The Digital Corporate Corporation used the society in San Diego meeting in Caracas and I got exposed to Latin America. And two years later, in 1996, I went to South Palo and a lot of people in the United States, when you say Latin America, they think of the Amazon or they think of Piranha or, you know, san Buen or something like that. But they don't really connect with the fact that South Palo is the second largest city in the Western Hemisphere, after only Mexico was sitting in New York, being kind of far down the line, and they don't connect with the fact that the University of South Palo has 100,000 students and 16,000 PhDs. So if your interest is in almost anything, there's a person at the University of South Palo who is passionate about it and he was at the University of South Palo in 1996. I saw my first Bay Wolf supercomputer in real life and they were doing some amazing things, and so I started working with the University and then from there a lot of other countries. So I kind of concentrated more in Latin America than I did in Europe or China or the Asian countries, although I still went there too.

So right now, maybe skip ahead a little bit I'm working on two projects in Latin America. One of them is called Caninas Lagus, which stands for Crazy K-Lines, kind of as a tip of the hat to me in maddog, and the project is about designing and manufacturing and distributing little, basically Singapore computers, something along the lines of the Raspberry Pi, but it's slightly different. It has two words to it. One is a board that has the CPU, the GPU, the memory, the flash, everything, and the other is what we call the IOTO board that has the connectors attached to it. It does power management, things like that.

We actually have three board boards. One is 32-bit, one is 64-bit, that has been for a period of time, and the other is a 64-bit board that has additional data lines for the RAM, so you can have more memory than you can have in the first two boards. But all three boards fit into a dim socket, standard dim socket, so that you can slip one board out, stick the other one in change the operating system and not have to replace your IOTO board. So we started this project a number of years ago.

0:09:52 - Dan Lynch
Sorry, now I was just saying that sounds really interesting. It reminds me a little bit of something like the Freedom Box. Possibly Is that any relation.

0:09:59 - Jon "maddog" Hall
Well, the Freedom Box is actually software that can run on a wide variety of different pieces of hardware, and this is hardware that basically, we have Debian as the operating system that we chose to concentrate on, although we would welcome all the distributions of Linux on it W5. We would even I'm going to have to choke on this we would even welcome Microsoft when it when it's not working, if they thought that this was worthwhile doing. But you know they haven't offer this anything yet. So we're really really quite happy with Debian, and on top of this we're building different types of applications. So one of our applications is the port Udoon on top of this and then allow students to be able to sell this to small business people. So instead of a small business person having to shell out all their money for S&P or for a portable enterprise or a portable ERP, they could get this little laboratory system with the Udoon Code on it via printer, cash drawer, scale scanner and actually create a quick sale ERP system for a fraction of the cost of either SAP or portable. And by making this available to students to do this, then the students can actually have a job that could help to pay their way to university without having to flip hamburgers or be a clerk at a night clerk at a hotel Not that there's anything wrong with those jobs, it's just the students are typically going to be the first to hear about it. So these are the types of projects that we're working on in conjunction with Kameena's computers.

You showed another little computer there, something about the size of quarter. That is a sensor computer that we're building. It's using an ARM microcontroller on that, but it still has the same design characteristics. That one board has the CPU, the GPU and all the high speaking ones and the other board is IO, usually Wi-Fi, lower WAN or Bluetooth as the IO thing and we can run that board, that little computer, for about six months on a watchpad. So, that's it.

Yeah, so it's a sensor computer. It gathers up information, turns on its transmitter, transmits it, and then some other computer maybe our little labrador gathers that information, condenses it and sends it on to the next board. And we were going to call that small computer a Chihuahua, but everybody hates Chihuahuas, so we named it Polga instead, which is Polga's Portuguese from Flee and all dogs that are Flee.

0:13:07 - Dan Lynch
So that's true. That is very interesting. So, maddog, I wanted to ask you about well, actually it leads right in with some of the back channel chat we were just having between me and Doc. There you mentioned the M word, Microsoft, and it feels a bit like the elephant in the room is that we all? I say we all, we did all live through the days of Linux as a cancer and all of that which I don't want to get too into. But I'm just wondering how you feel about Microsoft's position now in the open source kind of space. It feels like maybe they've changed a little bit. Is that fair, do you think? Where do you kind of stand on that?

0:13:44 - Jon "maddog" Hall
Okay. So I will tell you that you say we all live through that. I have whip marks on my back that I got from Microsoft. Okay, I was thrown out of conferences because I was trying to hand out CDs, free software. I was not only thrown out of the conference, I was thrown out of the building. I was told I couldn't even just stand out on the street and give them away, that they were going to call the cops.

Now, granted, that was a whole long time ago when Steve Ballmer was still yelling developers, developers, developers, developers. But I will also point out that Microsoft only talks about how much they love open source. Now I'm going to differentiate between open source, which includes licenses like MIT and BSD, where you get a whole bunch of code that you can use and then you can change it to meet your needs, but you don't have to be distributed the source code for your changes when you create your binaries. So the end user still gets a bunch of binaries that they can't change. They can't hire somebody a third party to change it for them is they may as well just be getting closed source. The only one that benefits from the open source is the developer or the company that's distributing it Free. Software, on the other hand, is a reciprocal license, or some people call it copy-link, which says you have to make your changes available to the customer. And not only that, but the latest versions of the GPL say you also have to make any type of special build information available to them so they can actually change the code or support it over time if you lose interest in it and people say oh, maddog, I don't have the expertise to do that. But you could hire somebody who has the expertise to do that.

And the point out where this might be practically useful is that Microsoft stopped supporting XP years ago and that was when millions of people were still using XP. But even now we estimate that about 12 million people are still using XP. They can't put it to new hardware, they can't have new device drivers for it, they can't have any types of bug fixes, they can't extend it. 12 million people. If XP was open source, those 12 million people could form a little community, hire some programmers. And there's lots of companies who would love to have. 12 million people want to support contracts, but they can't because they don't have the source code.

0:16:51 - Dan Lynch
Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but it makes me think a bit of the whole embrace, extend, extinguish approach that we saw from some companies.

0:17:02 - Doc Searls
Well.

0:17:03 - Jon "maddog" Hall
I'm going to be my rare form of being fair to Microsoft. I used to work with Digital Equipment Corporation. I am very well aware of the engineering process. We hire a bunch of engineers and they produce a product and then they support that product and another group of engineers decides the next release and they support that. But sooner or later that first group of engineers has a number of people using that product decreases. You want to take those engineers and put them on the next version. You don't want to have them keep supporting this older and older version. So I understand the business model, but that doesn't change the fact that there's still an estimated 12 million people using Microsoft XP, that they don't dare put these systems on the internet and, like I said, they can't get new hardware. They're stuck with it. Maybe they have an application that only works on XP it's a binary application but for XP it's the only thing it runs. They can't move.

0:18:20 - Dan Lynch
So go on.

0:18:23 - Jon "maddog" Hall
This is a problem. And the second thing is for years people like O'Reilly have been welcoming Microsoft to come to open source events or free software events and they come and they give talks and they tell how great they are. But as far as I know, there's never been a single time that Richard Stallman has been invited to speak to a Microsoft users group. He has been invited to talk to a research group. That doesn't count. He should be invited to talk to a Microsoft users group so he can tell them why they should be using free software. And I would estimate that after Richard Stallman told Microsoft users group where they should be using free software, he did that only one time. Microsoft will only have half the customers left. But that doesn't happen. And Microsoft doesn't love Linux, they love free software, they love copacers. They really don't love free software. They love something that benefits them.

0:19:42 - Doc Searls
This is sort of a natural corporate behavior to some degree. But I want to take a break now and go a little bit deeper into what we're talking about now, especially pulling apart how that, how licenses work, and you were mentioning that earlier. So let's take a quick break now. We'll be back after this. Okay? So, dan, if I'm not mistaken, we're coming out of the break without the guest. We lost the guest, our beloved guest maddog himself. A power outage or some other glitch has happened and he has disappeared, at least for the interim. Well, while our production team labors in the background, make stuff work I don't know if I should say this, but I really just hope he didn't run into Steve Barma or something Didn't turn up down, I don't know, it's interesting so we were on the subject of Microsoft, and and you asked a really good question about you know, is Microsoft like the good guy now and maddog is busy saying, well, they were so bad for so long.

It's kind of hard to wait a minute. You guys got reformed, and he was making this great distinction between free software and open source and really sharing and participating in a community and simply deriving the benefits of open source. And when we didn't go any farther with that, I was suggesting that it might have something to do with the, with the, with the GPL license, the copy left element yeah, the copy left element, because I'm remembering it was a. I was actually Craig Burton, I'll say who it was. He's gone now, sadly.

He would have been a great guest, another late convert to open source, actually, and to free software, who, when he was still at Novel and almost single handedly responsible for the success of Novel back in the 80s and early 90s, he long since left it. By this time, though, when we were talking about the GPL, he said I don't know what to do with that, and I'm wondering how much of it is. I don't know what to do with that versus I do know what to do with something that's free for the taking and I don't know. I don't have to worry about anything else.

0:22:01 - Dan Lynch
And what do you think?

0:22:02 - Doc Searls
about that, I mean it.

0:22:04 - Dan Lynch
Yeah, I mean I think it's really interesting that I think a lot of it needs to be tested in court. I mean I'm definitely not a lawyer by anyone's strategy imagination, certainly not an American lawyer. I know we have different laws between our two nations but it does seem to me that like a lot of this stuff needs to be tested in court a bit more still that, in terms of enforcing copy left it's happened with there have been cases. There have been large scale cases and some involving friends of mine who, back in the days of the software freedom law center if you remember them, I think actually I say if you remember them, but they still going Evan Moglin and all those kind of people. I was a little bit involved with them, helping out with podcasts of all things. But they were actually taking test cases like TV manufacturers who bundle the Linux kernel and some some things like busy box, which is a kind of cut down version of the new tool chain, if I understand rightly, and they were using embedded Linux with busy box on smart TVs and not contributing back to the community and not making the source available for what they've done and all the things that the copy left licenses require, because they were under GPL V2 and they were prosecuting that.

But I don't know the actual outcome of the case, which is bad, I should know, but it went on for a very long time and sadly, I think there's a large thing where you've got a small entity like a busy box, is only a couple of guys, I think, or you know guys or girls I don't know how to use that in a you know, but they couldn't, they would struggle to fight the legal department of a Microsoft, google, son, sadly, no more. Or, or whoever it may be, ibm, because their lawyers are. So you know, they've got so many lawyers, they've got so many good people that can just throw lots of money at it and make you give up, I think, is the problem, and so it's just an interesting one. I think it's not a fair fight in a lot of ways in terms of legally, but I do think that the precedents are probably there for more of these cases to come up and for copy left to be more enforced. And I don't know if you've seen any of that kind of stuff, doc, or you know I haven't.

0:24:17 - Doc Searls
I'm. I'm kind of almost allergic to legal stuff, in the sense that I tend to get snowed under. I mean, I'm not, I think my mind is not built for that. Often in legal work there's, certainly in programming. I'm not a programmer either. The only code I know is Morse, but in much the same way that you, as in programming, you have to remember a lot of things. You're, you know, you're full of logic if stands, whereas else is in the rest of it. And what I'm, what I'm looking at, what I'm kind of hoping to get some insight on, doesn't have to be for you or me. I'm sorry, mad doc provided, but maybe our back channel, which is a thing, is in the market. I mean, I think what Craig Burton said to me, with I don't know what to do with that is, is just like I got. I'm speaking to him now.

I stumble over this functionality, that the freedom this has has to be given to others as well, and even understanding that there's a freedom to use, there's a freedom to do a bunch of other things other than simply use and reuse or or make make your own in some way. And there's a. There's another aspect to this which is a very human thing, which is to use a resource without, without, without, without recognizing the consequences of it, was watching last night the new Ken Burns documentary on the buffalo. Buffalo was the most abundant large animal in America at the point when, when the Europeans arrived and we're driven almost to extinction, and not just by, not just by the, by the immigrants, but by the natives as well as it, to a lesser degree, but they were more respectful of them, but the fact was it was a gigantic market for buffalo everything.

And, and I again, we don't, we don't want to be political here, but I don't think this is a political, this is a scientific matter Pretty much. I mean, humans tend to use things that they can when it's free and available, and just they can just carve it away, you know, we'll just. I mean in England they basically clear, cut forests to make ships, you know, and then and and you know this is just true everywhere we just tend to use what's available with that, when it's not complicated and the GPL seems complicated to people, I think, and I'm not sure it's malevolent in every case, I guess is what I'm saying, but it's certainly not. It takes some mental effort to understand why it is that the GPL and copy left are actually good for business. I mean, this is something that Eric Raymond wrote a lot about back in the decade.

I was going to mention Eric Raymond on that. Yeah, he did a really good job of that because he's a hardcore free market libertarian on the one hand. On the other, he's very much an advocate for and a pragmatist as well. I mean, he was not so much against free software, he was against the label and and and some of the doctrinal insistences that the C free software movement had.

0:27:38 - Dan Lynch
But I suppose the thing is, though I mean from to take the devil's advocate point of view, if you like, which there are no devils, so it would help Exactly.

Yeah, so somebody, somebody like an Eric Raymond, for example, who I don't know, I've never met, but I've heard speak and read some of his writing. Yeah, I believe that his position would be that the freedom not to give others freedom is a freedom. Does that make any sense? So you make something and you, you and sorry, not to enforce other people to share that. So the ultimate freedom is to give someone something and not expect anything back. It would be maybe his point of view or the point of view that I've heard, but I don't know that I necessarily agree with that person.

0:28:23 - Doc Searls
Well, when I have to go back and I'll have to go back and look at it. I spent a lot of time. He stated our house and I knew Eric really well for a long time, but we haven't talked to each other in quite a while as well. But my understanding of it and again I'm subject to correction on this is is that what, what the, what the GPL did, was it kind of held Linux together. It and it held the community together. There was something about copy left as well as strategically. That is part of the reason that Linux succeeded in ways that, say, bsd did not and where GPL products are have a way of succeeding that we don't see with the MIT or the BSD or the more permissive licenses, and I know from having dealt with a lot of companies when I ask what license is using, oh, we're using, we're using MIT license because we do it. It works for us. To simple, they didn't think about it. There was no thinking involved. But maybe in some cases there was thinking involved. I don't know.

0:29:39 - Dan Lynch
There are great many cases and yeah, and there's also the whole patent side of things, because some friends of mine who are involved in this kind of legal space and educated me on the fact that the Apache 2 license is one of the first permissive licenses to actually deal with patent Matters as well, so it's an interesting one. I don't know whether it be classed as a this where we need Simon, isn't it Simon? I don't know if it's free software license, apache 2, but I think I think it might be alright. I certainly know some of my friends who are free software advocates and copy left advocates still say that at least Apache 2, which was a Google favorite for a very long time, does have patent provision, which some, some don't. And I'm getting into legal stuff again, so I can see you getting to worry. I'm going to get no, I'm not.

0:30:28 - Doc Searls
I was thinking of a lot, of, a lot of times. What we do is we, we work with what's familiar to us, you know. I mean, there's a one project I know of right now that when the developer told me that they're using a license because he's an Apache guy. He worked on Apache, he was in the community, he's very active in it, as a matter of fact, and and so it's familiar, it's just, it's just inherited it, as it were, for this, yeah, we're doing the Apache license why? Well, because it's what I use, you know, it's kind of. It's kind of like you're, you know, like we always ask at the end of the show. You know your choice of text editor in scripting languages. I like Python, I always use right.

0:31:13 - Dan Lynch
So yeah, sorry, doc, I'm cutting in you, but I just mentioned the fact that in our chat here are I'll see chat that we have going along during the show They've been talking you were talking about buffalo and they and bison and they're talking about bison, but it all links back in because I can think of his canoe, because that's the exactly, yeah it's a.

It's a. You know, you had the bison project. You had other things that came out of New. There was a reason, I think, why Richard storm and maybe chose that as the logo.

0:31:41 - Doc Searls
I don't know just just, I haven't. I'm looking at At the back, at the back channel. I've got a bunch of equations and it ended, so maybe I missed that one. Yeah, for those who don't know, bison and buffalo are the same, they're more, they're numbered because the buffalo, including the water buffalo or the canoe, is the new water buffalo.

0:32:00 - Dan Lynch
I think it might be interesting, it might be yeah, I can tell you that in France I don't speak a lot of French, although I live there very for a very short period of time. I tried, but I wasn't great at French, but I did learn. There was a guy had a farm nearby and he had Bison on the farm, and I don't French, for bison is B song.

0:32:20 - Doc Searls
That would totally make sense yeah, yeah same same spelling, just different.

Yeah, yeah, it's just the emphasis on the final syllable in the French way. I yeah, I worked in France for short periods in the mid 90s, never long enough to pick up the language I really wanted to. I go, I sit in the metro, going somewhere with my la Russ and and I would look at the words in ads that are in the in the subway and and I think, okay, I'll, I'm going to memorize 20 words a day and after two weeks I'm getting there, you know, and, and the next day I remember what you and the valley, so the other words. But there is simple and nothing else. It didn't stick because it was already getting old. You know, it's a different. I just absorb that quickly.

0:33:11 - Dan Lynch
Yeah, it can be a difficult language to learn, but I'm it's really interesting that people are discussing this. There are so many links in back to the kind of subject of Copy left and so on and them licensing. I mean, I matched, although I'm definitely, as I say once again, not a lawyer. This does not constitute legal advice in any fashion, but I do love licenses. I'm a bit of a licensed geek, so I'm not in as much as, say, someone like Simon are esteemed co-host, but yeah.

0:33:38 - Doc Searls
You two can be a designated license geeks.

0:33:40 - Dan Lynch
I'm well, I'm, I'm a true enthusiast.

0:33:44 - Doc Searls
But I have that. I look at effects. I mean that. To me that's the interesting thing is like where did this work and why did it work, you know? And Was it so much the particulars of the license or the habits of people are already in it, or moral sympathies, or or all the above? Linus chose that the GPL in the first place for, I think, strategic reasons, and but he also for strategic reasons he did not go with the GPL three. I have stories about that which I will go tell one. Actually, let's do it after a break. Let's do it after break. We'll take a quick break and then come back with it with one of those stories back after this. Is this working, guys? I think.

0:34:32 - Dan Lynch
I think it's working. I'm happy.

0:34:36 - Doc Searls
I don't know where we're back. Okay, we're back, so just go ahead yeah so we were talking about.

0:34:42 - Dan Lynch
We talked about licensing and the GPL V2 and the GPL V3. I had the privilege of being at. You may have even been there, doc. I was at the first Lennox con in Portland in 2009.

0:34:53 - Doc Searls
I was not there. I was a Linux world, so is it several of those? So?

0:34:58 - Dan Lynch
this was the next foundations equivalent one they called it on. I was at the first one, anyway, and I was with my friend Bradley, who we talked about before and he was at the time very much trying to because he was heavily involved in drafting GPL V3. And there were a number of the kernel developers, very prominent kernel developers. People are likes of Ted show, for example, and obviously he lived up there yeah, yeah, and one of the best introductions I've ever seen for somebody.

So Ted gave a talk. I met him through Bradley and again this was like to me. He was like, oh my god, I'm meeting Ted. Show you know, this guy is incredible, but he was introduced on stage at Linux con as the man who's lost more of your data than anyone else.

Because he was the file system right, he made the XT file system, which is now XT4. Which is still a default on most Linux distributions, but at the time it was very much the default. But yeah, he was introduced for his key notice, the man who's lost more of your data than anyone else, which was good. But on the whole GPL V3 thing, because I was with Bradley, he was going round and talking to people like Ted About moving the kernel to V3 and Linus was there or Linus, I should say, because that's how he pronounces it and I actually got to meet him as well.

So I met him very briefly and he was getting a coffee. So everybody was because it was Linus. It's Linus 12-olds and you're out of the people are going to swamp him. So, yeah, it was just. I ended up having a privilege of meeting him and getting him to sign a program for me which we gave away on podcast as a gift Sorry, as a prize, not a gift for the listeners which was really fantastic. But I did overhear a lot of conversations about why the GPL V3 was made and maddog is back.

0:36:44 - Doc Searls
I see him in the tip. I see him too.

0:36:49 - Dan Lynch
Can you hear us?

0:36:50 - Doc Searls
OK, so it's 2023 and technology is still imperfect, and we lost maddog for the second time, and so let's carry on with where you were going already, dan, with your story in Portland. Yeah so with Linus and Ted.

0:37:06 - Dan Lynch
Yeah, of course. So Linus wasn't. So I should recap for people in case they're joining in, joining us at this point Very quickly I was in Portland, in Oregon, of course, in the US of A, for Linuxcon 2009, the first one where I got to meet Linus 12-olds for all of five minutes. You make it. You very graciously don't make it sound like I was having a drink with Linus and Ted and we were all hanging out, but Linus wasn't, wasn't there for that part. But I did meet him and get him to sign something for me and he was very, very nice to me, which I was a bit not surprised about, because he can be quite short with people on the Linux kernel developers lists and stuff. I wasn't sure whether he'd be happy for someone to come up to him and go, oh, can you sign this for me, but he was great.

So we were talking about GPL V3. I was with a friend of mine who was trying to convince Ted Ted Cho, who's a kernel developer, file system developer, formerly a serverist developer, I believe which I was told to ask him about by a friend of mine about moving the kernel, the next kernel, from GPL V2, which it currently is under, to GPLv3, which is obviously a newer version of SED license, a copy left license which links into our earlier discussion, and it was really interesting to experience that, because the impression I got was that many of the kernel developers whose conversations I ever heard were actually very positive about the idea of moving to GPLv3. They actually liked the idea, because what happened with v2, the argument was that Linus chose GPLv2 all those years ago it's a license from 1991, I believe so, even in 2009,. It was quite out of date and it didn't have provisions for patents. It didn't have things that had since developed to become a problem for free software and open source software.

So they were quite positive about it, but it never happened, which was a real shame, and I didn't think that it would, because the issue with the kernel, which you may be able to speak to as well, doc, is that the copyright is retained by the individual developers, so the lines that they contribute to the kernel, often unless it's on behalf of a company. There are lots of individual people out there who are kernel developers, who have little bits of copyrighted copy left, I should say code in the kernel, and they would all need to agree for there to be a license change and I don't think they will ever fully agree. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

0:39:37 - Doc Searls
I don't have thoughts, I have more. Have like I don't have thoughts, I have opinions. There's an important difference. Where I go with this is that a lot of great work had thought, and I especially love and respect Evan Moglen a lot, and the same goes for RMS and goes for Bradley and all of the fully principled people out there that are and I know them I'm one of those ones. On privacy, I just think that any kind of surveillance, unwanted surveillance, is wrong on its face, and so I kind of stand for that.

What's interesting to me is that, from both the development perspective and a business perspective, as a second order of the development is why something succeeds. I mean, when we started Linux Journal Al Hale, phil Hughes, who started Linux Journal it was going to be Free Software Journal and I don't know if he did have some disagreement with Richard, but I don't know what it was. But then Richard has lots of disagreements with lots of people. Who knows right? I mean, I have tapes of interviews with him which are so interesting and someday we'll go somewhere with them. But at some point when we were talking, we had this email round thread, and this is when, I hate to admit, my email was with AOL at that time. This is back in early 90s because I couldn't get on the internet yet and internet wasn't, there were no ISPs I could get on, I wasn't at a university or a big company and I also had a copy server on one side. Whatever worked, and we went around about starting a Free Software magazine. All of a sudden, I don't know where, phil said Linux, is it? I know this kid. This is this kid from Finland who's got this thing. It's going to be at 1.0 soon. I want to come out with the magazine when it hits 1.0. And that was in April of 94.

And he saw something in just in Linux and how, where Linux was coming from, that was let's build it on this. This will succeed. And it was an awesome call. But was what he saw in there the GPL, or was it just that he saw a lot of developers lining up around it? And was that because the GPL was involved or not? I think it was. I think the GPL had a lot to do with it, but I don't know the specifics of how that happened. I do know that Linus is very adamant about not going with the GPL 3. And he got into arguments with, I don't know, directly, with Evan or with Bradley or anybody else involved, but the reasons you give are plausible ones. I mean that makes sense. Yeah, I mean.

0:42:46 - Dan Lynch
So the reasons, the things that I overheard or was privileged to overhear were arguments about things like patent provision and the fact that under the GPL v3, once again, I am no kind of lawyer and this does not constitute legal advice. I have to keep saying that because my lawyer friends all do this. Whenever they go, you know they say something, they preface it with. This does not constitute legal advice, so that you know sign and wait Anyway. And also another friend of mine who is a lawyer told me that if you ask a lawyer a question, a direct question, the answer will always be maybe Right.

0:43:21 - Doc Searls
They're not going to give you an actual answer because or another question, or another question, a question about your question. Yeah, exactly.

0:43:29 - Dan Lynch
So yeah, it was really interesting. So the GPL v3 has exceptions what they call exceptions in it and it's kind of like modules of a license. So if you think of it in software terms, you're choosing which clauses you want to invoke in the license. So when you license something under GPL v3, which I haven't done, I may be completely wrong on this, and I understand that what you can do is use the clauses to say I want this place, but, like creative commons, I want it to be, I want it to be share alike or copy left, I want it to be commercial, I want it to be commercial, all those things. You can almost kind of tailor the license a bit more to be what you want it to be, rather than just being stuck with GPL v2, which was written like a big monolithic thing. That was, yeah, that is interesting.

0:44:21 - Doc Searls
I'm involved in something like this right now with a standard we're baking for IEEE.

The IEEE, which is very much a corporate entity working for companies, made a decision and invited me and other people in on this to work on standards that work for people and not just for companies.

So we're working on one called P7012, p7012 for machine readable personal privacy terms, and the big thing we're looking at right now is, I mean, what we want to have the things say is something like what you're talking about with GPL v3 and that we have with creative comments, which is, you can pick a bunch of different agreements that you're going to lay on companies.

I mean one would be, for example, don't track me anywhere under any circumstances, or track me only on site here and give none of that information to anybody else. Or go ahead and show me ads, just make sure they're not based on tracking me. That actually is a written agreement and is written by Harvard Law School for us and as one of the possible things, but there would be like not that many variants of it they would all be basically privacy terms, because privacy is basically, I mean, a privacy statement is what you wish other people to know. We're not know or do or not do, and it should be fairly simple and straightforward. And maybe we should be looking at the GPL3 and the provisions that are in that. That would be an interesting look at it.

0:45:57 - Dan Lynch
We've got a little bit of a question from a loquacious who's in the IRC. It's not a question as such, but kind of they're asking whether you can sell something that's under GPL, v3 or even V2. And as you and I both know, doc, you can definitely sell. You can sell whatever you want.

0:46:12 - Doc Searls
Right, yeah, I can sell you a bottle of air right here it is.

0:46:16 - Dan Lynch
Yeah, exactly. But the license itself does not prevent you from selling and profiting from the sale of the software. If I so, it's about adding value. If I sell you a piece of software that's on a I'm trying to give a good example on a USB flash drive, right, you want some software? This is an old school, real world thing. You're not downloading it. You come to me I say here's the software, it's under GPL and I can sell it to you. But I have to also provide you with the source to the software.

If it's a combined, if it's a compiled piece of software, it's a binary blob or anything like that, I have to also allow you to see the source code, to improve the source code, to learn from it the freedoms, the four freedoms that they talk about.

That's where that comes in, because you have to be able to see the source. You have the right to study, you have the right to modify, as long as you contribute back your modifications under the same license. So if you are a customer and you make smart TVs again is the example and I say here you go, Linux embedded system for you, here, That'll do what you want, and the Linux kernel itself is under GPL v2, which requires copy left. So if you, some large TV manufacturers who I won't name, in many countries around the world have been selling TVs with embedded Linux operating systems and never providing any of the source code for the customizations that they've made and they are clearly making a lot of money out of it they're illegally allowed to do that. There's nothing against it in the license. What they're not allowed to do is then keep the changes that they've made to themselves and not contribute them back to the community.

0:47:52 - Doc Searls
It's an interesting one. The Sony Bravia 1K TV that we bought I guess it was like two grand, something like that in 2006 came along with the instructions, a two page print out of the GPL saying we have to provide you with this. Our lawyers say because we have to live with this. This is here, but then nothing like what you just said. No evidence that whatever modifications they made with that and I'm pretty sure pretty much everything since then is running on Linux and I'm not sure many of those are doing any of this and, worse, on the privacy side, they're all spying on you at this point.

0:48:36 - Dan Lynch
There was a big case with airlines because airlines have their onboard entertainment systems where they have a screen in the back of the seat and you can watch films. You can do whatever you're going to do. Most of those run on Linux. They run on a Linux media server system, not exactly embedded. It might be a server somewhere on the plane which has a lot of video files on it for all the different films that people might want to watch or TV programs, whatever it is, and that's all done from Linux. And there's been high profile cases where the aviation companies have not complied with the GPL over things like their entertainment systems.

0:49:15 - Doc Searls
I have somewhere I shot with a phone, the I don't know. It was a Debian screen or when the entertainment system on a plane failed. There's the little penguin and a whole bunch of text, colonel Panic.

0:49:32 - Dan Lynch
So we very quickly years ago. I had an episode of Linux Outlaws, the podcast. I was on. One of the very early episodes we did was because I'd been on a plane and seen just that, but it was a Colonel Panic and it came up on the screen Colonel Panic and I was like Colonel Panic at 3000 foot in the air. I don't think I like the sound of that.

0:49:49 - Doc Searls
The episode is cool, I know, I know, I know that it's all the fun.

0:49:53 - Dan Lynch
It's just wonderful, it's tied to everything else.

0:49:55 - Doc Searls
Oh my God, it's a. It's a, Mr Serles.

0:49:58 - Speaker 2
I've seen that screen and it always reminded me of like Nopics. You remember Nopics? Oh yeah, you would run from the CD and I would. I would pull that up and it was like wait a minute, hold on. This is on the plane, this is running the plane. Should I be? Can I start? No, it's like.

0:50:14 - Doc Searls
I know there's a United to their enormous credit, and it's one of the things I loved about them had this feature called from the flight deck and you could listen into the chatter between the pilots and the ground, and especially if you're going through turbulence is very reassuring because you just listen to it and they clearly don't care or they're just completely stoic about it and which, basically, is their training. But but it's, it's incredibly interesting and but you know, they've dropped that in most of their planes at this point, which is sad. But yeah, I wondered when I've seen that. But the thing is that the entertainment system routinely fails in all planes.

0:50:54 - Dan Lynch
They're just bad, they're not just the entertainment system. How many times have you been to an airport and seen, you know, the flight board where they put the flights, and it's got a right and that usually goes.

0:51:02 - Doc Searls
that used to fail to windows. So I mean it would be like a blue screen of death, yeah, yeah, it was there People who put published on the BS BSOD forums. So we're a wrap time, so maybe you already told us what your favorite text editor and scripting language is. I have, since you're not a guest.

0:51:22 - Dan Lynch
Well, I'm happy to tell you again very quickly. My favorite scripting languages are bash and Python and I use and this is where I'm kind of glad that I don't have to make myself ashamed in front of mad dog here I mostly use Visual Studio code which is open source and it's a Microsoft product, but it's fully open source and it's really good and I feel kind of guilty about it, but it's good. That's all I can say.

0:51:50 - Doc Searls
Well, we've had Miguel because on here who reached out from the open source community. He loved C sharp, he loved what they were doing with whatever the sort of larger effort was around that ended up working there for a period of time. There are good people doing good work there. There's no doubt about it, including people in the who started in the Linux world. So next week you do your plugs.

0:52:18 - Dan Lynch
Well, I look up was no problem. And yeah, yeah, no problem. So, yeah. So if you want to find out anything about what I'm up to, you can go to Dan Lynchorg, which is in the lower third for people watching the video, and ants very kindly put up a lovely picture. That's me in my cowboy hat. That's a genuine Texan Stetson that my friend got for me from Texan. She's a Texan and she brought me a Texan hat and I was like that's amazing. So, yeah, you can find music on there. You can find podcasts. You can go to Dan Lynchorg slash music. If you want to find music, you can go to my very out of date blog. There's a blog on there which I haven't updated in about a year, I think, at this point, so I will need to do that.

You can buy the music on bandcamp. You can listen to it for free on bandcamp. You're welcome to steal it. Don't worry about it. It's under Creative Commons. It's under Creative Commons. It's actually licensed in the copy left theme. It's licensed under Creative Commons attribution share alike, so go and enjoy that.

0:53:12 - Doc Searls
There's a forum I've recently joined called something like abandoned Indiana, and it's old places in Indiana that have been abandoned one way or another. I was thinking there ought to be one of abandoned blogs like good abandoned blogs Our legacy of that there is still up and somebody's still paying for that domain name. Some of mine have been like that for a while, but they're still there. Next week we have Frank Carltasek. He's from Next Cloud and that's Next and Cloud. I know Frank.

0:53:45 - Dan Lynch
Sorry, oh, great Well, I've met him. He won't know who I am.

0:53:49 - Doc Searls
I've met him at a conference, yes, Jonathan Penciled in right now is the guest host. Jonathan, you'll do a great job. But if we bring you back. We could have you three weeks in a row, which might be a new record.

I think, Jonathan will have a show, I'm sure he will. So that's coming up next week and so in the meantime, thanks everybody. Thank you, maddog. Wherever you are, we'll have you back. We have openings here and there and we'll have you back when you're home on your two megabit, enviable in each direction, fiber connection, and your two gigabit. Now make a bit. No, that would be bad, that would be very bad. We've had that before. That didn't work. That's probably what he was on in Brazil anyway. So we'll do that and in the meantime, see everybody. See you next week.

0:54:44 - Mikah Sargent & Jason Howell
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