LINUX Unplugged - 517: Caught Red-Hatted

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

Just about every take on the Red Hat news seems to have missed the mark. Special Guest: Carl George.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, Red Hat made some news while we were away. We thought about it for a week and we realized we've got to address it because we think most of the takes are wrong. We'll give you our take on the Red Hat situation and then we'll round out the show with some picks and boosts and a lot more.

So before we get into all of that, let's say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale makes all the other VPNs look old and busted. It's a mesh VPN protected by WireGuard. Each machine connects to each other, creates a flat network. We love it. It'll change your game, and you can try it for free for up to 100 devices and support the show when you go to tailscale.com slash unplugged. Also, before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.

Hello, boys. Welcome back. Hello. It is nice to be back. It's nice to hear your smiling mouths, as they say. Right, boys. Welcome back. Hello. It is nice to be back. It's nice to hear your smiling mouths, as they say. Right? That's what Wes always says. And I have a plea to the Mumble Room and the chat room that's all listening live this week.

Feel free to interrupt as we get going. Just tag Wes in the chat room with a description of what you want to say, and he's going to try to work you in because today's topic is really complex and there's so many different angles and perspectives on it that we're going to do our best to try to address the most common things that we've seen but any kind of pushback we can get from you guys i think would give us another opportunity to address other points we might miss so please feel free to tag wes while we're going on and get your thoughts in because it's a big one this week so i guess a few things happened while we were away, right? We have this Red Hat news, which we're about to get into. But Brent, you also have some big news that we're excited to share. I do have some news.

I kind of fell in love earlier this year, and I have now joined the NextCloud team to try to make a difference with all the things they're doing over there. How great is that? What a perfect, naturally organic fit. And, you know, of course, that means we won't take your topic seriously or your opinion seriously on the topic anymore.

Nor should. No, actually, I think this could be a great opportunity just for us to kind of, you know, watch from a little bit closer than normal how this project goes. It's something we all use at the center of our workflow. Yeah, we want it to succeed. And we know you have a lot of handy talents that might just help things along. I think Brent's going to be good help, so it's great to hear.

I will say, I have found a bugger, too, so hopefully I can help in those areas, too. Paying off already. No, what a shocker. So I think the news of you joining the Nextcloud team also means you'll be taking a trip to Berlin again. It does. And I wanted to share that as soon as we could. So details are still to be determined, but we're hoping to do a Jupiter broadcasting meetup here at the end of

July or near the end of July. As I said, dates still to kind of be sorted out. We have a meetup posting on meetup.com. So please join that if you think you might be able to make it. Also, please join our Berlin Buds Matrix Room. We'll have a link to both of those things in the show notes. But we're aiming around likely Saturday, July 22, maybe Sunday, the 23rd, something like that, or maybe worst case, the following Sunday. So that'll be the 30th. So still details to be

determined. Basically towards the end of July. That's it. And then when you know, you'll lock it in at that meetup post. Yeah, I'm hoping that by next Linux Unplugged, so next Sunday, we will have all these details sorted out. But if you're interested and you think you might be able to go, please RSVP, join us, and

we'd love to make it happen. Well, congratulations. This is really exciting. Well, thank you. Of course, you're still going to be on the podcast. Yeah. And hopefully maybe it means one day even Starlink or something's in your

future. So that could be great for the show too. You know, does this mean Brent should be maintaining our. Yeah. He's the expert. He's now the next cloud admin, I believe.

I don't think you want that to happen, Wes. No, I think it's a good idea. Also, I have a tradition where whoever gets the new job has to buy lunch. So that does mean Bren owes us a lunch, too, technically. All right, fine. Also, while we're tossing around the congrats, we should say congrats to our buddy Alex, and of course, somewhat myself. Episode 100 of Self Hosted was posted posted last week and it's a good

one self-hosted.show slash 100 it's a good jumping in point because we decided to kind of reflect on some of our favorite most essential self-hosting applications and then we dug into something I think is going to be a topic for us in the future which is Proxmox 8 which is based on Debian 12 Bookworm with I think it's got Linux 6.2 in there or 6.1. It's got a more modern kernel and they have also updated QMU and KVM and all those libraries like Ceph and all that stuff to go along with it. Proxmox 8 is looking real good. So we dug into that in self-hosted 100 as well. Self-hosted.show slash 100. We got a little note saying, hey, we found a geocache. So John and family left us a note. It reads, we just wanted to reach out and say we found the last geocache.

My family and I were out trying to get photos taken before we moved to the East Coast, and it caught our eye. We want to reach out to say thanks. Now, we don't know which geocache this was. I mean, congratulations. But one of us wrote, congrats on finding the last geocache. And which is so silly in retrospect, because how would we know what order they'd be found in? The last one we made, I suppose? I think that's what it is.

On our little journey of geocaches. And then there's also something else very strange in here. I mean, yes, we have a Coda Radio sticker, a Linux Unplugged sticker. But then there's a $2 bill and a $1 bill. We didn't put cash in any of these. I'm pretty sure we did not. I don't think we did. They're really crumpled as well.

Yeah. So like, did another listener find this, resupply the stash with some cash for, you know, to like make up for the swag they took and then put it back, I think, which is also great. I think the saddest part is there's the elastic from one of the t-shirts we left in the geocache but there's no t-shirt so just the elastic says like 2xl on it and it's just sitting there that's what i'm thinking is the cash is for is like here's a little bit of

cash because i took the swag so now somebody else gets some value when they find it or something i don't know but john and family congratulations we need to do that again. I wanted to kind of come up with a way to post it all publicly and that sort of slowed it all down. I think the idea would be, if you find our caches, throw some great stuff in there you think another listener would enjoy. You know, cache is great.

And send us a note with name and where you found it. Yes, please, because we have no idea. We don't know what we did in the past. We forget them, I think, as soon as we put them on the ground. It was so ridiculous. I was trying to remember where we'd stuck them all. It's pretty funny. I will say, I think, at least in my mind,

there is a last geocache that hasn't yet been found, which is the geocache that I left in Washington Pass, Chris. If you remember, I kind of placed it, and then I think a couple weeks later, the road closed for the season. It's kind of a seasonal mountain pass. So it was closed all winter. We didn't, I thought maybe a listener would make the trek out there. I don't know, on a snowmobile or some snowshoes or something. I don't think they care that much. No, it's clear. We got to put something better in there. Yeah. Yeah. It's too bad they didn't know. We just

filled it with bars of gold too. I mean, you know, well. Yeah. Jeez, guys. Maybe I should go out there and check on it. You know, like a little family road trip and see if it's out there.

Do it, because I don't know. Like, we've had a few that might have been found by people of the public and they just vanished. This one I tried to hide very well

considering it was a somewhat well-visited area, but that one, from my best knowledge, has not been found by a JB listener yet. So there's still one out there at least. We'll find out. I'll have to check in on it. And I suppose before we get into the rest of it, just before we get to the chaos, a moment to say thank you to Drew, our editor. He does a fantastic job.

And last week we did something brand new. We snuck in live boosts and we've never done anything like this where we've pre-recorded a show but then left a segment to be done after the fact it's kind of scary because like what if we can't all get together then the show just publishes don't have that segment just a big old hole in the show and then of course when we all got together we were traveling brent was out in his tent hunting moose wes and i had our travel mics with us and you know he just did a fantastic job making it very listenable so shout out to editor drew and

when you boost in he's also in the splits so he automatically gets a little cut of that and he earned that split that week that's for sure okay so let's talk about what's happened with red hat put in the simplest terms i can think of since we have gathered together red hat has changed the way they post the source rpms for red hat enterprise linux to the general public that's what's changed what has been the way it has been for a bit now continue is that rel development work is being submitted upstream to CentOS streams GitHub. What has changed is if clone makers want to use the Red Hat RHEL upstream sources to base their clone on, i.e. if they want to have the same source code base as RHEL now, my understanding is they're going to have to figure out where RHEL

was essentially snapshotted or forked from the upstream github repository which should be doable through github commit history they're also going to be responsible now for pulling out all of the branding and rebranding it and which they already had to do to some degree already and they're going to also be more responsible i understand for sweeping it for things that red hat might have pulled out preemptively. Since the switch to CentOS Stream, Red Hat hasn't used these source RPMs themselves directly, but they've continued to publish them. So that way they'd be available to the general public. With this change now, the clone makers would have to do a lot more work and verification in there to kind of make this work for them.

And that's yet to really be determined if that's the route they're going to go. We'll get into that here in a moment. But does that kind of recap like the on the ground change that has happened from just like a fact standpoint? Yeah, I mean, it seemed like before, you know, rebuilders, anyone interested in rebuilding Red Hat Enterprise Linux was handed ready to go, you know, source RPM files that had kind of a lot of this work already done, already packaged, would be the code that had been used for RHEL. Whereas now, yeah, you kind of have to go figure that out for yourself. It is all, they are branched off CentOS Stream, but, you know, there might not be a tag or an exact reference to know where Red Hat started using them for a particular RHEL release internally.

And that's where some more verification work is going to have to be done to make sure they've gotten that right. That's legwork they probably don't have infrastructure for right now. Also maybe raises some of the questions we'll get into about, you know, what is your intention? Do you just want like a well-maintained version of these codes that have been integrated or do you want for some reason an exact copy of a particular point in time release? As Rocky Linux likes to say, a bug forbug compatible version. So this has been a real nice deal for Alma Linux and Scientific Linux and Rocky Linux for a long time

because they're able to take a really high-quality commercial product, rebrand it, and in the case of, say, Rocky Linux, CIQ can go around and sell support contracts for it. If we'd like, Carl's offering to elaborate a bit on the extra work

that would need to go in in this new model. I would like that, yeah. So I would be curious to know what additional work the clone makers are going to have to do now. Yeah, what's up, y'all?

So full disclosure up front, in case anyone's unaware, I work for Red Hat, formerly on the CentOS stream team. Now I work on the Apple team. So if anyone's looking to add Haman in me and discount my opinion because I work for Red Hat, just go ahead and fast forward because I'm not going to say anything that's going to make you happy. But the extra work that's involved, right?

100% of the code in RHEL is open source, unambiguously. The exact combination of that code delivered on a specific timeline in a specific combination with the accompanying certifications and hardware software ecosystem stuff, that's all available to subscribers for RHEL in compliance with all licenses. But all of the code itself does go into CentOS Stream. It has to go into CentOS Stream because if it doesn't go there, then it's a regression for RHEL customers when the next RHEL minor version comes out. Like if we don't put it there, then like RHEL 9.2 just came out. If we don't put it in CentOS Stream, then when RHEL 9.3 comes out, those customers lose that fix or that feature. Then that's just unacceptable. Now that's not to say that things go in like the exact same day always. I'm tracking a change right now that's like a week or two delayed where, and it gets into the nuance of the difference between backporting versus rebasing.

And for the uninitiated, a backport is when you take a commit from the upstream repo, like say a CVE fix, and you apply it to an older version of that software so that way you can deliver it in a way without also updating the software that might have incompatible changes. That's a very common way that software is updated in RHEL with backports. It's also common in Debian and other distros too. The other way is that if you think it's possible to update the software to a newer version in a compatible way, you can do that. And that's usually referred to a rebase. The Git equivalence would be rebasing versus cherry picking, if you're thinking of it from a directly code perspective. So every time that something

needs to change in RHEL, Red Hat maintainers have to think about what is the risk versus difficulty of doing a backport and the risk versus difficulty of doing a backport and the risk versus difficulty of doing a rebase. And those are complicated questions and a lot of nuance there about how you would go about that. Sometimes doing the backport is an obvious thing. It's, you know, maybe a few characters, maybe a few lines. It's not a big change and it makes perfect sense to do a backport. Other times doing the rebase makes a lot more sense. Sometimes doing the backport makes sense for RHEL 9.2, but doing the rebase makes more sense for RHEL 9.3.

And that's what you'll see in CentOS Stream is that the code goes in there, but it might be by, say, updating Python from 3.9.16 to 3.9.17 instead of doing a backport patch to 3.9.16. Ah, that is a bit of nuance there. Yeah, that's not just a random example I'm making up. That is a specific scenario that I'm looking at right now because some of my friends in Alma asked me, hey, where is this update that's in RHEL 9.2?

Y'all stop this, and y'all said it's in stream, and I can't find it. And I pointed to an open merge request that at the time hadn't been merged yet, but it has been now. It hasn't been published to the stream repos yet of where Python got rebased from 3.9.16 to 3.9.17. RHEL 9.2 for customers got a backport patch for it. In 9.3, it's going to be rebased to 3.9.17. And that little bit of nuance is how people can correctly say that not all of the exact sources for RHEL are in CentOS Stream.

And also people can correctly say that all of the source code for RHEL goes into CentOS Stream. It's not a true-false thing. Ah, that just gives you a sense of the nuance here. Thank you, Carl. And that is going to be tricky work. And I can see why there'll be additional verification required to make sure they got that right. And I can see why they would be resistant to that. Yeah, it's extra work. They don't want to do the extra work because they've built their business offerings on doing an exact amount of work, which is Red Hat

doing most of the work. And that's the point I kind of want to underscore here just for a moment. And this part's my opinion, but it's what i've observed is when we got the announcement about the transition to centos stream i think there was probably a motivation inside red hat to say you know we have essentially created our own competitor here and uh some of these deals we'd like to be getting are going to centos i'm sure this is one of the bits of the calculus and so they thought they would solve that problem a little bit And I think the messaging around the initial announcement of stream sort of conveyed the wrong ideas around what system stream is appropriate for. And so instead of solving the problem that they were setting out to initially with the changes to CentOS, they kind of just created two more really valid CentOS contenders as well as a couple of others as well. And I'm primarily thinking of Alma and Rocky here. CentOS contenders as well as a couple of others as well. And I'm primarily thinking of Alma and Rocky here. Then on top of that, Red Hat got something they didn't have in the previous

arrangement that was never a problem. So in the previous arrangement, CentOS was a community project with some famous organizational issues and sometimes not always the most effective product, but it was there. It was solid, people could rely on it. But now, with Rocky Linux, there's a sales department. There's an aggressive sales department that has recognized an opening in the enterprise software market and is pursuing it with all company focus. The thing that they can offer is they can essentially offer the same exact product that Red Hat is creating with minimal effort to create that clone and then undersell on the support.

And the beauty thing here is you could deploy hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Rocky systems, but maybe you only want support on five of them. And they can come in and they can offer pricing that just is outside of Red Hat's scale. and offer pricing that just is outside of Red Hat's scale. And so Red Hat has created, in their previous actions, a much worse problem than they had to begin with. And it was a pretty sweet deal for the clone makers because the product they got to sell is based bug-for-bug compatibility on Red Hat's commercial product, which not only has deals that require it for software compatibility, but has a ton of industry momentum and brand respect. So talk about a great deal for them. And that deal just changed, and that's the part I want to get into now. Linode.com slash unplugged. Head over there to get $100 in 60-day credit and support the show while you're checking out the exciting news.

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scale your applications from the cloud all the way to the edge it's linode.com slash unplugged i have to say i think the majority of the takes on this red hat situation have missed the mark a little bit some of them worse than other I want to start with the clone makers. So I watched Alma and Rocky pretty closely after the news broke. And I've heard from folks inside both camps. And I'm just going to generalize what I've heard. I won't try to name specifics. But I saw meeting notes. And one of the sets of meeting notes I saw was from the Rocky Linux team. You see, they made a statement very early on, a very kind of bullish statement about proceeding and how things would be fine. Internally, Rocky Linux held a meeting. And they hold their notes on, I think it was Etherpad.

So you can see each contributor, and Greg was in there, has a color. And you can see the notes that they've edited and all of that kind of stuff. And you can see the whole meeting notes for the call and almost immediately you saw the difference of strategy rocky linux started talking about ways of getting their hands on the source rpms and then somehow getting them published on like a independent third-party website that they wouldn't have any official connection to and then they and alma Alma Linux could just start using those source RPMs that somehow ended up on this independent enterprise website. And they discussed a few other ideas, but they almost immediately, almost really the

first thing they started doing was discussing loopholes. Well, where you saw Alma Linux kind of take a more calculated approach and go, all right, well, let's investigate trying to base it off the GitHub. Let's investigate our possible options here while trying to remain, you know, somewhat positive of their community. And I told you guys a couple of years ago when all of this started, when we really first learned about the stream transition and we heard about Rocky and Alma, I said on this podcast, there will come a day. on this podcast, there will come a day. It'll be down the road where something happens and a decision has to be made. And you're going to see the values of these two communities get reflected and the decisions they make are going to be critical. And what I am seeing right now is Rocky has come out with a statement that says they're essentially going to try a loophole of signing up on a cloud provider, a VPS, getting access to the source RPMs through that cloud provider, and then republishing those source RPMs and using it to base Rocky Linux off of.

And people are all on board with this. As if this isn't the biggest sketchy loophole. loophole. And this is supposed to be an enterprise grade product that you're running in a business for critical infrastructure. And you're relying on this ridiculously, obviously dumb loophole. And as a project, this is what they're representing publicly. And their stands are clapping that along. What universe do you people live in? Do any of you who are agreeing with this actually work in a production environment with commercial software? I mean, this is absolutely ludicrous that you would consider basing your entire environment on this rickety loophole that they're going to try to use to grab the source RPMs. It certainly doesn't feel like it's got a long-term view in mind, which is somewhat

what you expect with a distro like this, right? I mean, instead of adapting to the new, you know, what the new world you've got, trying to figure out a long-term plan, it's sort of what can we scramble to do to keep things exactly the same or as close to exactly the same as we've got them now? It was the same reaction after Stream was announced. What can we do to minimize the change? People didn't ask themselves, all right, well, can we move our application target environment

over to the UBI image? Because the universal basic image that Red Hat produces has actual RHEL files in it it's based on actual rel releases and you can ship your application in a ubi container and you can run it on any distro you want and if you decide to run it on rel you can even get commercial support for it and people could have started targeting the ubi containers two years ago and then they could be running these on centOS stream and they could be in a hundred percent compliance. It's so simple. It was so obvious, but instead we let charlatans,

in my opinion, sell us on ways to maintain the status quo. And if you think about what this compatibility is that everybody needs with rel, it's because archaic software that is shipping the way we ship software in the 90s is targeting specific versions of the kernel and the libraries and the system file locations and all of that. And they certify it against Red Hat, Enterprise Linux,

or sometimes SUSE. And that's really what these distros are providing the value in. And it's a stupid, old way of distributing software. And these vendors that distribute the software charge millions of dollars for doing it in a way that we knew better in the 90s. And these vendors that distribute the software charge millions of

dollars for doing it in a way that we knew better in the 90s. And so instead of us pushing on the industry to change this practice that we should have changed 10 years ago, we just maintain the status quo. And guess what? That deal hasn't worked for Red Hat. And Red Hat has said it publicly. They have said, quote, we don't see the value from the clones. They've said that. And it makes a lot of sense. Why would they? They have a commercial product they're selling. And the outrage farming going around saying that Red Hat has abandoned open source and then stabbed the open source community in the back is absolutely ludicrous. Red Hat employs more people developing software in Linux than just about any company I could name. It's an incredible amount of software that gets created, and a good deal of it doesn't even really benefit the enterprise product.

It benefits idiots like us that love Pipewire. To say they're abandoning open source is so narrow-minded, it's absurd. And if you think about it from a different context, if you just, in my opinion, think about it, if Red Hat had always done it this way, if CentOS Stream from the very beginning was always upstream, it wouldn't be a big deal. This would be a natural way to ship a commercial distro. You would have the upstreams, open source GPL software, and then you would have the company making the commercial product. Yeah, I can't help but think that a lot of this is made a little more difficult to like analyze or think clearly about just because we have had that history. I think maybe to a lot of folks on the outside, maybe internalizing just how different the world with stream is, can be a little tricky. But you're right. If you were starting this up now,

that's probably the way you'd do it. Carl, you've got some thoughts on Red Hat, quote-unquote, abandoning open source? Yes, sir. Yeah, the abandoning thing, obviously, like y'all pointed out, it's crap. It's also not true-false, right? It's not a black-and-white thing. It's gray, right? We always talk about how, you know, why is there only one Red Hat? Why is only one company this wildly successful

productizing open source? We see all these other attempts at, you know, much more questionable approaches, right? Like being Apache licensed for a couple of years, getting popular, and then switching to like SSPL, server-side public license, where it's not open source because there's specific restrictions that preclude places like Amazon from using that source code. Uh, and not like a one-to-one thing. It's totally different. It's a different scenario, but just from using the source code at all. Uh, so you see other ways to go about that. And you know, I'm not necessarily, I don't disagree with that or I disagree with that approach, but I'm not necessarily trying to criticize that approach here. What I'm pointing out is that making money off of open

source software is hard. Tons of companies have started and gone out of business because of it. F***ing Red Hat almost went out of business because of it, right? Like back in the days in Red Hat Linux, whenever the model there was, we're going to build a distro, the internet's so slow that people will pay us to buy box sets of it. And also they can optionally pay us to call us for phone support. That model, which is the model that tons of people are screaming at us that, well, I just want the real bits. I don't need support. We've tried that model. It nearly bankrupted the damn company. That was the original model, right. There's an Ars Technica article I read recently that went into details about it that talked about how Red Hat bet the farm on moving the company's focus to RHEL.

They basically rebranded Red Hat Linux to Fedora Core, moved it out into the public space, made it better. Fedora has gone on to be in the long-term wildly successful after short-term blowback and arguments. Yeah, no, there's an article out there, I'll find it, and it's talking about how Red Hat killed their core product and went on to be successful. And it was about basically shutting down Red Hat Linux, which didn't really go away. It got rebranded to Fedora Core and opened up and became a real community rather than a throw-it-over-the-wall open source thing. Basically, my summary is that making money off open source is hard. Red Hat has always tried to walk that line. They almost went bankrupt doing it with Red Hat Linux, switched to the RHEL model, but because of the open source principles,

still publish the source RPMs, the source code in the throw-it-over-the-wall model that Red Hat Linux used to have and RHEL has always had. And that throw-it-over-the-wall model was what allowed things like CentOS to exist in the first place and later on, ALMA and Rocky and Oracle. And it's always going to be walking the line. There's going to be people that disagree with where Red Hat draws the line. There's a ton of people that think that Red Hat should just be completely happy making the bits, no matter what the engineering cost, and selling optional support if people feel like it. But we've proven that that model doesn't work. The reality is that as you look at Red Hat's attempt to kind of address the whole CentOS as a competitor, if you want to put it that way, they're trying to solve a problem in that if you really have a critical the training is consistent and the skill set's consistent, you want to keep it REL compatible.

Yeah, definitely. There's definitely places where they're not making money from it that they want that kind of stability. They want what REL offers. And to be fair, there are programs. Those programs need improvement and need to be more accessible. But there's programs for academia. There's programs for research institutions. There's programs for individuals to get free RHEL. The developer program. Another common thing I hear is that

people say, well, I only want to pay for Red Hat support for my production stuff, but I'll use a RHEL clone in dev and prod. Red Hat literally has a program for that. It gives you several thousand free rail instances in your non-prod stuff if you're paying for it in production. This isn't just like, oh, damn, Red Hat, they're terrible. It's people, and we're actively trying to make things that meet these criticisms, and it's not going to be perfect the first time around. It's going to be an ongoing improvement thing. And I mean, no promises, but I would not be surprised at all if some of the results of this is that the 16 free instances for individuals goes higher. Like that's an entirely plausible outcome from this. You know, our buddy Noah did

a great interview in the Ask Noah show, Ask Noah 343. He interviewed Mike McGrath, who's been really on the public front lines with these changes. And I thought it was a really informative interview. And one of the things that he makes clear in there is red hat's perspective on this is that rel is a product and centos stream is a project and so if you think about it and if you think that's their core alignment with the way this is the way they see this these changes fall in line with that it makes sense um and you know red hat indicated although mike wouldn't be specific that they saw some bad faith actors you know i i have to note and i and again specifically too um in in the interview the comment you know not necessarily bad faith in the

technical sense but bad faith in the in the money making side of things yeah in kind of some of the claims and some i i also and i have no information here about this but i noticed that about oh i don't know 10 days or so maybe it was less than that five days before all this blew up rocky and nasa announced that nasa had secured a contract with rocky enterprise linux i don't know if it was very many systems but probably an example of an outfit that could probably either through one of the programs or directly just buy rel you know this could be an example of maybe a customer base that was previously on traditional centos and rocky comes in and says hey you can move those over to

rocky and if you need to support you can get it and that's that's a contract that could have gone to red hat and it's not like rocky's turning around and submitting 20 to 30 percent of the fixes upstream. And so they're contributing so much value upstream that they're totally justified in this rebuild. And that same interview Mike kind of talks about, you know, if you want to build your own product based on stream, let's collaborate there. You know, we can do that if you're offering something that's unique. I think that's kind of where the question comes in. Is your value, look, Red Hat does all this great work to keep this super stable and you can get it this other way and we'll help you with it? Or is it we help turn this upstream project into a stable OS and you should trust us? clone makers were to provide and participate directly upstream, they could catch some of the same bugs. They could catch those bugs and they could submit them, you know, to have the Red Hat

developers fix them. And if they don't do that, they're going to eventually get those bugs anyways when they do ship in RHEL. So it may actually be better for them to participate sooner in the process and catch that stuff before it ships to anybody's customers. So there could be an opportunity to make the space better in that regard. I think people are angry because a great thing, a really nice thing got taken away. But I have a personal outlook on this. And that is that the economics of the tech industry have changed. I mean, we've all heard about the layoffs, have changed. I mean, we've all heard about the layoffs, the rate hike increases, VC funding drying up. It creates a different environment. It creates an environment where they have to find value, they have to make money, and some of the things they could do for free when money was cheap and easy, they can't necessarily continue to do.

And I think if you can draw a line through something we're seeing right now, with the API changes at Reddit, with the Twitter changes right now with the throttling and even with this change in the rel source code distribution the through line you can draw there is the economics of running the tech industry have changed and some of the really nice goodies that we've been getting for the last 13 years because the cost of money has been below the inflation rate, are probably going away because these tech companies basically could have unlimited money to do this stuff. They could hire people like crazy. And now they're laying off or they're freezing, right?

They're having to focus on things that make money. And that has a ripple effect, in my opinion. And these are some of the ripple effects you see as a result. Carl, you've got some comments here. We've definitely been talking a bit loosely about the actual organizations building these rebuilds and then the organizations selling support for them.

So maybe you should be a little more clear about that. Yeah, of course. What I'd like people to think about is that this is, again, another area that is just soaking in nuance and is hard to just make an absolute statement about.

But as far as objective facts, both Rocky and Alma were started by CEOs of companies, CIQ and CloudLinux respectively, that had business plans based on a RHEL rebuild existing. And those business plans essentially boiled down to doing something with that RHEL rebuild and not having to pay for the vast majority of the engineering effort to create the operating system, but doing something adjacent to or on top of that operating system and being profitable because they're not having to foot the bill for most of the engineering work. If it was just about the code, they could take that code from Fedora, from Upstream Projects, from CentOS Stream. They could do those things.

But it's not about the code. What it is is that their business propositions hinge on RHEL compatibility. Red Hat has spent literal decades building a hardware and software ecosystem and certifications around the exact bits and the exact combination and the exact lifecycle of RHEL. And these businesses are fundamentally designed to take advantage of that. Those businesses went on to do various things. They like to talk about how they're separate entities, and that's somewhat true or false or whatever. It's another gray area, right? What I can say is specifically that the AlmaLinux founder, the CEO of CloudLens, Igor, I forget his last name, he said he was going to make a nonprofit, and then he actually made a nonprofit, a 501c6. Total props for him to doing that. They gave over

all the trademarks, but the core engineers building AlmaLinux, as far as I'm aware, are still 100% Cloud Linux employees that work for Igor. It is completely sustained by that and because of their business interests. And somewhat similar, but different thing on the Rocky side. Originally, Greg, the founder of Rocky, said that he was going to make a nonprofit. He reneged on that promise and made a B Corp instead that he completely owns. It's even in their FAQ that they talk about how their B Corp bylaws of their quote-unquote foundation are binding. But in their FAQ, they point out that Greg actually isn't legally bound by those bylaws in any way, shape, or form. He can delete those bylaws and delete the board and do whatever he wants to.

And the vast majority of the employees working on Rocky Linux are CIQ employees that work for Greg. So he can make any decision, dictate it to his employees to do, and depending on how he wants to characterize it, he can say that this was a CIQ move or this was a a Rocky Linux, Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation move. And Chris has seen that before with the stuff on Twitter, with the advertising where you pointed out their open SUSE ads and other stuff like that. Yeah, I I'm a little disappointed to see the tacky strikes from SUSE on this. I'd like to dig into how their licensing works, too, and the way they release their source RPMs. Well, I want to I want to steel man Greg's argument just for a moment.

So I think what Greg would, or I don't want to, maybe just generally, I think the makers of the enterprise Linux clones, let's say, not to make it about any one person, but I think their argument could be, well, isn't that what Red Hat's doing with open source? They're taking the Linux kernel, they're taking the GNU user land, they're taking all these things that these other giants have built and they're selling their commercial product on top of that.

And what the clone makers are doing is essentially just the next stage of that. The shoulders they're standing on is Red Hat, but of course Red Hat's standing on all the other individual contributors

that make up the platform they're shipping. And so their argument is we're justified in doing this because we're really just doing what Red Hat does, we're just doing it at because we're really just doing what Red Hat does. We're just doing it at a different scale. Yeah, they're wrong, though.

Yeah, I'd like to hear your response to that because I've seen that argued quite a bit. Again, personal opinion. So it requires a specific understanding of what I mentioned before about skirting the line between making money off of open source, right? about skirting the line between making money off of open source, right? What lives in the open source, spirit of open source, open code space, the project space, if you will, and what lives in the product space? Red Hat Linux was, it was a product, and it was a throw-it-over-the-wall open source. Like a lot of the criticisms, we always lodge at Android. Google builds it, and then they throw some of the source code over the wall,

and then they say it's open source, right? It's not really a collaborative thing. That's what Red Hat Linux was in its early days. It was built internally at Red Hat, private, thrown over the wall to say, yep, we're honoring all the open source licenses. This is the easiest way to prove that we're honoring all the open source licenses. No, you can't really collaborate with it and help us build it, but it's open source. You can see the source code and you can file bugs.

Yay. So they started with that with Red Hat Linux. Same thing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, same model, throw the source code, the source RPMs over the wall and build whatever you want to with it. But that conflated and kind of smudged the lines

between the project space and the product space. The Red Hat Linux to Fedora core transition, that was a course correction on that of moving something that was in the product space fully into the project space so that it can be a real community project and that real community members can contribute to it and do things with it. I saw something recently from Matthew Miller, the Fedora project leader, where he did some measurements around contributions to Fedora and like over a specific set of Fedora releases just to limit the data set. And something

like only, I think it was like 40% of the contributions were from Red Hat employees. And the rest were real genuine community contributions that had nothing to do with Red Hat and didn't even go into RHEL. So that was a course correction there. CentOS Stream is a bit of a course correction as well, where CentOS previously was built on the same model of where we're going to take the open source result of the product space and build something for the community space again and try and take it back to the community space. And it wasn't collaborative. There was no way to fix bugs or do pull requests. It was all, the entire premise of a bug for bug clone

is unique to stealing Red Hat's business value. Like it's not about the code itself because if it was, people could build other things off CentOS Stream. It's all about leveraging that ecosystem that Red Hat has built, those certifications, because we saw for years where people said, well, RHEL is certified for this FIPS compliance or whatever else. So we're going to run the equivalent CentOS version and check the box for FIPS compliance.

It's not about the code. It's about the compliance and everything around the code. clients the other argument i've seen online is that well what they're doing now with red hat is essentially if it's not a direct violation of the gpl it's an it's in violation of the spirit so therefore what we're going to do is we're going to keep open source open uh but this is kind of a silly argument um in fact uh i think bradley coon of the software conservancy has reviewed this multiple times and uh like 11 years worth of multiple times. And, you know, to his frustration, what he sees Red Hat doing is legal. And he just recently wrote about that again.

He's very critical of the model, but it seems to hold up. You are agreeing to that EULA and the source code is made available to customers still. And we'll put a link to that in the notes. We're kind of playing right in the space of what's allowed, what's legal, and what you actually do. And I think, you know, as the clone makers kept playing in what they were allowed to do, now Redhead is also kind of playing in that space and deciding, well, we don't actually have to make it easier for you. Yeah, his previous posts were much less critical, but also came to the same ultimate conclusion that this is all GPL compliant. Right. It is. And I think we're going to have to wait and see how the end result sort of shakes out for the clone makers.

I think, you know, Rocky has their path they're going to try. We'll see what Alma does there. Yeah, Tosk in our Matrix chat kind of wonders, Red Hat gives back, at least in the forums, things like SELinux, you know, SystemD, Pipewire you were talking about. What do we see given back improved in the general open source community from the cloud makers? And I can't speak to that directly, but perhaps that's something we'll see more of in this new era. Yeah, I mean, I feel like there has been some things, so I don't want to completely count them out. But I want to address one other common thing that I saw. And Mike addressed this in his interview directly with Noah.

Mike addressed this in his interview directly with Noah, and I thought it was worth repeating here, is that according to Mike McGrath, Red Hat staff has not had a single IBM staffer discuss this issue with them, not before and not after. So this, I believe, just like the initial CentOS changes to stream, this is an internal change and anybody who's worked in a large company with a sales department that has their uh the numbers you know that they have to hit these these discussions happen and i think where their blame where the blame does lie is once again i could think of a hundred ways to do this better the messaging sort of blew again they blew it and redhead's kind of just this is this is kind of what you get in fact i have been led to believe by some other conversations and Mike's interview on the Ask NOAA program that Red Hat didn't even really consider making a public post about this. They drafted up

the blog post, then posted it after people noticed from the Alma project. They weren't really expecting this reaction. Yeah, I knew about this about a week ahead of time. Not that they asked me if they should do it. They just told me, by the way, heads up, you're out in these community spaces. You should know this is coming. And the original thing they told me was, we're not going to announce this. We're just going to turn this, by the way, this old janky automation that is costing us engineer time and money to keep running that we need to fix or turn off. They told me that they were going to turn that off and there wasn't going to be

any message. So I woke up on June 21st to that initial blog post, very surprised. I bet. Geez. Yeah. And that's a bit of interesting insight too. I hadn't really thought about the fact that it's about a lot of infrastructure to do this and it has to become a project to maintain it. And at that point, that value discussion comes up. I can see Dayjob West being like, this is really annoying. We have limited people. We have a lot of infrastructure to do this and it has to become a project to maintain it and at that point that value discussion comes up i can see day job west being like this is really annoying i you know we have we have limited people we have a lot of stuff to work on can we just ask this yeah tons of people like think that like this was purely just a you know a shot across the bow trying to come after the clones and like it's not not that but also there's the factor of you know i mean if people actually read mike's mike mcgrath's post with an open mind, they'll see where he talks about Red Hat is putting time and money into the things that we're not getting value out of.

The source code export, the debranding, we were doing that and we needed it for CentOS. CentOS Classic. I hate calling it CentOS Linux because that implies that stream isn't Linux and it isn't. God, I hate the name. That's a whole other mess. But we're putting in that work for Classic CentOS. We're still doing it for 7 because there's no stream and that's just going to keep going until it's end of life. And we're putting in that, but none of our customers are using that directly. None of our partners are using that directly. None of the people actually collaborating with us are using that code directly. So it's not justified.

It's not a net positive value for us to keep working on that. And we were delivering the code in three places, right? The customer portal, CentOS Stream, and in this exact one-for-one export location. So we just said, you know, we don't need to do it in three places. We're only going to do it in two places. We have so many links in the show notes. And if you missed any of the nuance, we covered just the facts, ma'am,

in Linux Action News this week. So you could head on over there and check out the most recent Linux Action News, which was 298, and get kind of the snapshot of the facts on the ground. But we'll have a ton of reference links in the show notes to it. Linux unplugged dot com slash 517. Carl, I appreciate your insights on this, too, as somebody who's boots on the ground with this.

Of course. I think our job now going forward is to kind of watch how the response continues, how the clone makers adapt. What paths work, what paths don't. Do you approach this change? Do we see different involvement? Does Red Hat make a compromise or two on those programs? I mean, there are a lot of low-cost programs already. You make a couple of more changes to that

and you almost get it all. And then you basically have a sales funnel too. So I could see them making that compromise. I'll be curious to see. The last time Red Hat made such a big change with CentOS Stream, we got a few new businesses pop up and a few new kind of opportunities. I'm curious to see what will happen from this.

Collide.com slash LAN. Yeah, that's right. Collide is joining the Unplugged program and we're thrilled to have them here because I think they have some solutions for many of our listeners out there. They're coming over from the Linux Action News program. They've been there for a little bit, and I'd like to introduce you

to Collide. Go say hi by going to collide.com slash LAN. I imagine we'll have a new URL soon, but you can jump on board right there. And if you're an Okta user, Collide's got something to get your entire fleet 100% compliant. I mean it. How? Well, it's simple. If a device isn't compliant, the user can't log into your cloud apps until they fix the problem. You see, Collide patches one of those major holes in the whole zero trust architecture, device compliance. So without Collide, I've been there. Many of you have been there. IT struggles to solve basic problems like keeping everyone's OS and browsers up to date. That's where your focus goes. Unsecured devices are logging into your company's applications because, well, there's nothing to stop them. Collide's the only device trust solution that

enforces compliance as part of authentication, and it's built seamlessly to work with Okta. The moment Collide's agent detects a problem, it alerts the user and gives them instructions on how to fix it. If they don't fix the problem within a set time, well, then they get blocked. Collide's method means fewer support tickets, less frustration, and well, most importantly, 100% fleet compliance. You can reduce IT burden and make it simple and straightforward for your users. It's a fantastic experience. Go to collide.com slash LAN to learn more or you could book a demo. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash LAN. And a big thank you and a big welcome to Collide to the Unplugged program. We've been getting great feedback from folks since we've been gone.

Thank you for that. If you want to leave us some feedback, linuxunplugged.com slash contact for that. Luke from Anacortes got in touch with me and gave me some great feedback about our episode Linux Unplugged 515 ham sandwich. That's where we had our buddy Noah on talking about ham radio. Luke says, hey, I got my SDR tuner working and just caught my very first ham broadcast at 146.94 megahertz. But there's a bunch of Canadians doing Canada Day trivia. So, Brent, happy Canada Day. Aww. It sounds like Luke also just passed his technician's exam,

and he's waiting for the FCC email so he can finish paying up and get his call sign. Oh, congratulations, Luke. Let us know what it is when you get it. Anybody else out there, too, keep us posted. Brian S. sent us a server while we were gone. Okay, what? Luke let us know what it is when you get it anybody else out there too keep us posted a Brian S sent us a server while we were gone okay how great is this the day I got back a uh an HP you know a desktop tower server oh that's convenient it is nice because it has the Lilo management stuff in there so I could like do the install from my from my desk and it arrived just in time

for self-hosted 100 so I was able to use it for a project already and of course i put debian on there because i'm putting proxmox on there so i put debian 12 on there first and then installed proxmox and uh it's a slick little box i think we popped some more ram in there and he sent some more drives and stuff he also included a couple of video cards and the uh he and like an nvidia like a 10 series and then an amd uh 7 series i think that i looked up and has compatibility for proxmox gpu pass-through excellent so that's gonna work out great so thank you brian we really kind of spoiled sometimes we get people to send us some great gear if you ever do want to send us some gear too i just want to mention uh you can contact me on matrix or email or something but include a note in there with your name because sometimes stuff shows up at

the same time. I know horrible problem to have, and we just want to make sure we give credit to the right people. We've got a great piece of feedback for Linux unplugged 5.16 as well from some guy says, Hey folks, long time lurker, first time contactor. There's so much in one episode in 516. That's the episode, if you boys remember, where we each brought our own topic. He says, I can't agree with Brent. Dark Knight Diaries is a great podcast. I've caught up to their newest episode and re-listened to an oldie about once a week. Highly recommended. Also, sorry for the bad news, but our government, the US I think here, has been spying on us for decades. Enemy of the State is the first movie I saw as a kid that showed this concept that Snowden later confirmed. The Patriot Act I was the first widespread we're the government, we need to keep track of you bill that passed in the US. that passed in the U.S., most Americans, in my opinion, use the saying, I have nothing to hide.

While that is true, I can agree with Chris generally here that it doesn't matter because privacy is generally a human right. When my friends or co-workers call me the crazy guy because I'm a stickler on privacy, I ask them for their email name, username, and password, and to let me have access so I can read all their emails. And they generally say, oh, no, no, no, I can't do that. But yet you're okay with Google doing it? Yeah, let me just go through all your photos real quick. Yeah, what about when you go to the bathroom and you close the door, right? There's some Taco Bell embarrassment there, surely. And what about people who have, you know, adult relations? You don't want that

just out in the open. So you do have private stuff going on. They never like that argument, though, because it makes them think and people generally don't want to think about the hard things. Also, Chris, great choice on Mike's book. I've just gotten an updated version of Extreme Privacy and OSINT techniques. Both are truly horrifying, but worth the info. and OSINT techniques. Both are truly horrifying, but worth the info. Even if you're a techie or a normie, it's a great refresher and eye-opener. He also has

PDF versions and mobile device versions. You remember the name of the book, Brent? I know we mentioned it, but I've already forgotten it. Extreme Privacy, I believe. And there's also How to Disappear. Oh, yeah, right. There's a bunch of good ones in this space. There's legislation brewing, not quite as awful in the States, but across the pond, there's also some laws brewing that are really going to break encryption. And I do feel like that's going to be a hard line for me is sort of that's where I'm going to draw the line. And I wonder if there could be a point in the future where people who are advocates for privacy

aren't considered extreme. I mean, I hate to say that, but those views do shift over time. And if a particular, God forbid, awful event were to happen and the terrorists that orchestrated the event were, say, using some encrypted chat, I think laws would change pretty quick. And that's all it really takes

is some sort of moment like that. And so even more props then for being the weirdo privacy advocate in your group, keeping the discussion going, keeping these normalized as much as you can now. Right. So that way it doesn't look so weird later on is my thinking. And I do think human human rights, privacy is a human right. So thank you, everybody who wrote in at Linux unplugged dot com slash contact. I jumped in

there a couple of times during the vacay and just saw some really nice emails and I saw some good recommendations for cheap Vigicards and I went and looked them up on eBay and I think I'm going to pull the trigger soon. So appreciate that. And now it is time for the boost. And some boosts we did. In fact, we got 200 200 000 stats i should say from eric d he was using castomatic and i think this episode really touched him he sent us a really long boost i'm going to read parts of it but we've we've all read it uh already as well he just he wanted to thank us and noah for the episode on ham he has a family friend who's a ham and it's it really touched him too because uh as he's moved around he was able to stay in touch

with family and friends um and some of those people have passed away as time has gone on and uh he hadn't really given it much thought until this episode and he said noah's explanation of fundamentals of amateur radio and his passion for the hobby brought back so many of those memories it got him thinking about it again he wanted to do some reading see what was involved to get his license and the more research he does he says he's starting to make more sense to him he's made up his mind he's going to take the course later this year and get his license that's pretty great says thanks you guys for helping me relive some great childhood memories and remembering an old friend wow thank. Thank you very much. You see, he's also going to email in some more deets too.

So really appreciate that. And that, you know, you just never know when you're making these, right? You never know which episode is going to resonate with folks. Honestly, I thought the ham radio stuff was pretty risky to do,

but I'm glad that for the people that enjoyed it, it worked. Sir, Alex Gates, the podcasting two to no consulting comes in in with 101,045 sats. I hoard that which all kind covet. Wow, across a whopping 10 boosts now, Wes. Okay.

Boost mania. Yeah, take some of these, Wes. Alex also is brilliant, so I appreciate it when he does write it. In fact, to that point, Wes messaged Brent and I last night. It was you, right? No, it was Brent. Brent messaged us. Look at these boosts coming in from Alex. We're going to have something great to read. We know as soon as we see some boosts from Alex there's something we want to know. Yeah, Alex's boost in the end, we touched a little bit about XMPP and Matrix. After much reflection, I've come to realize my primary issue with Matrix, aside from the protocol versus API and

privacy versus security issues. Matrix has, for all practical purposes, been designed as a synchronous social media platform, alike to Slack and Discord, with similar cathedral-style development and funding practices, the opposite of most open-source software. It is great at this. But here's the rub. I'm not interested in synchronous social media platforms and group chats. I don't care for the issues of groupthink and conformity, even amongst otherwise well-educated people. People just act differently in groups,

and text communication exacerbates those issues, especially defensiveness and a lack of open-mindedness. I dislike Discord and Telegram for similar reasons. Um, that kind of actually resonates with me so far, Alex. All right, you got me. Mastodon and ActivityPub work for me because it's more like an inbox, just like email. It's more asynchronous and easier to ignore people I don't care to communicate with. More like maybe to a public square and less like a pile of speakers attempting to take turns at a podium.

I use XMPP as a signal replacement that I control and doesn't need a part-time job to maintain. I appreciate one-to-one communication much more than group chats, even with family. XMPP also happens to have the properties best suited for large-scale live stream events with thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. For those reasons, comparing XMPP to Matrix

would be disingenuous as I don't see them accounting for current UI UX implementation as really playing the same role. If an XMPP client with a Discord-like experience came along, I would likely dislike that too. That's a pretty compelling argument. I was starting to write off XMPP as just the, I kind of thought Google came in and Brace brace extended and then broke it for the world but alex you're winning me over with

this for one-on-one chat i have really enjoyed simplex or simplex whatever you want to call it i think that's kind of my go-to for small little private chats but you know imagine if we'd had a jb xmpp server for the last five years and that we use that over Telegram for some of our Telegram chat and stuff. That might have been a better direction to go. Yeah, I wonder if Alex has any recommendations for an XMPP server or other software to use with it because maybe we could. Yeah, I'm going to follow it closely because I think they're going to integrate this more and more into the podcasting 2.0 stuff for some cross-app comments and whatnot too.

So we'll follow that. Thank you, Alex. Keep us posted. Wise Papa John boosted in a whopping 57,777 sets over two boosts. Hey, I'm still catching up and I'm a little late to the party, but happy 500.

Hey, thank you. It's, it's been a blast listening along with you guys. Keep up the great work. I really enjoyed the extended intros and outros to Linux Unplugged and Coder 500, by the way. So that was a nice surprise. Oh, that's great to hear. Yeah, I just enjoy those songs so much.

So it was a good excuse to just run them along. Appreciate the value you boosted in. And using podverse anonymous also used a podverse using sending 55 987 sats and you know what i'm gonna give it to him i hoard that which will find covet uh they write low power in the case of the zigoo x6100 means both actually puts out 5 watts on the internal battery and 10 with an external. Ah, it's designed to be portable. A full desktop form factor HF radio typically puts out about 100 watts, but it's much larger and will require a much larger power supply or battery

if you want to use it as portable. He also OS, it's a boost for a zip code, so I'll have to decode that for a second. Winona County, Minnesota, perhaps. Let us know. Maybe. Thank you for that explanation. That was an answer to me looking for portable radios

that I could use while driving. Because that's still one of them. I would love to have something, and I don't think ham radio is right for that. And I don't like handheld just standard family band radio because you get a hill between you and it goes out and most of the radios are crap now like i got these you know they're under 100 bucks but i got these motorola handset ones and there's like a computational delay when you hit the button like the system

has to think about it for a second so you you hit the button and you go one, one thousand, two and thousand. Then you can talk. Oh, it's the worst. Let's talk about unnatural. Why is Papa John Boosin again two days later, this time over at the podcast index with thirty eight thousand six hundred and seventy two cents. B.O.O.S.T. Hey gang, catching up slowly but surely. But I've got a question for you.

I currently have one phone owned by my employer with two SIMs inside, one work, one personal. Pretty soon I'll be getting another phone for personal use, likely running graphene, or giraffe-ine, excuse me, and I'm wondering if anybody out there has transferred in a similar manner. I'd like to export only the messages from SIM 1, but I'm not sure the best way to go about that. Thanks for the show. I'm loving the nonstop JB I have with all this backlog. P.S. This is a zip code boost. Love the zip code boost. Thank you, Ice Baba John. So, you know, I was just thinking about this a couple of days ago. I used to move phones by saving my contacts to my SIM card, and then I would take the SIM card out and I'd put it in my next, like, Nokia or whatever it was, and I would import my contacts from my SIM card, and then I would take the SIM card out, and I'd put it in my next, like, Nokia or whatever it was, and I would import my contacts from my SIM card.

Insane. This, this wise Papa John, this is not the way. I mean, I'm sure you could do it, but it is not the way. What you really want to do is decide your most comfortable way to just export those contacts and import them. Myself, because I already got to the next next cloud i would just sync them out to next cloud set up the next phone sign back in the next cloud and sync them back down sounds like some of the problem too is like the messages i guess i suppose associated with the various sims do they even save those to the sim card anymore with modern

android i don't think so right like they used to yeah i think it's all on phone it's not on sim anymore because the sims are just too small and can't handle all that information i know there are several apps that allow you to like extract those from the internal i don't know database or whatever they're stored in and uh that can make it handy but i don't think you can make it seamless so that it kind of just is back in your messaging app on your new phone but maybe maybe there are solutions, so if anyone has a better idea than we do, please send it in. Or boost it in. Better. Wise Papa John was boosting in from DeSoto County, Mississippi.

Aha, Mississippi! Now we got two boosts from Magnolia Mayhem for 30,000 sats total. Coming in hot with the boost! I've never boosted in with the show's audience itself as the intended target, but I also consider this a special occasion. Late last year, after the tuxes wrapped up, there was some talk in Matrix over how the categorization and nominations for the awards was to be done this year. Someone suggested using user testimonials to inform the next awards show, but someone else brought up the question of how to parse all that information. My contribution was the suggestion that we use a word cloud generator to pick out keywords from those testimonials, immediately followed by diving in headfirst on creating those tools. Originally, the project consisted of a web framework that glued together

several other more mature open source projects, but as scope creep inevitably came and my own tendency towards reinventing the wheel rose to the surface, the project's development became more and more complex, slowly incorporating a lot of components that go way beyond a simple word cloud and into things like natural language processing. Although the full project isn't complete, the front end and database are to the point

that I think I can start talking real-world data. With Chris's permission, I'm now coming to the community here. If you are interested in contributing to this first wave of real-world data, the current reference implementation is live at catercloud.me. And if you want to get in touch, I have the Tuxies Matrix Room in my favorites. Unfortunately, I'll be on my first day as a mail carrier when it goes live. So you may have to wait to get a response. But by all means, contact me if you have any questions. This is a great project, right? We're really trying to source more information to make the Tuxies even better and more representative. And I love that Magnolia Mayhem's a mail carrier.

I had no idea. I just, thank you. And his project at catercloud.me, it's not live as far as for me, it's not loading yet, but I imagine maybe it will be in a day or so after the show gets posted. Yeah, stay tuned. We'll have it in the links.

And then I think the other thing that I would underscore there is that Tuxy's matrix room. If you are interested in helping make the Tuxy's even better this year, we're not actively planning anything right now, but that will be where we start to organize it. That's where Mayhem is organizing this right now, is that Tuxes Matrix Room.

Leaky Canoe comes in with 25,000 sats. This was a just-under-the-wire boost that Wes's Automation picked up. 25,000 sats using the podcast index, and they wrote, I'm always excited to see a notification when a fresh jb episode drops keep up the excellent work well leaky canoe we're always excited when we see a notification about your boost so thank you for the boost skiing monkey boots in with 20 000 sats across two boosts switched i3 to sway after hearing y'all talk about trying projects you haven't used in a while and Wayland rocks. Oh, we need a clip of that, Drew. I have to say really briefly, I wanted to mention on the show

at some point, this just seems like the right point. All my systems, with the exception of this Reaper computer right here, are running Wayland. All my desktops, my laptops, this machine, the OBS machine, everything's Wayland now. I think that means it's the year of the Linux desktop. In the second, Boost here's Gingham Monkey notes that they're finally back on Pixel hardware and went straight onto Giraffean. Feels great to make my phone more free and get control over it. Hey-o. Yeah, still really enjoying the Giraffean.

I want to do a couple of shout-outs. We get some boosts into the show that, you know, are just great messages that we want to read. So I'm just going to go through a couple of these, you guys, just as a thank you to everybody who boosted in. Captain Egghead came in with a row of ducks. Go value for value and in open source as well. And I still strongly believe what we're doing here, it's not, we're not there yet, but what we're doing here,

I think could absolutely apply to your absolute favorite open source free software project as well. And it fundamentally changes the economics of media production. And I believe it would fundamentally for the better change the economics of free software production.

So I agree. I hope we find it right there sometime. Thank you everybody else who boosted in. We got several more boosts that maybe we'll read in the post show. Maybe we'll do that to try it too. And of course, everybody's boost will be in the show notes as well. Oh, Moon Knight came in with a NextCloud sharing calendar experience. I want to touch on that for 10,000 sats.

When moving from iOS to Draftian, I switched from using a shared iCloud calendar to NextCloud, and it's been perfect. My girlfriend uses the iPhone, and everything just works the way it did before. As an added bonus, I now sync my calendar on my Linux desktop as well. Right. Yes. There's truly no reason to use a spyware version of these things if you have a NextCloud instance.

NextCloud syncing combined with GS Connect or the KDE version, whatever that's called. But just really that time with your phone, it is so powerful. I really, really love it. So thank you, everybody. We'll read some more in the post show for everybody that boosted in. If you would like to boost into the show and support us directly that way at a value that you think is appropriate,

I think right now you have two paths ahead of you. You can get Albie at getalbie.com and top it off and then head on over to the podcast index, podcastindex.org. Look up the old unplugged program and boost right there. If you have Albie ready to go, the boosting functionality is just automatically embedded into the podcast index website. If you're ready to try the wild new world of podcasting and 2.0 apps, and there's some great ones. I saw Castomatic, Podverse, and Fountain all getting a lot of representation. Those are some great ones. Newpodcastapps.com, Podverse, and Fountain all getting a lot of representation. Those are some great ones.

New podcast apps.com. Podverse just shipped a fantastic stability upgrade to Android. Absolutely just nailing it these days. So if you like a cross-platform GPL podcast player, check out Podverse. The nice thing about those is you can boost directly from within the app, but there's other features down the road. Transcripts, live streams, all of that's going to get integrated into the app. It's going to be so, so fantastic. So thank you, everybody, who boosts in.

And, of course, thank you to our members at our core contributors that just donate monthly and get an ad-free version or get the bootleg version of the show. Much appreciation to all of you. I got a surprise pick for you. A sneaky last-minute surprise pick, not even in our doc. Not even in the doc. So, you know, I know you guys just use

Disk Destroyer to write your, I mean, DD, to write your thumb drives. Hey, hey, what about DD Rescue? Come on. Yeah, you're right. This is pretty good, actually.

I don't mean to tease, but if you're on NixOS, I saw that coming. Etcher is not a great option. Etcher is not a great option on Dix. And honestly, do you need all that shenanigans? Do you need all that shenanigans just for writing a USB thumbstick? I say nay.

I say check out Popsicle by our friends over at System76, and it's up on Flathub. This guy is just the simplest little image writer. It's all you need, man. You fire it up. You choose your image. it's got a nice little GUI to pick the right thumbsticks, you don't overwrite the wrong thing, and then it gives you the information about

the speed and the write information, all the things you like to have. Oh, it looks like it supports multiple drives at once, too. Fancy. Yes, so you can also, if that's your bag, you can also write to multiple disks. It'll support ISOs and image files.

You can just like bring them right in from the file manager. I think they've just made a nice little handy tool in the fact that you can use it as a flat pack. Absolutely great. So it's Popsicle. And I suppose Pop OS users are like, yeah, what are you talking about, man? It's already built in. I've been trying to figure out the Nix like, yeah, what are you talking about, man? It's already built in. I've been trying to figure out the Nix connection, Chris, here, but I think it's just because you're just hooked on Nix.

Yeah, and it's in Nix's package repository. Oh, there it is. All right, great. Yeah, it's marked as unstable or bad or whatever. I don't know. Just a quick note here. Do you have your SAN board at the ready? Yeah, sure. What do you need? Well, it turns out that Popsicle is at least partially written in rust. Oh, I thought so. I suspected that might be the case. Yeah. You know what? It fires right up.

That's the other thing. It ain't electron, you know, and that's nice. That's nice. I mean, it's no DD, but it's pretty nice. You know, we talked a lot about a really complex issue. I mean, it's no DD, but it's pretty nice. You know, we talked a lot about a really complex issue. I mean, obviously, we said it has a lot of nuance. And if you think we missed the mark or if you have a different interpretation, we'd love to hear from you. Obviously, the boost would be the best way, but you can also hit up an old traditional email. Still works, linuxunplugged.com slash contact and share your perspective on these changes. Because I am open to a convincing argument here and i would like to hear somebody articulate it so if you think you might

have it or if you have other thoughts let us know we appreciate your feedback i already mentioned linux action news so i think instead what i'll say is linux fest northwest put it on your calendar it's going to be in october details at linuxfestnorthwest.org it's happening yep and now we're back to our regular live times as well so if you want something on your sundays we'll be streaming over at jblive.tv at 12 p.m pacific 3 p.m eastern see you next week same bad time same bad station and i guess technically it's archived over at jupiter.tube but if you're a member you get it all packaged up delivered in a feed with some audio effects applied, and Wes sometimes even throws in a chapter marker or two

in there for you. Sure do. What a gentleman. What a gentleman. Alright, guys, well, we did it. It's nice. Back in the flow now. Now we just have to figure out what we're doing next week. Yeah, that does feel good, though. It also feels good because we're at this end, and we're going to go make some tacos. Alright, everybody, thanks so much for joining us on this week's

episode of the Unplugged program, And we'll see you right back here next Sunday. So Thank you. not everyday users like us in the end we'll see who is right personally what will happen primarily is red hat will continue to make money and be a presence in large enterprise similar to microsoft in the smb space and self-hosters in general linux users will move to something like open suce or nixos also on the ones one more smaller boost keep up the good work and the reporting you guys do thanks take care in 73s. I want to touch on one point here because this is something we didn't talk about in the show.

Do you think this will leave a bad taste in a lot of users' mouth and we might see people transition to Debian, SUSE, NixOS? Because we didn't see that migration happen when the stream announcement landed, right? What we saw was people just moved to another status quo

and maintained status quo. I wonder if that'll depend on the next sort of set of releases from the clones like do they ship on time do things keep working uh or is there a little more instability introduced yeah i i think it's going to be that's like i could talk about the spirit aspect of it but i think that's so personal that's a hard one i think we could almost do a whole segment just on is it the spirit of open source but i have seen a lot of people say, well, I'm moving. I felt like we saw that last time. Yeah.

It does mean we think too, you know, for all you may not like the business model. And I think, you know, we have our own complicated thoughts around that. But, you know, over on the Coder Radio show, you talk a lot about just how hard it is to find any sort of, you know, workable, semi-workable open source business model. So, again, it's a great, it's a complicated area. And if we want some of the benefits, we might have to have, you know, not always the best taste in our mouth too.