Hello and welcome to episode 2-3-1 of Late Night Linux, recorded on the 15th of May, 2023.
I'm Jon and with me are Phanem.
Hi, Hi.
Graham.
Hello.
And Will.
Hello.
So the keen eared listeners may realise that this is once again the third episode that we're
recording back to back.
So instead of news and stuff, I've got this question for you.
What are you excited about in the Phos and Linux world and what are you worried about and
what can we do about it?
Let's start with what we're all excited about.
Who wants to go first?
Well, I'm not going to surprise us if we should be by saying plasmus6.
Yeah, I think that is something too genuinely be excited about.
It's starting again, but it's not like going from three to four or four to five seemingly.
It seems like it is going to be more of a gentle upgrade, more of a refinement than a complete
fucking change like before.
And I think they've learnt a lot from how the three to four went badly and four to five
was a bit better, but they also learnt from the way known.
Didn't do a great job of bringing everything along with it as well.
So I really hope it's going to be an easy, smooth transition with a lot of nice things
coming along with it and re-write the crafty old stuff and chucking that out too.
So yeah, fingers crossed.
Yeah, I agree.
I'm excited for it for the same reason that I think there's a lot of people who have been
around the project for a long enough to remember those old transitions.
And they've really seemed to have got their project together over the last few years and
really building momentum, I think.
I'm really hopeful they don't screw this up.
Yeah, I don't know whether I'm making this up or not, but I feel like when there was the four
to five jump, a lot of developers who were involved at the time either drifted away after
or just sort of had enough at the time, where this feels like there's a more stable crew
that's been gone all the way through the five series into the six.
And you know, they're not like phased by the whole change sort of thing.
So it looks like it'll be a very managed sort of change and you know,
only for the better at the end of it as well.
Yeah, and there's a whole new generation of new contributors and new people,
all the people that you talk about in KD corner, you know, a lot of those people from the last few years.
Yeah, that's true.
I mean, like you'd swear Nate was there for the last God knows how many decades,
but yeah, no, he's literally a new import as well.
All right.
What are you excited about, Will?
I'm excited about improving interoperability between open source projects and specifically more standards coming to the four,
where previously there were a lot of competing formats for various, let's say data interchange formats.
Things seem to be settling down and there seem to be groups of projects forming around very particular things.
So my day-to-day work, we talk a lot about Parkay as a mechanism for storing data,
really nicely compressed, nicely organized, very easy to move between various databases,
various frontend systems, various machine learning systems, various data science systems.
And this sort of spread of standards has been what's been on the horizon for years and years, you know,
forever, really, since the internet really came about.
And it is finally starting to seem to become accepted that there will be these standard formats in which data will be stored,
and you can take them between all of these various different systems that you might need to use,
and it will just work.
And I think that open source is leading this by finding groups of people who are interested in solving a particular problem
and letting them get on with it.
And systems don't have to be all things to all people that we can focus on a particular problem,
like, you know, libraries in software development.
Somebody can take care of all of that difficult bit, and then you can just come along and import it into your project and use it.
And it feels like we're really accelerating this sort of adoption of various standards.
And I is exciting for the future because I think we won't be left with a whole load of dead end data
that is now orphaned and can't be used in the future.
It'll just be evergreen. That's my wish.
I've never heard this. What is this parquet? Parquet? What is it?
Parquet. It's an Apache project that's been around for a very long time,
and it's, I think of it as a CSV file.
It's a way of storing data in a way which is strongly typed,
so that, you know, makes it easier to import into other projects,
because you know what each of these columns is supposed to do.
It compresses. It's very quick to scan and find the bits of information that you want,
and it's a standard, and it's an Apache project,
and so everyone is welcome to implement some sort of import or exporter for that format.
That's very cool. No, not just that has passed me by at this point, so that's great.
You tell me there's more than RID files, and what?
What about you, Graeme?
Well, I knew failing with 2's plasma.
You can choose it too. We can choose it together, Graeme.
No, there's a lot of things that actually, there's a lot of things that happen.
A lot of exciting things. Nick's sauce was another exciting thing.
I'm, this is going to troll, fail him.
I think read-only things are going, this isn't going to be my pit.
You're going to hate why I actually chose.
I am really excited about that as well.
I think it's a whole new way of thinking about Linux distributions
and Linux in general. I'm genuinely excited about it.
But I'm going to go with Microsoft, adopting more and more Linux,
and I'm genuinely excited in that kind of WTF is going to happen kind of way,
because I see it the only way they can be moved forward.
That's a huge deal, Graeme. That's how it's going to happen.
I think they're going to create a Linux distribution, and we're going to have to up our game.
They're going to force us to up our game.
I think they only have one way to go.
More adoption, it's going to get really exciting.
I don't like this game anymore.
When I was trying to think of these things,
and yeah, sure, Linux OS is really exciting.
Ain't no one got time for an XOS.
Sorry, it wouldn't be, but really, we don't.
Well, it's not just that. I think it's a new way of thinking that's quite exciting
and makes me want to play with things like I did in the beginning.
But really, I think I'm really excited to see what Microsoft does with Linux.
Well, before we get a lot of emails, they already have at least one distro,
CBL Mariner.
I think they may have renamed that, and they've got one like data center distro as well.
So do you mean they might create a desktop Linux distro?
I don't think they will, but I think they're going to have to incorporate more and more Linux methodologies
and technologies into their platform.
Maybe to the point where people is spending most of their time on using Linux
on top of their Windows platform or Shell, whatever that happens to be.
I think they're going to have to become more and more involved in the ecosystem.
They already are, and they already are probably a huge host and provider of Linux
in terms of people using it.
And I really think this brings a totally different perspective on what Linux
and open source is in a way that we have to come front
if we're going to continue to make a successive force.
It's no just point putting our heads in the sand and pretending that we hate Microsoft.
This is the way it's going to be, and they're going to dominate
unless we find a way of engaging with it.
What's that saying about that hero?
And then like, if you wait too long, you become the villain.
Is that it?
Is this it in reverse?
I could have said plasma.
I mean, come on, Gray, and please.
Why?
Why would you do this to me?
Is this pick and fail in the episode again?
Every episode is that funny.
Okay, right, I was afraid of.
I know my place.
Look, I'm happy for Microsoft to take this role if they play with the same rules that we all do.
I just worry that they're going to do their usual of, well, embrace and extend.
It's an old trope, but...
It's hard to not see them do that.
I mean, if they come along and they play with licensing rules, they play by all the other rules
and they want to actually benefit everybody together.
Okay, fine, I can take that.
I would like them to do that for a long while, and then yes, then they can be accepted
and be believed that they actually do hurt us to the max.
But I feel things are changing, and I feel like we don't always change quickly enough
or responsibly enough to things like WSL and the way people want to use Linux,
such as in Docker or however, we're very slow, I think, as fast people to adapt
to the way people are just simply using the technology.
Which is fully because we probably got ahead by the fact that we were able to be so quick.
Yeah, but I think we're going to be forced to confront this,
and that's what I find quite exciting.
It's never been more relevant.
The future is open source, you know, but the fight's on for force.
Yeah, probably right.
I don't like it, but yeah, I mean, that's probably a good thing.
Because if you're too comfortable, then you're probably not making the effort,
and then that's probably a bad.
Am I having the same old arguments over and over again?
And I think this is going to come to some kind of...
This is going to come to a, you know, map doom situation.
So we have to throw a water's face into the fire, okay?
Oh, I don't know, it was a bad choice of...
Literary example.
All right, well, I'm excited about open source AI machine learning.
Oh, sure.
No, not really.
Although I am actually somewhat excited about that,
but I definitely don't want to hear your bullshit about it, fail him.
So I'm not going to have that as my real thing.
The truth?
You don't want to hear the truth?
Whatever.
No, but just what I've talked about on other shows as well,
just mastered on Fediverse decentralization.
And that's what I'm excited about.
I think that, you know, we've tried it so many times with...
What was it, diaspora and identical?
And I think this time it's really sticking.
Hey, look, Musk, the gift that keeps on giving.
Yeah, it took Twitter just getting destroyed effectively
for Mastodon and the Fediverse to take off.
I called it.
Apparently somebody wrote in to say that I called that apparently years ago.
I wish I could meet me back in the past because apparently I know more
and I'm getting to know less.
But after we've talked about this so many times,
we don't need to go too much into detail,
but I do genuinely find it exciting that it's finally stuck, you know,
GNU social and like so many attempts before.
And I'm sure there's plenty of people still using those old things,
but Mastodon really just caught the design guise, I think.
And it's not going to be as big as Blue Sky or whatever,
but even Blue Sky has to have some sense of it being decentralized
for people to take it seriously.
And that's exciting to me as well.
It might be a sort of poor facsimile of the Fediverse.
It may in fact end up being interoperable with the Fediverse.
We'll have to see on that one.
But nevertheless, the fact that that is now almost the default
for something to succeed, much like open source is the default for something to succeed.
And that I find really exciting.
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All right, so what are we worried about?
And more importantly, so this doesn't become a moment first,
what can we do about the things that we're worried about?
So will you go first?
Oh, I don't know what to do about it.
Well, what I'm worried about is tightening budgets.
We see layoffs from all of the VC start, funders startups,
but we also see them from big established companies like Red Hat, for example.
That worries me.
Does it mean that companies will be less accepting of open source,
less accepting of producing an open source product at risk of losing profit or losing margin?
And so we see just a general divestment in open source.
And then other things like what about sponsorship of conferences?
If the marketing budget is half the size it was last year,
where is that money going to get spent?
And it worries me that the sort of, I don't know, lifestyle,
that the open source community has managed to build is at risk.
And I don't know what we do about it really.
I think we need to make sure that open source is seen as being a valuable investment
and not a cost center.
I think there's a genuine worry here.
And I think that all we can do about it is become leaner effectively
and produce more direct results in terms of value for money.
And that is a very difficult challenge.
Yeah, it's funny because that is exactly my, well, prediction.
I don't know what you want to call it, but yeah, that is my worry as well.
It's exactly the same.
It's like we've seen the IBM Red Hat stuff and it's a big worry
because all those budgets are going to get dried up.
And that's where we really suffer because we don't have a spokesperson to come out
and say, you know, this is a really good way to do things
because it's seen as giving away the magic sauce every time.
So yeah, you just hope that heads prevail
and they're not going to throw the baby out of the bathwater.
Is that the term?
That is the term.
You got it right for a change.
Second language.
Yeah, right.
What about you, Graeme?
Well, I've said something similar to this before
and I don't want to repeat myself.
But genuinely, my biggest worry is still the move towards
more permissive open source licenses.
I don't want to go into chat GBT and open AI,
but I think that's going to make it even harder
when there's no open source data sets
and we get so used to walled gardens
and software running on websites
and a cultural shift in younger developers
who are more used to choosing
more permissive or MIT licenses
and considering, because of the history,
maybe because of some of the organizations behind it
seeing GPL and their ilk as viral,
when actually I understand that
and I'm certainly not free software zealot.
But at the same time, I think the viral nature of GPL
is essential for a healthier open source,
free and open source environment.
And I really, really don't like the continued trend
for everything to move more permissive
and for GPL to become more seen
as a viral damaging license.
All right.
You don't get to mone about it without a solution.
So what we're going to do about that?
Yeah.
Change the defaults and get a hub.
Yeah.
Force it to be GPL.
You know something, maybe I hadn't thought of a solution.
I must admit.
But the conversation we had about Thunderbird recently,
even maybe something as simple as a pop-up,
maybe something as simple as saying
why something's GPL in the apps
that are GPL and why it's work for those projects.
Maybe something as simple as that is a good place to start.
I'm really annoyed that you picked that
because it's actually one of my other ones as well
and it didn't even occur to me at the time
when I was thinking of this.
And I feel like somebody has stolen
the whole idea of what is good, what is bad.
And I think we talked about it even a few weeks back
where we were talking about stuff.
And it feels like the bargain that we take
for doing up and stuff work,
it's important that you get that back at the end of it
whereas the BSD crowd,
they seem to be happy to just give it away.
And I think that's so powerful to be able
to keep that software open
because it depends on whether you want to be powerful
for the user or you want to be powerful for the developer.
And I think the user in the grand scheme of things
is the most important person.
And you know how I chose Microsoft
for the excitement part.
And you're right to have some reservations fail him.
And it would be nice for us to have a set of licenses
where Microsoft is winning
by using open source software
and we're winning by feeling confident
that they'll stick to the terms of the license
and everybody will gain from their involvement.
Is that not the GPL?
Well, realistically, if we think about it.
Well, I think one of the solutions
needs to be better education on the licenses
because I think they're so complex
and so surrounded by misdirection
and misunderstanding that it's very difficult
for somebody to make an informed choice.
There are so many and they are so complicated.
Maybe one of the aspects of trying to fix this
is reduce the number of licenses there are.
Yeah, what we should do is consolidate them
into one new license for each one.
And that will definitely fix the problem
having a new standard.
But the footing is,
Will has literally just reminded me
that that was talking about stolen going away
for the FSF last time.
And I think that is a real issue.
It is him associated with the FSF,
associated with the GPL,
when really the GPL should stand on its own.
And we should just not count about
stolen or the FSF.
We should just look at it playing it as a license
where we all contribute,
we all benefit,
and we all feed it back in,
and nobody gets to lock it back up.
And that's what it should be.
All right, well,
what I'm worried about
is that there's not enough young people
coming in to this
universal hours.
And I might be wrong about that,
but I don't think I am.
There are certainly some young people
who are wrong people.
What I just dulled on this,
is he like 15 or something?
No, Don's mid-twenties.
Oh, I mean, that's,
that's as close to mid-fifteen
as what I will be.
Yeah.
And Amaless, I think, is 23.
Oh, fuck off.
I know.
He was born this century, I think,
which is just like,
I know, it's really worrying.
So there's two of them at least.
Well, I mean, come on.
I know, but the rest of us are all just old men.
And, you know, that's not ideal.
And I do think that the,
the people on this show
somewhat do reflect the realities
of the Foss and Linux world.
What's that sunny?
Exactly.
There are a lot of people
who look like us,
put it that way.
And I think that is definitely bad
that there's not more young people.
And, you know, the reasons for that
are pretty clear to me
that young people generally have gone mobile
on mobile first
and only use laptops and desktops
for either gaming
or work,
slash school work,
and have no desire
or reason to use them other than that.
And, you know,
you can get into the Raspberry Pi stuff
and there are certainly some young people
getting into it.
But I'm worried that
there's not enough of them.
And so what we're going to do about that,
well, you know,
you joke about Dalton
and, you know, I mentioned Amaless.
I mean, that's something
I am trying to do.
I'm trying to get
more young people involved
and not just be a lot of old blocs.
And, you know,
that's my tiny thing
that I'm doing on these shows.
But I think mentoring young people,
being more welcoming,
being less gatekeepery
about it, being less,
you know,
you're using the wrong license
or you don't know what you're doing
or you're top-posting
on this mailing list or whatever.
Like,
being less of an asshole
to young people,
being more welcoming to them.
I think we have to do that.
We have to really,
really make an effort.
And these young people
might have strange
goings-on,
strange cultures
and with all the tick-tock
and stuff.
And I don't know.
I'm too fucking
out of touch.
I haven't got any kids
of my own.
So I've got no idea.
But I think we need to
be more welcoming
to young people.
We need to make it
more welcoming
in the first place.
And then we need to
do outreach to young people
to get them
into our cult,
essentially.
I absolutely agree
with everything
you said.
But I think I
differ slightly
in that I don't think
we need to bring them
into our cult.
And I say this
from a perspective
of amateur radio.
When 30-something years ago,
when I first saw
packet radio
before the
web existed
and the early days,
relatively early days
of the internet,
amateur radio buffs
were out there
sending packets
over the wires
and over the radio
and talking to each other.
And then the internet
comes along.
And what you hear is,
oh, it was all
different in my day,
sunny, and we invented
all this stuff.
And you're just,
you don't understand it.
I think if we bring
young people
into our cult,
they'll get the same
treatment that, oh,
well, we were around
when you had to
compile your own
kernel. So I don't know
that bringing people
into our cult
is the way to go.
I think we need to encourage
them to start their own
cult, but with
a similar goals
and similar values.
So maybe that's a subtle
difference.
I think it's a subtle
difference,
but a very important one.
You're right.
As long as I think
the right way,
we need to make sure they
think the right way.
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On to a bit of Admin then.
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Let's do some feedback then.
Sam wrote in to say,
I just had a look
at the Ubuntu summit presentation
around native host messaging,
which made me recall
our exchange about
snaps of browsers
breaking government-issued
smart IDs.
And Sam wrote to us
about this in 2021.
As the feedback
in the late nightlinux
show at the time was
mostly log a bug
and it can be fixed
for the LTS.
Here is the current situation.
16 months after
me logging a bug,
which I had done
for Firefox
and three-and-a-half years
after me logging
the same bug for Chromium,
the issue is now gently
being fixed for the
mainstream usage
for native host messaging.
So no
extensions management
will work.
SmartCards such
as ours, however,
require a system-wide
PKCS 11 library,
as they are obviously
devices that are available
to the system
and not just the browser.
This is not solved yet.
I try to explain
that doing this is huge
and especially unnecessary
hit for organizations
like ours
that actually do
want to support
open-source users.
We have no commercial
interest here.
Just support costs
to bear
to support users
in the Linux ecosystem.
So last year,
I saw a lot of drama
around the snap start-up
problem and I found this
bizarre.
Do average users
really care that much
for a 10-second
way after a cold boot?
If so, why do distributions
that do OS tree
upgrades during boot
still have any users?
And where is the
complete outrage
around that, by the way?
The whole Linux
ecosystem pushed
canonical to put resources
on this effectively
making it an issue
where perhaps
it wasn't.
Think about most podcasts
from some articles
Jim's rant,
IMG Ubuntu, etc.
For these other
breaking issues,
there was hardly any
attention.
My expectation
at this point
is that we will see
two LTSs parts
before we can technically
support
out of the box
Ubuntu again.
And this was
because of a packaging
format switch,
not a single new feature
or capability
involved.
Sam makes
some very good points here.
And we
somewhat brushed
them off, I think,
last time
with our log of bargain
and it turns out
we had done that.
And there are
more issues
with snaps than
just the speed,
which has
mostly been fixed.
But I think
that Sam has discovered
something key
about open source.
And that is that
you have to be
the change you wish
to see.
It was the
45 seconds
that it was
taken to open the
Firefox app
that bothered me.
So I went
and shouted about that
as loudly as I
could.
And I'm
in the fortunate position
having
worked my ass off for
about 10 years
to get this
podcast that
thousands people
listen to.
But we all
have a voice,
and we can all rally
other people.
And FOS
is something
of a democracy,
isn't it?
That if you have a
compelling case,
make the case
for it and
change minds
and push the agenda
to what you want
it to be.
And if smart cards
are not working,
and that's causing you
to not be able to
support a bunch
of out of the box,
then you've got
to shout about it.
And writing
to us was a good
start.
Presumably you wrote
some blog posts,
maybe got in touch
with people
to do YouTube stuff,
maybe went to some
events,
talked to people there.
I mean, obviously
events have been
difficult over the last few
years.
I think you've got
to just get out
into the world
and push your agenda.
Yeah.
I think you're right.
It is extremely difficult
to be in a position
where you can push your agenda
without just being seen
as a noisy,
complaining user who,
you know,
doesn't really necessarily
have a point.
It's a tricky situation.
You need to know
where the developers hang out.
You need to know
who they are.
You need to know
how to best engage
with them.
And how do you do that
as an end user?
It's a very, very difficult job.
I sympathize,
but I don't have
any solutions.
It's difficult
because if you take it
from Katie Neon's point of view,
they actually had issues
with the way the snap
was going to work
and they switched
over to the PPA.
Now,
you probably don't
want to have to say,
well, okay,
everybody in this country,
you now need to switch
to the Belgian government
or whatever government
happens to be
PPA for this Firefox
because we need
the PKSC to work,
whatever.
It's very difficult
to be in that position.
And, you know,
as the guys have said,
you need to know
who to bother.
I mean, again,
in a lucky position,
I've had bugs
for Katie
that luckily I know
some people from Katie
have listened to me say
and been able to fix them,
but that is
a very, very
lucky position to be in.
But the thing
about open sources
that if you don't
necessarily have a voice,
a prominent voice
that people will listen to
or aren't necessarily
friends with the people
who you can
bug about this,
there's always
the option
to pay someone.
And again,
not everyone is
in that financial position,
but if this is such a huge issue
that basically
an entire country
can't use a bun
to out of the box,
then you would think
that it would be possible
to get together
enough money
to fund a developer
to have a crack at this.
The source code is
all out there.
You could fix the bug
and then
go about upstream
it to help all
the other countries
that are struggling
with this same bug.
But imagine
from the team
that care about this,
they go to their manager
and say,
we need to spend
one developer's time
for six months
to fix this bug.
And the manager says,
who's it for?
And he says,
with these Linux users
and how many of those
are there?
Well, they're like 0.1%
of our user base.
Well, get fucked.
But some drunken man
keeps shouting about
how slow snaps are
so we better fix that.
I mean, I don't believe
that it was us
who did that.
It was much bigger
than just our show
and our own
jubuntu
or whatever.
It was the entire fucking
internet or the entire
Linux internet
was shouting out
canonical about the speed
of snap start-up.
And that is sometimes
what it comes down to as well.
I mean, well, you've
talked about this before.
About deciding
how to allocate resources
you are an engineering manager.
You have to decide
what the priority is
and how many people are
affected by things.
And you have to
know that they're affected
by it in the first place.
It might be that there are
way more people
affected by the lack
of smart cards.
But if you don't hear
about that,
then how are you to know
that you have to fix it?
Yeah, I think that's
a good point.
And if you can
drum up interest
from other groups
who are also affected
that increase the size
of your vote
as it were,
it sounds like a good step
in the right direction.
Although, if this worked,
then we wouldn't have
Tories for 14 years,
would we?
And we'd probably have
someone better than
Sir Keith
to try and be the
opposition.
Yeah, maybe we were all just
fucked, Sam.
Sorry.
But at least it doesn't
take 45 seconds to start
on my wife's laptop anymore.
So,
it swings around about.
Right, well, we better get
out of here then.
We'll be back next week
when, who knows,
what we'll be talking about.
But until then,
I've been drunk.
I've been failing.
I've been grand.
And I've been well.
See you later.
Bye-bye.
you