LINUX Unplugged - 338: Success Through Vulnerability

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

How did we get from shareware to free software? We jump in the Linux powered time machine and revisit software past. Plus a new Plasma focused laptop, and two powerful command-line picks. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.

Wes, I think I found the creepiest run Linux I've ever seen. Oh, you mean this weird robot cat? Yeah, Python, robot, and cat that runs Linux. It's the Mars cat. Just like a real cat, Mars Cat is fully autonomous, stretching, tapping, and even burying litter. It may express different emotions by different meows or gestures. Mars Cat can play with you or your toys because it can feel, hear, and see.

It can interact with objects or people nearby, even play with real cats. It sounds so great, but if you watch the video, which we'll have linked in the show notes, the thing doesn't move like a cat. No, cats are graceful animals, and this is an awkward robot. It's very awkward, it's very stiff, it's very scary looking, and they want you to treat it like a real cat. It heals with purr sounds. Every Mars cat is unique, from its eyes, body to personality, you can

pet it and shape its characters in your own way. Dress it up, make it more adorable. MarsCat is open sourced and programmable. With powerful quad core Raspberry Pi, you can create your own applications. MarsCat is also an ideal choice for education, research, and commercial purpose. Or other things. This thing is, like they said, powered by Raspberry Pi, uses Python. It has a series of APIs available to control the camera, the microphone. It has touch sensors, 16 servos, which it needs about 30 more. And it's a platform for a bionic cat for the first home robot. The weird thing is, and this is in the video,

when they take this thing apart to see the insides, it's as creepy as if they were taking apart a real cat. Yeah. I mean, I like a lot of these ideas. I love that it's open source, but you have to be able to actually be around the thing. And I also wonder, it is powered by USB-C, but where do you plug it in? Hello, friends, and welcome into the Unplugged program. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. You've got that very special edition look going.

You've dressed up all nice. Oh, yes. To the nines. I don't know why you have to dress up like that, but I appreciate it. And it makes me feel like it's a very special episode. It's all for you. Today, we're going to bridge the gap between shareware and free software. Those of us who have been around for a piece remember a time when you bought software in bags on walls, and it was the full version of the program, but it often came with certain limitations. How did we get from that to open source and free software really in the world? We're going to talk about that today, as well as some news, some discussions. And of course, we've got Alex and Cheesy here. Hello, gentlemen. Hello. Hello. Hello. And as always, we have our

virtual lug, a fantastic showing. Hello, Mumble Room. Time-appropriate greetings. Hello. Hello. Happy Linux Tuesday. Hello. Hola. Happy, happy Linux Tuesday. Thank you all for making it here. We have a lot. I think we're going to have a really fun discussion, a lot to get into today. So let's start with some good news, not robot cat news, but good news for Kubuntu users who might be interested in a laptop that comes pre-bundled with what they're calling Kubuntu Focus. Michael Lierbal over at Foronix had a chance to give it a look, and he says, I've been testing it out for several weeks. So he got it like under an embargo. Oh, look at him go. An old NDA skis, as they say in the biz. This is

the first generation of the Kubuntu Focus laptop. You ready for the hardware specs, Wes? Oh, please. You got any guesses? Well, I'm guessing I'll probably be a little disappointed. I thought it was, I mean, when I first heard the initial rumors, I thought it was going to be an ARM box. Right. Yeah, something small and minimal. This sucker has

an Intel Core i7 9750 processor, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060. Wait, what? It's got a 16.1 inch 1080p screen that runs at 144 hertz. It's IPS too. It's got a terabyte Samsung Evo drive in it.

And then all the other kind of niceties that a Clevo laptop of this size has, which have been getting pretty competitive. Do I also see it's got 32 gigs of RAM? That's right. Wow. Okay, I'm interested. Yeah.

I mean, you know, as far as a laptop of this nature, a high-end laptop, if you're a Plasma user, Larble seems to be pretty impressed. He says the software side's looking choice. Yeah, that's right. Kubuntu 18.04.3 is shipped on the device with some alterations around the default desktop environment and themes. You get a little bit of customization there, including the dark theme by default, Chris. You'll like that.

Well, now I'm sold. You know, you have that NVIDIA GPU too. So Google Chrome is included and already tweaked with all the GPU options for maximum acceleration. Also of note, it ships with disk encryption turned on by default. So if you're listening to this and you're wondering, what's Kubuntu Focus? We'll have a link to it in the show notes. You can also just go to kfocus.org.

It's the result of the collaboration between the Kubuntu Council and Tuxedo working to create something that they felt was pretty well focused on the user we maintain the platform so our customers can focus on work and play yeah i mean you can really see it there's not a very wide selection of pre-built hardware shipping with plasma most i mean i'm really struggling to think of anything, almost all of them, that you could buy that's System76 or Dell or somebody else would be generally Gnome Shell. Right, right. Not all of them, I guess. Not 100%, but a lot of them.

Some of them, you know, you got like the mint hardware. Oh, sure. Stuff like that that's probably Cinnamon. And there's a couple others. But yeah, you're right. Plasma's been somewhat underrepresented, and it's nice to see what seems like a great offering now. Okay. has been somewhat underrepresented,

and it's nice to see what seems like a great offering now. Okay, can I admit what feels like an insecurity to you guys? And I think it might be. You know, that's what we have, this virtual users group for, Chris. You can be honest, share your feelings. All right, hi, my name is Chris, and I'm afraid that the Windows terminal is getting extremely competitive.

And the worst thing about it is Microsoft is incorporating legit nice features that have been contributed by outside community members into their core product. It's like they freaking get it too. And that's the really

most frustrating. They're using open source to compete against us. They got it. They figured it out. Maybe that's why they love it so much. That was our secret.

I am talking about, of course, they have now added those cool CRT retro effects that you get from, like, cool retro term into the Windows Terminal itself, which was a contributing. The community member was called, I love his handle, Irony Man. Not Iron Man, but Irony Man contributed the CRT retro effects to this. and now it's shipping as an experimental feature. There's other really kind of cool things in here too, some things you might like. Yeah, they've got some nice updates to usability,

things like you can now modify your profiles.json to have your own default profile settings. And once you set that property, you can have it applied to like all your profiles. Yeah, so if you always want the font, a certain font or a certain size, you can set some defaults across all profiles. That sounds really nice, and it sounds like the direct kind of feature you add when you've been listening to the users of that terminal.

Yeah, stuff to do, like some improvements to how tab sizing works. It's getting pretty slick. The reason why I wanted to pull this story in is because there's an interesting connection here from a company that was really ignoring its terminal for many, many releases. We spent years ragging on old command.exe. Yeah, and then they really focused in on it and it really has exploded. I think your insecurities are somewhat right, though, too. I mean, it helps them that they've got this open source, but even already on the Mac desktop, they've got competitors, too. I think we it helps them that they've got this open source, but even already on the Mac desktop, you know, they've got

competitors, too. I think we need to step up our game. Yeah, so that, so you read in my mind is what I was thinking, is like, imagine if one of the distros really got it in its head, like, you know what I'm going to do is I'm really going to invest in the terminal. I'm going to make the terminal really great. I know most people are listening and probably thinking to themselves,

the terminal's fine, there's nothing really wrong with it. But I don't know, man. I think with the WSL2 stuff and terminal and all of that, I think it's very likely that more and more power users are getting at least a little bit what they want. At least they can stay on the Windows platform. And I guess good enough for them. Maybe it's fine. It is hard to say, and I don't like thinking,

that a beautiful, well-functioning open source terminal somehow makes the world worse. You know one thing that really I always struggle with on a Windows terminal, whether it's PuTTY or whether it's the built-in one, is copy and paste. It's just really difficult for some reason. You know, my favorite, favorite thing about using the terminal on Linux is that X clipboard when you just highlight something and then you just middle click to paste it. Yeah.

As soon as I'm on any other terminal system and I go to highlight it, I'm like, oh, yeah, right. It just changes. Like you think you already have it. You've copied it. So quick. So fast. So fast. Now, Wes, I want to go to our reporter on the ground in Enlightenment Island.

Minimek, do you have an E17 perspective on this particular situation? Over, and tell us what you're learning now. So Enlightenment, we started with terminology, which is a future terminal, which is really cool, because you can watch a video while doing some commands on your command line and everything, and all that in your terminal. So it's quite an interesting terminal, and it is available in Ubuntu, I think.

Okay. And, of course, a cool retro term. I like what NodeRunner said in the chat room, though. The future is the GUI. But have you tried the terminal? That's exactly it. Nailed it. That is so exactly it.

The future is a great GUI where I run a really nice terminal. All right. So last week, we've talked about some community transitions that were happening around container Linux. And there was also a recent story about a pretty big upset within the Rust community around the Actix project. I want to say ActiveX, but the Actix project. And that developer, who is actually a Microsoft employee, experienced significant burnout and quit the project, pulled the repos off.

Now, this is actually a pretty significant project for the Rust community, so it made headlines pretty quickly. How would you describe its relevancy? It's probably one of the few that – or it's the largest that does what it does in the community? Right. So it's sort of a whole framework for web services, interactive HTTP sorts of servers. It's kind of the biggest one. It was at least one of the earlier and most well-known in the community.

And the number of projects that had used it, the sort of community that had developed around it, led you to think it was, you know, maybe there was a team behind it, it was well-maintained or endorsed by the community. Turns out, mostly just one hard-working maintainer. Yeah, we covered this story, the whole cycle happened during the week of Linux Headlines.

And I'm happy to say there is a resolution which is also covered in Linux Headlines at linuxheadlines.show. But the really quick summary is he got overwhelmed and felt probably a little taken advantage of and was sick and tired of justifying well-thought-out design decisions over and over again. Like the same stuff would get noticed and thrown at him. And he just reached a point of, I'm done with open source and I'm pulling the repo. And then people panicked because of the value of this project. Well, I think there was another side of that, too, is that, you know, it started as a personal project and it grew. And so you could say, you know, there were design decisions.

And I think a lot of the community had some rising standards or at least standards that they wanted to implement. I think a lot of the community had some rising standards, or at least standards that they wanted to implement. And that takes a lot more work, or maybe just a different style of management than a single maintainer can provide. Though, after some time, the developer had a think and came back and said, here's what I'm going to do, is I'm going to hand the reins over to another community member.

And so now the repositories are back online. And a transition is taking place. And it's all amicable. And a transition is taking place. And it's all amicable. And it's really nice to see that. But it's a reminder of a constant problem. And I really feel for these developers because they start something in some cases that they don't plan to monetize

or they don't plan to turn it into a business or a foundation. It's really scratching their own edge. Scratching it in, trying to learn or just help the community. And in this case, this individual just nailed the timing because interest in Rust was growing and there was interest in having these types of services. And so it just took off like wildfire and he ended up running a fairly large project. Pretty common story. And it's something that we have a hard time fully appreciating because we don't do the work.

I have definitely, as I've gotten to be an old fat fart, is... Wisened, wisened. Oh, thank you. I really didn't understand how much work went into all these different career trajectories. And when you think you know what a plumber's job is or an electrician's job or a media person's job

or a software developer's job, you just can kind of only really appreciate what you are able to observe from afar. Right, you get the surface level and none of the hard work that goes on underneath. And there was a blog post by Drew DeVault that it was like, I wrote this, only it could be all about content creation,

and he's talking about software. And so I think this is a universal human problem. And he posted this last week as this episode goes out, and I think this is so worth a read. So I want to encourage you to go to Drew's entire blog to read the entire thing. But he just recently crossed a major milestone. February will mark one year that I've been working on self-directed free software projects

full-time. I was planning on writing an optimistic retrospective article around this time, but given the current mood of the ecosystem, I think it would be better to be realistic. In this stage of my career, I now feel at once happier, busier, more fulfilled, more engaged, more stressed, and more depressed than I have at any other point in my life. Yeah. Isn't that a weird mix? Absolutely, right? It's the hobby turned profession. There's a lot of emotions there. I mean, he speaks to that more. I also have mixed feelings about how busy I am. Every day I wake up to 100 new emails, delete half of them, and spend three to four hours working on the rest.

Patches, questions, support inquiries, monitoring, and reports. It's endless. On top of that, I have dozens of things I already need to work on. The CI work distribution algorithm needs to be completely redone. I need to provision new hardware. Oh yeah, and the hardware that I need ran into shipping issues again. I need to improve monitoring. I need to plan for FOSDEM. I need to finish the Wayland book. I need to figure out the memory issues in Himitsu, not to mention write the rest of the software.

I need to file taxes, which is twice as much work when you own a business. I need to implement data export and account deletion. I need to finish the web-driven patch review UI. I need to finish writing docs for Alpine. I have to work more on the Pine phone. I have a legacy server which needs to be overhauled and is now on the clock because of Acme v1. That's a lot of stuff. Yeah, and that's not even all of these.

Like, that's what's off the top of my head. He says, not to mention the tasks which have been on hold for longer than they've been planned for in the first place. Alpine is still going to have hundreds of Python 2 packages by the end of life. RISC-V work has been stalled because the work is currently blocked by a large problem that I simply can't automate. There's another project he's committed to called FOSPAY, which is having issues pulling data figures from Patreon. And he has to restart a process manually every so often to get it to work. And there's dozens of other loose ends. And he says that's not even considering any personal goals.

I think anybody that's kind of been in this situation has been here. It's like you just get so focused on work. He says, which I have vanishing little time for. I get zero exercise. And though my diet is mostly reasonable, the majority of it is delivery. Right. Unless I get the odd two hours to visit the grocery store.

That is, unless I want to spend those two hours with my friends, or in my case, family and wife, which means it's back to delivery. My dating life is almost non-existent. I want to spend more time studying Japanese, but it's either that or keeping up with my leisure reading. Lofty goals of also studying Chinese or Arabic are but dust in the wind. And to make matters worse, I'm addicted to caffeine again. There have been healthy ways and unhealthy ways of dealing with the occasional feelings of being

overwhelmed by all of this. The healthier ways have included taking walks, reading my books, and spending a few minutes with my cat, doing chores, and calling my family to catch up. Less healthy ways have included walking to the corner store to buy unhealthy comfort foods. Oh, yeah. Consuming alcohol or marijuana too much or too often, getting in stupid internet arguments,

being mean to my friends and colleagues, and kookling myself to read negative comments. Ooh, yeah. He says, I've been trying to do that my entire life, trying to get all of this balanced. Writing code for someone else has always been a huge drain on my emotional well-being. That's why I worked on my side projects in the first place, to have an outlet through which I could work on self-directed projects

without making compromise for some arbitrary deadline. I recently had that realization that I should do a personal side podcast just so I have a pure creative outlet so I can stick to what works here, like the topics, and if I want to talk about RVs or whatever it might be, I need to have an outlet for that, but I don't need to put it into a Linux shell. Or shoehorn it in. So, and then, you know, the idea of taking as long as I want to make content, because I've been doing weekly content for so long. I could really kind of connect with this. He says, when I'm in the zone writing lots of code for a project I'm interested in, knowing it's going to have a meaningful impact on my users, knowing that it's being written under a meaningful impact on my users,

knowing that it's being written under my terms is the most rewarding work I've ever done. This isn't a retrospective I wanted to write, but it's nice to drop the veneer for a few minutes and share an honest take on what it's like. This year has been nothing like what I expected it to be. It's both terrible and wonderful and very busy. I have a bit of advice for Drew via podcast here. Just for a moment, the rest of you can skip ahead.

But my advice directly to Drew is, and to be clear, this isn't our Drew. This is software developer Drew. Our Drew, Drew DeVore, is not. This is Drew DeVault, which now realizing sounds a lot like Drew. Drew's also very busy, so I'm sure he sympathizes with this too. Yeah, this is not our Drew, this is software developer Drew, full-time software developer Drew. Sway maintainer and many other cool projects.

Yes, we've talked about him before on the show, so I kind of went in with a little bit of assumption. But my advice to him, and really anybody who finds themselves in these positions actually, is try not to get in the, oh my God, I'm so busy mentality, because it's a way of thinking. And it's a way to immediately say, no, I can't do that. I'm too busy. I can't do that. I'm too busy. Now, what's the point of running out for 15 minutes? I'm too busy. And it's a cycle you can get in that amplifies your feelings about not being appreciated for the software you're creating or people not understanding your rationale. Those all get amplified by this,

I'm too busy to deal with this crap mentality. And you've got to break it. And you've got to just say, right now it's quite busy, but there will be time. And you have to just shift your mentality and try to say yes to a few things. And I know that sounds hard when you're really busy,

but it is a tricky mindset you can get locked into, and it's very counterproductive. So, and I think it leads to burnout. That's always hard to prioritize long-term over short-term, but you have to make time. Yeah, I mean, it's like I'm some expert at it. I was feeling quite overwhelmed when I lived in England and working in London. You know, living in a big city like that, I actually found it quite oppressive. And I was going to an office every day, so I had an excuse to get out the house.

And so one of the big things, obviously, as some of these listeners will know, is that I obviously emigrated last year to the US. And one of the primary drivers for that was quality of life. And it was me being honest with myself and sort of saying and looking at my life as it was and was me being honest with myself and sort of saying and looking at my life as it was and saying am I happy with how this is going and would I be willing to try and change some things to try and improve it and then I got this job with Red Hat

where I'm working from home the whole time as in if I want to never leave the house I could literally never leave my front door ever again. Yeah. So I've kind of swapped one set of problems for another set of problems, which is kind of great because I don't miss a commute. I'll be perfectly honest. I miss the kind of disconnection between the office and home, you know, that 20, 30 minutes or sometimes two hours. Right. Clear separation of where you're doing work. Yeah, I don't. I mean, I don't miss a commute. Genuinely, I don't. But there are some days where you think it would be nice to take 20 or 30 minutes. And a great example of this is before

we recorded the last self-hosted episode, I went and said to Chris, look, I just need to take a 20, 30 minute walk to clear my head and just get some air because I actually hadn't left the house that day. And it was like, what, 4.30 p.m PM at that point. So there's a bunch of stuff you've got to be cognizant of. I did that recently and I should do it more often because I have found I have a huge resistance to doing it. But if I go and then come back, not only do I feel like kind of good for actually have gotten it done and that kind of gives me like a bit of a boost, but I, I tend to have a bit of a temperament or mind shift on a topic. And when I got back, I really cranked out a lot of work, which felt really awesome too. So then it was sort of like a double whammy. And so it kind of felt like it was, it was worth the time and it was nice to get a break in the rain.

Brent, you said you were just kind of struggling with this stuff earlier this morning. Yeah. I mean, I've been working as a solo photographer now, I guess, solo photographer slash podcaster for basically ever. Um, and, and Alex, you, you sort of expressed this as well, but, um, you know, being in your own little office in your house or, you know, a lot of people feel this at work too. You feel kind of isolated somehow. And so I, I find myself just really empathizing with everything you read there. Because most of those thoughts that he expressed, I was thinking just this morning, like, oh, geez, I can't do the 20 minutes of yoga that my body is craving that I know helps me throughout the day, because I feel like I have too many things that I need to get done. And those 20 minutes feel really precious.

But I think sometimes I remind myself that, like you were saying, Chris, it's a bit of a trap. Because by taking those 20 minutes to go for a walk or to eat a healthy meal or something like that, your future minutes are actually spent far better. And when you're just overloaded with work, I think it's easy to forget that kind of stuff. Think about it like painting a wall print, like the preps, the worst part, but once you actually get there and you do it properly, you know, take the extra time to prepare for the day properly, you know, it's a really good point. And I think something we need to remember every single day. But I even hit with, you know, the topic of social life because it feels like often, you know, we feel as though we have some quasi social interaction

through our computers via the internet and stuff like that. But it's just not the same and it doesn't give us the same... Slow bandwidth. Yeah, there's not the same human connection that is life-giving. Our factual evolved brains are like, oh, this is good. I'm chatting with people, I'm very social. But there's this lower-level part of you. I think we also need to remember, too, to accept that when working in open source or others in day-to-day life, that you've got to let other people make time for their own health and well-being if you're going to keep interacting with them.

I think there's room for developers to have a better set of expectations for their users, to be able to set expectations, and I think there's room for users, a lot of room for users to adjust their expectations of open source projects, and a lot of people blame GitHub and the GitHub model for this,

but I actually think you could use that same argument and say people could be spending the time to look into who's contributing to this project, do the frickin' math and realize it's one developer and set their expectations accordingly. Once you start using it, say like, this is important to me. How do I make sure that this project is healthy and maintainable? Yeah. Yeah, really. The other thing I feel is important is collaboration.

It feels like, you know, when two people are working on a project, it's far better than two isolated people working on a project. Like the throughput is more than twice the times, right? And someone can cover the other person while they're taking some downtime and that kind of thing. So I think really healthy collaboration is often not given the right kind of praise.

Well, remind me, let's pick this back up in the post show because I think we all probably have more thoughts on this. And this is probably, we could expand this conversation a bit. But I think we should get back on the main track here because we have a lot to get to. But I think this is a very important conversation and we can pick it back up here in a little bit.

And it's one that keeps cropping up every few months. Yeah, I don't think this will be the last episode we talk about it. Boy, we could go through and make so many examples. But it's good to see in their case of Rust that a resolution is there. Things are moving forward. People are talking. I think some learning happened. So, you know, in this case, and I think I really want to commend Drew Duvall for posting that.

Very honest. for posting that. Very honest. And I must add, I mean, he took the time out of all those other tasks to write this retrospective blog post

and share some of his private personal feelings and that's, that takes a lot. And I think that's the exact kind of thing that can help us have a better connection

with these developers, help us empathize a little bit more with their position. So I think that actually, him being vulnerable like that, I think really kind of, see, look at that. It's an episode of vulnerability.

Vulnerability helps everybody. Every now and then a little vulnerability is good. Oh, is it that time? That's right. It's time for housekeeping. Few things to mention today. I want to plug the outrageously awesome Telegram group that we have raging now at jupiterbroadcasting.com

slash Telegram. Having a really fun conversation in there this morning about Project Off Grid, which is something I'm working on, and a few other things. Sometimes we make a few jokes. People like to give me a hard time every now and then. You never. Poppy pops in there, teases me, that kind of stuff. So that's at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram.

A lot of the crew hangs in there. So, you know, we're hanging. Yeah, come chat with us. We're chilling. It's like the JB water cooler, only instead of a water cooler, it's like a town water tower. Because it's really kind of the population of like a small town. Oh, yeah. All crammed in there.

Yeah. And they've got a lot to say. And then we just got, yeah. Sprinkle a little Linux on top. Mm-hmm. Yeah. A few bots to keep the order. And it's all good.

So that's the jupyterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. Do we have anything else for the housekeeping? Go check out self-hosted, self-hosted.show, where I give a major project off-grid update probably in the next episode by the time this is coming out. I don't know. Time math is hard because we're recording ahead. So I don't know how it works. Time is just a construct, man.

I'm not going to get held down by it. New media. Right. All right. So how did we get to free software from shareware? Those of us that remember the term shareware, remember an era of software that you would download and maybe use it for a certain amount of time. And then you get a pop-up or maybe you could do certain kinds of functions. There's a lot of different types of shareware.

Headware, crippleware, trialware, donationware, nagware. You know what's funny is this is a topic that is literally about as old as I am, and it goes back to an early era of the industry that was still figuring out how to even distribute software pre-internet, pre-CD-ROM. So you didn't have a lot of capacity. Most everything was on floppies. And then BBSs came along and then stores started to come along. So we thought it'd be great to go back in time. I think it was somewhere back in 1988-ish.

That's right. We go to the authorities, the Computer Chronicles, in which they have an episode dedicated to shareware and their struggle to figure exactly what it was. Oh, it's great. Why are you giving this away? How does it work? How is this even possible? Don't people take advantage?

Is there a trade of money? Today, we're going to take a look at some of the best examples of shareware, both for the IBM PC and the Macintosh, and we'll meet the man who helped create the concept, Jim Button. Jim Button gets a lot of credit for coining the term shareware, doesn't he? Yeah, and it's a little bit complicated because he was an IBM employee back in the 80s, and he wrote a program to help his local church congregation. And as we were just talking about, demand for his program consumed too much of his time. So he left IBM and created his company, Buttonware, released his first program, PC file, which was like a flat file database,

I don't know, old technology, right? In 1982, he called that user-supported software. And it really was one of the first examples. There were a couple other terms thrown around, freeware, but that was copyright. So eventually, it landed on shareware. Joining us in the studio now, the man they sometimes call the father of shareware, Jim Button, CEO of Buttonware. And next to Jim is Russell DeMaria, author of the book Public Domain Software. Gary? Jim, what's the background of shareware, Jim Button, CEO of Buttonware. And next to Jim is Russell DeMaria, author of the book Public Domain Software.

Gary? Jim, what's the background behind shareware? Where'd it come from? Shareware started really in 1982. I think Andrew Flugelman probably was first with the idea out of San Francisco, and he produced a product called PC Talk. It was the first shareware product on the market. There was no free software. There was no open source.

There was really not even an agreed-upon way to distribute the software. No, and most of the software you're going to get at this time, well, it all came from big commercial software houses with expensive price tags because it was business users. This was at the dawn of personal computing. And the software originally with shareware was very generous. Some of it was run for as long as you want.

There's a few examples of that still. WinRAR comes from that era. But people, just like some now, struggled to understand free software. Back then, struggled to understand the concept of shareware. And Button says, well, think of it really as just a marketing term. Shareware is a distribution method and is primarily a way of distributing full-function demo disks. Users are invited to share the full-function disks with all of their friends

and to use them in the comforts of their home. Money changes hands when the user decides that he really likes the program, wants to put it into productive use, and develop a relationship with the author, which would include technical support, printed manual, and things like that. And what are the typical prices for a package? Prices, shareware prices go all the way from $15 to $20 up to, there's one product on the market that's $100. Doesn't that sound familiar?

Hey, use it if you want. If you like it, help out. Yeah. And you never really saw shareware as a concept really take off on the Linux desktop. Crossover, I guess you could technically say does it. They let you try it for 30 days or something like that. And there's a few, you know, helpful but proprietary applications or sorts not available that are floating out, but they're definitely the exception. Yeah.

When shareware was really getting going, there was all these different schemes like we mentioned here at the top, all these different ways of doing things. And the more successful the app was, the more riskier shareware model they could take. But what about – you were telling us about the decompression and the compression software, about how depending on what you're going to do with it, you have a different price. Yeah, Stuff-It in particular, Ray Lau, who wrote the program, has a very nice scheme. If you're just using it to decompress files that you're getting from some online service or elsewhere, it's free, and there is no donation requested. If you're using it to archive files, to upload, then he requests $18. This doesn't actually even seem that far from the free core model. No, right. It's a natural analog. Hey, here's some basic

features. If you want more, well, we want you to help us maintain and make this sustainable. Yeah. I kind of became aware of the shareware industry when it was sort of in the CD-ROM era, when it was sort of in the CD-ROM era, when it went big time. The CD-ROM revolution meant that you could pack and ship hundreds of shareware applications on a single CD-ROM. And the way it could be sold was the entire applications on this disk. Look at all these great applications. Everything you would ever need is on the CD-ROM. And the companies that nailed that, and you would have like the really, the really sweet shareware companies would have books that you would order like magazines and you could go through that and the magazine might come with a CD-ROM.

And I'm not talking like a thin magazine. I'm talking like a Sears catalog magazine. Put on some music, kick back, look at all the options. Yeah, it was. And there was, of course, there was BBSs that were dedicated to this, and of course there was Juarez sites that were dedicated to trading a lot of the keys to unlock or crack the

shareware. Right. Which is still kind of a thing in the Windows world. And so when I came along, it was kind of during this part where the internet hadn't really become a thing yet, but that really changed the game too, especially dial-up. My dad and I used to have like a collection of shareware apps that we loved that whenever we could, we'd buy like the family edition and we'd share that because that became a thing for a while too. You get a family license for this.

the businessification, where a business could come in and make a sweet offer to a developer and say, we want to buy a year's worth of your software where you develop it, but we rebrand it, different icon, different name, and we bundle it with other shareware. And then we'll even put it in a box and we'll put it on the shelf and you'll get a cut of the sales. So the shareware developer would maintain a public shareware edition of their software, and then there would be like a sneaky rebranded version that would be sold in a box, and these big shareware middlemen would come in.

They were huge operations. They would come in and organize all of it. The deals with the shipping companies, the magazines, the deal with CompUSA or whoever it was that was going to put it on the shelf, they would manage all of that. And one of the bigger ones, you might remember if you're from my era, was a company called PCSIG. If you've ever bought shareware, chances are fairly good that you got it from here.

This is PCSIG, the world's largest shareware distributor, with a library of over 25,000 programs and sales of some 1,000 discs each day. Well, shareware is the alternative to the high-price commercial spread. The shareware programs that are now available are equal, if not better, than a lot of the commercial programs on the market, and hundreds of dollars less when it comes to registration PCC is the conduit between shareware authors and users handling the marketing and advertising for the authors and guaranteeing quality for the customers when we get a program in here that's submitted it goes through

our librarian he looks it over if it meets what we consider to be good shareware standards, he then sends it out to an independent reviewer. Then it's reviewed again before it's placed in the catalog. Everything sold here is also supported by full-time staffers. PCSIG's success has allowed it to branch out into some new areas. It now publishes a bi-monthly magazine. You can buy all 25,000 programs at once on this CD-ROM disc. And you can buy some of the titles now in retail stores.

And the company has also branched out into the business of selling hard-to-find videos. In other words, shareware has been very good to PCSIG. It's come a long way from the founder's garage to a company now making several million dollars a year. In Sunnyvale, California, for the Computer Chronicles, I'm Wendy Woods. Oh, the short reign that they had. I love that sound at the end there. That was floppy disks moving on an assembly line.

Yeah, right? Yeah. I mean, I tell you, the method of shipping software has changed, and so it has really changed the entire software industry. And the growth of open source and Linux kind of rocked all of this. There was a period of time where commercial software was the default. Closed source software was the default. Closed-source software was the default. And even in the Unix era, it was keeping your own innovations.

That was really the default. It wasn't until really a bit of a revolution came along and changed everything. We do have one sector that is taking off today. It is the Linux-related sector. And I thought this might be a good opportunity to say, what is Linux? And I'll answer this question for you. Many of you probably already know, but there are 12 million users out there, a computer operating system developed by hundreds of programmers collaborating on the internet, a challenge to Microsoft Windows NT, very popular for its speed. And so this is what the craze is about. The internet combined with the free software movement and Linux, and then the explosion of the web

in the late 90s was all perfectly timed to fundamentally shift value of software and the entire software industry. And during this transition, shareware as a normal concept of software distribution sort of became an ancient idea that very few things... Right, it's interesting when you think, too, you know, how you interact with it. Shareware, the focus is on, you know, delivery of the application as its runtime, running executable because it's filling some business need. But as, you know, as computers came more and more into our lives, the need to have that freedom and to be able to modify and control things, that becomes a lot more important.

Yeah, and the shift again to hosted services versus selling directly to consumers, there's more value now in building something that runs on a back end than, in most cases, than building something that consumers use directly in terms of software. Not in all cases, but it's been a big shift. And if it wasn't for it, imagine. I mean, just the world's so much better off for it.

I encourage everyone to watch Revolution OS if you haven't watched it or you haven't watched it recently. Boy, is it a time capsule. But it perfectly covers, and I wish we could play a lot of clips from it, but they'd slam us for copyright, but it perfectly covers this transition period. We're talking about this period of time.

It really captured it, captured the mentality. Um, and it, it really kind of reminds us of the wars we were fighting back then with Solaris and the different Unixes and just really something. We've come a long way. I mean, we could have been in a, you know, a world where Windows NT just consumed everything. It was kind of close for a while.

Yeah, good. You notice in that clip, they're talking about NT and hundreds of developers. It's so quaint. It really is. It really is something special. So, shareware eventually faded away, and it's not completely gone, but I think the big default became the transition to open source software for not just server-side development,

but really for anything that you wanted to get a large market adoption. It kind of just became the default. Right, and I think having easier modes of communication, that helps. Because before, let's say you had your source there, that might be nice, but probably 80% of the people you shipped your shareware to, they weren't going to have the tooling or knowledge to be able to modify that. But now anyone who's interested has easy ways to participate in a code base that's open. So much has shifted because of the way we can distribute software over the internet and then interact directly with the people that are distributing that software. And then build wikis and forums around that to help people get it set up and it's

it's just such a huge shift from when you were getting it in a disc in a bag in a little shop somewhere or buying it from a developer and downloading it over your modem using git right which was also shareware best downright back in the day was git right um and uh classic shareware games like doom like that was how Doom monetized. You could get the first few levels. It was like in-app purchases now. Oh my God, what's old is new. Holy crap. I don't know if you remember this. You can actually, we'll have a link in the show notes. There's a version on archive.org and DOSBox. It's the shareware version of Doom. And so like the first bit of Doom, the first level or 10 levels, I can't remember, was free. And then if you wanted to play all of the other levels,

you had to pay for the shareware. It's kind of not unusual when you think of it in terms of apps on mobile devices. No, not at all. That's how the new Mario run and Mario games work on the phone. It's like you get the first couple levels, and if you want to play all of them, you got to pay the in-app purchase.

I guess there's just some core models that work, and it comes back to talking about marketing. It's a way to get your stuff out there, to try before you buy, but then still have a way back to actually support continued development. Oh, Wes. I love running those old clips. It's very nostalgic. Computer Chronicles was great.

But I think, do we have a link to that full video? We should. Yeah. We should put a full link in the show notes to that. All right. Well, why don't we get to our picks before we get out of here in the special edition? Yeah, because it turns out, you know what? We do live in the current day.

We have access to tons of great open source software. And this is the part of the show where we tell you about it. Two picks, guys? Pick overload. Well, that's why it's picks and not pick. Oh, okay. Well, this first one's pretty great, especially for those of us who think the terminal's the future.

Hashtag terminal future. That sounds bad. That doesn't sound good. That doesn't sound good. So this first one's called Brut, B-R-O-O-T. I was going to try to make Wes say it, but he didn't speak up, so then I had to say it. And it gives you an overview of a directory, even a big one, in a really nice, concise, readable way. Right. Think of it as a combination of maybe something like if you used ncdo to manage and clean up files,

which shows you an interactive, curses-based application to drill down and get to sizes. Yeah, I do. Do you ncdo? Oh, yeah, of course. versus-based application to drill down and get disk sizes. Yeah, I do. Do you, NCDU? Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. And if you've maybe used the tree command,

it prints you a little tree of the directory structure. Brute's something of a combination of those, but it's a very interactive environment, so you can sort of drill down. It stores past locations. It's like the tree file viewer manager for your terminal you never knew you wanted. Huh. I'm sorry, I'm just distracted by your special edition outfit

that you wore today. It's just... Isn't it nice? Yeah, I mean, it's nice, except for the sequences are a little bit much because we have the lights on, so that's a bit much, but... Yeah, but I didn't...

I mean, did you even know they made this color? No, I did not. I don't even know how you found that. All right, well, we have another pick here. This one is, again, hashtag terminal future. Oh, that's not good. And I don't know how we say this one. How come I'm always the dumbass that has to read the names?

I think it's Tizonia. I was going to say that or Tizona. Tizona? Tizonia, yeah. It's a cloud music streamer for your terminal. So if you got your Spotifiers or your Google Play Musics or your SoundClouds or your YouTubes, maybe you got a Plex, maybe you want to Chromecast this business. I do, I do.

Well, who wants to do it in a GUI when you can do it in the terminal, right? Cheese, boom, cheese-ify it. Absolutely. That's what we're going to call when you put stuff in the terminal. We're just cheese-ifying it. Cheese-ifying it. I like it. I'll go with that term.

When you can take something and do it in the terminal, that's putting a slice of it. Cheese-ifying it? I like it. I'll go with that term. When you can take something and do it in the terminal, that's putting a slice of cheese on it. That's what we're doing. Putting a slice of cheese on your music app. Ooh, looks like they've got Docker, Snap packages,

Ubuntu packages, even one for Raspbian. Well, it says right here on the website, too, that it's the most powerful cloud music player. So, power's good, right? I mean, you're welcome, everybody.

What else do you need to know? It's the most powerful. And apparently, it's the first implementation of open max ill 1.2 which i don't know what that is but uh it's the first implementation of it so it's a standard for integration of multimedia components into media frameworks to simplify development of audio video encoders and decoders dodgy yeah from the Kronos group. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows the mobile market is constantly evolving and demanding ever-increasing multimedia functionality and performance cheese. Duh.

Why am I even here? Do your homework. Anyways, we'll put a link to Blot, right? Was that the first one? Brute. I'm going to make you use it now. You're just being so mean to the Plut thing. Well, I mean, I got NCDU and I got DF. I don't need this crap.

But it's fine. It's fine. You want to put it in my show, it's fine. We've been streaming for too long. And then Tizona, which just sounds like a delicious calzone. Oh wait, Brute's written in rust. So there you go. You'll change your mind now. Oh, I love it. Oh, okay.

Alright, why didn't you say so earlier? That's great. Have you guys heard of Brute? It's a really nice way to view the directories, even big ones. Check it out. We'll have a link in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 328. Over there at linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe is where you can get it.

You know what? No. We're what? No. We're changing this number. We're starting over. All right. All right. So it's 328. 338.

338. 338? Yeah. Where am I? All right. There you go. Linuxunplugged.com slash 338. I would redo it so that way Joe could clean it up, but I think we'll just keep it in there like that.

Because, you know, we podcast hard for you, and this is the result. We get a little loopy. That's what happens. You know, you'd think the caffeine would keep you on the straight and narrow. Nope. It just slowly destroys you. And Wes was like, we should be drinking today.

And I was like, no, we got to, you know, we got to stay on the straight and narrow. Keep this on the straight and narrow. Yeah, that's how it went. Anyways, LinuxUnplugged.com slash 338 for links to everything, as well as the contact page is over there. We'll be back live at our regular Tuesday noon Pacific time. You can get that converted to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. A massive shout-out to our virtual log.

A fantastic showing. Really appreciate everybody making it. And each one of you now go to linuxheadlines.show and subscribe. It's a good little show. I feel, you know, like I'mlines.show and subscribe. It's a good little show. I feel, you know, like I'm proud of it or something. It's a good show. You know, like when you're a parent of like a kid or a pet and you watch them learn something and you get proud of them,

you know, like the first time you taught your dog to piss outside and you're like, I'm so proud of that dog. That's how I feel about headlines, you know? It's also just super handy because sometimes you don't have time to keep up on the news. Yeah, and who wants your podcast to piss in the house? Wow. Wow. This has been Linux Unplugged, the podcast that won't piss in your house.

And headlines won't either. It's really well trained. It's been domesticated, and I really like it. So check it out at linuxheadlines.show. Go get more Alex and I at selfhosted.show. And I got one more for you. A little bit different, though. Different TLD, so brace yourself.

Techsnap.systems. What? Yeah, I didn't even know.systems was a thing. Turns out it is. There's so many great things. Turns out.horse is a thing. .audio is a thing. Who knew?

Oh, I guess I did. Jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for the times in the local zone, because we would like you to join us next week, and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday! The Unplugged Program. Love that song. You know, I'm a big fan now of the longer outros, but the tighter intros. Yeah. Bring it nice and short.

Over the years, you can chart the length of the unplugged intro. It's just gotten shorter and shorter and shorter. Well, you want the intro because you're excited about the content, right? If you're listening to the podcast. But the outro, that's your nice, the long outro gives you time to pick what you're going to listen to next. Well, when we were new at podcasting, we thought, we told ourselves, well, we got to set the tone.

We got to set the mood. So we got to have a nice long intro that really sets the mood for my great podcast. And you know, you see this on YouTube now, like so many like YouTubers have these really long intros. Oh yeah, with fancy graphics. Hey Chris, hey Chris, let's get to it. And you see this on YouTube now. So many YouTubers have these really long intros. Oh, yeah. With fancy graphics.

Hey, Chris. Hey, Chris. Let's get to it. Don't you love it when they say that? Let's get right to it after like an eight-minute intro. Yeah. So let's get right to it. Yeah.

But podcasts do this too. But then what happens is if you're a listener and you've heard that podcast a hundred times, think about how much of your life has been just listening to that same intro music, which is coming in in a compressed MP3 likely or a compressed YouTube video. But I love it. Like one of the transformation experiences

of my year last year was sat in the studio with you listening to the intro of Lupp recording Lupp. Well, you got to have a little something, I think. You know, you got to have a little something so that way when you hear the song, you're like, oh, that's from the show I like. Right, totally. So you got to have a little something, I think. You know, you got to have a little something so that way when you hear the song, you're like, oh, that's from the show I like. Right, totally. So you got to have a little something,

but I think where you go long is in the outro, where I think the balance is struck really well is in user error. It's got an identifiable boing, right in. Yeah, that's nice.

But then it's got that beautiful long outro that I listen to every single time. Right, you don't have to skip it. You just let it fade out. I always have. What was that intro like again? Boing!

A little more oing. Boing! You nailed it that time. You're trying to get me. All right, we've got to pick our title. JBTitles.com. You know, when you guys were talking about the shareware and the freeware and stuff. Yeah, I remember that.

Oh, yeah, and I wanted to come back to the other thing, too. And you had mentioned WinRAR. Yeah. You still haven't paid for yours, bud? Oh, man. It was Nagware, right? But the one thing about it that I don't think a lot of people knew is that if you just right-clicked on your file, you could extract it and never get nagged. Oh, I think it was classically famous for that.

Oh, I think it was classically famous for that. So take me in the mumble room if you had other thoughts on the whole developer burnout topic that we discussed, because I knew a couple other people wanted to jump in on that. Because I think what I really appreciated about that blog post that we read was it really made me realize that this isn't a Linux problem or an open source problem. It's a human problem, and you can apply it to software development. You can apply it to

basically everything. Anybody who's in a situation where there's a lot of those kind of types of dynamics at play. So, Colonel, I wanted to give you a chance because I saw you had pinged me earlier. Yeah, I've been thinking for a while now about is there some way that we could maybe

the open source community band together and create an organization that would put a framework around bringing in volunteers to deal with the non-development side of maintaining a project? So things like managing the money coming in, managing, creating a foundation, if it gets that far for that project, maybe maintaining the servers for like a website or, you know, Rocket Chat or something like that. Yeah. Wes and I were actually just brainstorming this yesterday. And I think we both agreed it probably wouldn't work.

But the idea was a loose group of volunteers who are kind of like a team that can come in and say, we can help you get these things set up. They don't run it for you necessarily, or maybe they get something immediately resolved for you, but they connect you with the right people to get a foundation established or get a contractor in to help you with the accounting or something like that. It strikes me as kind of the other side of the coin.

You know, we've often talked about how we have a lot of open source developers, but not always like technical writers. Right, exactly. Or people who do UI work. Accountants. Yeah, but no one people who do UI work. Accountants. Yeah, but no one's managing your backlog for you when you have this open source project.

Communications, troubleshooting, tech support. Yeah. And these are all important roles. It kind of makes me want to put it together. You know what I mean? Like I want to put together a strike team that comes. But then we started talking about it. We're like, you know, a lot of these developers

are pretty proud of doing it their own way. That's the other part is it's not for work. You're not getting, right? It's your project and there's a little more ownership and care. And it's kind of like, hey, knock, knock, we noticed you're doing a bad job. Would you like us to help you solve it? I mean, you'd have to really be careful

on who you approached, how you approached it. You've got to be respectful. Yeah, but maybe if you'd done it long enough, you'd have a reputation where people would come to you. But I kind of was thinking something along the same lines, Colonel. It would be nice to have a little organization that could pop in and just help manage that. All right, we'll do Drifter first, and then we'll do PyCrash. So go ahead, Drifter, what were your additional thoughts?

Well, I was just thinking, like, it's definitely a developer thing. Being a developer myself, it's a huge issue to get burned out. And it's really hard, especially when you have like the consumer or user who, you know, is approaching you and, oh, I got all these things that have to be done. And it, like you were mentioning, it's really difficult if you're not getting out, you don't get those breaks, you burn out really easy. But I think that it's just a human problem. Sometimes it's really easy, whether that's like via our ticketing system or something like that, it's really easy, whether that's like via our ticketing system or something like that, it's really easy to forget that there's just people behind it. Like it's a, it's a person problem. We forget that it's these people. Sometimes they need,

need a little bit of a little bit of slack on that. Yeah. I can't tell you how many, how many emails I've gotten where somebody really gives me the third degree about something. Maybe, maybe it's generally somebody who's pretty passionate about something. And then I just kind of respond and address a few of their points. And nine out of ten times they respond back saying, Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot you were like a dude that was just talking to another dude. And I was having a bad day.

I mean, I've seen that a thousand times over the years because people that are part of a project or somebody that's just on Twitter or a celebrity or a podcaster is a bit of an abstraction. And so you're communicating with an abstracted concept of a human. You know, you don't, you don't see, you know, you don't see me here with my belly and, and my beard and my hair that still looks pretty great. And all of that, you don't see that, right? You just, you have the concept of Chris and you communicate with that concept.

And that's when I was saying earlier in the show that this low bandwidth aspect of communication over the internet really matters to like base levels in our monkey brain. All right, so Mr. Crash, I wanted to give you a chance to jump in. So the thing I wanted to talk about, it's like burnout is pretty much in everyone's problem.

I mean, startup people get burnout and even students get burnout. I'm a student myself and I got some problem with burnout a couple of years ago. And it's like, the problem is that you need to learn. And so we all need to learn to ask for help before we are burnout, actually. That's the really big problem. And it's a good thing what Rudi Wald wrote.

That's just like I'm asking for help. Yeah. And just a little understanding even just to kind of connect with where I'm at. Brent, what do you think? Yeah, this is a huge topic and an important one. And I feel like if, yeah, there's some way that we can allow our experts, you know, those who are coding, they're best at coding and yet they have, you know, a hundred other tasks're best at coding and yet they have you know 100 other tasks that surround that activity to make it successful um we need some open source you know it's really in any area but if we're talking just open source we need some people who are really

passionate open source accountants who can you, come and help 10 developers with that area so that the developers or podcasters or photographers or whatever their expertise is can focus on what they're actually really good at and not waste their cycles doing, you know, inefficient and also oftentimes really frustrating work that they just need to get done to allow them to, to make a living, but,, but aren't jazzed about. Yeah. Oh, there's a lot of that. I think, too, conversations like this, which remind us that they're human,

and conversations like you have on brunch remind us that it humanizes these people. And I think that's also pretty helpful. Even if it's only part of the solution, I think it's still good to do, especially in free software and open source. Yeah, I agree, Drifter. This could be a whole topic, couldn't it? I mean, you could have a whole podcast dedicated to this. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I think we could all definitely use it too. Just being able to have like an area just to vent, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that, I mean, I've been bashing on internet communications, but it's, it's at least we have this. And so, I mean, I've been bashing on internet communications, but it's it's at least we have this. And so I mean, I think you could glass half full it too and say, it's not enough, but it's better than absolutely nothing. And just being by yourself in a room quiet. It's nice to have this connection. So I think there's some positives to it too. What do you think, Alex? some positives to it too. What do you think, Alex? I think recognizing burnout and being honest with yourself and being able to have the courage to say, yes, I'm not enjoying what I'm doing is a real,

you know, it's a real scary thing the first time, you know, my personal experience was, I was working for Apple on the Genius Bar and everything about that told me I should love it because I was repairing stuff and I was enjoying it you know the technical side but dealing with customers all the time just wore me down and admitting to myself that that wasn't what got me out of bed in the morning took me a couple of years honestly. From apple to red hat but it took some analysis right? Yeah yeah and reading reading books honestly on the topic I would say is a huge help. Because it gives you, as you're reading, it gives your brain that time to sort of say,

yeah, I identify with the way that this author is trying to make me feel or whatever it is. And sort of say, it's okay to make mistakes in terms of thinking that this role or you know being a developer it wasn't right for me either because it was too monotonous but where i am now i i love it because you know every no two days are the same even though broadly speaking i do the same thing every day you know different cases might ever come through so it's it's a real balancing act and being honest with yourself is the real key to unlocking, I don't want to say like super cheesy, like happiness, but genuinely, I mean it, that being able to say, I need to change something and then putting a plan into place and kind of sticking to it, even

though it can take several years, is well worth the effort. Yeah. And sometimes having something to work towards and just being able to see measurable improvements out of a situation is really all it takes to change your attitude around, which kind of doubles your net result. Because you're energized, so you're getting more creative, you're working a little bit harder,

you've got energy again, so it's not as much of a slog. And it's just simply by having a, it doesn't have to be a master plan, but just a few key milestones that you're working towards and you can see progress. And if you can, you need to be able to realize that progress to actually get the boost. But if you can pull it off, it can be a trick. And I, you know, it's not awesome. You can start building that momentum and sort of like, right, I just got that done. Okay. It was a tiny piece, but I can keep going.

I'll tell you the other thing as well is it's not necessarily just about huge life-changing stuff like changing job or emigrating right it's about incremental change as well making small tweaks to your morning like brent said earlier you know take the 20 minutes and do the yoga but do it regularly and build that into your routine like node runners saying in the ir, get a standing desk so you can change it up. Or if you're working from home, go and work on the couch for 20 minutes or whatever it is. I actually did that today. Before the show, I was out in the living room of the studio working from there just to change it up, change up the energy flow a little bit so that way I get a little more peppy for on air,

get myself work going again and get out of the sleepiest chair that I've been in since like 7 a.m. And, yeah, it actually does work. Just little tricks like that that seem silly. That's how I describe it. That seems like a silly thing to do. But sometimes it works. You just got to find the ones that do for you. If you think this is something we could talk more about, let me know.

You can either tweet me at chrisles or linuxunplugged.com slash contact Because I think, you know, maybe we do an extra on it or something like that. I don't know what that avenue would be. People in the chat room are saying do a special on it because it does apply so much to open source development. But it's broader than that, too. I would like to think that Mr. DeVault got something out of even writing that post. You know, simply putting those words down and acknowledging that himself. And, you know, there's, there's a level of, of it being, you know, just therapy, uh, for lack of a better word to sit down and put your thoughts out like that. And then admit it to the

public, right? Exactly. And then put those thoughts, you know, somewhere where the public can actually read them and understand the struggles that you're going through, I think helps a lot. And it's, it's kind of a first step to acknowledging that and, and changing the way that you operate so that you do have that little bit of downtime and you don't necessarily have to schedule everything, every single event of your, of your, you know, your life to, to try and, you know, have a little, you know, bit of time for your time for your family or that time just to walk around the block and and, you know, get out of a headspace for a moment. I think I hope at least. And I think he probably did hear from a few people like right there with you, man.

So much on all that, because I think it resonate with a lot of us listening to it. OK, well, I have something kind of special for us that I say for the post show because it's probably it's probably too retro maybe Wes and I are the only ones that remember this but this just felt extremely appropriate with today's topic so I leave you with this but I just wanted to make one copy you say I'll just make a copy

for me and a friend then he'll make one and she'll make one and where will it end one lead to another Then ten, then more And no one buys any discs from the store So no one gets paid and they can't make more The posse breaks up and then close the store Don't copy, don't copy that floppy So let me break this down for you

Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't No common San Diego, no more Oregon Trail Tetris and the others, they're all gonna fail Not because we want it, but because you're just taking it Disrespecting all the folks who are making it The more you take, the lesser we'll be The disk becomes fewer, the games fall away The screen starts to shrink and then it will fade

Programs fall through a black hole in space The computer world becomes bleak and stark Loses its life and the screen goes to dust programs fall through a black hole in space. The computer world becomes bleak and stark, loses its life and the screen goes to dark. Welcome to the end of the computer age.