librarypunk - 020 - Proprietary formats, a podcast where we will yell at you

Episode Date: July 24, 2021

This week we’re talking with John Fink about open standards (a little bit) and open source (a lot) in libraries. Also libertarians.  John’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/adr  John’s internet famous presentation: Stop Using Proprietary Document Formats; A Lightning Talk Where I Will Yell At You  Article we read (post-print): https://asu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2346.1/36134/PDF_Proof2.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Library Funk, now in high-law compression in P3. I'm Justin. I'm a scholar communications librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I'm an IT systems administrator, a public library. My pronouns is she and they. I'm Jay. I'm an academic metadata librarian. My pronouns are he, him.

I'm Carrie. I'm an academic health sciences librarian. And my pronouns are she, her. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. Hi, I'm John. I'm an academic librarian. in Ontario, Canada. And my pronouns are him and they.

Awesome. So we're going to talk about open source. Oh, boy. All kinds of open source. But first, I have new standards news. I feel like Bruce Springsteen's going to come out and know we're like in high fidelity and start giving us sage wisdom. Wait, what's that bit? What's that slide from?

That's from a TV show. Oh, yeah, it does sound familiar. It's from a TV show. I have no idea. That's from a TV show. I know exactly what you're talking about. I can't place it, though. I've watched too much TV.

It's from like a basic prestige TV show. I think I found it on like... Like for men. Oh, okay. Like I'd go on a date as a straight person and hear about this TV show. It's a guitar. Of course, it's for men. I can't help you.

I have no idea. Didn't watch TV for a really long time. NIST releases a new standard cigarette for testing flammability of mattresses. And if you want to send them to me, send me the NIST cigarettes. I want to try them. I want to know what a standard cigarette is. Are you going to test the flammability of your bed? Because that sounds a little risky.

People die that way. Don't do that to the bunnies, Justin. No, I'm just going to smoke them. Well, there's a standard cup of tea. like Britain has a T standard or there's an ISO standard for tea and apparently it's not very good and I myself have been to where the can they where the Hawaiian pizza was invented it's in Chatham, Ontario oddly enough and it is thoroughly median it's not very good but it's not bad so the whole point of standards to have a thing which is okay and so I wouldn't smoke those

well I wouldn't smoke any cigarettes but I really wouldn't smoke. Wait so would that make the tea mediocrity? Oh my. my God. Score one for Kerry. It's like the whole like authenticity thing of like, you know, Buffalo wings and Buffalo and Cubana's in Miami. It's like that's the standard and so people get lazy with it. Cuban sandwiches are from Tampa.

Buffalo wings aren't from Tampa? No, Cuban sandwiches are from Tampa. Oh. They're not from Miami. Buffalo, yeah, okay. Cashew chicken is from Springfield, Missouri. Oh, hey, there you go. Missouri fact for the day.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are from here in Dover. This is a fun fact. Cowell Bunga. The question of standards for like things that aren't like data or what a not like, I guess how is it different from a patent or like or is standard? Like I don't mean like oh, you do it in this way like like with cocktail recipes.

I guess how there's like the international cocktail whatever. But I guess like how just standards for not. software and dates and things like that differ from patents and whatnot, I guess. What I learned about NIST is that it's run by like the Department of Commerce. And so they're just basically making things so that it can get price gouged by the manufacturers who make them. Yeah, like a quality control kind of thing. Yeah.

So I'm sure there's a lot of people who've worked with NIST who are now like libertarians like for $500 standard hammers? I'm in libertarian state. I'll go look around at some hardware stores. Yeah, report back, Jay. Yes. Hello, are there libertarian hammers? I would like to know.

Can you hit libertarian bears with them? I have not seen or heard from a libertarian in a long time, at least not one that would be around physically where I am. We only have one group of libertarians in this country, and it's the band rush and you want to keep them at bay. Yeah, they're all here. I move to where they all are. We're keeping them safe.

Yeah, I want to know if we can make open source standard cigarettes, but I guess that would be like DIY. I have no idea. Like, I know that standards publications are not, they're not freely available, at least in the States. It's like you can't just say, go to whomever and say, give me the standards document for this, this, this, and this. Because who's that guy?

Oh, there's some guy who just gets a lot of standards and then puts them on Internet Archive or something, and I can't remember his name. Oh, gosh. Anyway, so I have no idea how standards. A little better idea of how patents operate, but I don't have a very good idea of how standards operate. I noticed the engineering ones are a huge-ass big book, and apparently the electronic database version is worse. Yeah.

That's all I know about ones that aren't like dates. RDA. I actually like RDA. I just don't like that it's close. So, John, I wanted to ask, since you are internet famous for yelling at people about proprietary formats. Yeah, this episode is my idea because of that.

Why should libraries care about open source and open standards and non-proprietary formats? It's a little bit of a different, like I'm not talking strictly about open source here, because I haven't given up that battle. I've been using open source in libraries, like on my desktop and almost exclusively since, like, 95. But in that whole time, you know, it's really hard to get people off that. So I settled for the open data, which I think is an easier sell.

That presentation was like a 10-minute, like, lightning talk at McAllister College in Minnesota, their library technology conference, which I love. For one thing, I love it because it's just called library technology conference. So it's a bit like a standard library conference itself. And it's a real nice little scrappy little conference. I don't know if it's ever been to it, but it's a nice place. I haven't been there for years because I haven't been to the States since 2016, coincidentally enough.

But I hope to make it back there someday. That's a lot of reasons. But yeah, there's a big reason and there's a lot of little reasons. But yeah, that talk, I barely remember it. I have the slide deck for it. And it was just mostly just telling people to stop using Word, please. Because, oh. And I don't recall how it was received other than people were laughing.

And I don't know if they were laughing at me or laughing with me or what. So I guess one of my big questions in all this is, you know, big mission is stop using Word, which is great mission. but Word also has like a lot of great accessibility features. So from like an advocacy and accessibility standpoint, it's actually kind of a great file format and program. How do open source file formats compare and hold up? Oh gosh. I wish I could answer that better.

I don't. You're absolutely correct in that. There's been a lot of answerlayer work on Word and Apple stuff. as well to make sure accessibility is more of a thing than an open source. And that's really, really regretful. And I remember I had a conversation, oh, I can't remember who was with, I'm sorry, but somewhere on Twitter about PDFs and how PDFs are not accessible in and of themselves. There's a whole standard to use that is difficult, at least difficult for me to carve out.

Like, it's difficult for me to generate accessibility standard PDFs. And I thought if you had a PDF and you had, you know, when it was machine readable, then your job was done. And it really isn't. And I felt I had a really big education that day. So, yeah, I don't really going to answer that. I would automatically, like previous to this conversation I had, I would automatically assume that anything that was like asky text would be accessible. And apparently it's not always the case. That sort of brings me to a little thing, a question I put in the notes.

because especially with one of the, I have your presentation up, something in your presentation and in the article about like library philosophy, right, and how we, you know, we're library people.

We talk a good game about openness and sharing. And that article talked about, you know, the philosophy of things should be open and free. And just the way I've heard a lot of people talk about, like, FOS kind of gives me like vocational awe vibes. And so I feel like sometimes things like accessibility issues maybe don't get pointed out as often because we're so focused on like, oh, it has to be free and open, which is great, and it should.

But I don't know if maybe you had thoughts on the sort of maybe relationship with vocational awe and the reverence of library philosophy with sort of open source philosophy. Not that I'm saying those are equivalent or bad things, but I don't know if maybe the way we talk about them. Yeah. I don't see much crossover in the library world to open source vocational awe because most library workers are not like super big fans of open source. They just want something that works. And I have a hard time really blaming them. But you're correct in that the notion of vocational awe you can translate to open source in the software world. And there's, I don't really know what to think about that.

There's, it's, I don't, like, there are times when I don't use, when I've had to use proprietary software, it's not like if I had to use proprietary software, I'd throw my machine out the window. I've done it. I tend to prefer open source just initially because I was an enormous cheap ass and then I just got used to it. But yeah, there's definitely that, and the accessibility thing is a real big element of that. It's like, okay, these are these ancillary things that, that software people don't generally concentrate. trade on because they think it's secondary to the actual functioning of the software when really it should be considered more of an integral piece. I mean, I think that's changing. I don't

think it's changing enough or perhaps fast enough, but I do think there's a more appropriate attitude about these kinds of ancillary features that there wasn't even five or ten years ago. So hopefully that'll, that continues to pace. Yeah. So before we go too far in, Jay mentioned FOS, which is free open source software, just so everyone at home can keep up, which is aligned with a lot of open standards. So if you use like Open Office, they're going to use open document formats. And there's a little bit, I was thinking about preservation. I was trying to find an article that was really related to open standards in libraries.

So it's really surprisingly not a whole lot. There's a lot of conflicting literature. The article I actually ended up finding for us to read and talk about a little bit. just to give us some talking points was one of the better ones by far. One of the things I talked about were institutional barriers to adopting open source and open standards. I wanted to know if you could guide us through the idea of technical debt a little bit. Okay. So if I'm getting the interpretation of technical debt wrong, please stop me.

but to my mind, technical debt is the sort of detritus that you accumulate because you've worked on one thing a while and to change it to another thing is a difficult proposition. Is this in line with what you're thinking? Like the sort of cruft that accumulates from using a certain tool for a certain period of time? I hear it used a lot of different ways. So that's why I wanted to ask you what you thought about technical debt because I see people using it in different ways. The way I was interpreting people saying it is you outsource a certain amount of things. And you don't have the ability to restaff because there's no one with the expertise. Yes.

I don't know if I'd quite call that technical debt. I'm not sure what I would call that. But yeah, that's a definite problem. It is very, very, very, very, very attractive for us to throw money at a vendor to do a thing rather than try to build the expertise or hire their expertise locally. And that happens in IT constantly. And I'm very, very fortunate about where I work in that we have a very robust and fairly well-equipped IT situation, probably unique in this province, that if we want to spin up a new service, we can do it ourselves in a house, whereas most libraries that I can think of have a dependency

either on their central IT or on external vendors. And I think that's a great, great shame because it's allowed us at my place to be very, very agile, lowercase A agile, not talking about the development methodology, just being able to do stuff agile in a way that I, at least in Ontario, I can't think of another institution that's comparable. And that's a real shame. It's good to know that there's different ways of understanding technical debt because I was getting very confused reading people talking about it. So there's quite possibly different ways of talking about it. Yeah, I would have gone with John on a definition right off the top of my head is the stuff that accumulates as you move through using different systems. And, oh, that's left over from this. And yeah, that's not the funnest part of my job.

No. And Sadie, you and I probably think similarly because I was for a very, very long time, a library system administrator for, oh, good gravy. 10 years, I don't know, and that still informs a lot of my practice and my thinking is system in a library context. So I'm not surprised. On the centralized IT, Jay had a note he wanted to talk about digital library migration being halted.

Yeah, so just on the concept of like, especially with the institutional barrier of as much as an organization might want to do this if they don't have the technical capability, especially if you're, I don't know, a public university in a state full of libertarians who don't like to give you money. We are functionally a private school, even though we are the state school of New Hampshire, by the way. They just don't give us money. And then COVID happened, and then we got targeted by a Huron consultation. And so library IT got sucked up into centralized IT, including dropping, so not just migrating her, but dropping basically our applications developer. This is when we were in the middle of migrating from Fedora 3. We weren't even at

4 yet. That's what our whole digital library collections was on with Fedora 3. If you looked at it wrong, it was going to break. We hadn't digitized anything in years. Like, this is what I was hired into. I was like, oh, boy. And so she was working on, like, getting, you know, Ruby or something all set up. I don't know things to move us to even just Vodora 4. And then her position got dropped. And Central IT was like, no, because apparently they didn't know how to do it and they couldn't just use what she already had. So we're like, well, we can't do that anymore. But we have this whole system that's going to like shit the bed in like yesterday. And so we had to do this whole thing where we migrated our entire digital collections into our institutional repository system,

all because we lost our own IT and we don't have money because it's New Hampshire. But yeah, so with centralized IT and then we don't have anyone who knows that, basically we got about halfway through an entire like setting up for a digital migration only to have it be completely derailed. And now we're like, well, what kind of software can we use? Because, you know, can we afford something that's not open source, but do we have the technical capabilities to do something that is open source? Or will we have to rely on IT who aren't going to learn things new just because we say that's what we want? Right. So it's, it's been interesting to sort of be like, well, what would cost more? Like hiring someone and training someone to be able to maintain some sort of fedora thing or do what University of Utah did and build their own while I was there or just pay the money

for a proprietary system that has like tech support and stuff. It's been interesting to say the least. And you run into an additional problem with that and that vendors are very canny and they will often go to the

university librarian with a big old dog and pony show and dinner and drinks and stuff And then your university librarian comes back the next day and says, we're implementing vendor product X because they bought me dinner. And what can you do the way that workplaces are structured in a capitalist society? You have very, very little recourse to tell them this is the wrong idea. And I have been at places where we have gone down incredibly bad rabbit holes because somebody in a position of power was especially credible. And what you say about tuition, that's not unique to New Hampshire. I think when I was in university in Ohio in the early 90s, like the state gave like 50% of funding and now it's like 10.

So that's everywhere. I mean, New Hampshire is probably worse than other places, but it is really everywhere. The libertarians, man, they're bonkers. There's so many of them. I have to explain to my wife that New Hampshire decides, despite being in New England, is a weird little. island into itself. Like she's... We're not New England.

Yeah, exactly. It's just like, you know, live... The only thing I know about New Hampshire comes from this guy I used to work in forestry with who was from Brockton, Massachusetts, and he like had this well-prepared rant he would go on about how he hated the state of Massachusetts because it was just like apparently a parasite on Boston. They also are shitty drivers. Yeah, exactly.

And if like you are from Massachusetts and you think people from New Hampshire are shitty drivers, like... No, Massachusetts are shitty drivers. Well, you say that because you're from New Hampshire. Now I am. Anyway, everyone's terrible at driving except in Iowa, so fuck it. It's the only place with good drivers I've ever lived. I believe that. Yeah, only place with good driver.

Although I will say like Chicago driving, fucking Illinois bastards, FIBs, they're like really good at bad driving. So yes, that's like a skill, you know. Agree. I hate driving in Chicago, but. I actually love driving in Chicago. Like I feel really cool because I can drive in Chicago. I can also rule drive really well. I'm a really good rural driver.

Oh yeah. That's like a skill, like being able to pass and shit. Oh, yeah. Cool driving convo. Yeah, so we've got the same issues that Jay dealt with when we have centralized IT at my institution. And one thing that the article pointed out was the lack of staffing, the lack of local expertise, and centralized IT being barriers to having open source. So in my institution, there was not an explicit policy that you couldn't use open source. source. They would just ask you endless stupid questions until you stopped asking.

And see, that's the, I mean, there's a time and a place for stupid questions, and that time in a place is when you're putting in a production system. If you are wanting to do a thing, and you're like, I want to see if this works, you ought to be able to do it with a minimal, minimal, minimal, minimal, minimal, minimal. And so they're really, like, in libraries and central IT, there really needs to be a facility for sandboxing. Like you don't have to have the service accessible outside your institution, that's fine. But you ought to be able to say, look, get me up a Linux box, get me a Windows server, give me a Docker container, get me whatever.

I'm going to spend an afternoon trying to do this thing. And it's really a shame all the hoops. That just reminds me of something I saw that was like every place has a training and a production environment. But, oh, man. can't remember it, of course, as soon as I start talking. But basically that your production environment is your training environment. So, yeah. Don't tell them, Sadie. It's one of the stupidest things. Like, you know, in IT college or whatever, it's like, yeah, you want to do everything

in a sandbox environment and then move to production. And then it's like, no, I have never, Well, I've only worked in a couple of libraries, but the sandbox does not exist. It was just greatly unfortunate. Absolutely not. My first ever job, my first ever librarian job was in digital libraries, and I literally spent the entire year running out grant money, fixing errors in like a pilot platform. I literally was going through and like manually debugging things writing help tickets. Like that's all I did. And that's why I'm no longer a digital librarian.

That's valid. Yeah. Because I was like, fuck this. And I was like literally working in an IT basement full of people who were just like, yeah, there's nothing I can do for you. Have fun. And it was just like demoralizing. Because I was like working between ours. our vendor and our help vendor and our database software and all kinds of things.

I remembered what I was going to say about production versus like training or, you know, testing environments. I wonder how much of the lack of that has to do with running servers is expensive and the equipment's expensive. So of course, you would probably want to throw that stuff in the cloud, but we all know that AWS is like the lowest level. of evil or like, you know. And they own everything. They own everything. So even in that sense, it's not even easy to just try something out because you're

either costing a whole lot of money or you're feeding the capitalist machine in one way or another. I would actually take issue with that a little bit in that you were correct that that would be expensive to do that, let's say, 10 years ago. But for instance, in my place, we used to have, we had a basement that was filled with one you and two you computing units. And pre-COVID, I mean, I'm not sure it looks like now because I haven't been there, but we were slowly but steadily whittling them down without any appreciable loss in our flexibility or our computing capacity simply because we're doing

things in containers or doing things in VMs and we didn't have to have one machine, one service, like you used to kind of have to do. So I would kind of disagree with that. Plus, computing is not as expensive as it used to be. So the primary cost in my mind now is time and just people, time and expertise and not so much the equipment. That's very true. And maybe I'm just salty because two of our virtual machine hosts have shit the bed in the past like month while we're short-handed. So I may just be extra salty right now. No, that's fair. Sadie, what do you use for orchestration on your virtual machines? I'm sorry to get into the weeds here a little bit. Oh, Hyper V.

Oh, hypervue, okay. Yeah. Yeah, nothing fancy, unfortunately. I think if Windows made a simulation environment out of the box that we could just use, RIT would be cool with it. So the stupid questions they would start with is, is there a Windows service that you can use? This is when I was asking them about Omecca. And I said, no, there's not a library software that Windows makes.

So anyway, it took a very, very long time for them to let me start doing it. Omeca, basically someone knew a higher-up had to come in and talk to the other higher-ups and say, see, it's just, ah, it's nuts. Like, how many projects do you not do? Because you're like, geez, the effort I have to go through, I got to talk to nine or eight, 10 different people just to get a test instance running. It's not worth it. It's just like, how much do you miss out on from having this bureaucracy stuff that you got to go

through just to do a test? It's nuts. Yeah. And I think our IT department has, is especially toxic. Like they seem to really fear talking to each other. So I would never want to work there. I feel bad for all of the people I talk to over there. But it doesn't have to be a general policy.

But there are differences, and this is something I think about a lot, when you're trying to do open source and you don't have the expertise in one place, you can have consortial adoption of open source. which I don't usually have too much of a high note here. On the podcast, I'm not usually like saying, oh, we do this amazing. But Texas Digital Library actually does a lot of stuff really well. So they run a lot of open source software that member institutions can use. So D-Space, OJS, Vario.

They looked into Haiku for a while. I feel like I'm forgetting something else. Oh, Dativerse. And so, I don't know, what do you think about the viability of consortial models as the kind of outsourcing that we can have to do? Certainly preferable to paying vendors or putting on ABS or what have you. So that's, to me, the sort of gold standard is having the ability to do it yourself. Like, I'm thinking of this in a very, in very sort of mercenary terms in that if I'm going to set up, say Omega, what is my procedure? On the ground, what is my procedure? And how many, how many people

or how many forms I have to fill out, how many hoops I have to jump through? So if you have it at a consensual level, and there's some kind of established path you go to on the consensual level to set up a new project, let's say it's a new project that they support. So if they support Omeca, fine. What is the procedure needed to get a test instance of that up and running. To me, that that's sort of the benchmark as to whether or not I want to fuck with it or not is how much effort do I have to go to just to get it up. And that's, that's, I don't know, maybe because I have ADD too. I don't know. Maybe that's my problem. But I'm like, okay, I don't want to mess around. I have an idea. I want to implement it at least in a test way as soon as I can.

What's my methodology for doing that? Yeah, I think it took me about like five months to get a test set up Jesus Christ. Weekly meetings. Okay, let me just give you an example. We had somebody in my Digital Humanity Center. They're like, we like to know Mecca instance to see if we can run it for this project. I said, okay, and I did it in an afternoon, like probably less than an afternoon. I mean, granted, that was just their test bed and when we had to do it, normally there was a little bit more setup, but it was not five months of meetings.

That's insane. That's just terrible. I'm sorry. Yeah. Well, the way I convinced them was I, I, I spun up an instance myself on AWS and just went to Dean's office and said, here, look, I can do it. Why can't they?

And so he went to bat a little bit more after that. And that brings me to another point. And to my mind, the more obdurate that your IT structure is, like the more that they do this, the more you try to find workarounds and the less relevant they make themselves. So I think they're digging themselves a grave like a teaspoon at a time by being this kind of way. And I wish that more IT people understood that, that they're making themselves less necessary by fucking up people's workflows as it was done with you. I was just thinking, well, I've been thinking and talking about it a lot because, as I've mentioned before, I did the last Library of Freedom Project crash course. And everybody in the crash course was like, fuck my IT department.

either it was bureaucracy or it was that they would just be like, hey, how do we do this thing? And they're like, you don't need to know. Or, you know, I just want to add, I just want to have Firefox work in private mode. No, you can't do that. And no explanation as to why my jaw actually dropped. I was like, I'm sorry, how hard is it to implement using in private browsing on Firefox on public computers? It's literally like three clicks in group policies. say what is your environment, that it's so bad that that's not possible.

So, yeah, no, I've been thinking about this a lot, like how to kind of desilow IT in terms of libraries and, like, what kind of work could be done to kind of ease that for library staff. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that, or if you want to go into it now, or if you just want to get into it on Twitter, but I would love to talk about that more. I mean, as someone with an IT background who has to deal, who had to deal with folks that have less technical knowledge than myself, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt. You have to put in, you have to put in safety measures. That's fine.

But something like limiting, overly limiting the things they can do with the software as designed is like blocking incognito mode. I don't understand the logic of that. that. It's just, oh, like, if I had not had early in my career the freedom to mess around and do stuff, I would not be here right now. I would probably not be a librarian. I probably would have gone somewhere else. People need the space and the tools to figure stuff out to learn because it's fun to learn. And as long as you make it a thing that they can do and, you know, if they, if they break something, you don't immediately march down and take their computer from them.

It's just like, I'm getting a popleptic here because it's really, really, really frustrating that IT distrusts people as much as they do. Well, I think it's because there's a lot of dumb thoughts out there and they really ruin it for the rest of us. I mean, yes, but no. I don't think. I mean, I might be. Yeah, no, I get you. But like, yeah. I think it's, well, this is something I've been thinking about a lot because I don't know if anyone, I had.

an interaction with legal affairs this week. Oh God. I sold that. I asked a very specific question about copyright and fair use and they sent me back a

lib guide from another institution. So it's like one of those, and I think this happens a lot with like IT departments where you get this real great taste of like how other people in your institution, be it like a public library

or an academic institution or like a hospital or something, you get kind of a taste of like how other people help other people or rather don't. So I think it kind of speaks to that and like how you have to go through this like kind of proving to get any level of actual useful help or assistance from certain people within your institutional hierarchy. So one thing, and I think I put this in the notes as well, we don't have to discuss the end length, but just it reminds me of another thing in the article was about like not just lack of expertise, but like the lack of documentation about how to even get started or to use this software, right? And so this sort of like not wanting to tell people how to do it or not sharing. the knowledge of how to do it as like a barrier for adopting these softwares, because that's a problem I've even noticed with proprietary software. Like I'm submitting some conference proposals

right now to X Libris conferences, so I hope they don't get mad at me about how hard I found it to not just learn Primo VE, but to learn how to use the development environment for Primo because their documentation in general is terrible, but the documentation for the development environment even more so. And that part is like on GitHub and you can just fuck around with it and do whatever you want with it. But even just like their actual company software documentation is out of date all the time or doesn't make the connections it needs to.

And so this question of like the relationship between documenting knowledge and sharing knowledge, so not just the software itself being open and sharing. shared, but how to even, like, use it and how it's made and stuff. So I don't know, I see you have your hand up, so I don't know what you have to say about documentation as well with this. It's kind of a twofold problem. And one is documentation is often secondary in software development. Like, it's not a first class partner when you're writing software typically because you have other things to concentrate on that you think are more important. And another sort of related

ancillary problem to that is it's for a lot of IT people especially, and I'm going to pick on IT people because that's my domain, that keeping knowledge on how to do something to yourself is a power move and often something you do because you think that it's going to guarantee that you have a job. And so it's very, very problematic. And another thing that's kind of related is to what I call the owl problem. And so the owl problem, which you may or may not be familiar with, is there's this graphic image of how to draw an owl. And the first caption says, draw two circles, then draw the rest of the fucking owl. And then there's an owl there.

And that's like almost every software tutorial I've ever seen. Almost every one has that problem. Like you go to a Python tutorial says, okay, here's really easy. You open up the Ripple and you type 2 plus 2 and it equals 4. Isn't programming great? And the next chapter is write a web server or just like, it's this huge leap. And the stuff, there's a missing middle that is almost always not done or badly done because people don't know how to explain it. And they're, ah, it's just, it's very frustrating.

Or it's like not relevant to the industry it's for. Like I see Justin mentions like the library carpentry tutorials and the notes, which I love library carpentry. BLC just did a series of the workshops and I attended those. Those were great. I've walked through some of them myself. but rarely do the examples relate to library work. So it's, yeah, open up the Ripple, 2 plus 2, yeah, I'm learning Python. But then it's like, well, I don't know what to do with this.

And so then I just forget it, right? And I find that for myself, if I do not have a project that I am personally invested in, not like some demo project that I find somewhere, but if I want to write a thing, I have to be interested in it. And that's the only way I can learn reliably. Really. I don't know what it is, man. But learning for learning's sake almost never works with me.

I wonder if that's an ADD thing because I'm the same way. Quite possibly. Like every code I've tried, like every programming language I've tried to learn. It's like I learn it enough to do the tutorial. And then after that I'm like, well, what the fuck am I supposed to do with this? Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited about learning it.

And then I'm like, wait. Exactly. And I think the only thing that I've actually managed to retain. was sequel because it was directly, directly relevant to my job. Like, I get to write sequel for the ILS stuff, and I find that incredibly fun. So, yeah, like, a lot of, yeah, I don't know. You just can't apply it. So.

Yeah, it's, well, even if you can apply, it, it helps to have that as a motivator, even if you, even if you can learn other ways. Like, yes, I want to make this thing work. And I want to make it work. It's my idea. not someone else's idea I wanted to mention the article mentions that libraries

that they surveyed are unlikely to consider open source software in the future and said that things that should be researched in the future is what would need to be done to get them to reconsider and I wanted to contrast that with some of the themes we've already been talking about like lack of skill,

lack of expertise, lack of control. In the other part of the literature, which is mostly focused in India and Pakistan, the perception of open source is very different, which is it's cheap to run up, it's ready to go, and we don't have the money for the big expensive things, although if we got the money,

we would like to buy them because they're a little more user-friendly or they have a little better documentation. Although on the documentation front, like Jay said, the documentation for Primo is like really bad. It's kind of an interesting parallel to a conversation I had today with a faculty member who thought, because he's moving from proprietary textbooks to open textbooks. And when we first had our conversation, I gave him, you know, five different books that he could pull from for his students.

And then he said, oh, once I got into the first one, I had everything I need, sometimes even more. I didn't think it was going to be good. So I think open source software is the same It's like people just don't think it's going to be good And I think it has a certain perception problem So It's really interesting

So I'm thinking a lot about like Audacity As an audio person Because I learned how to do everything I know how to do, or at least like basically spent the first five years learning how to do any kind of audio, engineering, recording, everything, and audacity.

And then I moved into proprietary stuff before. But it's an incredibly powerful platform. However, yeah, they, in their most recent addition, they got caught for essentially trying to build a data collection mechanism into their open source software. Fortunately, yeah, fuck you. Fortunately, because they got caught, they removed it.

But still, that's like a very valid concern to have about any kind of software, right? Particularly, you know, especially open source, we're always going to hold it to a different kind of scrutiny, right? Because it's open source, so it's going to have that kind of connotation to it. Yeah, the audacity thing is almost to my mind, demonstration of open sources resiliency more than a more than a weakness because there is there are already efforts underway to fork it and take that stuff out whereas if you know if other audio recording proprietary audio recording software did this your you're you know your sort of recourse is to use another package entirely and just ditch that one completely uh it's worth noting that

open office did this and that's why everyone uses Libra office now because I I think it was Oracle. I don't remember exactly, but someone bought Open Office, fucked with it to the degree that they're like, we're not doing this anymore. And now I don't know anyone who uses Open Office. It's all Libra Office. And that's because of something exactly like that.

Probably less annoying than that because I don't think it was a matter of, you know, of spying on people like Audacity apparently is. But it was something bad enough that people migrated off it en masse. That actually, in the news recently, EdX, which was developed by MIT as open source platform for, or OpenCourseware just got sold. And the main concern there is you've sold all the lead generation to a for-profit company. So you've got five to 10 million user profiles now, mostly in the underdeveloped world that are people who are aspirational by education now that this company is going to market them.

So, and it kind of relates back to something you said right at the beginning about how you sort of focus more on open data. now. I mean, obviously open source is still, you know, but as sort of like a thing to advocate for. And one of the things about your presentation I like is the stress on using open formats, but you can use an open format with a closed, with a proprietary software. Of course. So I don't know if you had thoughts on, especially in libraries, because like, as you've probably seen on my Twitter, I'm like getting obsessed with different like mark up languages, but like I still have to use word for work all the time and stuff. I just use Pandock and like convert shit, right? So I didn't know what your thoughts maybe were on like

if you can't fight the good fight and you know force everyone to use you know free open source software. Is it maybe equally or more important to just focus on the file format that then you can use with any program or is it like the software itself that we should also be focusing. Well, ideally, people should be doing both, of course, but I think you were correct in that it's more important and I think easier to talk about open data formats rather than software. So, yeah, you mentioned Pandock, which is a wonderful, wonderful tool, which I use all the time when people give me Doc X files. And what I love to make everyone use latex. Yeah, but it's a whole programming language and it's incredibly irritating. I think it's wonderful. I've had so much fun

learning laytech writing my research paper, but at the same time, I just cannot fathom asking anyone, you know, random library staff user to write all their documents in latex. It would be, it would just be completely bizarre. That's what Pandox for. Yeah, exactly. It's a Pandock for. And Pandock works well about 90% of the time and we'll get you most of the way there, so it's pretty good. I wanted to ask a question sort of critical of ourselves when we're talking about openness, which is, I was listening to David Columbia, who wrote a book about the ideology of Bitcoin, and he talked about cyber libertarianism, the anti-government hostility in open source worlds, and I mean, I'm also anti-government hostile, but there are a lot of traps I think librarians can fall into,

particularly when we think we're doing something for the good of the world, that people can fall into certain things that if we're, we weren't talking about computers, you would realize it as a right-wing talking point. But at the moment you start talking about computers, people will say, oh, we need this distributed system that is actually going to be controlled by someone who centralize it. So like audacity is mostly controlled by like sort of one organization or like what happened with open office. You can fork it, but sometimes these things go back and get re-centralized in a lot of ways. I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on, what do we do to have actual governance over these things when we're talking

about we want to use open standards? What's the organizing principle we should be using? Is it? Because I think through TDL, we have a pretty good way of saying, oh, we're going to create this code on our side and we're pushing it back out to the community. And because we have the force of numbers as a consortia, we can kind of help steer the direction of the whole project. but I wonder if that's enough to really have governance over these open systems we're trying to build. I say the governance aspect is a very thorny one and not one I have a really good handle on. So, yeah, I'd love to hear people's responses to that. The thing that I sort of immediately thought of, and again, I might, you know, be oversimplifying in my little anarcho-sindicalist heart,

I feel like in a lot of, like with Justin said, like when you move things to talking about it in like a tech environment, that sort of like techno-utopianism kicks in. And what techno-utopianism often leaves out is like labor aspects. Or if it does mention them, it talks about removing labor from people when if you talk to anyone who's ever worked in an Amazon warehouse, that's not what tech does it at all. It just makes your labor worse most of the time. So maybe in these instances with adopting these softwares and the workflows involved with them, like instead of putting the focus on the tech itself, because I think that also might remove the vocational awe element of, oh, this tech is going to save us.

Making it open source is going to make it the best thing in the whole world. Focusing on the people who are using it and the people were doing it for. I mean, you still have to watch out for idealizing it, but that might root it in the actual work that people are doing and how it will affect both the laborers who are doing it and then the people who will be using it, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I think you've got a really good point there, Jay. This kind of made me think of an article that I read recently about what's going down at the W3C about cookies and how wild that has gotten because it's a consensus platform, right?

Like try and create these standards for browsers and whatever, but then there's these people who are coming from ad companies who have relied on things. third-party cookies and data, you know, for their entire, like, 12-year, you know, history of their company or whatever. And then there's people who are coming from the other side. And they both claim to want, like, privacy. They both claim that they're, that they're doing what they're, they're opposing each other for the same sort of ideals. So I think you've got a good point there, Jay. And like, so who's, yeah, who's doing the actual labor here? Or are people just arguing for the sake of arguing, kind of.

Yeah, I'm not articulating that well, but. I think that makes a lot of sense when you're talking about people say like things about freedom, democracy, democratizing, privacy. These are all words that we've mystified and reused multiple layers. I think Jay's right that if you focus on the labor potion, I didn't want to like just to harp on about labor the whole time because that's kind of my thing. But it demystifies technology and it, re-physicalizes it. Like when we talk about there is a physical data center somewhere that hosts all your cloud shit. Like all of the pictures of my asshole are somewhere in Virginia physically on a desk. On a disc.

I didn't need that. I didn't need that. Mental image. Thank you, Justin. Like what Mr. Robot, Christian Slater, person, do we have to get to like find the pictures of Justin's asshole in Virginia? So running a heist. give my nudes. He glued, really blue-ly eyes on him. Christian Slater, where are you? So I may have missed something, but did Justin say that someone had to build an entire data center just to house pictures of disaster? There's a data center in Virginia that has some pictures of Justin's anus on it. Okay. On the walls.

All right. Good deal. But, yeah, I read a really good book about cloud infrastructure and how it's ultimately physical, but then we build infrastructure on top of it. Just like Goatzy. Google Goosey kids. No, don't. Show to your mom. Actually, just take a video of your face when you're Googling it and send it to me.

It's my favorite party trick. Cheeking people. Yeah, telling people about Goatsy at parties is one of my favorite things to do pre-pandemic. And then watching their faces as they Googled Goatzee. This is how I know I'm a 48-year-old man and all of you were 12 Because this was very well known When I was in my 20s You wouldn't have to tell anyone about Goatsy

Everybody already knew about Goetzy I was telling people older than me about Goatsey Well that's fine yeah You're probably telling people like 55 or something But anyone who's been on the internet No I was telling people like In their 30s and 40s about Goatsy Well

Fair enough Yeah they were just not incredibly online They were like cool So. See, the web was invented when I was 18 years old, which is probably the perfect time for the web to be invented. No one should be on the web under the age of 18. And so I came at exactly the right time. As a trans person, I agree.

Like, don't let us have the internet for two years. Yep. I didn't know where you were going with that, Jay. And I was like, oh, okay, yeah, Cucon phase. You lost me first thing. I was just like. We lost John. Is this just going to turn it?

into an episode of Marco Polo with John. I might need to reload then because he's not showing up for me. I'm definitely here. Okay. Marco. Po. Po. Po. Po.

Jay vanished. Oh, no. No, no. There we go. Jay's refreshing. Good God. All right. Was that really loud? Marco. Marco. Marco. Marco. Marco. Marco. Marco. Marco. Marco. Marco.

I'm afraid to use my soundbox now. because it's apparently 12 times louder than my regular voice. That's just how distortion works. Man works, man, work. Man works. Man works. Man works. I'd have got some more like tech-sounding things.

Dect. Carnal favor. Her carnal favors snuck in there. Carnal favors. Conal favor. Conal favor. It's the only one I didn't delete. So to wrap up, what can we do to adopt open standards and libraries or if we've kind of already talked about that,

then what does post-capitalist library technology look like in an idealized future? I don't ask the fully automated thing because crimes made it uncool, which is a very impressive thing for a formerly cool person to do, is to make things instantly uncool. Dude, she was never cool. Okay, cool. She was never cool. I didn't know about her until the internet told me.

I remember seeing an interview with her. Do you guys know who Nardwar is? Yes, the human serviette. Yeah, Nardw, dude, dude. So he did an interview with her way, way, way, way back before she became Grimes, the partner of Elon Musk. Back when she was just Claire. Yeah, and it was a nice interview which she seemed very delightful. And I thought this is a very charming person.

But, yeah, there you go. What does post-capitalist library technology? What would you imagine look like? Good gravy. That's a really, really good question. And post-capitalist library technology, I can't imagine would look terribly different from the library technology that I spend most of my time in.

The problem with open source is that it's not independent from capitalism, but has this weird sort of parallel relationship with it that doesn't intersect with it in the same way that other things we're used to is. And that is because within the realm of software, like, within a very, like, this is a very narrow definition. So it's kind of seems like a lie to say it. But the idea of scarcity, which is what capitalism addresses, is not a factor within a certain sphere of software. Like, software can be replicated very easily and be distributed very easily. And that puts scarcity kind of at a tilt. And so I would like to think that a post-capitalist library technology

sphere would look like mostly what I work with now. I know that's probably not true, but I would like to believe that because I like what I work with. I don't want it to change significantly. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know to answer that. I would love to know. I don't Yeah, I think it's the same thing where I was trying to tie in libertarian ideology with open source, because it does seem to, yeah, it does interact the capitalism way. It's the sharing economy, but in a very transactional labor exploitative way in a lot of ways. Like Wikipedia exploits a lot of free labor to build things on top of it. And it's sort of a test of it to how weird the relationship.

between open source and scarcity is, and that you'll find people who are huge open source advocates and were libertarians, you know, I'd find odious in probably many, many respects. And you find people working in open source who are straight up communists. And they're doing the same work and thinking about open source and kind of almost the same ways. But because open source doesn't really reflect the physical world in the same way, it's an odd situation to be in. Like, have you ever met a libertarian librarian? I don't think I have. Yes, I have. Oh, you have. Not here either. Not here in Utah. Oh, good Lord. All right. I have also, John.

Okay, never mind then. Yeah, but yeah, I've met a few actually, weirdly enough. I mean, I've met. He was all for like free market principles and libraries. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's a really odd dynamic, but they do exist. One of them was actually the, yeah, sometimes they get into weird positions. Usually admin kind of.

of any people tend to be leaning that way. Anyway. Just guys being dudes. Yep. Okay. So, John, thanks for coming on. Is there anything you want to plug like your Twitter or any upcoming work? Or do you want people to leave you alone?

No, I don't really have anything to plug. I have an exciting project that I'm working on that is not ready to roll out yet that I'm calling the archivist's friend. So just watch out for the archivist's friend. That's what I'll say. And you can ignore me or you can follow me on Twitter at ADR. Either way, it's up to you. I won't tell you how to live your life.

Very libertarian of you. This has been our episode on libertarianism. Thank you all for joining us. I mean, basically. Wait, let me, can I tell one story? I'm sorry. When I was working at University in Ohio, I was, I had a student come up to me. I think he was in one of my workshops or classes and says, I'm starting a libertarian club.

Will you be my faculty advisor? And I said, you know, I am a huge, like, left-wingy kind of dude. He says, I don't care. I just want to have the club on paper so I can use it in job applications. And I said, yes. I said, I'm so excited. I will absolutely be a faculty advisor. And as far as I know, they never, like, he never got another member.

He never did anything else. And he just wanted it to use it for, you know, for his resume or whatever. and to me that is the essence of libertarianism right there. I hope that young man is doing well. I really hope so too. I was so pleased. I was so tickled. It was just delightful.

That's the bad thing about libertarians is I agree with them sometimes. All right, that's it for me then. You don't have to admit that. That I do. You literally didn't have to say that. Good night, everybody. Good night.