FLOSS Weekly 761 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, and this week I'm joined by Catherine Druckman and Dan Lynch and Simon Phipps. And Leo LaPorte himself to celebrate the victory of Floss Freed Libra Open Source. We succeeded. We succeeded as a community. We succeeded as a cause, and we succeeded as a show. And this in fact is our final show. It's the last Floss Weekly, so tune into that. It's a good one and it's a great way to go out. And that's coming up next

TWiT (00:00:39):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This Twit Twit,

Doc Searls (00:00:47):
This is Floss Weekly episode 761, recorded Wednesday, December 13th, 2023. We won. This episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by Bit Warden, the open source password manager to help you stay safe online, get started with a free teams or enterprise plan trial, or get started for free across all devices as an individual user at bit warden.com/twit. And by Collide, that's Collide with a k Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Visit collide.com/floss to book an on demand demo today. Hello again, everyone everywhere. This is Floss Weekly. I am Doc Siles, and this week we're having a round table and I see there are five people around table, including two of me on my screen here from the uk, well in advance of the us both Simon Phipps and Dan Lynch representing fc. What football club are you for? Do you care? I know Dan is for Liverpool. Simon doesn't care. Is there one in Southampton? There must be a football club. There is a relegated one maybe or I don't know.

Simon Phipps (00:02:17):
Allegedly. All I know is it disrupts the traffic like the cruise liner do.

Doc Searls (00:02:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And from Houston, Texas. Catherine Druckman. I'm going to

Katherine Druckman (00:02:28):
Start talking like that. Yes, that's me. Maybe I do talk like that. I don't even know, huh?

Doc Searls (00:02:34):
No, you don't. Okay,

Katherine Druckman (00:02:35):
We'll find out. We'll find out. No, you don't.

Simon Phipps (00:02:37):
That's the rest of us that have accents

Doc Searls (00:02:39):
And we are here to celebrate, not at the end of the year, but toward the end of the year. The victory, if you could call it that, of floss of flossy free Libre open source, which we've been fighting for on this show for I don't know how many years, maybe somebody in the back channel.

Katherine Druckman (00:02:56):
I saw 17 somewhere.

Doc Searls (00:02:58):
Yeah, it's 750 some episodes. So a lot of them. And we won, and this is debatable. We already had a bit of a debate before the show. Maybe just finger one of you. So Catherine, your job is talking open source at Intel. It really is. So what if you won Intel over? I mean that's your

Katherine Druckman (00:03:22):
Yes, it was all me. Intel was won over many, many years ago before I got there. But yeah, so part of winning is that it is ubiquitous and open source software is very important to any big technology company. Certainly critical software is made with open source components at minimum and more likely it's completely open source. Look at something like Kubernetes, one of the biggest success stories since Linux I would say, or Apache. It's everywhere. But I think that changes the conversation, which is kind of what I'm interested for us to get into. What does that victory mean? What does the ubiquity of open source mean? And a lot of times those conversations come up in insecurity conversations and regulation conversations. And I think that's going to be an interesting, I'm anxious to hear from Simon and Dan and you on all of these things.

Doc Searls (00:04:13):
Yeah, I would hear from Simon first because just in advance of the show, he shared some numbers that I thought were astonishing. So many billions of dollars, euros, pounds. What is that? What is the story? Well,

Simon Phipps (00:04:29):
It depends on which source you look at, but it's generally understood that the software, and I can talk about Europe because my job at the moment is talking about public policy in relation to technology in Europe. And so I can tell you that the European IT industry, 10% of its turnover is generated by open source software. And between 85 and 99% of all the software on the market in Europe, we estimate about 95% is made at least half with open source. And another estimate suggests that the average open source content in any commercial product exceeds 90%. So what people are doing is they're building on open source to come to market. It's allowing them to come to market faster. It's allowing them to have a more secure base. And the result of that is that open source is now generating over a billion euros of GDP for the European Union.

(00:05:32):
And the inevitable consequence of that is open source is now 25 this year. Free software as a concept is 40 years old this year. And as a consequence of those two great big numbers, the regulators have showed up. And so this year I've been dealing with over nine separate legislative packages in the European Commission and there's a more, and the same thing is happening in Washington DC and the same thing is happening in Japan and China and India. The regulators are coming and the people who are briefing them say that we are the enemy. And so we've come from the place where we were the plucky, underdog fighting Microsoft to the place where we are the dominant party partnering with Microsoft. And I think that that's the big change to talk about.

Doc Searls (00:06:24):
Okay. So when these people are characterizing open source as the enemy or we as individuals or as a collective, I suppose as the enemy, in what sense? Insecure, as Katherine mentioned earlier, no.

Simon Phipps (00:06:39):
So people, we gave names to our failures. We call them things like Heartbleed. The proprietary failures typically don't have names because they're all done in secret. And so nobody knows how deep the hole is and how bad the poison is. But all of our failures are very public. And so the folk, they're typically from big telecoms companies who are busy undermining open source. They're saying how incur it is and how unprofessional it is and what a risk it introduces into the organization and how it allows people from foreign countries to work on the code in your company. And they say those sorts of things that's on their brief list and that may sound like old stuff from years ago, but their people are still saying that today.

Dan Lynch (00:07:32):
But if you're in a country, you would say, sorry, go

Doc Searls (00:07:34):
Ahead. What's that Dan?

Dan Lynch (00:07:36):
No, sorry. I was just going to say if you're in a country other than the US and you're buying your software from an American company, you're allowing foreigners to work on your software anyway and you can't see what they're doing. So for me, that's not, the argument was won a long time ago, but it seems like it keeps coming back up. It just won't go.

Simon Phipps (00:07:53):
No, this is the great thing with when you're dealing with people who are making populist arguments is they tend to accuse you with the things they're guilty of themselves. There are certain politicians that are not allowed to talk about who tend to do that as well. So you see it happening routinely in the lobbying that's going on, certainly in Europe, and I'm sure in Washington DC as well. You get all the proprietary companies saying how the insecurity and obscurity of the supply chain is a threat to your security when it's actually their supply chain that is okay.

Dan Lynch (00:08:28):
Absolutely.

Simon Phipps (00:08:29):
And in their software, which is insecure, you hear them talking about how it's foreign nationals being involved in your it when actually if you're here in Europe, it's all of those foreign nationals who are unaccountable to your government, who are involved in the it. So I think it's just another one of those populist argument things as they point the finger, they've got three fingers pointing back at themselves.

Dan Lynch (00:08:53):
Years ago I saw

Katherine Druckman (00:08:55):
On the SolarWinds site, speaking of high profile security issues, but on the SolarWinds site, and I don't know if this content came from SolarWinds or it was just a user generated, but I saw a post describing using open source software as eating off of a dirty fork. There's this sort of, and then I thought, oh, that didn't age well. So an example if you will, of the type of thing that Simon's talking about. I would say, doc, you like to describe Muggles versus wizards, right? Less technical people versus more technical people. And I think in this case it's maybe the muggles discovered things like, what do you mean just anybody can contribute to this software and then make a poll request assuming they know what a poll request is. And I think that concept is very hard to grasp for people who do not work in software

Doc Searls (00:09:45):
Toward what Simon was saying about a campaign against open source. The same thing is being done here in the US toward fiber, especially open fiber and community fiber and city led fiber by the telcos. The telcos don't want to compete with, and the cable companies don't want to compete with fiber. The telcos are picking it up a bit now, but the story's the same. You don't know what's going on and you need big companies doing all their own work. There's an interesting backstory here, and I'm wondering Catherine, if it applies to Intel a thousand years ago in 1999, I think back in the last millennium. Anyway, I was witness to what happened at IBM, which is that IBM was sort of like just talking about we're going to use some open source software to do WebSphere or something like that. And then the next year at Linux World, they had beanbags everywhere and ethernet laying on the floor. wifi wasn't mature yet, and they had a big team of people there now wearing sneakers and no longer wearing the black shoes all about open source. They're talking about it. But in truth, what happened, what I gathered was that every old, not every, but many of the old Windows boxes were now running samba everywhere.

(00:11:15):
And what they found was that they had to get in compliance with their own engineers. A giant engineering company has to do that. And I think the same thing happened to some degree with Microsoft. I haven't heard a precise story about that. The only thing I heard on that was well being the search engine was running entirely on Linux, and I think it was actually running on Akamai to begin with. They were hiring, they were hiring cloud to do it. I dunno what the story is now, but they got very much behind open source at least in some ways. But I dunno, was that the case with Intel? Intel has always been pretty friendly, at least the time

Katherine Druckman (00:11:52):
To my knowledge. Again, all of this is the adoption of open source and community involvement in Intel is way, way before my time. But I think Intel realized, again to my knowledge because this is a long time ago, realized the benefit of contributing to these projects. So many projects. I mean I can't even, there are, so the number of projects that a company like Intel contributes to and I'm sure Microsoft and Google, any big tech company, it's kind of mind boggling actually. So yeah, they realize the benefit early on and that has been the case ever since. But again, hardware company's quite different from a software company, so it's a little bit of a different conversation.

Dan Lynch (00:12:38):
But I mean, speaking of Intel, I've always found, and I think, I dunno if Simon will explode at this, but I've always found Intel to be quite friendly when it comes to things like drivers and so on for their hardware.

Katherine Druckman (00:12:47):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it behooves intel to be friendly. Yeah.

Simon Phipps (00:12:51):
Yeah. I mean Intel was always one of the good guys. It's other companies that are more of a challenge. Again, I'm going to avoid naming too many names.

Katherine Druckman (00:13:01):
Thank you Simon. I say that's one of the reasons I joined Intel because it, it's a good feeling to know that you're going to a place that values what you value.

Simon Phipps (00:13:13):
Yeah, I mean Intel was a big supporter of Open Solaris when we were doing that at the Sun. They were willing to invest in things that were not the obvious winners in order to make sure that there was diversity in the market and that Intel was well represented everywhere. And I think that's something of an exemplar as an open source backer. I mean think that changes, things come and go and the staff gradually has been changing quite a lot at Intel over the last year. And the way that it works has been changing quite a lot. So there are never permanently any good guys, which is as we're discovering. But nonetheless, I think Intel's been a pretty good player there. And again, at some we try very much to aim to have that open approach as well. So I work very hard to get our Silicon chips open source by publishing the very login.

(00:14:06):
I don't think Intel's gone that far yet. Whereas we found that there were some other suppliers of chips to our company who stood in our way solidly when we tried to open source drivers to Solaris. They refused to allow us to publish the specs of the chips that we were using in our hardware. And they meant that it was impossible for us to get full peer Linux support, which we try very hard to do in the mid two thousands. So Intel, I've got a lot of time for both its approach and its products, and I just wish that all their competitors had the same willingness to take risks with their Intel's willing to take the gamble that adoption was going to be a better benefit than secrecy, whereas companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm don't have any of those instincts.

Doc Searls (00:15:00):
I want to go, go ahead.

Dan Lynch (00:15:02):
No, I was just going to say to your point doc about Microsoft and them supposedly and Simon's Point as well about Microsoft becoming, we are now kind of in bad with them. You've only got to look at GitHub, they own GitHub now, which is where a lot of open source projects, free software projects, maybe not free software projects anyway, but certainly a lot of open source projects are based, but GitHub itself is proprietary. The software that runs GitHub is proprietary. So it's an interesting one because we're kind of building a castle again on sand in some ways We talking,

Doc Searls (00:15:33):
Did it start out that way? I mean GI itself, I don't know,

Dan Lynch (00:15:39):
GI is free software, but GitHub has things in it that GI does not. So pull requests, the concept of a pull request comes from GitHub, it doesn't come from Git. And that's something that GitHub added. And I don't know if it's free software to be honest, but I don't think that certainly the web platform, the hosting platform, I don't think you can't get the code and run it yourself. It's not like you can host self-host your own GitHub branded repository.

Simon Phipps (00:16:07):
This is where it's so important to focus on the self sovereignty of the end user. There's a bunch of companies out there that are using open source software to gain market share, but when it comes to sharing the freedoms of free software and the openness of open source software with their end users, they decide that that's not what they want to do. So we've seen this year a sequence of companies decide that they're going to introduce non-compete licensing to their source code, gradually take the journey towards being proprietary like CRM did. And I think we need to make sure that we encourage people to associate open source with end user self sovereignty and not with any other concept like time to market or developer access or any other thing which serves the vendor rather than the end user.

Doc Searls (00:17:01):
That's good. I want to go deeper into self sovereignty and in licensing as well in the role of OSI. And I want to get to that after. I'll let everybody know that this episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by Bit Warden, the only open source cross-platform password manager you can trust. Security now is Steve Gibson has even switched over with Bit Warden. All of the data in your vault is end to end encrypted and not just your passwords. Bit Warden protects you by creating unique usernames and adding strong randomly generated passwords for each account or using any of their six integrated email alias services. You can log into Bit Warden and decrypt your vault after using SSO on a registered trusted device. No master password is needed on top of being public to the world. Bit Warden has professional third party audits performed yearly and published on its website.

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(00:19:15):
So Simon, you've been with OS I for a very long time and I want to go back to when, I mean you just said earlier that we're at the 2020 fifth anniversary of open source from 1998. 1998 was when the letter went out from Eric Raymond saying something like, goodbye free software, hello, open source or something like that. But a lot of geeks got together. I was not in that meeting, but I was close to it, reported on it and was part of the team basically that promulgated open source successfully. I mean, I ask people if they know what open source is at random and they often know the word, don't know what it means, but they know the words and use it. So that's a big success. We won with that. But almost immediately with OSI, especially the conversation centered around licenses and we've proliferated licenses over the years that free software came with two licenses, I think GPL and A GPL early on. So is that right? You're tilting your head, you filming

Simon Phipps (00:20:29):
It L GPL

Doc Searls (00:20:30):
L on truth because I'm winging it was

Simon Phipps (00:20:32):
GPL and LGPL,

Doc Searls (00:20:34):
I'm sorry, A GPL came along later, I'm sorry.

Simon Phipps (00:20:38):
And then they also added a license for documentation as well. Free documentation license,

Doc Searls (00:20:45):
Right.

Simon Phipps (00:20:46):
So I mean licensing is very important because it's the licensing that concretely gives you the freedom to do what you want with the software without asking for further permission from the rights holders, without the license, nothing would work. And this was one of my early criticisms of GitHub is that GitHub didn't ask people who put code on GitHub to make sure it was licensed in a way that people other than GitHub could use it. In the early days of GitHub, almost all the software was unlicensed. And so that meant it was under copyright control and that meant that nobody could legally use any of the software on GitHub. So although it's a tricky thing because it's legal and there's expertise associated with it, the license is profoundly important. What allows you to be self-sovereign in the software. And so I don't think anyone should ever allow that to be deprecated, to go unsaid that if you're using software and it doesn't have an OSR approved license, then you can't guarantee you've got the freedoms that you need to use the software.

(00:21:57):
And that's the reason why the path that all of these database vendors mainly have been taking over the last couple of years is so bad is because you can't be sure when you use MongoDB or Redis and all the others, that you've actually got the freedom to do the thing that you intend to do with the software and that you will have that freedom in perpetuity throughout the life of your project because they've decided to step back from guaranteeing end user self sovereignty. So licensing sounds geeky, it sounds legalistic, but it's absolutely the anchor of what's going on. That isn't to say that the freedoms aren't important because the whole reason we did this was to give end users the confidence that they're self-sovereign in their digital universe. And I've been trying to work out how to say that without saying either open source or free software for quite a long time because open source is free software, free software is open source, making a distinction between the two is divisive.

(00:23:01):
And so the best solution I've found is to not use either term and to talk about end user digital sovereignty. That's the key phrase that I've been using recently. And that's the reason we all came into it. So if the objective of putting it under the license isn't to deliver end user digital sovereignty, then it's probably not really open source no matter what else is going on. And I think that that's the emergent truth that's coming out of the increasing collaboration between the world of free software and the rest of the open universe that actually what really matters is end user self sovereignty and that's the thing to fight for. That's the thing to tell the legislators that we need not some other piece of construct, which sounds and smells like it's ever so worth in open, but doesn't actually deliver end user self sovereignty.

Doc Searls (00:23:58):
So Dan and or Catherine, are you talking self sovereignty when you talk about open source? Are you thinking in those terms?

Katherine Druckman (00:24:06):
It depends on the context. So if we're having an ideological conversation, then absolutely the type of conversation you and I tend to have elsewhere and here, but yeah, then yes, absolutely. But if I'm talking about software, this is difficult because software does not exist in the silo. But I don't know, again, it depends on the context. I like to think so. Again, when I'm talking about the ideology of it all, but I'm not always talking about the ideology of it all.

Dan Lynch (00:24:40):
However you did. That was a great answer by the way. I'd kind of like to just say plus one to what happens, but that would be really lazy. No, I really like that term, self sovereignty. It's not sovereignty if I could say it properly. It's not a term that, it's not a phrase that I've used often, but I'm going to steal that and use it because that is very good. I think Simon's very right in the fact that, and I know Simon does too, I have a lot of friends in the free software camp and the open source camp, and I don't think there should be any of those camps. I think we're all on the same side as just what Simon was saying. It's the same thing. We're all fighting for the same things. So I think that historic battle between the two, if we could abstract from that, which is what Simon was saying, that would be good.

(00:25:29):
I think for everyone, and I think self sovereignty, when I talk to people about the idea of open source or free software, I always say to them, you would like to be able to look at the code, the freedoms that Simon talked about, the things that are in all of these OSI licenses and free software licenses to be able to look at the study, the code to run the code for your own purpose, to modify the code to redistribute code. I kind of explain those things to them and usually they pick it up pretty quickly and they can see why it's useful. I suppose it depends who you're arguing with. That's what Catherine said about context. I say arguing who you're talking to about it. If you're talking to a salesperson from certain companies who sells proprietary software, then they're not going to necessarily agree with you on what you've got to say.

(00:26:23):
But I find most people are quite open-minded. And one of the big things that I always say to, I've done some talks to university students who want to be developers, and I always say to them, they come to me and they'll say, I want to be a really famous developer. I want to be like this, that and the other. And I say to them, great, so what are you going to do? And they're like, I'm going to get a job for Apple or I'm going to get a job for whoever. And I'm like, so who makes Mac oss? And they're like, what do you mean? So I said, tell me some names of some developers and they can't. They'll go, well, I say to them, who makes Linux? And they'll go, linis Torvalds. And so-and-so and Soandso, I'll go, well, there you go. If you want be a famous rockstar in quotes coder, you need to be working in a space where your work can be seen and reviewed and shared and modified and all that kind of stuff.

Doc Searls (00:27:11):
It's interesting to me that self sovereignty has, to me, it came out as a word in common usage came out of the self-sovereign identity developer community and there was a source there. And that source was a guy who's been on this show, and I dunno if he's been on our show, Catherine Devin Reto, he's a teacher and hacker in Long, you have talked to him on, yep. Yeah. And he did it around self-sovereign identity. And it's interesting because self sovereignty assumes agency on the person's side. You're not just saying I'm independent, it's not about being isolated, it's about being capable. And that's what we want people to be. We want them to be capable. And that's kind of what we fought for the last X years. A question I have for Simon, but any of you can answer this is licensing. The reason why Linux succeeded in ways BSD did not because BSD did not have a free software license. They had the B SD license is really just a very permissive one.

Simon Phipps (00:28:24):
Sorry. I believe that it is the reason why it's become the most common general purpose operating system, but BSD is absolutely everywhere. Yeah,

Doc Searls (00:28:37):
It's in Apple computers. So yeah,

Simon Phipps (00:28:40):
It's in all my light switches as well. I mean it's everywhere. But I do think that the strength of the Linux licensing is that it guaranteed there could be no king by keeping the copyright distributed. And by having a license that meant that you couldn't behave as if you were the copyright owner, even though you had the freedom to use, do whatever you wanted with it. And so I think that using copy left licensing was the key to success for Lennox. And I think that the BSD, by focusing on giving everyone the freedom to behave as if they were king, resulted in the medieval world of many small principalities ssd

Doc Searls (00:29:25):
That bsd,

Simon Phipps (00:29:26):
I do think it was the licensing that was the critical point in it's becoming so big as a community thing, but we do, we at our peril ignore the fact that BSD and that massive array of little principalities is actually a very strong force. It is absolutely everywhere. And just because it isn't on the cover of magazines and isn't being talked about on podcasts, that doesn't mean that it isn't the dominant operating system behind the scenes.

Doc Searls (00:29:57):
What were you about to say there, Dan? You're

Dan Lynch (00:29:59):
Kind of, to be honest, Simon's pretty much covered it. I was going to say it depends how you define success, because I'm very much a Linux guy. I love Linux. I don't really run BSD on anything other than maybe my light switch apparently. I didn't know that, so maybe I should look into that. But I was going to say success could be seen as being absorbed by Apple in the Darwin project and all of that depends. I don't see that as success because the code is not being contributed back by Apple in the same way because they don't have to and they can build a proprietary thing on top of it because of the way it's licensed. So I dunno, but I'm sure people to play devil's advocate a bit, and that's a joke because we've got the devil in b sd. It's not a very good joke. The demon of course. And maybe that is success for them because the argument was always adoption, wasn't it, with permissive licenses. But it's not something that I would see as success. But it depends, I mean you've mentioned it. If you've got a Mac, then you're running under the covers. You may not know it's there, but you're running a version of BSD

Doc Searls (00:31:06):
Jonathan who couldn't be here. But it is still contributing, says it depends on the switch. If it's an ESP 32 based device is not quite Linux or BSD, so it's still open sources everywhere. I'm just curious if anybody knows this. I mean, I think Darwin was the name for Apple's original version of the BSD kernel. They used the free B SD kernel, and I haven't heard that term in a long time.

Dan Lynch (00:31:35):
We were actually, the Darwin project is still going. Yeah, it's going that I believe. Yeah. I believe

Doc Searls (00:31:41):
For a few moments around whenever it was that Apple came out with that, we at Linux Journal were in conversation with people at Apple about doing a magazine for that, but there was not an open source he beating there. They're a lockdown company. So there that is. So Catherine, you mentioned earlier about Kubernetes. You were at CubeCon recently. What is the scale of Kubernetes at this point? This the secondary point I want to get to with it, but when people are doing open source inside big companies, Kubernetes is kind of like the middle of it. Is that the case right now?

Katherine Druckman (00:32:24):
Well, I mean there, it's massive. First of all, yes, the scale is massive. It's a massive project with a massive community, massive corporate support. It is also kind of becoming ubiquitous because it has a lot of use cases, the glue that helps software get made and deployed and pushed into production and all of that is a lot of that heavily depends on stuff like Kubernetes and cloud native, other cloud native software. So yeah, from that perspective, yeah, if you are a sizable tech company, you're probably participating and contributing to Kubernetes and you are probably using it and benefiting from it is what I would say. Think

Doc Searls (00:33:12):
Kubernetes is. You mentioned cloud native community. Is Kubernetes only cloud native or can it live outside the cloud? I don't even know. I hate to say how mug I am about that.

Katherine Druckman (00:33:23):
Well, I mean you could run Kubernetes locally. It takes a lot of resources. It exists to run things in the cloud though. I mean you would not, I mean, I suppose maybe somebody could think of some reason to use it outside of cloud, but that's what it's for. Certainly.

Doc Searls (00:33:40):
Well, there's a hacky side to this, which is, and as somebody in one of the earlier shows talked about this, that the more people are working on Kubernetes, there's several layers above the iron ND and the core software, the open source community is not as involved at that lower level. We don't have the hacky thing going on, and I want to get to that. But first I have to let everybody know that this episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by Collide. Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta. And they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. If you work in security or IT and your company has Okta, this message is for you. Have you noticed that for the past few years, the majority of data breaches and hacks you read about have something in common?

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(00:35:43):
I was saying before the break that not a theme, but a topic often brought up is now that Linux especially but open source has succeeded to the degree that it has, it's kind of less in command of or even bringing in the kind of hackers that at least three people around this table are. And I'm wondering, is that a false perception? Do we have fewer and fewer of those or is there just so many more? It's kind of like what's happened with podcasting, actually, there are just so many more to choose from. There used to be there were like 15 podcasts and now there are millions of 'em. Well now there are millions of open source developers and the hardcore wizards that roll their own and all that are relatively a smaller population, but maybe enlarging anyway, I don't really have a sense of it. What do you guys think? Any one of you can jump in?

Katherine Druckman (00:36:53):
Well, I just think with ubiquity comes, let's say a wider net, I guess lots of different types of people are working with and contributing to open source projects. But not everybody. This is a conversation. Gosh, I mean I think we've had many, many times over the years, especially since mono Linux journal's effective folding. But as the ubiquity has happened, you have so many people for whom open source, it's just part of the job, right? It's a tool, it part of what they do. But you don't have to be an open source enthusiast to be involved in open source is where I guess I'm going with that. So in many ways that's made it a more inclusive space, I think because again, you're bringing in people with lots of different experience levels and lots of different perspectives to work on, potentially work on open source software or at least use open source software. So it's become a different conversation. It is not a small group of, as you would call them wizards anymore.

Dan Lynch (00:38:02):
Also, there's different types of people using it as well. We don't just need coders, we also need people to do documentation that's so important. We need people to do translation, translation, marketing, legal stuff. I mean, Simon's talked about importance of licensing. We need legal people who understand these licenses to help us. We need all,

Simon Phipps (00:38:26):
I think anyone who thinks that there is any lack of people doing open source should come to FOS Dem, which is the first February, February 3rd to fourth in Brussels, which is as a conference at the university in Brussels. There will be seven, 8,000 people there all showing up to participate in mini conferences for hundreds of little projects and big projects as well. When you go to Fsda, you realize that there is a huge crowd of people quietly getting on with open source. And it may be that people are now confident enough in their community to not need to make themselves visible outside their community, to not need to consequently, continually be involved in advocacy. Because when you've won, you don't need advocates. And consequently people just get on with a code because they know it's going to get used because they have, take Libra office, Libra office has got something like 50 million users.

(00:39:37):
There's a limit to just how much advocacy is truly necessary when you have that much. So I think what we've seen is the landscape shift and redesign itself because of the victory of end user self sovereignty that has delivered ubiquity, which in turn has delivered a different way of relating to the software, which in turn has led to people wanting to regulate our world, which has led to many other changes. And when we were talking before the show doc, I did wonder whether it was good to have won. I wonder whether maybe being the plucky underdog was more enjoyable than being the faceless advocate of the status quo. Dan, do you feel like a faceless advocate of the status quo?

Katherine Druckman (00:40:37):
Looking

Dan Lynch (00:40:37):
Faithful to me? Yeah, maybe I always was to some degree, but I've always been more on the championing side of things. I do write code to some degree, but I don't contribute to anything major. So I've always felt a bit like an imposter in that I'm kind of championing this, but I'm not writing the actual code. So I don't know, maybe

Katherine Druckman (00:40:57):
That's a problem. I think a lot of us have, I felt the same way. I mean, I worked for Linux Journal for how many years and never really felt like I was contributing until I actually started heavily contributing code to a big open source project. And I think that's of my own personal baggage, but I don't think it's just me. I think a lot of people feel that way and it's not correct. Right? There are so many ways to contribute. And I would also add to what Simon said about advocacy. I I don't think it's so much that advocates are no longer necessary, but the type of advocacy has changed. Consider again, at the beginning we mentioned how critical open source software is critical. If open source software went away, we would be in some post-apocalyptic movie, right? Depends that thing we use day to day is we're relying on open source software and all of these things have to be sustainable. And in order for them to be sustainable, you need to train a new generation of maintainers and contributors. And so advocacy may be shifts from being selling the idea of open source software, but instead to communicating community best practices, how to train new contributors and all that kind of thing. So I think the nature of advocacy has definitely shifted.

Doc Searls (00:42:07):
That is interesting. I am thinking about journalism and it is all about stories. And if you work at a newspaper, at least when they existed, the managing editor or the assignment editor would say, what's the story that was, you'd heard more than anything else. And stories are always about characters with a problem. And we had that as Simon was saying, that with the open source community when it was small and we were up against no less than Microsoft. And that was at a time when Microsoft was the dominant company. I mean, the feds in the US were trying to break 'em up. They were devout enemy. Bill Gates hated open source and said so and so did Steve Balmer went on about it. It was a big enemy, don't trust it and all that. And now, I mean, I used to have a business partner who was very hard to win an argument with because after you won the argument, he was on your side, didn't have that satisfaction of him G glowing or something. It was like, yeah, yeah, you're right. Okay. And then suddenly he was on your side. A little bit of that happened with Microsoft, I think. And so we don't have the same feeling of victory about it. It's just, it just happened. Well, I want to go into a little bit more of the whole background here by bringing in somebody who was there at the beginning, and we'll get to that after this break.

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Doc Searls (00:44:48):
Okay, we're back. And I want to introduce somebody who, as they say, needs no introduction because he started this thing a long time ago. How many years was it, Leo? 17 years.

Leo Laporte (00:45:01):
Hey everybody. Yeah, I started it and I killed it. So I guess I get boose.

Doc Searls (00:45:08):
Yeah, but nobody knows that yet. So what don't you explain?

Leo Laporte (00:45:10):
Alright, so, oh, nobody knows that yet. I won't say a word. Floss weekly number one, which I did with Krista Bona, who at the time was the in charge of open source at Google was April 7th, 2006. And one thing I'm super proud of, by the way, okay, I've been listening for a while. Just want to say we also serve, who simply use the users are what it's all about. So I don't think Catherine, you should ever feel guilty for not writing code or contributing documentation because if everybody is a contributor, nobody's a user. We all have to. I guess we're all both. But the real victory of open source is that everybody knows it and everybody uses it, whether it's an Android phone or open office or Libre office or any of it's flavors. I talk to normal people, they know about it. They know it's an alternative to the paid Microsoft Office.

(00:46:10):
Everybody knows Linux. I'm sitting in front of a Linux machine right now. So I think we can declare victory because we have the users. Of course, you guys are concerned about contributors and everybody who can should, but some of us don't have those skills. But we do use the thing. I was just looking back, and everybody can do this because all the episodes are on the website. If you go to twit TV and we have a shortcut that isn't widely known but slash floss one every episode, you could just incre it that number. But if you go to Floss one in the first episode, that's the one we did in April of 2017. Six 17 years ago. And then you can go through them. And in the first 20 shows we interviewed everybody, Guido Von Rossum, Rasmus Ludo, Miguel Deza, who at the time, I don't know if he'd even started, it was back when he was OME desktop guy and zi and I guess the Mono project had

Doc Searls (00:47:15):
Started. Yeah, he and that Friedman, they were ome.

Leo Laporte (00:47:18):
Larry Augustin, remember VA Software?

Doc Searls (00:47:21):
Oh yeah. Very well.

Leo Laporte (00:47:21):
Jimmy Wales. You ever hear of him? These are the first 10 episodes I'm talking about. Of course, Chris, I introduced Randall Schwartz, the author of Learning Pearl and Intermediate Pearl in episode nine. And of course Randall then took over the show and ran it for about 10 years until we replaced him with Doc so many. I think the victory of Floss Weekly is that we documented 17 years of open source. There's even Lin talking about the brand new at the time. GPL 3.0, yeah, Jeremy Allison who created Samba. I mean, this is a history, I think Mad Dog, John Hall of what happened, the record we had him on twice as long. Oh yeah, he's been on many times. But he should be. He's a great advocate for it. So Jay Shirley, who created Catalyst for Pearl, we talked a lot about Squeak, Ruby on Rails, small talk.

(00:48:32):
Remember the Yahoo user interface library before there was React and Angular. And I can go on, I'm still in the first 30 episodes. We're still back in 2008. Here's Blender, the creators of Blender, Campbell Barton and Bre Van Loomo. Now, these were the early days and it was audio only, but I think that we have with your help doc and Simon and Simon, you were on episode 39 back when you were still at Sun. Dan, Catherine, so many people, Jonathan, who's not here, have helped make this show a record, which was always the plan, kind of the journal of record for the open source movement. Commander Taco. Yeah. From slash dot. Yeah, it's been a great ride. And I guess I might as well, since I've already kind of broken the news, let people know that this is the last episode of Floss Weekly. That as many know, we've been going through some financial hardship as has the whole podcast industry.

(00:49:38):
And we've been doing Floss Weekly all this time for all 761 episodes as a pro bono gift. Yes, you had ads, but the ads never covered the costs. And unfortunately, we're not in a financial position to continue to it pro bono. I know Jonathan is looking at ways of keeping the show going. So watch this space, stay tuned. I would love to see it continue in some form or fashion, but it was our great privilege to for 17 years, bring you the people who made open source happen and keep people up on open source. And it's sad that we have to end it. We're going to be canceling other shows as well last week, laid off three of our prized employees because I just can't make people work for free. I mean, I'd like to, but I can't. And we don't want to. I know that maybe we could do an open source podcast, but until then we have to keep the lights on and keep the staff going. And so we're going to cut back in order to do that. And it grieves me because this is a show I thought was super important to our mission at twit, of keeping people informed on technology and what technology, what was happening in technology, but more importantly, understanding it so that you could use it to your advantage. And that's exactly what open Source is all about, is owning the technology, making it yours, and using it not for the benefit of some company, but because it serves you. So Doc, we don't have to

Doc Searls (00:51:28):
Belabor

Leo Laporte (00:51:29):
It, but I just wanted to let you know that this is the last episode.

Doc Searls (00:51:33):
Yeah, I don't want to belabor it either. But we really do appreciate your support and faith in open source and in the mission here. And I do think at Bookend something, I think it isn't just a gimmick that we're talking kind of a victory lap here. I do think there's a bookend of source. We went through it with Linux Journal, it was a similar thing, and some of it has to do with just changes in the economics of things. Oh, it's got a text from Ant who's one of us,

Leo Laporte (00:52:14):
Love an who produced the show for a long time, of course, who

Doc Searls (00:52:17):
Produced a show and was a voice off the show from time to time. And he's moved on as well. And we love him and we love Jamer B, who's behind the console today. And you and Lisa, it's been nothing but appreciation of love through the whole thing.

Leo Laporte (00:52:39):
In a way, what happened to Lenox Journal is happening to podcasting. Paper magazines have disappeared. We talk about this. I'll give you a preview of our Christmas Eve episode docs on it of Twit on Christmas Eve. And you talked about radio having a hundred years. I think podcasting got about 20 magazines might've gotten 80 or 90, but the cycle moves lots faster than it did. And now most of the advertising dollars are taken by YouTube and influencers, and that's where advertisers want to be.

Doc Searls (00:53:16):
Yeah. Well, one of the stalwarts here to it, Jeff Jarvis just wrote, published a fabulous book. I'm about a third of the way through it called the Gutenberg Parenthesis. And his case is that we're at the end of print. We're at the end of the print era. And Leo, you'll appreciate this or cringe at it, I'm not sure, but I heard a radio described as a really bad phone.

Leo Laporte (00:53:46):
I'd say it's a really good phone,

Doc Searls (00:53:49):
A radio, it only does one thing way and it does it on a low frequencies that don't carry data very well. And you can use one in emergency, but otherwise it's useless. Isn't that sad? Isn't that sad? Because you and

Leo Laporte (00:54:05):
I, both

Doc Searls (00:54:05):
Of us are old radio guys. Yeah, we're all radio guys. We come from there.

Leo Laporte (00:54:09):
Well, we've

Doc Searls (00:54:10):
Seen it happen and we've seen it happen. And what we're really seeing is the, we're in the internet era now, and I mean, I spent this last weekend, in fact, I just arrived here minutes before the show, after traveling 800 miles in two cars in the plains, you and you

Leo Laporte (00:54:30):
Haven't slept all night. And I appreciate it, doc.

Doc Searls (00:54:32):
I really, that's great. No problem. Really appreciate it. My extreme pleasure. But I was at my sister's house in North Carolina going through old things. And one kind of thing was our mother, my sister and I were the two of us, the two kids in the family exchanged letters in the form of tapes. And those tapes still exist and they're still in boxes. And we threw away all of the cassettes of music because who wants those now? But we couldn't bear yet to part with our voices, our parent, mostly our mother, because our father died in 79. But these are how we communicated because phones were expensive. You were on long distance, you were paying for that. It was cheaper to buy a cassette recorded in the car and send the cassette by surface mail and it would get there four or five days or a week later.

(00:55:35):
And that gets me to something else that I think is important, and it's why it's incredibly important that you've saved all of these episodes. Going back to one and that Linux Journal, the entirety of Linux Journal is still online. Thank you to the slash dot people who actually own it now and are keeping the lights on. And we're working on this here in Bloomington, Indiana, which is history-based journalism and documenting things so that decision makers and journalists in the future can use it. The archival side of journalism is incredibly important. And so that's a big part of what my life is about at this point.

Leo Laporte (00:56:17):
And all 761 episodes are still available at twit tv slash floss. A lot of our shows are also on the internet archive. And I think that that's going to, in the long run, what a great project this has been from Brewster Kale and Company, and I think in the long run, Bruce

Doc Searls (00:56:34):
Is a hero. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:56:35):
He's a hero. He's a real hero. He's literally a hero. And in the long run, that's going to be very important because I don't know how long our servers will stay up, but I have a pretty good feeling that the internet archive's going to be here to stay. Yeah. So this stuff does get preserved. I have friends. Okay, here we go. Old timer again, doc. Sorry about

Doc Searls (00:56:56):
This. Yeah, that's good.

Leo Laporte (00:56:57):
I have a friend, John Donnay works in Toronto very well-known radio personality who has hundreds of reel-to-reel interviews of some of the grace in rock and roll back to Jimi Hendrix and Janice Joplin. And I've been begging him for years to let me take those reels and digitize them. I don't know if they ever will, but I am very grateful that at least these shows will last. We should also mention Jonathan is going to continue doing the Untitled Linux show in the club. And I think that will continue to be our flagship floss show. So that will go on because the club members support that. We don't need to sell advertising on that. And the club members pay for that. And I know Jonathan also has plans or is trying to, anyway, keep a floss weekly alive in another form. So we'll still do that. Patrick Delahanty at

Doc Searls (00:57:50):
Uc, you see that? You saw that. Yeah. Lead it off. It's really

Leo Laporte (00:57:52):
Great. So he's our engineer. He's the guy who keeps the roads, must roll, keeps the bits flowing. He says Randall was on 484 episodes Doc 179 episodes. Aaron Newcomb did 177 episodes. Jonathan Bennett, 145, Dan Lynch, 125. I was on 112. Simon Phipps, 111, Sean on 37, Guillermo on 31. Johno Bacon, who did a lot of shows for us in the early days. 31, Catherine, you were on 29 shows. Gareth Greenaway was on 20. Chris Deonna bailed very early on. He was only on 18 shows. But he gets credit.

Doc Searls (00:58:36):
I didn't know Sean did more than Catherine. I would've thought it was way.

Leo Laporte (00:58:38):
Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Thank you Patrick. Yeah, we have the stats if nothing else, we have the stats.

Doc Searls (00:58:47):
So we're down. I know Simon has to leave as a hard stop at the bottom of the hour. So let's do our plugs. We have them. And you don't have hair plugs, Simon, because you kept your hair damnit. But what do you have?

Simon Phipps (00:59:06):
I'm going to encourage everyone to try and make it a FSS Dem this year. It's going to be huge. It's spread out over the preceding week as well. So I will be there from Monday to the following Monday. It is the weekend of February the third and fourth in Brussels in Belgium in Brussels. It's free of charge. All you have to do is get there. And it is probably the world's biggest open source free software hack fest with pretty much every community you can imagine represented. If you wanted to work out how to become a contributor, there is no better place you could go than Brussels in the third and 4th of February. And if you're going, let me know. Drop me a line. I'm easy to find. I'm wem in all the places that I could reserve that handle and get in touch and we can meet up and have a caffeinated beverage. Probably not an alcoholic one because I'm getting old now and I have to limit my alcohol.

Doc Searls (01:00:04):
Me

Simon Phipps (01:00:05):
Too. But thank you for as they say so long and thanks for all the fish. Thank you for your hospitality in the studio, Leo and also to John. And I'm going to check out now because I actually have a client meeting I wasn't supposed to be on this week and I have a meeting. Thank

Doc Searls (01:00:21):
You, Simon. Thank you for all your great. And Dan, what do you got?

Dan Lynch (01:00:27):
Well, I feel like I should kind of plug Simon's plug. That was really good. Yeah, it

Doc Searls (01:00:31):
Was really good.

Dan Lynch (01:00:33):
They should go to fuz them if you can. Yeah, definitely do that. What have I got to plug? So in terms of free software, open source, podcasting and so on, I'm going to be helping with the free as in Freedom show, which Bradley Kuhn and Karen Sandler do from the Ware Freedom Conservancy, if I can say it properly. Software Freedom Conservancy.

Doc Searls (01:00:55):
And Bradley was going to be our guest this week, by the way. He was, you can pick it up.

Dan Lynch (01:01:01):
So we'll pick that up. But if you head to my website, dan lynch.org, you can find all of that stuff on there. Other podcasts, music, my blog, which I will update I'm sure with a post about Floss Weekly. And it's been great. I looked up and it's been 14 years I've been involved with Floss with the podcast. Yeah. So it's been a long time. It's been a great ride and it's been a lot of fun and a thank you to everyone who's been involved, especially behind the scenes. It's always great to see John. Talk to John in the background there. Jama B, he's been there from the early days. He helped me to learn how to host a few of these shows, which was a white knuckle ride, shall we say, for me. For me anyway, it was a white knuckle ride. Yeah, so thanks for everything.

Doc Searls (01:01:51):
Thanks, Dan. Thank you. Thank you too. And so Catherine, I know we have something we do, you and I.

Katherine Druckman (01:01:57):
Yeah, well, yeah, so Doc and I do another podcast because there are lots of podcasts, but we are, again, not advertisers supported and labor of love, so we will continue. It is a reality 2.0. You can find that@realitytwocast.com. We talk about a lot of things, but frequently open source software and tech policy and lot of other things. And you can also find me at Open at Intel, which is another podcast, and that is from our open source, open ecosystem group at Intel. I talk a lot. I mostly don't talk to Intel people. I talk to people all over the industry and some really interesting ones. You're

Doc Searls (01:02:35):
Down to only two podcasts. I know.

Katherine Druckman (01:02:38):
I know. It's very sad. I was kind of loving the overwhelming world of being involved in three different podcasts and becoming more and trying to become more and more comfortable on a microphone, which is a whole other conversation. You're doing a great job. You do great. Oh, thank you. So yeah, you can find me there and doc there and elsewhere on the internet. And yeah,

Doc Searls (01:02:59):
I should point out too, that Reality 2.0 was actually the rebranded Linux journalist podcast. It was a Linux Journal podcast

Katherine Druckman (01:03:07):
Before that. Oh, it's true. And we kept it going. It started

Doc Searls (01:03:08):
As Linux Journals podcast. So Linux Journal went away, or we went away from Linux Journal. We got a new title, and I

Leo Laporte (01:03:15):
Think it's pretty important to point out that podcasting isn't dead, obviously. No, no. They're more than ever. It's a question of it being a viable financial entity, a business. I mean, magazines aren't dead. The radio's far from dead. Blogging's not dead. These things continue on, and I think podcasting has a great future ahead of it, but it's just running it as a business issue, especially in the way I take a lot of responsibility. I built this as an old media business, the kind of centralized big studio, expensive equipment, video, a lot of things that you don't need to do. And really, if you guys, Catherine and Doc are perfect example. You do it out of passion and love and you could do it with virtually no cost. Those will continue forever, just as blogs will always be around.

Doc Searls (01:04:11):
Yeah, there're probably more bloggers than ever. Exactly. There may be more magazines than ever that we don't see. They may not be on the newsstand, but there are

Leo Laporte (01:04:20):
Online. If you go to the Santa Rosa

Doc Searls (01:04:22):
And look at newsletters, barn

Leo Laporte (01:04:23):
And Noble, they have literally like six stacks of magazines going. There's plenty of magazines. It's just the business has changed a lot. And I take full responsibility for building this doc. I built it like a radio station or a TV station.

Doc Searls (01:04:41):
I know. I know. I going to go in there and say, I know. And I make a practice of visiting old radio stations. I visited one in Burlington, North Carolina this couple of days ago. The doors closed. There's nobody in there. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:04:55):
We

Doc Searls (01:04:56):
Caught the tower lit up dark. Yeah. Another one was in Palm Springs and it's on the air, but all the programming comes in from New Zealand.

Leo Laporte (01:05:10):
That's a big problem. Computer and doc, because you've been in our studio. I have a decommissioned AM transmitter that I didn't know that. Oh, next time you're in here, take a look. It was from Sioux City, Iowa. It was a little, I think 1000 watt Daytimer in Sioux City, but Mike Doro, the guy who makes those fabulous doro meters. He also has a hobby of visiting old radio stations, and he actually takes their decommissioned transmitters off their hands and then reconditions them. Just like a classic car guy would recondition a classic car, fixes everything up till it's pristine and this beautiful transmitter, I don't know what I'm going to do with it. When we close the studios, it weighs about literally about 3000 pounds. But

Doc Searls (01:05:59):
Yeah, it has tubes in it.

Leo Laporte (01:06:02):
Yeah, it's tubes actually. Yeah,

Doc Searls (01:06:04):
There you go. Valves, as they say in the UK

Leo Laporte (01:06:05):
Valves, Mike. Mike is a amateur radio hobbyist, a ham, and so he re-tuned it to the am ham band. So you could actually use this as a ham radio maybe.

Doc Searls (01:06:17):
Oh yeah. No. 160 meters. You could run hundred 60 meters on those things. And 160 meter hams. Love it. Yeah. There is a life of these things. Time moves up.

Leo Laporte (01:06:33):
There it is. On a truck and

Doc Searls (01:06:35):
Go on tour. There it is. Oh my gosh.

Leo Laporte (01:06:36):
And remember, doc there somewhere? You turn the plates on last, or is it first I can remember.

Doc Searls (01:06:43):
Oh, I think last.

Leo Laporte (01:06:44):
I think it's

Doc Searls (01:06:45):
Last. You turn the filament on first. Filament

Leo Laporte (01:06:47):
On first, then the plates. You remember taking meter readings, doc. That was part of the job.

Doc Searls (01:06:51):
Oh, I did. And the station. I ran transmit our weekends in North Carolina, and I ran a riding lawnmower out to the towers because there were ticks in the fields, and you would get covered with ticks there so many ticks. But you ran the lawnmower out there. You sort of mowed your way out to it. Of course, the land under those towers is sold. The station is almost gone. Oh, there it is.

Leo Laporte (01:07:18):
You see, we opened the doors. You could see the dials. You could do your meter readings right now, doc. And it's good. You got your third class radio telephonic license from the Federal Communications

Doc Searls (01:07:30):
Commission. Yeah. You get your third phone before you get your second and your first phone. That's right. I never got a first phone. No,

Leo Laporte (01:07:35):
First tickets were for chief engineers. We lowly DJs. Just had to have third tickets. I

Doc Searls (01:07:40):
Had. I'd have a little framed thing. It was, I still had, I think I probably have my, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:07:46):
Again, next time you come to the studio, it's hanging in the hallway. Because I don't want the FCC to get us in trouble here. Everybody, correct me if I'm wrong, doc, but it's my memory that every DJ I ever met, I lifelong dream was to own a radio station.

Doc Searls (01:08:04):
I know. I know. It was. Yeah. And some did Stupid me and lost his shirts on it. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:08:10):
Dumb old me.

Doc Searls (01:08:11):
Because in Bruce, he brought a station in New Jersey. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:08:14):
I built one from scratch. Didn't have to get a FCC permit. I guess you still have my license. Look at that. Well, that's mine. Oh, that's yours, John. This is John's license, his third ticket. Oh, wow.

Doc Searls (01:08:27):
His third ticket. Jamer

Leo Laporte (01:08:29):
B. Actually, this is my ham. Oh, no. Yeah, this is my ham license, John. But that'll work too.

Doc Searls (01:08:36):
Do you still have your ham license?

Leo Laporte (01:08:37):
Of course. Yeah. Oh yeah. I don't. I have a general,

Doc Searls (01:08:41):
It was WV two VX H. I never got to be WA two, VX H, because I flunked the code test,

Leo Laporte (01:08:47):
The advanced test twice. Yeah. You don't need anymore

Doc Searls (01:08:49):
By missing us a space. I know.

Leo Laporte (01:08:51):
Had I had to pass a code test, I wouldn't have it, but I do W six TWT. It's a vanity license. Oh,

Doc Searls (01:08:59):
Very good. Yeah. Oh, I like that.

Leo Laporte (01:09:01):
Anyway, back to floss. Yeah.

Doc Searls (01:09:03):
Yeah. Back to floss. We

Leo Laporte (01:09:05):
Have declared victory. The war is over. Open source has won. Everybody uses it. Almost everybody uses it every day. Whether you use an iPhone or an Android phone, you're using open source software. The Heart of the Beast. I think that's when

Doc Searls (01:09:22):
You're checking out on Amazon, you're using open source software.

Leo Laporte (01:09:26):
Absolutely. Practically every website you're visiting. I mean, I don't know if in 2006 we would've anticipated a future like this show started before the iPhone. Before Android.

Doc Searls (01:09:39):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. 2006. I marked that as when I got my first fellowship at a university that wouldn't let me in.

Leo Laporte (01:09:49):
That's victory. That's another victory.

Doc Searls (01:09:51):
I've had three more since then. See that one now you shit will let

Leo Laporte (01:09:57):
Me in. Harvard didn't let me in either, so I'm jealous. That's nice.

Doc Searls (01:10:03):
That's nice. But we try and I know I'm looking at the back channel here. Lisa's in there and other folks from the show.

Leo Laporte (01:10:14):
I never get a chance to do this. I want to give Lisa A. Little credit. Oh, please

Doc Searls (01:10:17):
Do.

Leo Laporte (01:10:18):
Besides being my wife, before she was my wife, she came in as our CFO became our CEO and has been doing the job of about eight people working her tail off for the last few years, ever since Covid, frankly, to keep this ship afloat. And she more than anybody feels the losses that we've gone through. Yeah,

Doc Searls (01:10:47):
You can feel it.

Leo Laporte (01:10:48):
Yeah. It just breaks her heart and because she feels like she's done everything she could, but it wasn't enough. But I don't blame, I don't think we can blame anybody for this. It's just the way the world works and media moves on and Leo stupid to build a radio station.

Doc Searls (01:11:11):
Well, I am thinking this is one of the best If Madelin Club twit promos you can have. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:11:18):
Well, yeah. Lisa's going to post in a couple of weeks. Our goals for 2024. She's very transparent, which I love and is going to explain what our goals are in order to keep the company running, to actually keep doing shows and it's sales goals. But it's most importantly for the people listening, it's the goals for Club Twit, our membership, it's just about 1% right now of our audience, a little bit above that. We really need to get that up in order to survive. So if you're not yet a member of Club Twit, it is, I think a good deal. Seven bucks a month, you get a lot of benefits and it is vital to our continued success.

Doc Searls (01:11:57):
It's like public broadcasting, but with ads, it's the same actually called

Leo Laporte (01:12:01):
That. It's the same. And eventually, yeah, public broadcasting has ads. Right.

Doc Searls (01:12:04):
And they get 10%. So you give a goal of 10%.

Leo Laporte (01:12:07):
Our goal, I tell you what, if we had 5%, we'd be able to continue this show and every other show. But right now we don't have that. I can't ask you to work for free as much as I'd like to. You and Catherine could do a show for free, but I can't ask you.

Dan Lynch (01:12:27):
Well,

Doc Searls (01:12:28):
And

Dan Lynch (01:12:28):
Don't forget to get on Club Twit to listen to the Untitled Linux show with Jonathan. Of

Leo Laporte (01:12:33):
Course. It's a shame. The reason that continues is because we don't have to sell ads for that. It's a club exclusive. The club members are paying for that twit TV slash club twit. If you're not a member, we would love it if you would join.

Doc Searls (01:12:50):
So this is where in radio they just bring up the music. Or maybe you'll do that in post, throw you off

Dan Lynch (01:12:55):
The stage. I really wish I had a violin now. I haven't got a guitar.

Doc Searls (01:12:58):
We've got a guitar. We should

Dan Lynch (01:13:00):
Hot violin. Do you have some

Leo Laporte (01:13:02):
Blues? Get some blues going there. Dan, come on. Yeah, hang on.

Doc Searls (01:13:07):
Just a, he does a couple of bars

Leo Laporte (01:13:09):
Of eight bar blues.

Dan Lynch (01:13:13):
I was trying to find my harmonica. I've got, that'd

Leo Laporte (01:13:16):
Be good. Oh,

Doc Searls (01:13:17):
That'd be great. Yeah, you could do the right.

Leo Laporte (01:13:19):
A lonesome whale of a harmonica.

Doc Searls (01:13:21):
Yeah.

Dan Lynch (01:13:22):
Here we go. Here we go. I found them. I found them. Here we go. The important question for any musician, what key are we in,

Leo Laporte (01:13:29):
Guys? I think a minor key, if I don't care which of the minor keys.

Doc Searls (01:13:35):
Is it a, what are your big blues busters tended Gateway

Dan Lynch (01:13:39):
A's quite a big one. E's quite a big one.

Doc Searls (01:13:42):
Yeah. Let's skip this one. He's hard on the piano, but it's easier on a harp. Here we go.

Leo Laporte (01:13:53):
Oh, you know what's happening. It's too loud and

Doc Searls (01:13:57):
Oh, it's clipping

Leo Laporte (01:13:58):
Zoom's. Turning it off.

Doc Searls (01:14:00):
Wow.

Dan Lynch (01:14:01):
It's too loud. Well, zoom. I tried to back a wire.

Doc Searls (01:14:04):
Just back up a bit.

Leo Laporte (01:14:05):
Turn off the anti harmonica button. I think that's,

Dan Lynch (01:14:10):
It's

Leo Laporte (01:14:10):
Because Zoom doesn't like the blues. I think.

Doc Searls (01:14:17):
Yeah. You got to back up. Nothing.

Leo Laporte (01:14:19):
It's just not

Doc Searls (01:14:19):
Working. Wow. That's so weird. That's disappointing. That's so weird.

Leo Laporte (01:14:23):
That's it. Well, it looked good for people on the video. It looked like I was doing something that's not a bug. That's a feature

Doc Searls (01:14:29):
You could do. It's got a blues film. Woke up this morning and my show was gone.

Leo Laporte (01:14:36):
Don't be sad.

Doc Searls (01:14:40):
That's alright. I didn't mean it to be sad actually. That didn't be funny. We

Leo Laporte (01:14:44):
Love you guys. Thank you so much for your service to open source and to twit. We really appreciate what you, you've done all the hosts over the years. I love Floss Weekly. It breaks my heart that we can't keep

Doc Searls (01:14:57):
Doing it. And we love you, Leo and Lisa and everybody else. Thank you in the compound there too. Incredible work, and it's holy work. We really appreciate

Leo Laporte (01:15:08):
It. Jonathan Bennett. We'll continue with the Untitled Linux Show in the club, and I know Jonathan was hoping to have an announcement about Floss today. He wasn't able to get that together, but there is, I think, at least some hope that another organization is going to pick up Floss Weekly and continue it. But we will let you know. Of course. In fact, if you're subscribed to the feed, we'll give you the details on the feed if we find out something. Awesome.

Doc Searls (01:15:32):
Awesome. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:15:34):
Thank you everybody.

Doc Searls (01:15:36):
Thank you all. It's been great. You guys

Leo Laporte (01:15:38):
Imagine if you will, some sad blues in a minor.

Doc Searls (01:15:44):
Dad Lynch himself. So here's the guitar. So here we go. Is the guitar doing not

Leo Laporte (01:15:49):
Coming through? Is it filtered that as

Doc Searls (01:15:51):
Well? Let's see.

Leo Laporte (01:15:54):
Yeah,

Doc Searls (01:15:54):
Bits of it. Music very

Leo Laporte (01:15:55):
Gets cut off. Way back when Jeff Robbins,

Doc Searls (01:15:59):
There's an algorithm here, dammit.

Leo Laporte (01:16:01):
Way back when Jeff Robbins created the Floss Weekly theme.

Doc Searls (01:16:05):
Of course, yeah. Jeff Robbins.

Leo Laporte (01:16:06):
Yeah. He's at Lulla Bot and he had a very mediocre musical career before that. No, I shouldn't say that. I'm sure. He was a rock star. He was a rock star. He's an American musician and he did a wonderful job. He was in a band called as we'll. All remember a Boston based power trio called Orbit. And in fact, orbit appeared in Lollapalooza, the Lollapalooza tour in 97. In any event, in any event,

Doc Searls (01:16:38):
I remember Orbit,

Leo Laporte (01:16:39):
That wonderful floss weekly theme that you hear from time to time was composed and performed by Jeff Bins. And if we can find it, John, let's find the one with lyrics. Oh wow. Because Evan promo, that's probably funny, who was one of the creators of La Conica and we had on in the first 10 episodes back in 2006,

Doc Searls (01:16:59):
And we had on a couple of weeks

Leo Laporte (01:17:00):
Ago, and you had on it recently, says What happened to the one with lyrics? You'll see what happened to it. We'll play it

Ad (01:17:08):
As we say goodnight

(01:17:10):
And God bless. And as Simon said, quite aptly, thanks for all the fish.

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