meetings-archive.debian.net/.../Debian_in_the_Dark_Ages_of_Free_Software.webm

Can you hear me?

Better.

So, hello everyone.

Welcome again to DebConf, I guess.

It's a great pleasure to be back again
at one DebConf

and a great honor to be doing one
of the opening talks.

I confess I wasn't really expecting
that honor.

I just wanted to propose a session

which was supposed to be
a self held sessions

for those of us that think there are
some worries

about where the free software is going
in general.

And the role distributions have to play
in the current state of affairs.

So this talk will be about a couple of
journeys at once.

The first journey is a journey
through emotions,

through good feelings about what
we have achieved in Free Software

over the past 15 to 20 or 30 years

depending on how long you've been
involved.

The second journey is essentially
my own journey

through software freedom

from the day I started discovering
Free Software

and what I've ended up doing since then.

Starting with the positive news.

This is how I got involved myself
in free software in 1997.

I understand that there are people
in the room

who have been involved
since way earlier than that,

others that have been involved
since way later than that.

Well, that's my story.

I hope you'll find ??? points
with your own story.

When I started as a freshman in a computer
science class at university of Bologna,

that was a huge tiping point,

a huge hype point for the so-called
opensource movement.

That was the year the very influencial
essay by ??? has been published.

That was the year ??? Netscape decided to
opensource its own code.

That was the moment in the history of
free software

when people were trying to sell
to the industry

what free software was doing, and
I'm not using that word in a bad sense.

There was reasonable concern that
without involvement of the industry,

the free software movement wouldn't have
got far.

So they were trying to tell about free
software in an industry-friendly way.

Essentially, the rhetoric at the point
was that

if you do development of software
in the free software way,

in a more open way,
a more participative way,

you will end up having better software
and that by merely opening up you code

you'll have these flocks of programmers
coming to you project and end up helping you.

A few years later, I realised that
I personnaly didn't believe much in that idea:

it's only because your software is open
that it's gonna be better,

but it was a fair thing to try
at the time.

What I discovered a bit later is actually
what ??? me

was essentially the philosophy
of free software.

The fact that computer user should be
in charge and in control of their own machine,

that should have some basic freedom.

You know about the 4 freedoms,
I'm not going to repeat them here,

but my personal point is that
the narrative of free software is something

that resonated with me a lot at the time.

As a student, I realised that by having
free software at my fingertip as a computer science student,

I could debug any single layer of the software stack
and look at how things are going.

I didn't have to trust the teacher on how
an operating system should be developed.

I was able to open up ??? in the linux kernel
and look at the actual scheduling algorithm

that was being implemented in the real kernel.

Not that I really got all of it at the time

but the possibility was just breathtaking
for me.

Later on, I ended up distilling
the main intuition of free software,

which is the one I used to explain
free software to people,

which is intuition of control.

So, I ended up believing that the main
reason why I've been involved in this movement

for about fifteen years is that I really believe
that every single computer user,

and that's a lot of people these days,

should be in control over
their own computations.

Everything you're doing with a device
which is mediated via software

is controled by someone,
either it is you or it is someone else.

And the best episode, the best narrative
to explain that to people

that they've been using for quite a while
is this passage

from the novel "Makers" by Cory Doctorow

which is a bit long so I'm not gonna read it in detail,

but essentially there is one character
of the novel which is Lester

which is explaining to another character
the importance of controling

your own devices, your own tools.

The first example he takes is the example
of the hammer,

a physical hammer,

and he goes on saying that if you own
a hammer,

essentially you could do
whatever you want with it.

You can use it for its main purpose,

or you can use it for something
completely different

which was not meant to be its original
purpose but it's you that decide.

He compares that another device
which is the "Disney in a box" in the novel

and Disney in this book is the big evil
villain which is oppressing people

and essentially Disney in a box is a
glorified3D printer that can only print

what Disney wants it to print for that day.

One day, it will print a goofie character,

another day it will print Donald Duck,

but it's not you who decides.

It's Disney that decides what the printer
is gonna print for you that day.

You own the device but you are
not in control of what the device does.

The big quote for me is that if you don't
control your life, you're miserable.

This notion of oppression is what has
been motivating me for all these years.

So the fact that if you are not in control
of your own computation,

then someone is oppressing you.

Someone usually is the person or the company
or whatever that has created the software,

that has the power to change that software
instead of you.

This is something that really ??? me.

What was I doing at the time
with my computer?

Well I was doing pretty standard stuff.

I was using some hardware we had at the time

which was mostly desktops and
local network servers.

I didn't have a laptop because
it was really expensive for a student

so I did get a laptop much later.

I was doing some content production,
some content consumption.

The kind of content I did produce
at the time was mostly

office suites, desktop publishing
and this kind of stuffs.

I was doing some communication, some email,
some IRC, some newsgroup

which was really cool at the time
for geek communities.

And I was doing some software development
as a newbie

but it was what I was doing at the time.

I also did some content consumption,
some gaming

which are arguably some content that
someone else is producing for you to consume.

I was doing some web browsing.

Internet was not as popular as it is today,

but there were some websites
you could find interesting.

In that situation,
with this kind of computing,

the actual path to software freedom
and to control was fairly clear.

It was difficult, but it was fairly clear
to me as a new activist in free software.

What I should have done, what we all should
have done to actually liberate people

from the oppression of people controling
our own computation.

The idea is that while you have
a lot of pieces of proprietary software

which you do not control, what you need
to do is to replace

every such a component of proprietary
software with a free software equivalent.

Using some local application, some game,

we need to replace it
with an equivalent free game.

We were using some client-server software,
some mail ???, some mail client,

some mail server, some IRC client,
some IRC server.

What we needed to do to actually empower
people and liberate people was to rewrite

those pieces of software with free software equivalents.

It was difficult, because it was a lot of stuff
to be rewritten, but it was fairly clear.

The plan was clear.

And also, luckily, we also had, at the time,
all the heavy lifting was already in place.

The GNU project existed ??? since
quite a while,

the Linux kernel existed already
and it was working.

So someone else with shoulders larger
than ??? I had at the time

had already done a lot of work for me and me

and together with other free software activists,
what I had to focus on was to rewrite

proprietary application into equivalent
free software application, possibly better.

That was clear, was hard,
but it was fairly clear.

That's where, I think, the notion
of a free software project comes from.

We use very often this term of free
software project and never ended up

really thinking about that before a few
years ago and I think the reason why

we call it free software project is that
there is an objective.

So there is a mission,
ideally a time-limited one,

and that mission is writing a replacement
for a proprietary application using

free software which is as good,
possibly better than the original.

Having a lot of free software projects
around gives rise to a lot of releases.

So what we were doing a lot at the time
in the 90s

was to actually manually install
software on our own machines.

To be fair, our lab was running
some Red Hat machines.

At the time there weren't that
many packages available and

we had to fairly often install stuff
by hand on the lab machines

in our own directories and also
on our computers at home.

This is a procedure you all know very well.

You download a tarball, you run "configure",
you run "make", you run "make install".

The first time I saw that, it was kind of
a magical recipe for me.

Just follow these steps and you will get
some software to play with.

Well, except that every single step
could fail, of course.

Let's keep aside for the moment the fact
that the website might be down but,

you run "configure" and you miss some software
you need to fetch from somewhere else.

You run "make", you encounter some
compilation problem.

You run "make install", maybe the path
will clash and so on and so forth.

The problem with this procedure for
install software we are using by hand

is that you are essentially
conflicting roles.

You're mixing together the role of
software user,

the role of system administrator
and the role of software developper.

You need to have a little bit of all those skills
together to be able to enjoy software.

In a sense, a free software which works
like this is essentially a very elistist thing.

It's only an elite which have
all the needed skills who is able to enjoy

the benefits of free software and is able
to be in control of their own computation.

This is essentially the reason why distributions
much earlier had been invented.

We all know very well here
what distributions do,

they sit in between software developpers
and software users and make it easy for you

to actually use that software.

We do installer work, we create installers,
we create package managers,

we do all the integration work that make
different pieces of software work well together.

We actually make life easy for final users.

So, for me, something that I started believing
is that the ultimate mission of free software

distributions is to actually democratize
free software, to enable users

which do not have software development skills
or do not have system administration skills,

enable them to enjoy the benefit
of free software.

We offer very simple interface,

we offer the equivalent of what these days
are called appstores in which

with one click, you can just install
some software and

enjoy the benefit of that software,
in particular a free software.

This is for me the historical mission
of distributions.

Later on, in 1998, our lab decided
to switch to Debian

and I was really happy about that.

We switch from Red Hat to Debian and
I look out about this project,

I start learning what this project does
and I find out that not only

this project Debian was actually up to
the mission of empowering user

by making it easy for users
to use free software.

If you read the original announcement of
Ian Murdock announcing the Debian project,

we'll find this notion of being competitive
with proprietary operating systems

and it's really clear that the point is
empowering users.

I end up reading about this project and
not only I found their mission

they're up to is the mission I believe in,
but I found out that the key intuition there

is to make the project a community project.

Not only the target are the users
and empowering them,

but also the way to reach that objective
is fostering a community

that will work together to that goal.

I got immediately hooked,

I vividly remember the moment
a collegue of mine, a student

explained to me the anatomy of
a Debian source package,

the fact that it was a .orig.tar.gz,
the fact that it was a diff.gz

with the differences with respect to upstream,
and all those metadata

that was really thrilling for me
from a technical point of view.

A few years later, I ended up joining
the nm-process.

I was doing some OCaml development
at the time, there were some libraries,

OCaml libraries in Debian, others were
missing and I said

"Ok, maybe I should help and create
some libraries for the project as well".

I went through nm and there are a few things
I've learned doing nm

and also in the subsequent ten years
or fifteen years or so.

One thing I've learned in all these years in
Debian is the importance of being principled.

Debian is a project that did not start
from only technical means

but also decided at some point that
they needed some guidance,

some clear guidance of what it should
technically and what it shouldn't.

And an important document where we have
distilled this notion are the DFSG.

The Debian free software guidance

which has been very influencial
on the free software movement as a whole.

They've been used as a base for
the open source definition as you know,

and what was very ??? for me
is that commitment we had in Debian

in keeping the main archive completely
DFSG-free, keeping it completely free software.

This commitment is depicted here
by those fearsome character

and his owner on a couch and it's mediating
and triggering the NEW queue, supposedly,

and the NEW queue is not necessarily
the best way we could implement

a system which triage all the software
in the archive and to ensure it's DFSG-free

but it shows our commitment to actually
only follow the guidance we have set for ourselves.

It was really motivating for me.

The second thing I've learned and which
will come handy in a bit,

is the importance of the legal knowledge
and legal geeks in the free software movement.

Like it or not, free software as an ideal
is philosophical mean,

but its main implementation is through the
legal system, is through copyright licenses.

To really ??? what's happening
in free software in general,

to understand where the free software
movement is going, figuring out and

really understand what's going on
in the legal system is very important.

In Debian, we know that pretty well,
that's a stumbling block for many people

when joining the Debian project.

It's something we insist people are at least
basically familiar with and

that's pretty characteristic
of the Debian project.

In the end, what I've learned is that

in this quest that I feel very much myself
against the oppression of someone else

controling your own computation,
law, if you hack around it smartly,

can be a very useful ally,
a very useful device to liberate users.

Time passes − there was supposed to be an
image here, which for some reason disappeared.

And, we might argue that, these days,
we have achieved a lot since that moment.

If I look around the industry or, in general,
if I look around computing

as people are doing that,
free software is a little bit everywhere.

In the industry, there are some stats
that claim that essentially

every single software product you find
on the market has, inside of it,

a little bit of free software code.

If you look at all the different application
stacks we have

from webservers to education to clients
to smartphones,

you find a lot of free software, free software
infrastructures that are everywhere.

So these are just some stats ???
in the recent years

and for instance if we look at one of the
key target market for Debian ???

we'll find out one website over ten
on the Internet in general is running Debian.

If we include also some of our most
popular derivatives such as Ubuntu,

we'll find that more than 20%
of the websites

are running something which comes
from our own work.

And some of the recent hype on free software
is coming from the Snowden revelation

and most people are starting to be concerned
about what the software they're using is doing

and is turning to free software and is turning
to stuff like Tails which is heavily Debian-based

to actually see in which way we can
help them foster their own security.

In some sense, we have achieved a lot.

In everything we do in computing,
there is a little bit of what we have done

in free software and also a little bit
of what we have done in Debian.

This is pretty impressive for me.

We're in a place where I wouldn't have
dreamed being when I started in 1997.

That's very impressive.

On the other hand, there are some reasons
of concerns

and this is the main thought
I wanted to share with you.

There are some technical reasons which
we discuss often in free software circles

like the fact that "Ok but most of these
platforms are not 100% free software".

If you look at smartphones for instance,

you will find a lot of non free code every here
and there and the point can be made that

either you have full control over
your own computation,

or you are not in control at all,

because if your software stack is a single layer
which is controlled by someone else,

and is mediating all your communication,
maybe you're not so sure

that you are the real owner and
the real controller for your own device.

That's a absolutely fair point.

We can make some more technical points
about for instance non free JavaScript.

More and more of our computations are
happening in our browsers

and are happening through code which is
delivered to our browser

by remote servers and this code
is not free at all.

I absolutely agree with that but the point
I want to focus on today is actually

what we call the cloud.

All my images are gone.

You had a very nice image there, sorry.

The remaining point and my main reason of
concern is what is being called the cloud.

Let allow me to be a bit generic here
for a moment.

I know there are very different ???
in what we call the cloud

and will be specific in all of them
in a bit.

But for now I want to focus on the
common trend that

the cloud is bringing to computing
these days.

Computing today, for most people, is not
much different from the kind of computing

I was doing fifteen years ago.

That's the kind of computing that we do
on very different hardware,

we have way more smartphones, way more
tablets than in the past and that's true.

But the kind of activities we do − producing
content, consuming content − is very similar.

The big difference is the kind of
technological stack we're using

and where the computations are happening.

For most people today, the kind of
office suites we use is no longer

a software which is installed on
your machine but it is Google Docs.

I'm an academic myself, I'm very often
forced to use some Google Docs applications

to work with others, otherwise I'm free
not to work with them,

because it's a technological choice
made by someone else.

For many people, e-mail, as you know,
just mean GMail.

All our e-mails, even if your not
using GMail ourselves,

are passing through some GMail servers.

Asynchronous communications still exist,
but it is very often mediated

to software like Skype or GTalk.

And so on and so forth.

You have seen this list very often.

Consuming content, there as well,
we are still doing gaming,

we are still doing browsing but it's often
mediated by platforms

which are far away from us and just stream
content to us or,

in the specific case of web browsing,
they are more and more often hosted

by very few hosters in the world − which
we often ??? to a walled garden −

that can do whatever they want
with our content.

The point here is not demonizing
those services.

People are using those services because
they are convenient and

there is a lot of network effect going on
that makes it easy for other people

to start using those services.

It's really not the point of demonizing
those services.

The point here is observing that interesting
computations that we are doing

as our job, as our life,

are no longer happening on our machines,
but are happening on other machines

which are far away from us and which
are not under our direct control.

In this context, for me, I confess, what
actually is the road to software freedom

and to control, to enable people
to control their own computation

is no longer clear.

It's no longer enough to say
"Well, we just need to rewrite

Google or Facebook or Twitter
in free software".

That's not enough, because even
if you do that, you have the problem

that when you are using a server
you don't know if the code it is running

is the one they claim it is running, so
that's a very difficult problem to solve.

And even if it were the case,
where do you deploy yourself

a Google-like architecture,
or a Facebook-like architecture?

You simply can't.

It is no longer enough to just say

"We just need to make
some software development,

we just need to make it better
than the alternative."

There is a real tricky combination between
software development

and software deployment which
not easy to see how to fix it.

At least for me, it's very ???

So, what about distros?

We are distro people, doing one
of the most popular distro in existence.

Are we winning or are we losing
in this situation?

How are we doing in terms of our efforts?

In a sense, we are very much winning.

A lot of our work is being used
to deploy those infrastructures.

A lot of the infrastructure
of the big companies are deploying

on top of free software, if not direct
on top of our very own systems,

maybe modified here and there where
they need to make things better

as it is their own right
given it's all free software.

In that sense, we're winning.

We're increasing market share,

??? are being used a lot
to make infrastructure.

But we are also losing in the sense that
we are really not empowering users

to be in control of
their own computations.

If our final users are the sysadmin
that are running those infrastructures,

for them we are doing great.

We are making them be sure

they are in control
of their own infrastructure.

But for the final users of those services,

we are really not empowering them
at the moment.

So what I call the free software dark ages,

which is an expression I actually borrowed
from [name] ??? quite inspiring,

is a situation in which we win
on the end user market

so every single device out there
in the hand of people − desktop,

laptop, even smartphones where right now
we are not doing very well −

all of this is running free software.

All of that is running Debian.

So, total world domination as
we were talking about a long time ago.

But all interesting computations,
all the final user application

which is being used to bring on
with your digital life,

are no longer happening on your devices,
happening far away from you

on computer you do not control,
sometime with free software,

sometime with non free software.

But in any case, outside
of your own control.

In a sense, this is very worrysome for me
because we have this ??? we are very popular.

We are winning the war − we were using a lot
of this war-like terminology when I started.

But the war we are winning seems to become
increasingly pointless

because it's not being useful to actually
empower users to be in control

of their own computation.

To make things worse, there seems to be some cultural problems that might be just a perception of mind, maybe being too pessimistic, but it seems to me that, as developper communities are hacker communities, we are becoming way more lenient, way more ??? about the lack of control on the tools and on infrastructure we use to make free software.

More and more often we see free software developed on non-free infrastructure, meaning infrastructures which are built using non free software and which are anyhow centralized in the hand of a few hosters.

The new generation of developpers which is coming up seems to be totally fine with that.

I'm not gonna argue this point in much detail, there is a great essay by Mako that I encourage all of you to read, "Free software needs free tools", which actually make couple of points.

One is that by using non free software to make free software, we are sending out a very bad message.

We are telling to the world that free software is good for you, that's why we are developing it, but it's not good for us because we are using non free tools to make it.

That's the kind of ??? in our advertising message, but it's also making the software we are creating indirectly less free, because if the favorite way to contribute to that free software is using some non free infrastructure, some non free tools, indirectly we're making people that only want to use free software less apt to contribute to that software.

So I really recommend reading that essay.

But also technically, we are going back to a sort of a cage problem, which is also a problem which is called "the problem of the bug that noone can fix" by the FSF I think, and essentially we're creating software stacks in which some part of it is entirely free software, that we can debug and some other parts are non free software or software run by someone else, so we have lost the ability to debug the full stack.

When I was starting to learning programming, this idea that I could debug everything from the end user I was writing myself for an assignment down to the kernel level was just exciting for me.

We seem to be losing sight of this, a little bit.

As a second cultural problem, we seem to be losing sight of how much help we could get from the legal system and from new legal solution that we might be in need of finding.

An example of that is the post open source software "POSS" debate which some of you might have run into.

That's a debate which actually observes that the new generation of free software developpers actually don't care about licenses.

They just want to kick out their code, just put it on GitHub, not declaring their license at all and they're just fine with that.

They want to be ??? to have the hassle of deciding first of all a license, second of all also some governance model for their projects.

They just want to be hacking and doing, and not caring about those annoying details.

This could be intervetedly interpreted in positive ways like says that we want the right to work on the code and to do whatever we want with that by default.

We do not want to be expliciting which kind of rights we give and that's a very positive interpretation of this phenomenon.

But in the end, for now, it is creating a huge bunch of code that we could not use as free software yet.

For instance we cannot include in Debian something that does not have a license at all.

A second example is the debate about the non freeness of AGPL.

If you look up the history of free software, there is argument that GPL itself is not free.

It's an argument that was being used twenty years ago when the battle between copyleft and liberalizing was very high, was very harsh.

And it's just recurring again.

So maybe for some syntactically interpretation of our own guidance, we could make the point that something like the AGPL is non free, maybe.

But the point is that the way we distribute software to final users is really changing.

Twenty years ago or fifteen years ago, the main way to enable some user to use a piece of software was actually to make a copy of that software and give it to him or to her via the network or some media.

And all those ???, that kind of conveying software is clearly distribution and that kind of activity used to trigger some sort of license ???.

These days, a software is no longer distributed that way, in large parts.

It's being used over the net and something like the AGPL is the equivalent of triggering some licensing condition via the main way of distributing, of giving access to some software.

I want to enter in details in this debate.

Those are just examples, for me they examples of the fact that we are kind of losing faith in how much the legal system and free software are intertwined.

And this actually mixes very badly with the situation in which users are losing control because those computations are moving away from them.

I think this situation, in general, in not going to fix themselves and we, as distribution people, have a role to play in fixing it.

What could be a role for Debian in all this computing situation we have these days.

The common trend in the so called cloud seems to be that computations are moving away from user devices.

We cannot just say "Well just don't use anything cloudy", because it is convinient, people will want to use that.

We need to do something different.

As distribution people, we could do a lot, I think, and I have a couple of thoughts to share with you that are different depending on the so called service model of the cloud.

One of the first service model of the cloud you might have heard about is "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS) where essentially you have servers that give virtual machines to people and essentially you get to administer your own machine wich is a virtual machine on a virtual machine server controlled by someone else.

This is potentially very good for people because it is lowering the barrier you need to have your own server.

When I first set up my own server with friends, at the end of the 90's, we had to by some machine, to find someone kind enough to host it, pay the hosting fees and so on and so forth.

It was something that was by far not at all accessible to the random user.

Theses days, a lot of people can simply go to some virtual machine provider, rent a virtual machine with one-click button and they have their own machine to administer.

Maybe they don't have the skill to administer it, that's a different problem, but you are definitly lowering the barrier to access, to have you own server and do your own remote computation.

As Debian, we are doing pretty well in this area, I think.

We're offering technology like OpenStack and other competitors of OpenStack, which seems to be the market leader on that market which are entirely free software.

But I think we should be investing more in offering a trivial deployment experience for Debian users.

We should make trivial for people to have their own virtual machine servers.

If they are not computer geeks, they should be able to flock together friends which have system administration ability and have their own local IaaS and have their own virtual machine without having to rely on big hosters providing virtual machines to everyone in the world.

This is a great step to our autonomy.

As Debian, what is the best deployment experience we can offer for people that want to setup their own virtual machine servers.

Then, there is another service model which is call PaaS, platform as a service.

This is a kind of service model in which essentially you have hosters of application engines, you develop application targeting specific application servers.

An exemple of this is Google App Engine.

I think in some sense this service model of the cloud is mostly orthogonal to what we do as a distribution because either you're using a full fledge distribution and you do your own system administration, or you are developping an application for a specific application server and you rely on someone else to do that administration.

So, yes, I think it's mostly orthogonal to what we do, but might also be a symptom that there is a reject from the application developper community, a reject from the way they can target distributions like Debian.

So if it is very difficult to have your own application running properly on Debian because we have old software, because we change libraries, because we do not accept multiple copies of the same libraries and so on and so forth, if it is too difficult for application developpers to target Debian, they might be more and more tempted to target applications servers like PaaS.

So there might be something we could do about this, here, like finding better synergies between containerization technology, we have some work done in Debian, and the way we usually develop some, we usually maintain a distribution.

There might be something we could do about this here.

Oh, and I didn't mention this, but I have no specific answer to give to you, just a train of thoughts I wanted to share with you and what we could do to improve the situation.

The final service model we have in the cloud, which is I think worrysome from the point of view of user control, is SaaS, Software as a Service.

There, essentially your own device, your own computer only is thin client and rely entirely on a remote server to do your own computation.

We are back to the mainframe / thin client distinction of the early days of computing and here, there is a lot we could do, I think, but also a lot we could not do.

Here, most of the work should come from upstreams.

We need better free software and federated replacement for popular centralized proprietary applacations in which users can participate in some kind of network by using their own node.

This is work that should not come from distribution itself, it should really come from application developpers upstream.

But still, there are useful things we could do here.

We already have a lot of building blocks.

We have stuff like Owncloud, Git-annex, mediagoblin, pump.io, Yacy.

We have a lot of good building blocks, most of them are not yet up to par with the centralized proprietary equivalent, but I'm confident we could get there.

What we lack is the equivalent ease of deployment of these services on user machines.

In some sense, if we have democratized the installation of software twenty years ago with distributions, these days, to face the challenge of control of our own computation, we need to make it as easy as using a package manager to install your own nodes using those applications.

Ideally, everyone in the world without nothing more than basic computer user skills should be able to have its own machine at home doing some anonymous browsing, doing some mail handling, doing web hosting, doing storage calendar, doing encrypted peer to peer backup, and so and so forth.

I'm maintaining my own mail server and it is a user ???, I struggle myself to keep up with the need of knowledge and of surveillance that I need to make to my own mail server to be able to run it properly and I get blacklisted from time to time from providers and it's a pain.

Something that no one without having at least some basic system administration ability could do properly.

This is the thing we need, the nut we need to crack.

We need to empower everyone out there to have its own computer with its own node of those services.

Of course, you are all thinking of the FreedomBox now.

That's a great example of a project who wants to tackle precisely that problem.

It's a project that's been announced by Eben Moglen a few years ago at a Debconf if my memory serves me well.

It's heavily based on Debian and it's doing exactly that.

But my question from the Debian point of view is: maybe this project should not only be a spin-off of Debian, should not only be a derivative distribution of Debian, maybe we should think at making something like this a first class citizen in Debian.

I don't know exactly what that means yet, it's something we could think about having the main administration interface for Debian something that targets these specific scenarios.

We could generalize that, we do not need to target only specific plug devices because people at home might have desktop computers, might have media center.

They might want something like the FreedomBox at home and collaborate with other immediately.

My point here is that if our mission back in the days was to democratize free software by making it easier to install free software on your machine, well today our mission is democratize free software by making it trivial to install some node of some federation of free services on your machine.

Another thing we could do, it is the last one for me today, is to step in the free service debate.

When I started looking up these arguments a few years back, I was surprised by the fact that it's still not clear what it does mean to be a free service.

When I started working on free software fifteen years ago, it was fairly clear what does free software mean.

Sure, it was some terminology debate between free software and open source which still exists today, but the basic freedoms, the basic rights you should have to call something free and open source was fairly clear.

That kind of intellectual debate had already happened at the time.

Today, where the problem of computations moving away from indivual user is raging, there is no clear consensus on that matter.

There is some great work, for instance there is the Franklin Street statement on free network service, I think that's a full ???, dating back to 2008, six years ago, in which you find a lot of very useful recommendations for users, for software developpers and for system administrators to make sure that you maximize your control over your own computation on the network, but they take no stance on what does it mean to be a free service.

Is it enough to have something which is free, do you need more specific license.

There are some recommendation on that point, but still, there are no clear answers to this question.

There is another work by RMS in 2010 about Software as a Service or "service as a software substitute" as he calls it.

Here, essentially what you have is a main recommandation about not using Software as a Service at all.

Essentially there is a recommandation of doing your own computation on your own machines.

I think that might be a generally good recommandation but it's not gonna scale, it's not gonna be enough in my opinion to convince people not to use very convenient services.

Think we need more gradual and blurry lines saying, encouraging people to keep computation closer to them, to rely on federation of friends of people to do computation together.

And we, as distribution people, could make easier for them to do so.

And then there is another work which is "Network Services Aren't Free or Nonfree" which is a couple of years later, still by RMS, which essentially tries to walk the fine line between what's the difference between a pure service, so a service that just for instance convey messages, as opposed to a service which does computation that could have been done instead on your machine.

That's a very fine line to work, it's very difficult to stay there and what we might need there is a strong opposition, actually, and we should try to replace everything which is centralized with federated equivalent and say that we as free software people and distribution people should work in that direction.

So what we could do in Debian.

Well, I think we should try to step in this debate.

Surprisingly for me, we still have no clear answer to what does it mean to be a free service today and we have quite a bit of experience in Debian in leading debates in free sotfware.

We have created the DFSG which is being used as an example for many other communities, we have participated in the GPLv3 discussion for instance.

Our decisions of free license are looked up by other projects.

So we might have the authority and the reputation to step in this debate and we also have a lot of technical knowledge in the area.

Being a distribution commited to free software, we know a thing or two not only about software freedom, but also about how you deploy software, how difficult it is and how difficult it should be for people do deploy free software.

So I think we are in just the sweet spot to actually enter this debate with the needed authority and make a contribution to actually help people realize what does it mean today to use a free service.

The concluding question I have for you is "What's Debian take today on liberating users?".

Would we be happy enough to have Debian on every machine in the world if people are using completely remote services?

And if we were not, what should we do, what should we be working on to change that future which seems very much the future that we have at hand.

Pictures are gone, so there was a cloud on the left, there was Debian here and a sun here.

LaTeX, beamer or Tikz or something is playing tricks on me.

So that's all I have for you, I hope I've given you some food for thoughts for this week and if you have any question or comments in these topics, I'm very much happy to hear about that.

Thank's a lot.

[applause]

There seems to be a mic which is floating around down there.

[Q] ??? quite a lot and quite brilliantly about what cloud computing buzzwords mean free software, but I think what important battle we are actually losing is ??? in the minds of people.

[Q] Why is it young developpers or newcommers to free software don't care about software being free?

[Q] Why don't they care about using non free tools, why don't they care about which license declare for their software if any license is at all? and so on.

[Q] You mention that problem, but what do we do about it? Do you have any ideas?

[A] Well, a friend of mine we asked a similar question I think once answered "What could they say more that 'Oh those young kids' ".

So, I don't know, maybe it's our fault, maybe we have failed as a generation to convey the importance that being in control of our own computation had, or maybe it's just that the public that is open to coding and hacking is much larger than in the past so we are reaching out other communities.

It's very good for them to be coding because I think every citizen in the world need to have basic knowledge of coding to understand what's happening in the world, but maybe they just have different mission than we had in the past.

So, very good question, I don't have a very good answer, sorry.

[Q] Hello.

Thank you so much for the wonderful talk, I think it's great to talk about these political issues and I see there's a challenge between the sort of very individual focus of each person being able to use their own computer as the wish which has its own values, but there's a different sort of value that relates to power structures in general.

So, we're talking about not just how free is each individual person but whether an entity like Twitter, Google or Facebook or some these other services is a very powerful entity that has power over the majority of us who use their services.

And so, I wonder if and I'd like your thoughts on thinking about it less as a "Is this software free?" but about "Who is in power in the community?" and so in a democratic sense, you could have the community that builds the tools together as government structures or as mechanisms for handling power that make the power bottom-up and more democratic and maybe that's more important than the technical status of each individual user.

[A] So, as a concerned citizen and also as a political activist, I very much share your concern.

I think we need to focus on what is in reach on us as geeks in this circle and have this kind of discussion in a different circle.

So, as someone with activity in politics and as a geek, I very much try to actually explain to politicians and to activists the role of what we are doing here in very technical ways and the impact that it as on politics in general.

And I think the ??? the talk later on this evening might have a thing or two to say about that as well.

So from our part we need to understand it is some sense even if we advance a lot the status quo of user control of technology that we had thirty years ago.

We have also started to lag behind many other areas.

Something that I wanted to mention before but I fail to do so is that when I was doing my computing in the nineties, a lot of computations were mediated by clearly defined protocols.

So we had RFCs or equivalent documents by other organisations which were like clearly marked paths to how to collaborate technically on the internet and how to make software talk together.

In a sense, that culture of interoperability of protocols has actually started lagging behind a lot with respect to popular technology.

So stuff like social networks, most of them except the good ones that free software guys try to build like pump.io or like diaspora, well all those technologies started up without any kind of interoperability in mind.

So technically I think we need to push again on the direction of interoperability of protocols, and that's a technical contribution that we could do that will have an impact.

You know, code is law, as Lessig was saying, and that would have a technical impact on the power structures you mention.

That's my thought on this matter.

[Q] I have an answer.

Hello.

I have an answer, sort of an answer to the previous question.

This is of cours the heart of the difference between free software and open source.

The difference between free software and open source isn't nothing at all and it's not about licenses.

It's about goals and aims.

Over the past decades, many of us have chosen not to pick a fight with open source people just for an easy life and, you know, it's always easy to have somebody who might share some of your goals and to be able to collaborate with them.

But less and less is it becoming the case that the goals of people who are doing open source are the same as the goals of people doing free software.

You can see that very clearly in the responses from people like Google to things like the AGPL.

And there are a lot of examples.

So, one of the things that we can do to try and bring some of the new crop of developpers along with us is to actually make it a bit more of a fuss about…

You know, let's not come ??? all Stallman about that, Stallman is not the best PR guy, but I think Debian can do a lot better than he can and we've probably got a lot more credibility.

And individually, we have as well.

What we need to do is we need to explain our vision to those new developpers who mostly are just being, you know, they see a open source marketing machine and we are something different.

[A] Thanks.

So there's not need to be questions and answers, so if you have comments, feel free.

[Talkmeister] I think we're running short of time and we need to take one more question.

So maybe one last or, Stefano, one last?

[Talkmeister] We can.

Ok, one last question or comment?

[Q] Just a quick comment if I may.

You talked about federated services and facebook and dropbox and that sort of thing.

I think maybe the issue here is less about federated services but is about identity.

If I have my own dropbox alike and you have your own dropbox alike, the problem is not that the two couldn't talk to each other, we have no way of negotiation of identity authentication, access kind of problem.

I think maybe part of the answer to your question is "Can we come up with some way of allowing federated identity management for people in general and just us say".

[A] I think this is very much related to what I was answering before Aaron, in the sense "yes we could".

We have shown in the past that we can come up with very smart protocols that allow people to technically interoperate over the net.

But we are coming to late for that.

Those big entities which now have the power to attract a lot of users to them developped before those standard that we could have used to make smaller entities interoperate could have been put in place.

So yes, I agree with you, there is technical work to be done but in some sense we are late in doing that work and the question now is only "How could we do the technical work that allow us to have smaller entities that interoperate for authentication or everything else?" and also "How do we migrate from the status quo to the ideal world that would be possible if those standards existed in the first place?".

So in a sense I think we are a bit late and we have twice the work to be done before reaching the optimal and more federated situation which I think would solve the problem.

So, thanks a lot.

[applause]