LINUX Unplugged - Episode 107: Freedom Isn't Free | LUP 107

Episode Date: August 26, 2015

We celebrate the 24th birthday of Linux by looking back to it’s early days, discuss the new SSD optimized Linux file system, the rather normal things Linux is doing on Mainframes & how the community at large reacts to crowdfunding.Plus some great follow up, some great discussion & much more!

You know, I mean, Rodney, where do they tell you not to use it? Because this is KDE.org's announcement, and maybe they do say somewhere in here. I haven't read the entire thing. It says KDE ships Plasma 5.4.0. And so it might say don't use it yet. I don't know. But, I mean, in here it's not really looking – it looks like it's trying to market itself to new users. It does talk about having Wayland technology previews, but that's – okay, that's a given.

They said – until they say it's ready to use to be prepared for production, talk about having Wayland technology previews, but that's, okay, that's a given. They said that until they say it's ready to use to be put into production, they're inherently not saying that it is. They don't have to, every time they make a release, this is not ready. Like, for example, I mean, GNOME was garbage until 3.6. I would

argue 3.12, but okay. Maybe 3.10. Well, I mean garbage like fundamentally not workable not usable like three six it became where you could actually use a day yeah i mean but okay do you see reasonable but do you see what i'm saying how uh what you're what you're saying essentially calls for uh a tribal knowledge of uh of how this works like yeah they're not clear about their their kde is not being clear about what is what is usable and what is not that's true but that's pretty much all de's and you could like you could

say well kde also has a lot of other problems than the fact that their their website looks like it was made 10 years ago by the same time they have other websites that are like sub projects that look nice like plasma mobile looks nice but, but their main one looks like crap. So, like, they have a lot of things that they need to work on, but they're not – until they say that it actually is ready to go for, like, just production releases, then that's why 4 is still the stable, and that's why they still suggest it. It's just not – like, for example, I would love to have 5.whatever. I mean, that is...

So, okay. So, let's take everything you've just said, and I will grant you all of it is 100% true. And so now, if you grant me that most new people, or let's not even say new people, I would say casual Linux users and new Linux users, people who don't closely follow Linux news and things like that. I don't think it's unreasonable for them to think that something called KDE Plasma 5.4 with a very nice release announcement and press coverage around it, I don't think it's unreasonable for them to think that's production ready.

5.4, version 5.4 of something? I agree. Well, yeah, it's not properly uh announced sure but there's like for example kd uh kubuntu released uh 1504 with 5.2 which was completely unstable and a garbage decision and i know why they did it because they were trying to get like some testing in and they're yeah so they can gradually go to 5.3 and then gradually go to 5.4 and get more users yeah i get why they did it but it was still a garbage decision because people who moved it was like, oh, Kubuntu's got this new KDE and it's crap.

And so people, when someone suggests, I want to use KDE on Ubuntu, the current solution is either 14.04 or don't touch Kubuntu. So is anyone in here using Plasma 5 desktop? I'm using it right now. I have two drives in my 17 inch laptop um i have the wiley uh wolf alpha 2 okay and that's you and that's using plasma 5.3.95 pretty current which yeah it's like i just i just saw that 5.4 got announced today. I'm like, well, I might swap the hard drives and just see if there's a back port for Kaboom to 1504, which I'm running on the other drive. But even Plasma 5.3.2, I've had less crash issues on 5.3.95 than on 3.2.

3.2 still crashes on Plasma 5 on whatever. I haven't had any issue with the audio app, and I'm wondering if their new audio app is causing the problem for you, Chris. You know what? I would not be surprised if my audio app didn't install, simply because I'm in the middle. I installed last night, and maybe that's one of the few packages that has transitioned to Plasma 5.4, and because I'm not installing the rest of the packages, I didn't get it.

So, WW, as a fairly consistent Plasma 5 desktop user, is my characterization of its stability consistent with your use cases with the versions previous to version 5.4 and its RCs? Yeah. Even Rotten's correct on 5.2 because I was on 14.04 then it went to 14.10 and I was pretty happy with the Plasma 4 and it was working great. I didn't really have an issue. And then Cosmo 5 came out, and I'm like, that looks really good. I want to try that. And it was just

shut down script issues, and it was just, I could totally tell a difference between SystemD and the SystemInit that they had previously, even between 15.10 and, oh no, like 1510 and oh no 1504 and 1410

and that was a pretty big difference for me and then um just like plasma has been crashing consistently since five it's slowly been getting better so maybe maybe by the next release it'll get better, but I really don't know. We still have like two months to go. But this is what happened last time. With 3 to 4, the same thing happened. For the first few versions, it was a beta release

and people were not told it was beta. But in version 5, they were told it was beta. I specifically remember that transition. I was a KDE user at that time. And I remember it not being quite this bad for this long. I remember essentially what had happened was it was pretty unstable. And then it became more functionality and refinement features after release, after release, after release.

We're seeing some of that. But, I mean, I'm talking fundamental instabilities. And maybe you can blame the NVIDIA driver, the proprietary NVIDIA driver, darn it. Maybe you can blame something else that's not, you know, the Plasma desktop. But I remember that transition because I lived that transition, and I do not remember it being this bumpy. Well, they were also doing a lot more than this time because they they were just adding features from three to four yeah they weren't fundamentally rewriting pretty much everything and changing the way it's structured and yeah so there is a lot more for them to do yeah and

essentially like 80 of the entire project is replay is being like rebuilt well right you know what's funny is in some sense um when gnome made the transition from gnome 2 to gnome 3 it was obvious that was such a huge change. It was like they just threw out everything. It looked different. Everything was different. But when they went from the Plasma 4 desktop to the Plasma 5 desktop,

they actually took a lot of work to make sure it looked and functioned very similar. And so the amount of revolutionary change behind the scenes, I think, is lost a little bit on the average user because so much functions and looks the same on purpose do you agree um i think it's confusing for people because there are certain things that are very similar and they look the same especially like the worst part is that when people use four Qt 4 or KDE 4 apps inside of Qt 5 and KDE 5 or Plasma 5, and they look the same, but they're wrapped inside the new interface. I think that's a negative thing because it makes people think that those are five version apps when they're just actually potentially really old apps.

I agree. Yes, I agree. That is also kind of confusing. KDE Plasma 5 and Framework 5, they're doing a lot of cool things and I can't wait for them to actually get it to the point where it is stable. But right now, it's still not.

I mean, I haven't tried 5.4 yet, but they haven't announced that it's ready to go, so I would assume that it's not. Yeah, I'm pretty much using both versions, like 1504 and 1510 Alpha 2 on my system. Just like as testing, I'm not full. I'm like using it for like web browsing, trying out Steam games, and just seeing how it reacts and how it works. And if I encounter something, hopefully I can do a report for it. I'm kind of trying to keep in the mindset data.

That's really cool. Good for you. And, you know, one of the things that jumped out at me is their language they used in the release announcement for Plasma 5.4. The new volume control applet directly manages pulse audio, it says. And I thought that was particularly interesting. That set off some ding, ding, dings in my brain. And I'm thinking, hmm, maybe it's main issues was it felt like that phonon layer there was particularly interfering between when I would hook up like an audio out to the line out on, say, the Bonobo. KDE would still only send the audio to my HDMI out regardless of what I'd set in the audio out settings.

that it was like a miscommunication between Phonon and Pulse Audio because if I opened PoovControl or PoovControl or whatever you call it, I could go manually set it still and then it would work fine. But I just couldn't use any of the built-in KDE tools. And so when they say in that release announcement that, in fact, I still have it open right here. I'll read it to you because when I

read that, I was like, oh, what? I almost felt like they were talking to me here. Here's what they say. New audio volume applet. Our new audio volume applet works directly with Pulse Audio, the popular sound server for Linux. To give you full control over volume and output settings

in beautifully designed, simple interface. And I don't know if I'd call it super simple, but one of the things that jumped out at me is right there in the audio settings. Look at that. A volume slider. A volume slider. A volume slider. Took him a few releases, but we finally got it. I'm happy.

I'm a happy boy. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 107 for August 25th, 2015. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that, you know, now that I think about it, I wish all of our gadgets just ran off of DC power. My name is Chris. We've got a good show for you today, episode 107. Not only do I have something that I'm extremely excited to share with you guys that only the really Linux Unplugged crew gets to know about right now. But we'll be telling everybody down the road. But exclusive right here, Linux Unplugged first. And after that, we're going to throw a birthday party for Linux. We're going to go in the Wayback Machine and visit Mr. Linus Torvalds in the late 90s.

A much more humble, quieter, down-to-earth Linus Torvalds to celebrate Linux's birthday. And then there's a big old rumor floating around about Ubuntu. We'll get to that. And there's a new file system in the works that kind of accidentally came to be. And it turns out it's crazy fast. Even in its early days, it's smoking ZFS. It's smoking extended for ButterFS. You might need a solid state, though.

So stay tuned for that. And then later you might've heard from LinuxCon that IBM is hooking up with Linux and they're making the mainframe one, a mainframe designed to run Linux. And you got Ubuntu on there, OpenSUSE is on there. We're going to talk about that and what they're actually doing. And it turns out they're doing kind of what you could do on your PC, but just a lot of it. Like, I mean a lot of it. I'm going to tell you about that. And it's kind of quaint after all of that. And then supporting an open source legend, someone who's created a lot of code and someone who's about to create some code that we're going to depend on even more so, NTP, was recently kind of attacked for asking for support from the community.

And some folks threw in behind him. And we're going to discuss that quote unquote controversy. But I think it's kind of interesting when a community that relies on open source code and these kinds of contributions gets a little riled up when somebody comes and asks for money. And I wonder what that's about. So we're going to discuss that. But before we get into all of that, I got to bring in our virtual lug.

Time appropriate greetings, El Mumble Room. Hey, guys. Hello. Hello. guys. Hello. Hey, hey, hey. Hello there. Hi there. Now, I don't know what the chances are that any of you are going to be impacted by my first announcement. I'm going to take a moment. Nothing really Linux

related at the top of the show. I am too excited to bury this later in the show. I'm too excited to tease it with an ad break because I want to tell you guys those of of you who listen to Linux Unplugged, get the 411 first. Today, something – kind of a big moment for me. You know, I've been doing Jupyter Broadcasting full-time for I think three years or so. Who knows? Nobody can tell.

Um, and I get who, nobody can tell. And, uh, one of the things that when you go off and probably a lot of you have ever done your own small business might be able to relate to this scariest thing you could do when you own your own small business is go get yourself a payment on something because then, you know, you got to make the business work, uh, because you got to make payments. Uh, and I kind of got over that, like when we hired employees and stuff like, you know, but it never, for me, it it never that was a mental block that never cleared uh like i've never since i became full-time i kibosh on like new house no couldn't get a new house didn't matter couldn't get a new car we're not getting anything i don't want any payments because that freaks me out because i now i'm paying for myself uh and so it's been a few years and one of the things through all of that that has been consistent

is man i've wanted to do a road show i've wanted wanted to get on the road. I wanted to do a JB Roadshow, do meetups, broadcast from the road, because A, it's going to be full of technical issues and challenges, which sounds like a total nightmare, but it's a whole new set of challenges that I've never had to face before. So that sounds kind of exciting. And B, there's a ton of content in that. Like if I can't do a show for a day, but I put up a camera and I document the fact why I can't do a show. I'm going to release that as a show. So anyways, I'm getting ahead of myself. What I'm really excited to say is this morning I became the proud owner of Jupiter Broadcasting's first mobile studio. I got an amazing deal on a trailer RV, a 25-foot RV that is some unfortunate circumstances for the previous owners.

We became my good fortune, and it needs a little work, which is happening right now. It's in the shop right now. And I'm going to have a mobile studio, and this is going to be the rig that I will take and broadcast from when we do the Linux Action Show Cribs Edition, where I go over to Noah's house. So I'm going to start here on the west coast, and I'm going to drive across US 2. So if you are anywhere on US Highway 2 between the Pacific Ocean and Grand Forks, North Dakota, I would love to come say hi to you. And I will be driving from the West Coast to Noah's house.

When I get there, we will do a Last Cribs edition on Noah's automated house. We'll find the spots that are powered by Linux and the spots. I believe there are a few spots that are not powered by Linux. And I will reveal those spots on the show. Wouldn't it be interesting if Noah had a dark, dark Redmond-based secret? I will discover it, and I will air it, that dirty laundry, when I get over there. So the idea is I'm going to, this is in progress right now. It just all happened this morning.

I'm going to eventually convert it into a mobile studio over the next month on a budget. It's going to be pretty, pretty lean. But around mid-September, ideally, like around the September 19th timeframe, we'll hit the road and be doing shows from the road in the mobile JB2 studio. JB2 studio. So I'm very, very excited because I did tech talk early this morning. So I could go out there, did an inspection, made sure everything checked out. And boy, am I pumped. And I have no idea what I'm doing. Like I'm going to have to run off batteries. I'm going to have to run off water tanks. I'm going to have to flush my poop. Yes. And I'm a con. It has the first meetup. I'm a con. Tell the good folks where we're meeting up, actually, because it's pretty exciting. So we're going to do a meetups. I want to do as many meetups along the way as possible. So go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash meetup.

Right now, I'm kind of planning for like a 17 day road trip to give lots of time to come say hi to folks. I know it's in Spokane, I'm a con. I mean, the brewery that we're going to be going to. It's a super cool place. And we're going to do meetups along the way. And so go to meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting to sign up for that. And there you go, the Steam Plant. Steam Plant in Spokane will be probably our first meetup along the way. I'm really pumped. I'm super

excited. And I bet it's going to be awful. The good news is I happen to be tight with a mobile carrier. So I think I'm going to get a hookup on data connectivity. That said, though, if you have any ideas how to boost signal, like on a budget because I don't have a lot of money to do this, but I need to be able to get any kind of scrap of signal I can get and get it into the mobile studio. So if you have any ideas on how to do that, please email me, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com, or any kind of thing like that,

anything that you think would be very useful for me to know to do a mobile road trip. And I'm probably going to be doing some test broadcasts from it before we get going. But yeah, I'm a con. You're first on the list. Don't worry. So I'm really excited, and we'll tell you more about it as it gets going. I was going to do this road trip in my truck or I was actually thinking about renting an RV because who the hell wants an RV? But if I – but the deal I got, this actually works out to be almost – if we take this one road trip, it actually works out to be just about half the cost of renting the RV to begin with.

So it's almost a no-brainer. And then we can invest in actually setting up as a mobile studio. And so trip one is kind of, hey, maybe we'll go to Grand Forks. We're going to do the last cribs. And this is going to be like me kind of learning what I'm doing because it's a very challenging drive in some aspects. Trip two, though, you know, I think then it's going to be like going to conventions. Like, wouldn't it be great for scale to just take the rig down to scale and be able to

broadcast live from outside of scale and then we have control over our broadcast environment because right now one of the trickiest things is getting control over the broadcast environment at conventions because you're really uh it's funny it's a mixed bag between uh no provisioned ethernet to uh unions that actually object to you broadcasting in their area like it's a wide range of issues that i never ever thought i'd have to deal with. So I kind of find it kind of appealing actually. So anyways, that's my news and you'll see that rolled into content and also there's

going to be a lot of stuff for our patrons that is going to be wrapped into this too. So if you go to patreon.com slash today, you'll find out more about that down the road. I'm really excited. We're going to go crash Colonel Linux's pad, like D1 says in the chat room, and we'll do a Linux action show from over there. And I would really love to meet up with some of you. I'm crazy excited. Something else I'm kind of excited about, and I wonder, I think maybe, Popey,

maybe it was you I got this from on Google+, but maybe not. I mean, you're pretty sharesy on Google+. And I'm hoping this replaces Google Docs for the Jupyter Broadcasting crew. It's called Hackpad, and it's a web-based real-time wiki. Dropbox bought them a while back and now is open-sourced and placed it up on GitHub, a real-time web-based wiki. Now, talk about an awesome way to make some serious podcast show notes. And Hackpad is a web-based real-time wiki based on the open-source Etherpad collaborative document editor.

The Etherpad package you guys might or may not be familiar with. I've drooled about it quite a bit in the past. And now the Dropbox folks have posted it up online. It's a whole bunch of JavaScript and jQuery and Node.js stuff. But if anybody out there has a droplet and an implementation of this, I would love to check it out because I am biting at the chomp. Chomping at the bite? What is that called? Chomping at the bit? To replace Google Docs. Now, in the mumble room is somebody who's very familiar with podcast show notes,

and those of you who may have listened to a few other Linux podcasts, there's a guy, you're probably not familiar with him, actually, because, I mean, he doesn't really get on many shows, but from time to time he shows up on a couple of podcasts. And his name is Joe. Now, Joe, help me. Is it Joe Rezinger? Joe, is that how you pronounce it? Is it Rezinger, Joe?

How do you pronounce that last name? Ressington. Now, Joe, I've never heard of your name before. Maybe if I've maybe heard that, what kind of shows would I have possibly have heard your name on before? Well, are you going to let me plug all my shows? How long have you got? Joe, if you're willing to take the time to come on, you can plug away. Go ahead. Okay. Linux Luddites is the kind of main one. And that's a show where we try all the latest

free and open source software and then decide that we like the old stuff better. main one and that's a show where we try all the latest free and open source software and then decide that we like the old stuff better um recently just launched the pie podcast which is a show about the raspberry pi with wimpy he was the first guest on there um and i also sometimes guest host on mintcast which is the show by the linux mint community for all users of linux and um oh yeah i occasionally guest on the Ubuntu podcast, but only when they have me. Only when Axe is not available. Very good.

So what do you use? Do you have a standardized solution for, I mean, you do a lot of shows. You must constantly be having the show note challenge. What do you do? Google Docs. Simple as that. Drive.

Does it drive you crazy for show notes or do you find it workable? No, I find it really good. I can use it on my phone, I can use it on the laptop, I can use it on my tablet. It's brilliant, I think. Now, what about, and maybe, see, this is something we do that's kind of unique, and maybe this is why you don't have a challenge with it, is what we compose in the doc literally gets copy-posted onto the webpage. We write all of our show notes and markdowns so that way we only do the work once. And we structure it so that way it can be pasted right into the show notes.

But Google Docs was never created with the intention of you writing anything in any kind of markdown language at all. And so it's constantly trying to help by like indenting and all kinds of things. I just find it to be a nightmare. Not only that, but I find it to be strikingly ironic that, you know, many of the largest open source podcasts are being created in a very proprietary system that is controlled by Google. Like, it's just kind of ironic. We're all doing it because it's the best solution. But it seems like by now there should be –

Well, not all of us are doing it, Chris. Oh, oh. Yeah, we use Etherpad. Oh, and how does that work for you bobby well you can put your mark down in there and not worry about something automatically automatically screwing with it um it's not as friendly as google docs and uh it's not as straightforward to share with like guest presenter joe came on as a guest presenter recently and we had to monkey about a little bit so yeah it's you know there's ease of use versus you know being freedom lovers and uh and wanting to host the stuff yourself really and so uh how what is the process when

joe wants to come on do you have to create him an account and then what like is that what you make him a user id and that kind of stuff so that's what we should do like a guest account or something right yeah we should do that secret source poppy don't know yeah what yeah what i actually do is i uh i copy the notes onto my local pc and then i print them out and i fax them over to him and then he reads them for a piece of paper listen you could consider it an advertising fee for coming on the show week after week. Now, I'm just curious because I'm really considering switching to Etherpad, but it sounds very clunky. And the primary issue that I have is, like, for example, on today's episode, I just wanted to just quickly loop Ham Radio into the show notes. Boom, share it.

I added his collab email address. Bob's your uncle. Now he's looped in. And it takes me 10 seconds so I can do it while I'm on air and while I'm talking to you at the same time. And that seems invaluable. You don't, you don't find that to be a, like a barrier. The guy you looped in to get in to talk about how he's using collab instead of using Google, you forced him to use Google in order to contribute to your show. Yes, sir. Yes, that's correct. Okay. Just checking. You avoided the question, but all right. Very good.

Hey, let's see. I got another question maybe you could avoid for me. Apparently, Canonical is killing the Ubuntu Software Center with a lot of vengeance. According to the Var guy, desktop app stores are dead and their mobile-oriented equivalents are the future. That's the message from Canonical, he says, which is quietly made clear that it intends to jettison the software center in Ubuntu Linux to focus on mobile apps for snappy

Ubuntu core. He says that the software center is dead and that Canonical has no plans. In respect, the depreciation of the Ubuntu software center means that Canonical's open source operating system will be unique in another important way from the rest of Linux world. I don't know what to make of this, Popey,

but there's a lot of people writing a lot of things about the Software Center. Do you have any opinions on all of this media buzz? Is it all just like, are people just getting ahead of themselves, or is there actually some real fire to the smoke that I'm not seeing? I like the fact that the Var guy talks about how Canonical is killing the Software Center, and on the same day, Softpedia have an article titled, No, Canonical is not killing the Ubuntu software center. Yes, right. I saw that too.

Who do you believe? I don't know. Who do you believe? I'm going to believe you. The Var guy's article points to a really well-written article on, I think it's on PCWorld.com, which kind of summarizes the state of play of the Ubuntu software center the fact that it's not had a lot of maintenance you know we've talked about this in the past with Wimpy and you know when he was talking about the rationale for removing it

from the default Ubuntu Marte install you know it's not had a lot of love and it's not super performant and there are problems with it and there have been problems with the developers have experienced putting their apps in the store um and you know that's that's all well known well that's what i mean i don't know where they i mean they they kind of pull a bunch of threads together and maybe um put two and two together and it's not an unreasonable thing to think that an application that where the upstream isn't actually doing any active development or maintenance is dead. You know, that's a reasonable conclusion to draw. But we've got an LTS around the corner.

So, you know, what are we going to do there? Are we going to drop Ubuntu Software Center from 16.04 and then have no default graphical way to install applications that that seems that seems like not a good idea for people who are upgrading from 14.04 so i i don't quite understand why this makes sense um from a you know looking at the distro point of view but i can understand why on the outside looking in it totally does make sense you know it's what pushes my buttons is i i feel like uh so much controversy and crap gets stirred up just on speculation alone so it's this seems like particularly in the in the fact that there's no like announcement you know to say but there's no announcement saying we are not killing a bunch

of software center right so is it reasonable to expect that we are killing it but equally there's no there's no announcement saying we are not killing unity 8 is it reasonable to expect we are killing right then you know just because it says it doesn't say in the instruction manual don't fill your vhs player full of washing up liquid. It doesn't mean you should do it. Thank you. It's ridiculous a bit. Yeah. All right.

So point well taken. And that's exactly what was my take on it as well. All right. So enough with that. Today is actually an awesome day to be recording Linux Unplugged. It is Linux's big, big, big birthday. Well, big in the sense that in the U.S., after this one, that's when you get your big insurance discount,

and you can rent cars for a much lower price. Pretty soon, Linux is going to be driving around in some nice cars when it travels. But before we get to that, and something that I have to play for you guys, it is a great moment in time when it was a different Linus, and Linux was a very humble upstart operating system. We're going to cover that. We're going to go back in time to the 90s and talk about that.

But first, I want to mention DigitalOcean, sponsors of Linux Unplugged. DigitalOcean is my go-to Linux infrastructure, and I think it could be yours too. And it's funny I even say that now. As someone who's been in IT for so many years and then became a podcaster, and I thought, well, I'm never going to do anything on demand. I'll build all my own infrastructure.

When we created and we moved into the JB1 studio, I set up a pretty nice KVM system using Proxmox and several Arch machines doing specific dedicated tasks and a couple of Ubuntu LTS machines on there. And I thought, this is how I'm going to do infrastructure for Jupyter Broadcasting. Nope. No, not once I discovered DigitalOcean. It just makes so much sense. DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to get your own Linux rig going. You could also do FreeBSD if you want, but I wouldn't. No, I'm kidding. Users can get started in less than 55 seconds, and that's really nice. I can't even get a new system set up in less than 55 seconds in Proxmox. Maybe if I really blast through it, but I'll probably screw it up. But here's the nuts

part. I'm not even sure the electricity on the Proxmox rig is this cheap, because the base DigitalOcean droplet, $5 a month, and then I'll give you 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20-gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer. That is slick. That terabyte of transfer is a lot more than you probably think of. I mean, think about it in terms of your cell phone plan. How many gigabytes do you use on your cell phone plan? Now apply that to the fact that you're going to get a terabyte on your DigitalOcean droplet. And so I've thought about this a little bit, and I'm not really using all of my transfer. They have a really good dashboard that tells you all

this stuff and you can get on your phone too. So one of the things that's kind of nice is I decided to download the most recent Antegros release or Antegros or whatever. And I just, you know what, like why not continue to seed it for a few hours from my droplet? I have literally tens and tens and tens and tens of gigabytes to spare. So why not just help them out for a little hours for my droplet. I have literally tens and tens and tens and tens of gigabytes to spare. So why not just help them out for a little bit? Like, it's not a big thing. But as an advocate of that project, it feels kind of good. And for $5 a month, I've got own cloud on there. I've got all kinds of other functionality on there. So the fact that I'm just, you know, I'm burning a few extra gigabytes doing that. That's awesome. And you can get started right now for free for two months.

If you get their $5 a week, if you use the promo code DOUnplugged, D-O-unplugged, one word, lowercase, you can apply to your account after the fact too if you forgot to use it. They give you a $10 credit. And, of course, their pricing plans are pretty straightforward. If you want something with more horsepower, it's right. You go to their website. They have it right there.

They're proud of it, so they don't try to hide it from you. It's just right up front and center. They also have a lot of really good documentation, so you can get a lot. Even if you're not a DigitalOcean user, they have stuff that's just super applicable to managing Linux installations because they have editors and they really actually care about that kind of thing.

And the best part about DigitalOcean is I can kind of have a global footprint. They have data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, Germany, and London. And listen, when I first started deploying servers, it was literally $1,200 a month. So you have the base cost of the server. That goes in the rack. Then you have to rent the rack. You have to rent the power.

And then you have to commit to a certain percent of bandwidth usage. And that's about $1,200, $1,300 a month to get it in one freaking data center. And now, now I can have a $5 rig in San Francisco, a $5 rig in New York, and a $5 rig in Germany. This just blows my mind. I just, I can't even fathom it because then you combine that with the interface that is so much better than anything I ever, ever used. And for a long time, I had to administer VMware ESX servers that were running on top of an old Red Hat kernel,

but forced you to use Windows to administer them. And it's just the slowest, most pathetic interface. Now, it's better now, but this was years ago. It was awful, and it burned me. It burned me so bad that I'm managing this entire Linux infrastructure, all Linux virtual machines, all powered by Linux, and I have to use a Windows workstation to manage it. Now, today, DigitalOcean has this amazing interface written in HTML5 that works on your mobile device or your desktop, even the console access,

from post all the way up to login. All HTML5, like slick, super nice, really intuitive, and then they have an API on top of that so you can extend it even further. And there's a bunch of community apps that already take advantage of that API because if you're like me and you're never going to code anything, there's a bunch of good stuff you can take advantage of.

So go use the promo code DOUnplugged. Try it out, two months for free. Go put something up in the cloud. There's a new release of own cloud. Go play with it. DigitalOcean.com, D-O-unplugged. And a big, big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. So let's celebrate.

I can't play Happy Birthday as much as I have a soundboard sitting right here, and I would love to be able to play it for you. And the value of this is negative. I cannot play it. It is Linux's birthday. Things I can play are things that I've personally recorded and captured. It's negative in the freedom dimension. So instead I can play are things that I've personally recorded and captured. It's negative in the freedom dimension. So instead I'll play those

and I'll tell you about today. Today, August 25th 2015 Linux has turned 24 years old. That's pretty super badass. I have a really great write-up from Ars Technica about it. It took them until about midday to get this posted.

Just before we went on air they got it up. It's a really great write-up from Ars Technica about it. It took them until about midday to get this posted. Just before we went on air, they got it up. And it's a really great write-up. They go back and they find, like, Linus' original post. And everybody has seen that, like, 100 times or more. But they expand way, way beyond that. I'm going to read it just because, I mean, let's be honest, this is pretty cool. But this was Linus 24 years ago today, August 25th in 1991. Hello, everybody out there using Minix.

I'm doing a free operating system, just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU, for 386 and 486 AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and it's starting to get ready. In fact, I remember back then Linus never thought it would run on anything but certain types of IDE hard drives. And it took the mainstream press a really long time to figure it out, like an embarrassingly long time. So much so that as an early Linux user, I thought maybe I had made a mistake. Like maybe I, for a very long time, I thought maybe I was betting on the wrong horse because nobody else was seeing what

I was seeing. I think what made LinuxFest and LinuxCons so electric back then is so many of us felt that way. Oh, I'm the only one that gets it. And then you'd go to a fest or you'd go to a lug meetup and you would meet other people that also got it. And you would connect with them and you'd realize people get what a big deal Linux is. But it took the average user and the mainstream much, much, much, much longer. In fact, I have a piece from the Computer Chronicles. I've played it before on the network, but I absolutely love it. It's only a couple of minutes long, and it's a visit to Linus Torvalds in 1998. And it was sort of like, well, look, the new Microsoft product, Windows 98, is coming out soon.

Let's go look at the quaint alternative, Linux, created by some guy in his house. And you can see the bias in the press. There's so much you can extract from this if you just take it all in from 1998. Here it is. And I love, love looking back at the state of Linux so long ago on its birthday. Oh, hold on. Let me turn it on.

By a Finnish programmer named Linus Torvalds. Linus Torvalds is a 28-year-old software engineer from Sweden. In 1991, when he was a student at Helsinki University in Finland, he wanted to buy a personal computer, but he was not happy with the choice of operating systems. The problem was the machine is just half of what you need. The other part is the software, and quite frankly, it just sucked. So Linus developed his own operating system, one he could afford, based on Unix. I had been programming for half my life at that point. I was 21, 20, yeah, 20, 21. And I just knew that I was the best programmer in the world.

I mean, I was young, I was brash, and I thought, hey, I can do better than this. Linux grew from one user to 10 in its first year, then a few hundred. As more programmers discovered it, they added their own features. Today there are well over five million users, and the software is still open source and completely free. Thanks to a lot of programmers all around the world, I mean, it's been a lot of people working on it.

But even the people who haven't actually made contributions in the form of code, there are lots of people who have contributed in testing out things, even when they didn't intend to. They did. By using it, they tested it. Lennox took another leap in popularity this year when major computer companies, including Netscape and Oracle, announced their support of the operating system.

There is plenty of free software available through the Internet, but few commercial applications so far. So how can Linux compete with Microsoft Windows? Linus says the difference is in the way it competes. Linux doesn't compete on the terms of the marketplace. Linux competes on its own terms, which is that, yes, you can buy it on a CD, Yes, you can buy it on a CD, but A, if you buy one CD, you can install it legally on 100 machines. And if you don't want to buy the CD, you can actually install it directly over the Internet. If Linux is given away free of charge, how can anyone build a business selling it? VA Research is one company that is not concerned by the lack of licensing fees. VA has built complete ready-to-use Linux systems since 1993. The company now ships

an average of 20 systems a day. They are no threat to Dell or Compaq yet. They're dependent on what works best for Microsoft. On the other hand, we have a lot of leeway there, and we have a lot of things that we can do to make those things better. We can add to Linux. We can develop code in Linux where it makes things more stable, more reliable, and supporting our hardware and our customers better. For Linus Torvalds, his creation may not provide him with a paycheck, but there are other rewards. It's great for your kind of self-esteem to have people use your system and really enjoy using it.

It's a great feeling. I mean, I feel that I've done something relevant. For the Computer Chronicles, I'm Sarah O'Brien. So that's a... wow. Wow. That's a trip down memory lane. That's back in a time when VA was still a thing. Linus didn't work for the Linux Foundation.

He did all for free still. And you can see in 1998, they were still very skeptical about what it would be. It was just on the precipice. So here we are. I mean, next year is 25. And I don't know. It's just kind of incredible to look back like that. And it's just so much has changed.

So much has changed in the way the press covers it too uh which really stands out to me um watching that clip and uh you know uh also the other thing that really stands out to me as a father is at the end there in the video uh lenis is putting his daughter into a swing and she's uh she's just a little girl. And it was just two weeks ago that she was pretty much an adult now and she was talking about diversity in technology. I don't know if anybody saw that, but Linus' daughter was – she gave a speech about diversity and women in technology. And we just watched a clip of him putting her in a swing as a baby.

That's amazing that he has been in the public eye now for this long and how much Linux has changed since that clip originally aired on the Computer Chronicles in 1998. And for those of you who want to look that up, you can look that up. That whole episode, Windows 98 and Linux, I think is the title. And there's a little Easter egg in there if you watch the Twit Network. Mike Elgin is in there, and his delivery style is exactly like his delivery style is today. I'll leave that for you. Anyways, moving on, I want to tell you a little bit about our next sponsor, and then we're going to jump into this new file system.

So Ting. Ting, I don't know for sure exactly how my road trip is going to work out, but I think a big component of it is going to probably involve Ting. It's just mobile that makes sense. I'm just going to pay for my usage. That's what I love about Ting. Go to Linux.Ting.com. I mean just go there now anyways just to support this show, just to learn more about Ting. And I just encourage you, even if you're not going to switch to Ting, just go take a look because it's kind of funny to see like there is – if you follow different corporations, some people like they put on a pink shirt and a leather jacket and they say some of the same stuff that Ting says and that kind of works. Other companies, like they try to restructure their pricing plans to make it more similar to Ting. their pricing plans to make it more similar to Ting.

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And when he was out here in the Pacific Northwest, he switched over to GSM, and we were getting 20 megabits right here. 20 megabits right here in the JB1 studio on the GSM. So that's what's cool about Ting, is if you're even just a little bit savvy, you can make those kind of command decisions for yourself. Oh, CDMA

is better here, GSM is better there, I want data, I want call, you know, all those kinds of things, and you just pay for your usage. Ting doesn't care if you turn on the hotspot. And they have a dashboard that helps you manage all of it. Go to linux.ting.com right now and try it out. linux.ting.com and just go try it out and just see what you think. You can get $25 off your first month of service or $25 off your first device. They have a lot of really inexpensive devices and a lot of really great devices and a lot

of data-only devices. They have a savings calculator. Click that. Just kind of get an idea of what you would save. And I'm asking you, even if you've just recently got a contract, to try it out. The reason I suggest that is they have an early termination relief program. So if you kind of have second thoughts about signing up for a contract, and, you know, it's funny because you kind of got burned.

If you recently got in a contract, even, I don't know, in the last six months. I mean, these contracts, how long are they? Two years now? So even in the last year, if you got in a contract, didn't you just get burned? Because Verizon just said, oh, contracts? Well, we're going to do something different. Of course, you're going to pay more, aren't you? Yeah, you're going to pay more.

But we're not doing contracts anymore. Oh, that really nice new smartphone? Yeah, just pay us $22 a month for that. It's a good system. I don't blame them for trying to do it. I mean, it's making them a whole lot of money, and Wall Street loves it. But I'll be honest with you. It's just awful.

Linux.ting.com. Go there, no contract, no early termination fee. They have an early termination relief program, and you can get a great device that's unlocked. Linux.ting.com, and a big thanks to Ting for sponsoring. Linux Unplugged. Okay, so, you know, for quite a while, I was running my rigs on ButterFS, and of course, I'm always doing TechSnap with Alan. He's going on and on about ZFS all the time, and I eventually gave up on ButterFS. I switched over to XFS for my machines, and I've been pretty happy.

But I kind of wish it had a little more modern feature set. And that's why this story has gotten my attention. Maybe a lot of you saw it too. A new Linux file system that aims for speed while having some ZFS, or as you Americans say it, ZFS, ButterFS-like features. And I don't know really much about it because it's super, super, super, super new and it's totally not ready for production. But it's called BcacheFS, and it's based on Bcache, the Linux kernel block layer cache,

for pairing a large-capacity hard drive with a low-capacity, high-performance, solid-state drive to act as a cache. In developing this block layer system, Kent Overstreet, now remember that name, Overstreet, which is a great name, by the way. And by the way, before I talk my ass off and I sound like a jerk, if anybody knows more about Bcache, please feel free to speak up. I'm just, based on my research and things like that, I'm going to regurgitate what I have learned today and yesterday. But if you are in the mumble room or in the chat room and you need more, absolutely, please let me know.

But anyways, the idea here is you kind of get like Apple's effect and the other effects where you can have some stuff on your big spinning disk and some stuff on your solid state disk that you get to more often. And in the process, Kent Overstreet realized that they're basically writing their own file system. And in the process, Kent Overstreet realized that they're basically writing their own file system. In his own words, he says, the Bcache code base has been evolving and metastasizing into a full-blown general-purpose POSIX file system. A modern copy-on-write file system with checksumming, compression, multiple device support, caching, and eventually even snapshots are in the works and all other kinds of nifty features we can already envision. I and other people are working on Bcache. We realized that we were working on was almost by accident a good chunk of the functionality of full-blown file system needs. And there was really a clean and elegant design to be had if we took the time and ran with it.

Bcache itself has been in the Linux kernel since kernel 3.14 in 2013. Now, it is not anywhere near ready today, but he's aiming to add file system features that would match the performance and reliability of Extended 4 and have the features of ButterFS and ZFS. That's kind of the goal. Right now, BcacheFS supports multiple disk drives today. Caching, tiering, native Zlib file system compression support, which file system compression support is not like file system compression in the 90s and in the 80s.

We now have i7 CPUs and massive amounts of disk bandwidth. It is now faster to compress and decompress data off a drive than it is to read uncompressed data. It's unbelievable, but I've actually done my own tests for writing media, and it is fantastic if you have a great processor. In Overstreet's announcement, he stated some performance numbers for BcacheFS compared to Xenophore and XFS and ButterFS. And he says it's looking really good, so I was curious. He says it's looking really good. It's looking real good, he says. Well, I actually put the numbers in the show notes. It's looking fantastic. It's early days. But some of these benchmarks, BcashFS in its early state is already outperforming Xenophore and ButterFS, not by a lot, but a little bit in most circumstances. 4 and ButterFS. Not by a lot, but a little bit in most circumstances. And

yes, ZFS. Not all, though. There are some circumstances where Extended 4 is definitely outperforming Bcash. But today, right now, it's looking really, really good. And these are all based on the early Pharonix numbers, so

salt and all. But for example, on the compile benchmark, that's specifically like when you're compiling something where Bcash really sucked. But not like worse than anything else. It turns out all these different file systems suck really bad when you're compiling software. It's like a worst-case scenario for file systems. Sorry, developers. And so BcashFS has got your back, though. 140 milliseconds is what Bcache clocked in at.

Extended 4 for this particular test, 299. ButterFS, 164. XFS, 209. And these numbers are all arbitrary, but they're just – the numbers themselves don't necessarily matter except for within the context of all on the same system, all a baseline performance here. This system is really, really fast. It is really set up to take advantage of many things that we attribute to ButterFS and ZFS today, and it's good to go.

And so I got to ask the mumble room, are we ready for another file system? I mean, should we just be waiting for ButterFS to stabilize, or is it too late? I mean, in my opinion, I don't think I'm going to try ButterFS for years. Wimpy, let's start with you. What do you think? I'm cautiously optimistic.

Really? Yeah, well, like you, I've not had the best success with B3FS. And this is already in development and it's a fair way along. And I'm interested to see how it develops over time because Linux does need something to go up against ZFS. And although B3FS has been around for a long, long while, it doesn't seem to be ready to compete yet. Joe, do you follow the file system stuff as a Luddite yourself?

Do you care much? Do you think ZFS is the new hotness? What's your take and opinion on this? Well, starting with B3FS or ButterFS as you call it, I remember you and Brian talking about that years ago. And we're still in a position where you're not using it and it's not really production ready. I tried. Yeah, exactly.

The thing with the file system is it's so fundamental to your operating system and everything you do that you need something that is truly tried and tested. It's not like using an IRC client. that crashes you know you restart it no problem but if you are talking about your file system if that is not a hundred percent rock solid and you could potentially lose data okay fair enough it all should be backed up and everything but then you potentially talking about a lot of time to restore your backups and so so it's not something that I would be particularly interested in. And another thing is that why pile all of this extra functionality on a file system when there are things you could use external programs, you know, third. Well, like LVM, for example, like LVM, which has been in production for years.

Yeah. Why try and force that stuff into the file system where it doesn't belong, as far as I'm concerned? That's a really good point. Popey, I wanted to ask you from a production standpoint. I don't actually know Ubuntu Mobile or Touch, whatever you want to call it. What file system does that use? And when you look at this from a, like, I have to ship this to millions of people, is there any room for a new up-and-coming experimental file system yeah totally we use ext on the phone but i don't think it really matters

largely for us because um the vast majority of the software is is delivered as a read-only image so it could be pretty much any any file system so long as it works because you're not going to corrupt it because it's read only um the applications and your user data sure you that's that's you know that's different and you're going to be writing there and turning it off while it's doing stuff and all kinds of nasty things but i don't think butter fs could be considered not ready given yola ship their selfish phones with ButterFS by default. The first thing, the number one email I always get anytime I say something negative about ButterFS now or B3FS, whatever you want to call it, is, well, Facebook uses it. And I mean, and I've used it.

And I actually have a virtual machine that is like the most critical virtual machine here in the JB1 studio running on ButterFS right now. I use it too. GeoButter Broadcasting uses ButterFS on a super important server that I would be very sad if it crashed. And I also have used it on two different production systems that were very critical that I had to dump it and go to XFS. So take that for what it's worth. To me, it's, as somebody, and I know I don't mean to be like this guy, and I hate to say this. But before I became a podcaster, I was doing it for 14 years. And one of the end for for the biggest chunk of that, I was responsible for the as a as a customer, if you have a bank where you

can do images of your of your check, and you can take a picture of it, or your ATM scans it, where you can do images of your check and you can take a picture of it or your ATM scans it. I was responsible for managing the infrastructure that stored all of those images, OCR'd them, and sorted them properly. And I can tell you that file system reliability is something that I became intimately familiar with. And I got involved in the industry of data storage. And anything that has the track record of ButterFS is a joke. It looks bad. I'm sorry it's got nice features. I'm sorry it could be the future delivery platform of Linux software if you listen to Lenart Pottery. But I have to tell you, from somebody who spent a lot of years in really big iron, important data infrastructure, ButterFS is a joke. It is a joke.

And nobody's going to deploy it. The reason why Facebook is deploying it is because those systems run in RAM. Okay, you guys? They run in RAM. If there's a single problem, they reboot them, and they come right back from an image off a TFTP server. It doesn't matter.

Data integrity doesn't matter. And it's very fast. It's a good performance system if you're running your file system out of RAM. So Butterfest works in that scenario. Just because Facebook uses it, and I do not want 200 emails on this topic, just because Facebook uses it doesn't mean it's a production-ready file system. It makes Linux look bad. And that's why I look at these things, and you know what? I just got back from LinuxCon, and most of those guys are talking about storing your containers on ZFS. Now, how are they doing that? How are they implementing the back-end ZFS storage?

Are all of those container solutions where they're running thousands of containers, are they going to do all of that with a ZFS implementation in user space? I don't think so. Something's got to give there. So in my opinion, I look at BcacheFS, and God, I hope it happens. And I want to take – so something else that came out of LinuxCon is this Linux 1 mainframe from IBM. Canonical's in on this. OpenSUSE – sorry, SUSE is in on this. And I want to play a little bit of this clip because I think this is a good example of how big data and really all of the different applications that we've all heard

about, all the different open source projects that we've all heard about can be used at a massive scale beyond anything we've ever thought of before. And why the backend storage for all of this is such a critical key component to all of this. The Linux One server, it's a pretty extraordinary server for analytics, specifically for unstructured data, such as live tweets and news, and combining the unstructured data with structured data, such as Postgres, MariaDB, and MongoDB. MongoDB could be used for customer information in this demo. MariaDB would be used for financial information and Postgres for geospatial data. So, for example, in this box, I can type any topic, such as Cecil the Lion. And when I do that, what you see are live tweets and news streaming into MariaDB,

and the origin of where these tweets and news are occurring, their cities and the countries, are streaming into Postgres. At the same time, we have Spark Analytics running, doing sentiment analysis, highlighting negative sentiment in pink and highlighting positive sentiment in green. All right, so what? Let's add more load to the Linux One server.

So what you're going to see are three data feeds. You're going to see Postgres, MariaDB, and MongoDB. This is the icon for the S&P 500 financial data. We're going to start streaming financial data into MariaDB and we're going to start streaming trades, financial trades and their point of origins into Postgres. We're going to use Spark Analytics to analyze all this data in MongoDB. We're going to have live tweets and news streaming into MariaDB and we're going to have live tweets and news streaming into MariaDB.

And we're going to add another Spark Analytics service that determines how live news and tweet events influence financial markets. This entire infrastructure is written in Node.js. It's managed by Docker Swarm and Docker Compose. We're using Chef to provision applications into Docker containers. There's a Docker container for Postgres, a Docker container for MariaDB, and another Docker container for MongoDB. Spark Analytics is all running in Docker containers. So put another way, essentially what they're doing on some of these mainframes is they're taking all of the stuff that you might spin up on your own droplet or your own server,

and they're making it all run on one machine, and they're doing it all in crazy, crazy, crazy real time. In fact, I'm going to jump ahead a little bit just so that way we can kind of keep it interesting. And she pulls in real time sentiment and market data for the Greek market crash. This is happening live at LinuxCon while she's doing this. And what I want you to keep in mind is this system that she's demoing is being flooded with real market data.

And she's not giving an arbitrary query. She's giving very specific data queries where it has to search through the database. And what she gets from this is astounding. We want to drill into this, right? We want to use this information. So let's click on one of these points. And what you see here is aounding. We want to drill into this, right? We want to use this information. So let's click on one of these points. And what you see here is a globe. And each of these globes, remember, we save that geospatial data for some reason. Where are the trades occurring? So the red towers

is where selling is occurring. The green towers is where buying is occurring. The height of each tower is proportional to the volume of trades that are growing. I want to load up this Linux One server. I want to get millions of web events to billions events. And to do that, you have to type a financial crisis. Why not include the trades? I just want to make sure we understand this. We're talking about billions of events. Now, as somebody who processed all of the customers in Washington state's image transactions as they are cashing their checks and making transactions, the idea of billions transactions, and I used an IBM mainframe running system 390 to do this, this is blowing my mind. So here in Europe, well, you know, some of the European countries are selling the red towers,

but there are some, particularly, this is interesting, again, this is real data. In Germany, they're buying, they're seeing this as an opportunity. So let's spin it around. Let's go to India, okay? India, right here, the coastal cities, they are selling. New Delhi, they are selling. New Delhi, they are selling. They're kind of pessimistic about the Greek financial crisis. Let's go to China. I'm very interested in China. So China, Beijing, they see this as a buying opportunity. Here's those green towers. Shanghai is selling. Shanghai is selling. I just like Australia, right?

So here's Australia. You can't really see it that well. What you see are the coastal cities, and they are selling. But as you see, this is real-time trades going on at the same time. You see the amount of towers, buys, and sells proliferating. It's giving the world a mohawk. So let's go to North America. Let's look at the United States. I'll stop right there. So this to me is a fascinating illustration of where all of these day-to-day open source projects that we hear about can have a massive, massive impact.

And if we as Linux community, as the Linux community, if we cannot provide the backend storage to this, I worry about long-term relevancy as the platform continues to evolve into containers. As these applications, she said at the beginning of this presentation that all of the different programs are being delivered via container. She also said they're running on top of SUSE. SUSE. But if you extract all that out, like say you take the vision of the CoreOS project and you make the app spec such that you can run the same container on a Windows machine that has Hyper-V, on a Mac OS machine, Mac OS X machine, and on a Linux machine, and on a BSD machine. Well, if at the end of the day, what you really, really need is a super high performance, super well designed file system like ZFS, I'm not sure why you would choose Linux as the machine to run the container. Maybe I'm just being hyperbolic here. But to me, it seems like Linux is the most convenient platform because

that's where the development is happening the fastest. And people can just jump in and have an impact and deploy something today. But as this matures and the requirements of a container-based environment develop and become more obvious, I don't necessarily think Linux is in a good position to actually provide that. That's what I'm worried about. Anybody else in the Mumble room want to jump in?

Am I maybe just out of hand? I'm looking back at this and I'm thinking, as a system administrator, if I'm going to put all of my applications in containers, and then once I have them in containers, I can manage them very easily using a plethora of projects that I just saw at LinuxCon. And really after that, all I need is a good back-end storage. Then I'm pretty much set. Am I missing something here?

Am I getting out of hand? I mean, what am I not understanding? Nobody has any input on this? Really? Really? I don't buy that anybody's going to move their entire stack to a Windows machine. I mean, BSD would be the only

one that I think poses a threat. I think these problems are solvable. Ryan, let me ask you this, because you nailed it. I don't think they're going to go to Windows but I think it's a, I think these problems are solvable. Ryan, let me ask you this because you nailed it. I don't think they're going to go to Windows. I think that'd be crazy. What if though, what if FreeBSD is kind of, I mean, I am totally aware of the timeline of the projects, the existence of how long they've been around, the history of them. Just please go with this metaphor. What if FreeBSD, you know,

like public perception wise, is where Linux was in that Computer Chronicles clip I just played? What if today people are writing off FreeBSD as not all that applicable because we have this great superior operating system that's on all of these systems that has an obvious market advantage, with all of this momentum and money behind it, just like Windows had? What if FreeBSD is at that point? What if it's at the point where, like, God, for those people who have early vision, for those people that were early on Linux that saw this is the way that I should build my infrastructure, this is the system I should build my infrastructure on, this is the platform I should build my product on, what if that's where FreeBSD is at right now? And from those of us who are in the entrenched system, we would be the Windows users of the 90s right now.

What if we can't see it? Is that impossible? Well, that seems like the assumption is that Linux is standing still, you know, and we're not having things that are like BcacheFS, you know, that's an attempt to improve, you know, upon the file systems that exist under Linux. And also, if open, you know, free BSD wins, so what? I mean, it's still open source. Actually, Ryan, your first point is really well taken. your first point is really well taken. Bcache FS, Docker, Cgroups, all of that are actually an indication that Linux continues to be the spot where innovation happens.

In fact, so far, Linux has moved faster than the rest of the industry, hasn't it? And if you look at where it's gone, there's been other systems that have developed containers or zones or jails, and you know what? They haven't done a blip compared to what Docker and containers are doing today. That's a billion-dollar industry. Boom, right out of the gate. And I'll tell you what. It's all happening in Linux.

And the reason is because of the GPL. It all comes back, I believe, to the GPL. And I think that is the thing that will continue to be Linux's advantage for the long term that nothing else has. And it is, I think, since the beginning of Linux, and it is today, 24 years later, the GPL that will give it the heads up, that will always keep it ahead of everything else, that will always keep people, when you're investing in the next thing,

when you're planning on the next technology, when you're banking on the next platform, you're going to use Linux. And it's not because of anything else, but the GPL makes it possible. The GPL makes that code contribution have to happen. It makes that evolution have to come back to the source. And because that evolution has to come back to the source, it always has a little bit of a head advantage of anything else.

And I actually look at where we're at, and I think we're actually – regardless of file system, regardless of anything else, as much as I'm not a Richard Stallman guy, I'm not a GPL fanboy, but when it comes to our kernel, Linus made a very, very, very good choice when he chose the GPL version 2. And I think that continues to be our main advantage going forward. And as the market begins to change, and I very, very, very personally believe that after going to LinuxCon, after listening to the things that the leaders of the Linux Foundation said, after listening to the kernel panel not have a very good response to containers, after listening to them stumble over the fact that they miss C groups to begin with, after hearing all of that, it doesn't matter. Because the GPL, at the end of the day, I think keeps Linux kernel more competitive

than perhaps, say, BSD, even though they have a great file system, even though they have a great everything else, right? It doesn't matter because if you base something off of the most competitive product in the market today, you have to contribute it back. That momentum just continues to build upon itself. That's what's beautiful about the GPO. And there you go. Get it out of here. So anyways, that's why I left linux con and it took me a couple

of days i'll be honest with you we recorded the linux action show and and i hadn't come to a conclusion on this yet because i was like shit what if the people responsible for being like the flag holders of linux the linux foundation they're the people that put on linux con they're the people that called a container con they're the ones that decided on LinuxCon. They're the people that called it ContainerCon. They're the ones that decided the theme. What if the quote-unquote stewards of Linux or the flag holders or whatever you want to call them or the stakeholders, what if they're the very people ushering in the irrelevance of the platform itself? I know this sounds really hyperbolic, but I'm just thinking from like watching market trends from a very, very long term. Containerization, and maybe you have to be at LinuxCon itself, but it was… from like a watching market trends from a very, very long term containerization. And maybe you have to be at Linux con itself, but it was,

it was in the air. It was unbelievable. Like, uh, the, the people that weren't delivering their applications via a doc container yet were apologizing for it. They're like,

yeah, we're really sorry. We're going to have that done real soon. It's like number one, it's number one on our list. Like they were apologizing for the fact that you can't get their application in a Docker container. I mean it was blowing my mind. I've not seen anything like this.

And so I was like, geez, what if we go to the trouble of putting everything in containers and then we just abstract away Linux altogether? Because these systems, these management systems, and there's, you know, I don't know, 55 booths, literally, that are all showing different Docker management solutions, and all of them are basically trying to solve the same problem, and all of them abstract you away from Linux as much as possible. They abstract you away from applications. You could become an administrator of these systems never having ever heard the word RPM, become an administrator of these systems, never having ever heard the word RPM,

deb or package in your entire life. And you could deploy an entire application stack on a web server all around the world. But why is that a bad thing? I mean, we've thought a problem of, you know, for the longest time, people said, I don't want to write for Linux, because I don't know, I won't run on everything. You know know there are all these different distributions and it's really you know kind of fragmented and so a lot of companies said they didn't know what to target and it it probably was a cap uh uh you know a way to get out of creating something for linux but um but now that they have these containers and i think they're only going to become more relevant over time, continue to become more relevant, this is something that people can target Linux as an entire platform with a container and not worry about the ins and outs of developing these packages for every single distribution.

Joe, I don't know if you have any thoughts on containers and Docker, but sometimes I got the feeling and the opinion. So I'm not exaggerating when I say there's probably nearly 50 booths that all were trying to solve the problem of managing Docker containers. And I started to think to myself, maybe it's just a mess. Maybe it's not a manageable problem. Maybe it's really just one of these, it's going to become like, it's going to become the issue of when you ship an application and you statically link the binaries and all the libraries, you have to continually update that separately from the entire system. And all of a sudden becomes a complete management nightmare. Joe, do you have any thoughts on maybe if it's just all hype right now? Or as a Luddite yourself, I'm just curious, because you know, that's your

slang. That's your, that is after all, your brand. Well, it just feels almost like the dot-com bubble to me, all this Docker and containerization hype. And you go to these conferences, and it's just what everybody's talking about. And maybe I'm wrong, and maybe it really is the future, and there is some real benefit to it. But to me, it feels like the way we were doing things and are currently doing things isn't necessarily broken so why do we need to to do it in such a different way so i don't know but that's my whole shtick isn't it that i you know i'm sitting here using xfce

that's why i asked you yeah yeah yeah uh wimpy I think maybe it's perhaps I've walked away and I've just seen a little glimpse of the enterprise. Maybe there could be a mix of traditional and this new fangled next generation container delivery system. What do you think? with a conversation about file systems and that Linux was not competing with ZFS. With all of the options of file systems we have, we don't have something that competes with ZFS. But then there's that presentation there which shows some fantastic analytics using Postgres. Margo, et cetera, yeah.

When we had to change our storage back-end at work, I couldn't in good conscience build a solution around Linux for that. It wasn't the right tool for the job. So we still

have all of our processing running on Linux, and it's backed by clusters of Postgres and it runs clusters using Celery and all of that is Linux. But the storage backend we use was a TrueNAS or is a TrueNAS. And that's obviously, you know, free BSD with ZFS. BSD with ZFS. And big enterprises may not know about TrueNAS and BSD, and they would go to perhaps NetApp.

You know, they're the big enterprise storage server. Now, you'll pay a hefty whack for their solutions. And I went along to their sales, you know, demo day, and it's all very impressive, but it doesn't do anything that TrueNAS doesn't do the true nas is a fraction of the price like one tenth of the price for an equivalently specced system so the enterprises today will be using netapp and give it time linux will have a file system that does compete with the likes of ZFS and NetApp. And when that time comes, it will be the new Docker.

The fantastic new file system for Linux will be the new hot thing in some years' time. And in the meantime, people are already solving their enterprise storage solutions, either by using Linux and XFS on LVMs, or some are already using their enterprise storage solutions, either by using Linux and XFS on LVMs, or some are already using B3FS. But I think the file system will be the new hotness in a few years' time. Can I just ask, what's with the

dispute between how it's pronounced? I thought it was pretty conclusively pronounced ButterFS. Nobody wants to say? I know half of you are calling it B-tree. I realize it's based on a B-tree file system. I mean, I get that, but don't the developers call it ButterFS?

Yeah, so it is a B-tree file system, and B-treeFS is easier to say than the sort of the bastardized ButterFS, so it's just easier to say BtreeFS. I'll give it. I like it. And actually, the other reason I like it is because I think it's actually good to remind the folks listening what it's based on, because those of us who were Novell Network admins

back in the three days also remember Btree-based file systems and how many effing problems we had with them. This is not a new file system hierarchy method. And those of us who had to administer network systems, right? That's a good point. Yes. I know.

It's funny because, you see, people listen and they're like, oh, Chris had file system problems. He doesn't know what he's been doing. Hello, I've been using B-tree based file systems probably since before you've been using computers, most of you out there listening. I had to administer network systems way back in the day when people still use DOS, and they had an autoexec bat file that mapped a drive to a NetWare server that had a B-tree based file system.

And you know what? I specifically had to create a file system checker when that server rebooted, which, to be honest with you, only happened about every 500 days because NetWare was pretty baller with the uptime. And then it would have to check the file system and do a whole bunch of fixes. And so when BunderFS came around or BtreeFS came around, I thought to myself, and my first thought, I'm not even kidding you, this is years and years and years ago, like Joe said, back when Brian and I were still doing the Linux Action Show.

And maybe I even said this on air. I doubt I did because it sounded like a dumbass thing to say. But now in retrospect, I think I was right. Really? A P3 file system? Is that a good idea? Because I remember that being real bad. I remember that being real bad.

Like, it was so bad, you guys, that I was happy to move people over to NTFS. Okay? Yeah. That's how mad I was. It was realS. Okay. Yeah. That's how mad I was. It was real bad. Okay. I was like, yeah, this NT4 server would be better. And for a little while it was better, but then I shook that off too. Yeah. All right. So let's move on. And I actually love this next thing because it came from somebody in the community real close to us and it involves somebody

who's made massive contributions to the open source community. But first I want to tell you about our friends over at Linux Academy. Go over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and get the unplugged discount. That's linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. This is a platform to learn more about Linux and all of the sort of open source

platform tools around that. I mean, that's everything. As new things crop up, these guys are advocates of open source platform tools around that, I mean, that's everything. So as new things crop up, these guys are advocates of open source. They're Linux users themselves. So they pretty much jump on it right away. That's one of the great things about the Linux Academy platform. And that's why it kind of keeps its value a little sharper than pretty much all the other platforms because open source and Linux aren't like a bullet point on like the,

oh, let's make sure we cover how to do Nginx. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. As Mr. Obama says, hey, listen, it's actually what they're all about. They have over 1700 self-paced courses. You can go there and learn, get deep seven plus Linux distributions to choose from. They've just rolled out a new certified system administration prep course. It'll be going live very soon. And it is the biggest and best they've ever done. And what I love about it is they took people that are super passionate about Linux and open source, which I can completely

connect with that. And then they say, okay, well, we have friends that are educators, and we know people that are developers, and let's create the Linux Academy platform. And so when you go there, you can choose from seven plus Linux distributions, and then that, when you choose your distro, say it's like Ubuntu or Debian or, I don't know, CentOS or whatever, you choose that, and then all when you choose your distro say it's like ubuntu or debian or i don't know sent to us or whatever you choose that and then all the courseware automatically adjust to

match that distro and and i can tell you when we were trying to come up with how to linux like how to like even maybe sort of semi accomplish that like hell i it was it was an unbelievable task and and so i'm i super respect that they even just accomplished that part of it. But then they tied it so that way in the courseware when you need a virtual server, they spin that virtual server up on demand. And that virtual server matches the distro you chose for the courseware. So everything from top to bottom, like say you went Debian, everything top to bottom is Debian. And then they do scenario-based labs. So you actually deploy the entire software stack you're going to learn. And so when you go to do it in production, it's not the first time you've done it.

That's so critical. I really like that. Plus, if you're doing any of the Amazon stuff, like any of the AWS stuff, and they have a lot of AWS stuff, you don't have to go rent an AWS rig and accidentally pay a whole bunch to Amazon for just learning. It's just included with your Linux Academy subscription. So I want you to go to linuxacademy.com. Check them out. They've got a lot of great technologies,

and they have these nuggets that even if you're a little busy and you've got two minutes, you can still get value out of your Linux Academy subscription. That's what those nuggets do. It's pretty cool. And it's like back up your rig or figure out how to do something really nice in SSH or finally figure out how to use IP tables. Come on.

You know you need to do it. It's all over there at Linux Academy. And those nuggets are really nice for a quick deep dive. So if you're like, gosh, this week or whatever, I just am really busy and I don't feel like I'm getting anything out of my subscription, those nuggets are available to you. They also have an availability planner. And you just go in there and say, okay, this week, you know, you got to be kind of organized, but it's kind of slick because you say this week on Monday, I'm going to have X amount of time. I won't have any time Tuesday. I won't have any time Wednesday. I'm going to watch TechSnap on Thursday. And then I'll have

a couple hours in the afternoon. And then Friday, because I'm a geek, I'm not going out. So I'm going to have like all Friday evening. And so then you just go in there and you tell it how much time you have available and it'll automatically generate courseware that matches your availability. And including like reminders like, hey, bro, you're going to have a thing on Thursday. You better study up. That's kind of nice. And then last but not least, it's not really a feature like they would put on a bullet point. But their community is stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting community members.

So if you're having kind of a low moment or if you have something to celebrate, there's a lot of your friends over there that will celebrate with you. And a lot of times you'll see me like I'll retweet on Linux Academy when a Jupyter Broadcasting member gets their certification because they'll often tweet it out and things like that. It's really cool. So – and I think this is the kind of thing that I would love to see our resources go behind. but I would love to see our resources go behind. There's a lot of mainstream, larger educational resources online that they really have a limp approach to their Linux and open source support. It's just a feature for them. And screw them because they don't understand how important it actually is.

Linux Academy, they close that uncanny gap. I think you should go check them out. They're really cool. And they also support this show. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. And I'm glad that they're rolling out all that new stuff.

Just go check it out. You'll have your Linux Foundation Certified System Administration course online, probably sooner than later. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Big thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. All right, so he didn't join us today, but producer Q5Sys wrote up a blog post about his run-in meeting with Eric S. Raymond.

He got a chance to chat with him for an hour or so at Foscon 2015. And he did a blog post about it and it got some traction online. It got some R Linux recognition and a few other places. And in there, he linked a Patreon page for supporting Eric S. Raymond. And he's now got up to 40 patrons. But what was kind of weird is the backlash online. And, Popey, I know that you saw this. And other folks saw it.

Our friends from the Elementary OS Project saw it. A lot of people thought that it was sort of ridiculous, the idea to pay for somebody who's contributing to open source because that's the whole idea of free software, even if it's something really important like NTP. And I look at this and I think this is kind of a little sad. Eric has got 40 patrons and yet he's contributed to some of the most significant code in many popular operating systems.

And so, Poppy, do you remember – can you capture the conversation that you saw on Google+, because I know you commented on there. And the controversy was kind of sort of being brewed. Yeah, it was Daniel Foray from The Elementary kind of posted that he was sad that someone asking for donations via Patreon, that someone asking for donations via Patreon, when that was promoted on our Linux on Reddit, there were people dogpiling and saying how terrible this was and the guy should just get a job or whatever. Wow, wow, really? They shouldn't.

But from my perspective, if that's the model that he wants to use in order to put a roof over his head and pay for food for his cat, then that's the the model that he wants to use in order to you know put a roof over his head and pay for food for his cat then that's that's his decision i think it's i personally think it's quite sad that um there are people out there making you know don't take this personally there are people out there making video blogs right which is stuff that is somewhat ephemeral you know that video about how awesome those speakers are or that video about how great that game is or whatever is very ephemeral and the stuff that the stuff that eric is making is much more permanent and the same goes for any any

developer of open source software is way more permanent you know if you contribute something especially something as significant as ntp or maybe you contribute to mozilla or something else that's open source and and widely used that's a that's an investment and people long after you're gone long after your contribution is finished will continue to benefit from that work and it's quite sad that we value a bunch of videos posted online over and above a piece of software that we might use under the covers. I do follow what you're saying there, but let's be honest. That's sort of like saying that the documentaries of Abraham Lincoln are invaluable or the documentaries of the birth of the computer industry

are invaluable because... I'm not saying they're not valuable. I personally back some pretty wacky Kickstarter campaigns just like anyone else. But I think it's a bit sad that someone who is doing such good work... How is code any less infamerable than content? Because the NTP project's going to be replaced.

The code he's working on may very well never even be used. It may be superseded by a completely different project. How many times do we have conversations about, you know, in the context of a security vulnerability in some piece of software, like, you know, some mail server or SSH or OpenSSL or something like that, and everyone then sits back and takes a look and says, oh, my God, that code's been then sits back and takes a look and says, oh my God, that code's been there for 20 years.

That's what I mean. Someone can make an investment of their time that might take them months of their time, 20 years ago, and that's still being used today. That video that someone made about, okay, those interesting videos that you post at the end of some of your shows, they're interesting, but they're not a massive investment in the future in comparison to something like OpenSSL or contributions to NTP, in my opinion. I actually think that's a pretty common perception. In fact, I think I'm pretty much in the minority here. But I'll tell you, Poppy, what it sounds to me like is it sounds like idealizing developers.

Like they create some sort of unbelievable contribution to society that cannot be replicated. In reality, it gets quickly replaced. It's often flawed and not very good. Take SystemD-NTPD. Take any of the new NTP projects being created by any of the BSD projects. What Eric is creating is absolutely useful code and very, very, very much a contribution to the greater open source community.

That said, I mean, things come and go with code, just like things come and go with content. I don't know if you can attribute a value from one over the other, but I will say in terms of the one metric you could maybe value impact is user use, right? Oftentimes, code created something like an infrastructure like the NTP client is used by a great more number of people than content is watched by those people or it is used in a much more important scenario. So you could argue those kinds of value differences. I mean you could say this particular video or documentary had 50 million people watch it. But you could equally argue that this piece of NTP software has 50 million users. But those 50 million users but those 50

million users are using it every day all day in a very critical way it's not it's not a one-off it's not a one-off you know visits the cinema go and see that thing it maybe touched you it's maybe something that you know will influence your life in the future but I doubt it's gonna any any you know piece of cinematic um you know is is going to influence 50 million people every single day of their life right yeah um and i don't want to pick on videos i'm just trying to make the point that some developers sometimes get a bit of a bum deal but what i also think is that when daniel raised this i think he was a little bit glass half empty-empty pessimistic because I think he believes that RLinux on Reddit is a reflection of the community in general,

and I absolutely don't think it is. Yeah, I agree there. And Rotten, though, do you think there's a... I feel like there's a pretty major difference between the user base back in an open-source developer who maybe contributes to several projects and a company who would only support one project in particular. Here, you can come work for us, and you can contribute to this project, NTP, but only that.

Don't you see a difference there, Rod, or do you not? No, because if that person is working on multiple projects and is benefiting the computer in multiple ways, the community, I mean, then that's actually a negative. But if they're saying you need to work on this, but they're already working on that and they're benefiting the community in multiple ways, it's better to pay them and to say, here, continue doing what you're doing. We appreciate your efforts. And with like NTP, for example, that's 50 million users that are using it every day that have no idea they're using it and have never heard of it. So he's getting no gratitude and he gets no money.

He gets nothing. He doesn't even get a thank you most of the time. But all these people are reliant on it and the same thing when when shell shock happens and heartbleed happens why are these companies like google and redhead they're reliant on these people and these projects helping these people why is it a negative that when the community rallies around someone and says thank you we want to we want to sell you we appreciate you they get crapped on yeah that is it's true you look at the uh exactly the case when something when the shit hits the fan with a project and there's a security vulnerability and everyone rallies around and you look on something like hacking news great long thread about how

oh you know everyone wringing their hands and how lamentable it is that this piece of software is only maintained by that one guy in his basement. Right. And everyone starts throwing money at the screen. But then when someone goes out and actually asks up front and says, hey, I'm that guy who's maintaining that thing that you quite you use quite a lot and you quite like. Could you please give me some money? Everyone's like, I get lost. Right. Right. Yeah. Interesting. So, Ryan, I want to give you a chance to Everyone's like, ah, get lost. Right, right. Yeah, interesting. So, Ryan, I wanted to give you a chance to chime. What are your thoughts on this story? So you guys know that I'm in the middle of a Kickstarter, and we've gotten shamed for asking for money to develop our open source project.

And I think that people need to just shut the hell up and stop shaming open source projects and open these people you know are doing it out of the kindness of their hearts you know and and they have to pay the bills just like anybody else and nobody's holding a gun to someone's head and saying you have to give to this guy's patreon page right you know it's just not setting up a paywall or anything to use ntp so, you know, they don't have to go after him for asking for money. They just don't have to support him if they don't want to. If this was

NTP on an Apple, on an iPhone, then it would be an in-app purchase to get the clock to be right most of the time. Nice. Very nice. Wimpy, you have a little familiarity with community contributions. What are your thoughts on this story? Well, I do. My first question was for Ryan. Where are you getting this pushback and reticence? What medium, you know, is it Reddit? Is it Google Plus? Yeah, a lot of it's Reddit and some Google Plus,

but I hate to bash on Reddit because I actually like Reddit. But yeah, a lot of it's Reddit. It's interesting because I haven't come out and said, you know, I want your money or anything like that. I've placed some options for people to choose to donate to ubuntu mate and my feeling is that the open source community or the ubuntu community or the linux community because i'm not quite sure who who my audience is exactly it's probably a mixture of all of those have been overwhelmingly generous and i've not seen or heard any um negative remarks about the way we've gone about requesting funding for service and infrastructure.

But it's a bit different for you, though, because you started Ubuntu Mate while you're currently in paid employment. So you've got a roof over your head and your kids are being fed whereas uh someone like elementary they're trying to raise money in order to pay developers to do the project we don't even nathan dyer who's trying to make an app or esr who's trying to pay his bill we don't really even you know where i'm confused because what difference we know i'm sorry i'm just we don't have to even abstract make where the money's going? This is happening today to Jupyter Broadcasting. I have for a very long time, I have had a vision that I would love to have the primary source of funding for this network be user contributions.

So that way I can be extremely selective with sponsors. I can let them go if I need to, et cetera, et cetera. And I can make changes that maybe are not appealing to a sponsor, but are appealing to audience members if I truly believe it's best for the show. And so I've set up a Patreon for the network at patreon.com slash today. And since I converted the Linux action show, and since for the last three weeks, I've been experimenting with different formats because not because my co-host has pressured me into it as which is apparently the new domino have narrative online or uh because uh it's too

expensive to do video because i'm still delivering everything as video uh or because we're open source zealots but because i truly believe with the current available technology i can make the best the best possible show in this one particular way and And I'm trying to think, well, geez, I've been doing this show for 10 years. What do I need? What kind of changes do I make to be able to do it for the next 10 years? So that way I don't burn the F out and I can make the show not just something that's kind of like a version of itself, but like even better than itself. What kind of changes do I need to make?

And I make those kinds of changes because I know as somebody who's been doing this show for 10 years, intimately, every single hour of the day I think about this show. I know what's best for this show. And what I get for that kind of change is I get a massive drop off in support on my Patreon. And not only that, it comes at a time when I'm trying to ramp up support for other open source projects to fund them to improve video production under Linux. And the support drops out from underneath me. So there is very, very, very, very much a downside to going to your community for support because when you as the creator, and Wimpy, you got lucky this time that you chose to

make a decision that's better, i.e. the drop of Ubuntu Software Center, but when you as a creator go to make a change that you know intimately because you are familiar with every single aspect of your show because you think of every second of the day you think of that show. You know it's best for it. You get punished for it. And you have to continue forward regardless. And it makes me completely rethink going to my community for funding. It makes me completely rethink that.

And it makes me rethink all of the emails I get all the time offering sponsorship opportunities because they won't bail on me when I go to make something that I know makes the product better. And I know it's the same exact scenario that open source projects face today because you watch them try to make decisions that are best for the project and then their community punishes them for it. And then when you take somebody like Eric who goes out there and says, you know what, for a long time I've tried to fit into different corporate cultures, but it just doesn't work for me, but I still want to contribute. I still want to make a difference. I still want to make a dent in the open source universe. And he

goes out there and he asks for support and he gets shamed for it. I think there's also another aspect to it in the sense that there's a lot more people who agree with him and think that he should be paid, but they're not as vocal. Yeah, maybe so, right? Do you think the people that are – Go ahead, Winfrey. You hear the yelling a lot more than you hear, good job, congratulations, thank you for doing this thing and helping us do all these great features and utilities and stuff.

Do you think that people that are criticizing open source developers actively going out and seeking funding to effectively pay for their time and effort are people that think that because you're developing free software, it doesn't cost time and money to create and develop it? Because I wouldn't be, that to me is too easy of an answer. Because it basically, it assumes that people, the consumers are dumb. And the consumers are very aware that it takes time and effort to make code and to make software. They're very aware it takes time and effort to make content. What they don't have is they don't have the entire picture. They have what you are delivering today. They have what works for them today and a concept of that and why it's so great, and that's why they chose you to begin with is because it meets all of those things.

But what they do not understand is maybe perhaps a zoomed out 50,000 foot view of that you have. And, and, and, and I, I, I really, I really hate doing this on a Linux podcast, but, uh, I, I mean, he's dead now, so let's just, let's just do it. I mean, I think Steve Jobs was kind of best at this. He obviously often knew what was better for the consumer in a lot of cases before the consumer did. And I don't mean today, like with all the crap they do now, but I mean, like when they launched the first iMac, I was working at a school district that had to deploy like a couple of hundred of those things. And I remember the really, really big controversy was this new universal serial bus. We didn't even call it, we didn't call it USB back then. It was this new universal serial bus and nobody had it and nothing worked with it. And we thought Apple had screwed us because they had just abandoned

the ADB connector that all of our keyboards, all of our mice that we had spent thousands of dollars for the last 10 years on that we had hundreds of used to connect. All of our printers, everything. We had adapters. We could even do networking with these ports. And we thought that Apple was crazy because not another, not a single other computer on the market had this universal serial bus thing with this weird flat connector. And we thought we were screwed because we bought all

these machines and we didn't realize what a mistake we had made. And it was a huge controversy. And now you flash forward and USB is completely ubiquitous. It is completely obvious. It is a no-brainer. And it is that kind of like balls insight to like, I'm going to ship this thing even though I know today's market doesn't understand why. And I'm not trying to equate any of that to what I'm doing today, or what the other projects are doing today. But what I'm trying to illustrate the fact of the matter is, a lot of times, the current market be a distro consumer, be it a podcast listener, or a computer buyer, we have, we are very much aware, you know, we like our Lenovo's,

we like our Lenovo keyboards with our track points that are scientifically proven to be more accurate than the track pad. And now the Lenovo is going to make a retro unit. That's great because that's what we like. We're going to make something more. Just like Hollywood makes all of the same dumb movies over and over again. That's why we have Spider-Man three times over again. Because we like what we like and we just want to stick to that. But sometimes things have to evolve forward.

And the problem is it's not always, always great to be community funded when that happens. And I look, I'm taking my personal experience and I think, boy, I think some open source projects could be handicapped by this because you kind of get paralyzed because essentially what it encourages you to do is just maintain the status quo. Just try to maintain the status quo and make people as happy as possible with the status quo, but there's no growth in the status quo. Just like, and Wimpy, that's why when a couple of weeks ago when you came on here and you were like, you're like, no, I am staying behind the decision about the Ubuntu Software Center,

I walked away from that episode really respecting your decision based on my experience as a content creator and knowing how that can go. When you take something away because you know the end result will be better, it can be very controversial. Now, I think this particular one, the momentum was behind you. But now you're a couple of weeks into it. Do you have any perspective on the the entire which would it was actually kind of big news for a moment in time i know it was bonkers wasn't it but um yes the the groundswell of opinion in the ubuntu mate community and probably outside it to some extent as well is that it was the right thing to do i'm getting a lot of requests

now asking if synaptic is going to be the default so what i'm learning from that is is that at the moment there is no simple way to install synaptic like there is to install the ubuntu software app grid for example and maybe in the next version, I will add Synaptic in there as an option for advanced users to satisfy, you know, that request. Advanced users don't need a one-click button, but I think by putting it in there, it will appease them. Now, Ryan, can you really blame, you know, projects like Ubuntu that put up a donation slider or Elementary OS that make a recommended donation before you download when they get such pushback on crowdfunding? That's exactly the point I was making. I actually used to be on the other side of this, but as time has gone on and I've contributed to more projects, I realized

that you, if people are really negative when people like, uh, Ubuntu or elementary try to go to crowdfunding and then they have to be ready for the, um, fallout from that, which is them trying to find other ways to monetize their project. And oftentimes, if they make some kind of, you know, partnership with a company or they try to sell software that's not maybe the core software, like add-ons and stuff, they get pushback as well. So it's a lose-lose situation. So I guess in the end, the creator should just go for

whatever they feel like is the right way to pay for their contribution. And yeah, I get it. Some people do contribute in their free time, and that's great. But some projects need more love than that. Some projects need more focus than that to compete with the proprietary software solutions that are... Oh, sorry. Go ahead.

Sorry, Ryan. Finish off. The proprietary solutions that are what? The proprietary solutions that are out there. Sometimes some of these open source projects couldn't be competitive if they didn't have people working on them nearly full time. Ryan, it was making me... Actually, the one I was thinking of when you were talking was Ardour a little bit

and how Ardour has community funding but also kind of gets pulled around by commercial interests from time to time because that's really where it makes the most of its money, I think. And that's a weird dichotomy for an open source project to find itself in because you kind of get pulled around by different priorities, I suspect. Right, and it's like what you said. You know, if these open source projects fight the same thing they sometimes they get you know sweetheart deals from companies that use their product but they say you know here's what we want you to focus on and they you know if they want to be paid if they want to pay their rent and you know they have to focus on those things and their user bases might be upset about it but that's what's paying the bills yeah yeah. I think that's fair enough, though.

I mean, patrons have been doing that for artisans for hundreds of years. So I don't have a problem with somebody who's prepared to financially back a project to hold some sway over what the priorities of that project might be. That's a good point. It is a longstanding historical tradition in a sense, isn't it? But what about things like the Core Infrastructure Initiative? I mean, shouldn't they perhaps be expanding that, having more companies paying into this pot, that then is kind of shared out more fairly amongst all open source projects,

not necessarily just the core infrastructure? Yeah. I mean, at a larger scale, these really critical open source projects are being taken advantage of by many, many large corporations. Now, to be fair, the core infrastructure project has quite a big list of contributors and they just announced a new badge program to kind of try to give some sort of certification or whatever to different projects. They're working. I mean they're moving closer to that, Joe. But point well taken is at a certain point, why does it fall on the responsibility of us when there's companies out there like Google, Amazon, Apple, and even Microsoft that are shipping projects and products and making billions of dollars off of them?

that are shipping projects and products and making billions of dollars off of them. But that's also missing the point that there are other organizations that do exist, like SPI, where companies can submit money and donate money to them, or users can donate money to them, and they will decide who needs the money at the right time and stuff like that, and they will help before you. So you just have one organization, just like the core infrastructure thing. The SPI is essentially that, but for a lot more – they're for distros, they're for regular projects. Anyone who actually wants to do it can just join the SPI and get that. But I would also say that the distro point is a little bit different because when a distro –

for some reason, some people look like distros are getting – when they ask for money, that they have more work involved. And in some cases, they really don't. But the utilities and the tools that people use to build the distros just get ignored. So I think it's easier for – if you have a 1,000-foot view and you see the distro, you're like, oh, they're doing a lot more work. I feel more inclined to give them money rather than this one little utility over here and they kind of get ignored. Yeah, and Looks Familiar points out that in some cases, perhaps the backers know better than the creators. I don't know if I always agree with that, but I guess it definitely is worth balancing.

And I kind of, you know, in the case of our patrons, I kind of look at the people who comment there as sort of like an advisory board, not people who necessarily know more or less, but people who are maybe slightly more invested so their opinion holds more weight. That's kind of how I look at those folks. And I think that's kind of an – that's why I think – I mean Eric S. Raymond is one example. The Elementary OS Project is another example.

Mateo Project is another example. But I mean there are different projects on there where I think things like Patreon make a lot of sense. And you could use people that are slightly more invested as an advisory board. And I don't know. I think there's something there. But there's a stigma still after all of these years. Not a topic that is new to this network at all.

After all these years, that stigma is – I'm surprised when it comes up, I guess. And maybe that's what I take away from this, is after all these years in 2015, I saw it in that thread and I was like, wow. Really? We're still debating this? Really? It's like our version of the political debates that never end.

But I would love, love, love to hear your thoughts on this. Go over to linuxactionshow.reddit.com. Actually, any topic you think would be worth discussing with our virtual lug, I would love some really good meaty discussion topics, linuxactionshow.reddit.com. You'll also find a feedback thread for episode 107 over there, and you can contribute your thoughts to this episode. And don't forget, every single episode has an RSS feed in different formats. We've got, I think, HD.

I don't know. We've got video at least. We've got the MP3s. We've got, I think, HD. I don't know. We've got video, at least. We've got the MP3s. We've got your OGS with your Vorbuses. And we also got yours. There is a way, actually, to get WebM. If you're really super savvy, I bet you can figure it out. I'm not going to tell you, though, because it's a horrible format that should die in a fiery, fiery pit of hell.

And it costs me a lot of money. It takes a ton of time. And I hate it it but if you're really super savvy you could probably figure it out uh go over to jupiter broadcasting.com why do i say that because all of our episodes are embedded with html5 video and uh well there's to make that work you got to use webm don't you but we have rss rss feeds and torrent rss feeds available of all of our episodes we have those linked in the show notes. Also links to everything we talked about including the full version of

that IBM mainframe video is in the show notes and I encourage you to check that out because the demo kind of just keeps getting nerdier and nerdier as it goes on. And what I love about it is it's super obvious. She's not doing like easy demo data feeds. She's full on plugging that thing full of

really esoteric, crazy requests and getting amazing results. And you can watch the rest of the video. We have that embedded in the show notes. Also, I encourage you to check out the Linux Action Show's highlight of our trip to LinuxCon 2015. I have that linked in the show notes. I also just submitted that to

the Linux Action Show subreddit. It's an extraction from this last week's episode and we went down to Seattle and we really wanted to create what the experience would be like. A lot of times we go to these cons and we don't know if we can really answer if it's something that's worth your money.

You know, the flight, the travel, the ticket. Is it really worth your time? And it's something we've always wanted to be able to answer for you. And so we tried to do that in our coverage in this week's episode of Linux Action Show. So I extracted that component of the show and posted it.

I'll have a link in the show notes. It's also on the subreddit, linuxactionshow.reddit.com and it's on the Jupyter Broadcasting SoundCloud account. Yeah, we have one of those and you can listen to the entire thing. Hey, don't forget Linux Unplugged is live on Tuesdays. Go to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar

to get that converted to your local time zone. I'd love to hear your feedback, jupyterbroadcasting.com slash contact, or the subreddit that I've mentioned like a dozen times. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged, and I'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you. Good times, good times. All right.

So jbtitles.com, everybody. Let's go pick our title. jbtitles.com. So any other closing thoughts, Mumble Room room on the any other thing we talked about i have one about um the you know that they're asking for money thing yeah um like so in this case daniel foray is right it's ridiculous that these people are getting mad about asking for money But it really annoys me when people correlate what he did and what Elementary did to what this guy is doing because they're completely wrong. The reason people got mad at Elementary has nothing to do with him asking for money. It's the fact that they insulted everyone before they asked for money.

Well, that's true, I guess. Well, in your opinion. Yes, but yes, insults, yes. Calling people cheaters is pretty insulting. Yes, that's true, I guess. Well, in your opinion. Yes, but yes, insults, yes. Calling people cheaters is pretty insulting. Yes, you're right, you're right. And also never having the balls to admit they were wrong and apologize. Right, right. That's more important because they have the balls to say ridiculous stuff like that,

but they never actually go, well, we were wrong, sorry. You do kind of have to have the balls to be willing to backtrack if you do say something that's dumb publicly. You know, it was kind of perfect that Joe was here on the episode where we played a clip from Linus from the 90s. Right? Huh? Kind of fit with your whole shtick, Joe. That was great. All right.

JBtitles.com. Let's pick our title. Insane in the mainframe is up there. Should we do something? I mean, it's also Linux's birthday. We could do something around that mean, it's also Linux's birthday. We could do something around that old Linux clip that we played. Butter FS, better than B-Tree.

But I can't believe it's not Butter FS. Oh, of course there has to be butter jokes. Man, those... The I can't believe it's not butter people have gotten so much freaking mileage out of their advertising campaign. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely insane. All right. So here's our top titles. You guys got to go.

The votes are wow. Wow. Whoa. We have like a, jeez Louise, we have like a 20 vote spread here. So you guys got to zero these in a little bit. I'm not going with I can't believe it's not ButterFS. We can't do that one. So that's our top one right now.

But come on. Come on. I like Insane in the Mainframe. That's pretty good. That's tied. Happy Birthday Linux. Freedom isn't free. That's not bad. I kind of like that one. I'm going to vote that one. It's a

buck-oh-five. And Linux in the 90s isn't bad either. I like Linux in the 90s and Freedom isn't free, but Insane in the Mainframe, I wouldn't be too upset if that was our title, but jbtitles.com, suggest.com vote it up hello everybody i like freedom isn't free because you know it's very global and it also is like um south park thing hey chris yep i would like to plug something real quick uh for those of you following mycroft there are only two of the reduced price early bird mycroft extendables left only two for 129 their

normal price is 149 and then we've got still have 427 of the 99 dollar mycrofts left so uh if anybody is considering getting one of the extendable units, that's the ones with all the ports exposed on the back. There are only two of them at the reduced price left. So if somebody wants to get over there and grab those, I don't think they're going to make it through the rest of the day. Okay. I'm so mad you're trying to plug your open source solutions right now.

Hey, Ham, aren't you going to a Ham convention this weekend? Do you want to plug that at all? Oh, well, it's not necessarily a Ham convention. There's a jet boat races. I'm going to help with communications. Oh, you're doing Ham radio at a jet boat convention? Okay. Alright, never mind. Nobody

go to that then. That's horrible. That's where my audio editor is going to be this weekend as a jet boat convention, everybody. Future JB jet boat. JB3 Mobile Studio in the works.