LINUX Unplugged - Episode 58: Cult of Community | LUP 58

Episode Date: September 17, 2014

Is the role of “Community Manager” a fraud perpetrated by companies trying to exploit the fruits for their community? We debate if things are really that black and white, and how a community advocate can make all the difference. Then we discuss your systemd follow up, the various desktops touch screen features, Microsoft buying Minecraft, and the recent purchase of openSUSE’s parent company Attachmate.

Okay, I had a pre-show topic. I just thought since it's not directly Linux related, we probably shouldn't do it in the main show. But I want to talk to you guys about it because you got to wonder if there's going to be anything that changes for Linux. You have to hope not, but everybody saw the news that Microsoft purchased Mojang for $2.5 billion and Notch is on his way out the door already. and you know you guys probably also saw because it was grabbed in the last subreddit comments that Microsoft explicitly said they don't have any plans to change to change where

they deliver to Mac, PC Xbox, Playstation and mobile they didn't actually say Linux do you think I'm being paranoid? oh it's definitely an elephant in the room they didn't thought think about it. I think I wrote that.

But to be fair, I think Microsoft is trying to become what they were before. A software company. That means producing software for whatever it's selling. So you think it would be silly

for them to pull it pull it up yeah i think so right i hope so so uh the whole thing is if their goal and the only way to make what they're doing right now totally microsoft centric so that it can't run that on other operating systems would be to actually to do to do to actually undo what they've done that's good and what is to java standard and to murder it and do stupid things like instead of doing it from a canonical url to something or canonical uh connection to something which is just assuming and going backwards from where you are and then finding something else in the file system they'd have to go and like state some kind of awful way to go say oh look for the c drive well so uh that's so before we go like way down in the weeds that's

way down there don't you think it's more likely that uh what would happen is microsoft will continue to deliver minecraft as we know it today to all the places that Minecraft is shipped but then maybe in the future there could be like themed versions of Minecraft or specifically Minecraft I don't want to call them spin-offs but I can't think of a better term that maybe would be exclusive to the Xbox platform or

Windows Mobile first. This is all about Windows Mobile. This is all about Windows Mobile, nothing else. They need a great game for Windows Mobile. They need the killer app for Windows. They need the number one seller on iOS. And when the kid goes into the phone shop with the parents and the parents have got the money and they say,

right, which phone do you want? The question is, does it run Minecraft? And every kid in my kid's school, all the kids play Minecraft, all of them without fail. And when they go to have a party over at someone's house, they sit there and pull out their phones and they do peer-to-peer playing Minecraft together. I've seen the same thing. And if you're the guy with the Windows phone, you're like the loser. You can't join in.

It's horrible peer pressure. And it's the thing we teach our kids not to succumb to. But, you know yeah i think it is so but how do you it's okay so obviously outside of i mean do you really think they'd spend 2.5 bill and buy something that is so counter to the microsoft culture right because minecraft's all about how the community is embraced and extended it and built their own servers it's a huge freaking java app? This is so counter to anything that is normally in the Microsoft realm of expertise. So there's no way they're doing

all of this just to make a Windows mobile port. It has to be much bigger than that. I mean, outside of even merchandising and things like that, I think they've got to make exclusives out of this property. Well, it's like I've been saying. I think we're going to start seeing a new Microsoft. I mean, this is the same... Well, it's like I've been saying. I think we're going to start seeing a new Microsoft. I don't think it's new. I think it's just the old Microsoft, the actual old Microsoft, the original one. The original one was endorsing Apple like hell when it made sense for them. They just grew too much and decided to take it to their own hands.

Come on. They were putting a backstab on them the entire time. Yeah, I think so too. I think, I mean, I see what your point is. This would be a much more mature Microsoft, one that really is truly more interested in just creating software for all platforms, and maybe it'll be that. Okay, so let's shift gears from this.

Doesn't this also kind of guarantee, like, more support's going to be going towards, like, MindTest and other open-source Minecraft alternatives? I hope so. It could do, but they need to step up their game. Yeah, so there's already other different, like Glowstone project. All this came out of the big Crafts Bucket fiasco, and it's already started, and I think this has only improved it and sped it up.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think like Popey said, it's going to be there's a long time to go and now, if Microsoft does it right, they're going to have more money behind Minecraft. Perhaps they could be, maybe they could make that even a better product even faster. So there could be more competition for Minetest to keep up with.

We'll see. We will see. stay tuned and find out hopefully it doesn't mean anything bad for linux users i don't think it will um all right yeah i didn't really think that was a main show topic but i thought it was worth chatting about just because i know it's a popular game on linux you know that's what my son plays it on he has a uh well now i'm gonna put it i don't know if it'll play on the Chromebook. I'm going to... I guess I could try. Get it so that my son can see it and see what he thinks.

It's an ARM Chromebook or an Intel Chromebook. No, it's a C720. Is that Intel? Yeah, that's Intel. It's got elementary OS on it right now. But he's got a HP laptop at home that has Antegro Sonnet that has Minecraft installed.

And that works really well for him. And interestingly, too, I didn't expect this, but he's taken much better to the trackpads on a laptop than a mouse because he started with touchscreen devices and then moved to the computer. He kind of graduated up to the computer. And so the touch on the pad, on the touchpad, on the clickpad, made much more sense to him to the computer. He kind of graduated up to the computer. And so the touch on the touchpad, on the clickpad, made much more sense to him than the mouse. Now, he's learned the mouse too, but he just almost immediately was able to translate touchscreen to trackpad, which I didn't quite expect because it's not really a one-to-one thing.

How old is he? Five. So Sam started off with a mouse and a keyboard minecraft and then eventually i bought it on the xbox 360 and he now favors the controller he's no son of mine i mean i'm a yeah i'm a mouse and keyboard kind of guy but he yeah he's he's big you know him and sophie as well who's 11 she's much prefers the the controller now finds it a lot 11, she much prefers the controller now. Do they use the controller on the PC or are they sticking to the console?

They generally only use the console because they use the multiplayer thing with the what's the camera thing? Connect. They chat to their friends. So does that mean no custom servers? How does that work on the console? They make their own servers and they invite their friends.

They're called parties. And they're persistent worlds? Yeah, they come back to this. There's like 100 of them saved on the Xbox. I don't know where they are. They're in the cloud, probably. Yeah, so they're hosted on the Xbox Live servers. I guess so, yeah.

Huh. So it's way easier than PC servers. Yeah. You don't have to worry about spinning up a VPS. But you can only play with other console custom worlds. Yes. Like you can't go console to PC. Correct.

But there's a ton of people who have Xbox and Minecraft. Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's like a huge game on there. I think they looked at it as a huge game on iOS. It's a huge game on the Xbox. And they went, huh, you know what we should do? We should probably own that. And plus you see you got Notch you got notch there he's like yeah i don't want to be part of a big company i don't want to do this anymore i mean it was just sort of i mean wow i think it

was the time was right he i think he i think it's pretty accurate what he was saying that he you know i don't think that was a cop-out and i think it was fair to say that he's not ceo material you can tell from right you know his tweets and stuff he likes just hacking around on stupid games and stuff and playing let him dare and and you know entering competitions and that's not ceo material ceos don't do that um so i can see why he wanted to sell it and you know two years ago or whatever he said billion is my price and the only company who's going to pay two billion for Minecraft is Microsoft. With their nice overseas cash pile. Blaster, are you a Minecraft player?

Yes. I didn't know that. Actually, the servers on Xbox Live actually don't they're not spun up on Microsoft servers. You actually host it on your console and then the party connects to you. So your friends can't spin up. You actually host it on your console, and then the party connects to you. So your friends can't...

You have to spin up your save. Yeah, you have to spin up your save, and then some people have to connect to you while you're online. And then once you close Minecraft, it's offline. Wow. That's interesting. That makes sense. It works almost exactly like the mobile version. Okay.

See, I like the idea of a persistent world that people can be visiting all the time. That's, I think, one of the coolest things when we had active... I don't know if they still are active or not, the Minecraft servers for Jupyter Broadcast, and you just go in there. Oh, God, yeah. They are totally active. Yeah, so you can go in there and there's just tons of people working on stuff. So that's really cool.

My kids play on that as well. That's another thing, is having a game that your kids can play, which is a safe environment. Like if it's a curated server like Jupiter is, where you know that the people aren't going to mess about with your kids and you're not going to get dangerous people talking to them, you can leave them playing on the PC for a while. It's cool. When my kids come in and they say, hey, dad, do you want to play on the JB server? That's quite cool.

Yeah, it is really cool. of my kids come in and they say, hey, dad, do you want to play on the JB server? That's quite cool, you know? Yeah, it is really cool. And I like the idea, too, that, I mean, I think, sure, you could make the argument that, you know, it has to be maybe try to be balanced with other things. But at the same time, it's like out of all the video games you could play for kids, Minecraft really seems like it's got to be not like super like healthier educational or something, but it seems like it's cultivating something, like creativity and building and problem solving and

resource management and all of these things that are actually really good life skills. Yeah, okay. You can try and make an argument for it in the same way that when I had a Sinclair Spectrum back in 1980, I would try and make the argument that I was doing my homework. It's a big fat lie.

Yeah, you know, the same thing goes with Minecraft. Yeah, it's educational, Mum, really. Yeah, but it's also, yeah. Yeah. You know, Joe Baldy of Minecraft Me has a really cool server too. Yeah, yeah. I've seen some of the stuff they have on there. Yeah, yeah, they have a really great server.

I love that my son learned about smelting and different types of trees from Minecraft. That's quite cool. That is really cool. Well, the only thing I was thinking that maybe would change, like, the game. Like, if I was going to look at my crystal ball, it seems like they're still going to ship to all the same platforms. They're probably not going to remove any features. They'll probably make some things better and maybe make it more developer accessible. make some things better and maybe make it more developer accessible. But then you got to wonder if like years down the road, if there's just like really hard things to measure that just never pan

out. Like this is a bad example, I think, but I'm working on the idea still. Like say like, say like on Mojang's like five-year roadmap, they have like this really awesome Twitch slash YouTube live streaming integration. I made the argument in tech talk today that potentially like maybe it was even going to be server side where on the Linux server, you'd have like this virtual camera that could live stream multiple angles to different streaming services, right? Well, now that Microsoft owns it, you know, they're not going to integrate a feature that connects directly into Google's live streaming platform or Amazon's now either. So there could be some things like that that would have been cross-pollination because Mojang was independent and didn't have any entrenched market interest that would influence those types of decisions. Wow. That's already happened once in the Twitch TV integration is Windows only

Wow That sucks, yeah, yeah I mean, screw those guys, right? I think that's more that they're using a third-party library, so whenever you bring in third-party stuff that you haven't written you're dependent upon whatever platforms they support and whatever library

they've used for Twitch TV doesn't support anything other than Windows, I believe. Yeah, it's because it's not Java at all. I actually believe it's a DLL file. It's brought down. Oh, sweet. I love DLLs. Isn't it a beautiful thing? You know how I like

my libraries? Dynamic. And late. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's prepared to finally just break down and invest in a caffeine IV. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey, Matt. Oh, man. I did one of these things where I had a couple of rough nights and then I was dumb last night and I had too much

to drink, Matt. I had too much to drink and I woke up in the middle of the night with a hangover like in the middle of the night and I couldn't go back to sleep. And it wasn't even that much. I'm just a lightweight now, Matt. What that means? Does that mean I'm getting too old to drink? I gotta just stick to my prune juice. You need the chat room there to tell you all the things that you should have done beforehand

because that usually really helps. That's true. You know, hey Chris, you need to drink more water. Right, yeah. You need HTML5. You need some other stuff. Yeah, you know, I do like the hindsight 2020 advice that the chair is so good at providing. And they're doing it out of love.

I mean, it's a great thing. It is, but it is comical. All right, so we're going to do a show today out of love. We got a lot of your feedback to get through this week, some really good stuff. I've picked the best of the best. And then Aaron Saigo took to Google Plus early one morning and said the community manager role is a fraud and a farce. And we'll break it down. We'll talk about it. I have a feeling that there may be some disagreements in the

show today on that topic, and we'll bring in our mumble room. And then after that, we're going to get into a few other topics, time remaining and pertaining, including potentially a little bit of info about some future changes coming to some Linux distributions near you. So we'll talk about all of that stuff, as well as some additional links towards the end of the show. Got a lot

of stuff to cover today. I'm just going through it right now. I'm looking at the papers, and I'm thinking, dang, this is looking like a pretty busy week. I think our news cycle has come back. I think the news is starting to pick back up again. In fact, we've seen some really big things go down this week, so I think we're going to have a huge news segment on the Linux Action Show on Sunday. But today, our duty is to focus on the feedback, to focus on the people. And so Stefan writes in, and he says, hey, Chris and Matt, I don't know if you have already seen the leaked preview of Windows 9, but in case you didn't know, there's quite some,

let's call it, progress in this hell of a stagnation that Microsoft calls Windows. Anyways, to keep it short, they integrated multiple workspaces. Oh, nice. And when they finally developed something usable. However, you might think it looks a little familiar. My biggest concern is that I almost hear these F-ers at Microsoft fanboys claim that Microsoft opened up a whole new perspective of user experiences. And I can predict that if you tell them multiple workspaces isn't something new because Apple and Linux had this for years, they'll respond with, but Microsoft made it awesome and usable.

So have you seen this implementation of virtual desktops on Windows 9? I have, and just the interface as a whole, not just the implementation, but the interface as a whole is the best box of Coriola crayons I've ever seen. Yeah, it is very, yeah. It looks like iOS 7's smacked Windows. Absolutely. We throw enough color at it, people are going to think it looks great. And I'm so blown away at how they come up

with concepts. I can't even wrap my brain around it. I don't even know. I don't even know. So I have it in the video version here. You can see they're dynamic workspaces, a la GNOME. And of course other desktops as well. I guess actually Mac OS X has dynamic workspaces

as well. And then you can see you can drag the windows around and move them. You know, I mean, i'm not going to use this because i don't use windows i guess it's nice to have it for windows users finally it is i think what is interesting is like remember how like windows 8 came out and microsoft's all like yeah so the desktop's dead we have that classic interface quote unquote when you need it But you should do everything in the new modern UI. That's the future. And now this version of Windows is coming out, and they're like, hey, so we know you like the desktop, so we're going to give you more desktops. You, in fact, have unlimited desktops.

How about some desktops, everybody? Exactly. And it's like, not only that, but we're going to borrow it. We're going to travel back in time and basically provide an implementation that quite honestly looks a bit dated. Yeah, it looks actually a little clunky to me. It's not very smooth. It does. It feels a little bit like an early KDE maybe

2.something kind of They need to rust up some cookies on top of something and I don't know. They need to add a little animation factor in there. Give it some jazz, right? Put a little jazz in that virtual desktop. Microsoft biz. Yeah, because that's what makes Microsoft biz. There you go.

Yeah, because that's what makes it usable. A spinning cube. Yeah, the latter spinning cube. It is funny, though. So when they decide to reinvest in the desktop and sort of double down on it, what do they do? They go rip off features from Unix desktops. So there you go. One stop shopping.

Redmond has indeed restarted their copy machines. So, yeah, I thought we'd just – It's always fun to kind of poke at Microsoft. I mean, come on, we had to. It's so easy. So, Eric, you're here, right? You're still here, Eric. Good. We have a question that is right up your alley.

So, Scotty Z.A. writes in. He says, hello, I'm loving, with a U, all the JB awesomeness. I have a new Dell PC on the way. The first thing I'm going to do is dropkick Windows 8 and install some Ubuntu goodness on there. It's going to be the GNOME variety of it. The Dell comes with a touchscreen, and I was wondering how the GNOME touch gestures are, and if there's anything

I need to watch out for, or things that could improve the experience. Pseudo-thanks, Scotty Zia. So, Eric, I know you've got a touchscreen laptop. You've been trying out GNOME, KDE, and Unity with it. What are your thoughts with regards to GNOME's sort of touch features that are there right now? Well, the GNOME touch features that are there right

now in 3.12 are not up to the par of Unity yet. You can't resize your window, you can drag your windows, but only from the title bar, and I've noticed that GNOME Shell will tend to crash every now and then if you try that. Oh, really? Ouch.

Yeah, so it's not up to par. Gnome 3.14 coming out later this month, if not the beginning of next month, that should solidify their touchscreen capabilities on Gnome. So 3.14, right now though, in your experience so far, Unity is the champion when it comes to full touchscreen support? Correct. And you also, does GnOME have an on-screen keyboard? I do.

I really don't know. It's handy. I'm sure you could get one. I mean, the one that comes with Unity is pretty nice, and it's really easy to use. It's a standard one, so I think you could just load it anywhere. But anyways, so it sounds like... Yeah, it sounds like it's Ubuntu GNOME. So what?

You can close Windows, maybe you could open the activities menu, but you're not going to be resizing Windows or dragging windows around? And there's no right-click or anything like that? Right, there's no right-click. It's just, it doesn't work very well. I mean, the best touchscreen interfaces they have is the activities menu itself, but also... Right, I would think so, yeah. Yeah, the activities menu itself is very touchscreen- friendly, but also the lock screen. But beyond that, the window management in 3.12 is not up to par. 3.14 is going to start to get there.

Okay. And I know I asked you, but you've been trying it out too on KDE Plasma 4? Plasma 4 and Plasma 5, it's still not up to par. They haven't done anything with multi-touch gestures or anything. Okay. And by the way, a little correction. WikiLeaks pointed out in the chat room. GNOME 3.12 does not have this, but GNOME 3.14 is going to have a long-presses right-click.

Okay. Oh, okay. Oh, yes. You know what? I've read about that. Righto. Yes. I do recalls.

Do I hear music? Oh, yeah's my daily it's my daily uh collections call yeah of course i'm not in collections but somebody is that gave out my number so this is the default sailfish os ringtone nice right i can dance doesn't that sound good yeah sounds awesome and i've got a cool cool pirate ship in the background. Oh, I wasn't able to answer it in time. Darn. I really like the Sailfish OS call interface, but it's a little funky because sometimes you have to swipe in a certain direction to answer the call, and if you're just late enough, that animation of making the swipe is just long enough that you miss the call.

It's all right. It's cool. I'm just experimenting with it. I'm just experimenting with it. I'm just experimenting with it. All right, Matt, you know what else I'm experimenting with? My mind. What's up? Over at linuxacademy.com.

Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged to get our special discount deal. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. So I've told you a lot about Linux Academy and how they're always working on their courseware, new features, and things like that. Well, today I got an email from Anthony, the founder of LinuxAcademy.com, and he says he's passing along some of the new exciting things they're working on, and it's really something. He says, Our new lab platform now allows the users to have four running Linux servers at one time.

You can have any distribution you would like from a list, as well as two public host names for each server. You can even assign each server a role. Let's say you want to have a DB server and another one to be a DNS server. You can now label those roles to help you remember which lab you're working with, and you can work with other people now. They have cool new learning plans, too, that allow users to select daily availability, and based on that availability, a study plan is automatically created for them. So you say, I have this much time available, and they will generate a plan that you can go through and learn something.

Learning plans will give you the lessons and quizzes and labs that are due on each day, as well as even send you email reminders that you have items due on that day. Based on your availability, it will even give you a projected completion date of the course with some extra time included for studying. How freaking cool is that, right?

He says, we're also really excited to announce the immediate availability of a few extra courses we've been working on. Today, we've announced Chef Fundamentals, CentOS 7 Enterprise Updates, as well as Apache Tomcat. We've launched our Deploy and Manage OpenStack on Ubuntu and Icehouse, which is 50% complete, and they're working on it right now. We have a list of 14 upcoming courses throughout the remainder of the year. He's going to send me updates when they've got them. Isn't that awesome? Now, you're thinking, sure, they're doing all this stuff. You know, real servers with host names that you can have people publicly log in.

These automated coursewares, these learning plans, 350 new videos and content before the end of the year. More scenario-based learning labs than ever before, all of these new additions, no price increase. You just get them as part of your Linux Academy subscription. It just comes as part of the subscription. Go over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged right now. You'll get that 33% discount. That makes it a great deal. You can go over there and learn courses on r-Sync and OpenStack and AWS.

Pick from any of the 7-plus Linux distributions. The courseware will automatically adjust the documentation, so that way it matches the distribution you've chosen, which is a really great way to also get up to speed on another distro if you've taken on a job where you have to change your distro. What a great way to get up to speed. Or if you know it's time to finally make that R-Sync backup script, why not go take the R-Sync courseware?

And they're always adding new stuff, as well as live videos and all that kind of stuff. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a really big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. You guys rock and great work, you guys, on the new updates. That's crazy awesome. I love the automated learning courses. That's, man. Go get your learning on. Well, I'm just thinking, like, you know, I could go in there and say, all right, I need a learning plan and I've got, you know, this much time

this week to do it. I just, I love that. I think that's a really good system. All right. So Alec writes in. We had a ton, a ton, a ton of email about our system D discussion. And I think a couple of people felt like it was our first time. Maybe they were kind of new to the show and they didn't realize that we've done past episodes on this. So they felt, some people wrote in and felt like we left some details out and sort of jumped in mid-conversation. So I apologize if that is how you felt.

I would suggest maybe go check the Unplugged Back catalog. We've done a couple of episodes on it with some really good discussion that does fill in some of the background details. But Alec wrote in. He says, hi, Chris, Matt, and chat room. And I thought Alec had one of the more interesting anti-SystemD concerns. Like, he's not opposed to SystemD, but he's bringing up a concern about SystemD that I think maybe has some merit worth discussing outside of what we normally hear

about some of the other issues that we've discussed before. He says, I want to chime in with my thoughts about the recent SystemD discussion. As a system administrator, I like SystemD and its innovative new features like Dbus and socket activation. Yeah, you know what? I agree with that. However, I have some concerns about its long-term viability. From what I see, the main problem with SystemD is that it's a large attack surface, which could lead to security problems in the future. Also, because SystemD will be adopted by all Linux, I fear it could become a major target for attackers. future. Also, because SystemD will be adopted by all Linux, I fear it could become a major target for attackers.

In short, I think SystemD is a good thing for Linux right now, but in the future, it could become insecure and unmaintainable. And because more and more projects are starting to depend on SystemD, it could become a painful process to move away from SystemD. Thanks for all the awesome shows, Alec. And I want to add to that, even outside of security, what about just code creep where something gets to be such a massive project

and it impacts so many distributions and so many users whenever you change it that it sort of becomes like this weight, this anchor on Linux because you have this whole layer now that has to be updated and it has potentially dramatic effects across the board. Now, obviously, there's ways and updates that maybe would have very minimal impacts.

But you have to wonder if that could become a source of stagnation. I wonder what you think, Matt. Do you think there's a potential that maybe SystemD is going to make a large attack service for Linux, a common attack platform, or maybe an anchor that slows us down? Or do you think the folks at Red Hat and people working on system D can stay on top of it? I think at this point, they can stay on top of it. I think it's going to be something that they need to be vigilantly aware of and proactive on because you never know, it could develop into what that concern addresses. But I think at this point, it's too early to tell. And I don't see any point in borrowing trouble. I'm not saying fall fall asleep at the wheel, but I'm just saying, let's keep our eyes open. But at the same time, let's go ahead and keep pushing forward. It hasn't created any

problems yet that are really significant that I'm aware of for my personal use. Others may have other gripes. I don't know. For me personally, it's been great. Okay, Daredevil, you think it's not about security, but something else? daredevil and you think it's not about security but something else yes so we saw what happened like linux as the kernel is super um complicated now to get in as a maintainer or to start contributing it's famous for that that is kind of the problem that i find like not the security aspect we can solve security aspects sure i mean we've been solving them in multiple fronts, and now there's even a specialized group for it. But I think companies getting a hold on who

maintains system D now becomes more and more parts being just company control, even though community always have a say. I think that's actually more dangerous than the security aspect. Yeah, I think you have to look at the kernel and you say, yeah, the kernel is not a one-to-one analog,

but it is an interesting way to compare just a large bit of code that obviously impacts every Linux distribution and even mobile devices. And yet we make that work, don't we? We have that working. I think it's in part because we have the right people on the job. And I feel like right now we have the right people on the job.

But these things can change. I do not know if I totally buy in with Alec on the – and I think Alec's not the only one who's worried about the, quote-unquote, system D lock-in. I'm not so worried about that, really. It's kind of a funny thing. One of the reasons we all want a free and open platform is because we want to avoid those problems.

And then we still worry about those problems, even though it's open source code with documented APIs and things like that. So at some point, we kind of just have to acknowledge we have to adopt a technology, but realize that we can build our way out, too, if we need to. I don't think it's as much lock-in as people think. All right, Fred, what do you think? think. All right, Fred, what do you think? No, I just wanted to mention that I think there were these patches to get systemd working

on BSD systems early, early, early days of systemd and they were not accepted because the developers thought they only wanted to target Linux and didn't accept patches for portability. Very good.

And Blackout rightly points out, sorry, I just mentioned I didn't want to lose track of this, almost 600 people contribute to SystemD, 200 alone in the last 12 months. So there's a lot of people that are working on SystemD. I think, yeah. That seems like a lot of eyeballs. I mean, it seems like a lot of people have got their fingers on the pulse and are watching what's going on. To me, that's my perspective.

So here's what we did, is Producer Q5Sys put together a simple system-to-opinion survey that we've put out for folks to go take advantage of and just plug through the questions, and just so we can get a little data to kind of see where everybody's coming from in this, where their heads at. Jack, close your mic.

And so it's a simple system-to-opin opinion survey, and it's up on the subreddit right now. I'll have it linked in the show notes. We've got quite a bit of responses. Q5 is going to be releasing the results in the future. And it's not like a definitive scientific study, but I think it'd be interesting to see where people who have different opinions, where they all stand and what their experience level is and things like that. So we'll have that linked in the show notes. And if you'd like to participate in the survey, we'll talk about the results in an upcoming episode.

And also, you can keep sending your system to feedback in if you got something really good. We'll put it on there. But either way, I'll even read it so that way we can just at least incorporate it into our opinions. Hey, speaking of producers, we just heard from Eric a little bit ago. And I want to plug something for producer Michael, a.k.a. RottenCorps.

You Get Beta 2 is coming and available for beta testing, and UGIT is a great downloader for Linux. We've covered it before in Linux Action Show, and RottenCorps is one of the developers for it, and they just put out a new beta for their brand new version coming out. So we'll link to that in the show notes. It's a great downloader, UGIT,

and it's my preferred way if I download large ISO images and I don't want to leave my browser running. And I like, you know, if I'm not doing the torrent, I generally do the torrent. But if for some reason I'm doing an HTTP download, boom. Boom. There you go.

UGIT's where it goes, Matt, like a bouse. Nice. Like a bouse. Hey, speaking of like a bouse, I want to tell you about something else that's like a bouse, and that's DigitalOcean. Go over to DigitalOcean.com right now. DigitalOcean. Go over to digitalocean.com right now. Digitalocean.com.

Not just walk, not just trot, but full on gallop because we've got a promo code that will get you two months for free of a DigitalOcean dropout. I know, it's crazy.

If you use the promo code unplugged September, you're going to get armed with a $10 credit. Oh. So you see that value there. You get for $10, you get two months

of DigitalOcean service. Why? Because they have pricing plans that start at only $5 per month. That'll get you a 512 megabyte RAM droplet with a 20 gigabyte SSD, one blazing fast CPU, and a terabyte of transfer connected to tier one bandwidth. You don't know what DigitalOcean is? My friend, DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server.

And they've got droplet centers everywhere. Or maybe you call them data centers. I don't know. Say like, oh, I don't know, New York, you heard of that? You heard of New York, right? San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, and they're rolling out new features all the time. Their interface is crazy simple and intuitive. Their control panel is very powerful. But if you want to even go beyond that, they've got a straightforward API that you can take advantage of. DigitalOcean has also recently rolled out IPv6 in some of their data centers, CoreOS, private networking. It gets better and better and better. One of the things I love about the private networking is not only does that allow you to build the etcd cluster you're going to need to configure your CoreOS rigs,

but it also allows you to have, say, a front-end web server with a back-end database server that isn't exposed to the Internet. And the best part is there's no charge for the transfer over that private link. That's how awesome DigitalOcean is. Something else that's kind of cool and another great reason to hold on to Unplugged September, you can also do hourly pricing over at DigitalOcean. This is super useful if you're doing testing and you need to do it up somewhere that actually has decent performance where a lot of people can get to it and you can turn it on, turn it off, take snapshots, deploy, redeploy. This is a great use of their hourly pricing structure.

It's so awesome, and their control panel makes it crazy easy to just get up and going. DigitalOcean.com. Unplug September when you check out. And a big thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. I'll tell you, I keep spinning up droplets. I say, oh, I really need to do that one thing, and I'll spin the droplet. It's great. Oh, yeah. Okay, so Aaron Saigo lit the world on fire via Google Plus yesterday at

3.01 a.m. I don't know why he's posting at 3.01 a.m., but that's what he was. And I'm just going to read a few highlights, and then we can get into the meat and potatoes of it here. He says, here we go, flamethrowers on everyone. Here's what I feel. The community manager role that is increasingly common in the free software world is a fraud and a farce. The community manager role is a fraud and a farce, he says. If your community has a quote-unquote manager, then it's being treated as a community, then it isn't being treated as a community and probably isn't a community to begin with. Community has an actual meaning that transcends a crowd. Community is a structure derived from the self-determination of shared values. Communities don't have managers.

Synthetic, organized hierarchical organizations do. Nearly all community managers in free software ecosystems work for companies that own and manage products that that community they are managing are built around, and that's not a coincidence. Communities, real ones, have facilitators and leaders of various forms and stripes. It's okay if they do get paid, and if they're able to spend time and energy facilitating and leading, but they damn sure are not managers of the community. They are accountable to the community, selected by the community, and derive their influence from the community consensus and can be replaced by the community at the community's behest. Does that sound like the free software community managers you know? I'd be fine in the situation if there was some honesty on the ground about this, because then we wouldn't be tainting the word community for those blessed souls who have managed to actually erect the real deal.

for those blessed souls who have managed to actually erect the real deal, there wouldn't be quite so many deluded individuals out there who think that they're a true stakeholder with equitable rights and privileges in the actual community. In summary, a community manager is really an audience handler, as in they handle you as members of their audience, as part of their marketing program. And frankly, I've run out of patience for this deception. Now get off my lawn. Matt, I'll open the floor to you. So I don't subscribe to his thoughts or his feed for obvious reasons. Because personally, so let's take a step back and let's go to this thing called Wikipedia, and let's look at what the term community is. A community is a social unit of any size that shares common values, period. Okay. Why is it a problem to have a

name of manager or facilitator or reach around guy or whatever you want to call them that comes in and facilitates, I don't know, something we like to call communication between a large mob of people and in some cases, a company or in some cases, I don't know, something we like to call communication between a large mob of people and in some cases a company or in some cases, I don't know, the developers. Fun fact, developers and end users don't always speak the same language. Sometimes it requires a manager to come in and help facilitate that line of communication. His post was the biggest pile of drivel I've ever read in my entire life. He's a nice guy. I like him.

But this pissed me off it was absolute nonsense absolute crap i couldn't even wrap my head about i i'm hoping he was drunk because it's like was he just a fight i mean he's such a nice guy and i i mean i like the guy i do but he's just so negative about nothing it's like oh my god relax take a pill go get stoned do something i i do wonder like i think wow yeah i think uh i think part of the problem is is like um the term community manager can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different groups and businesses and so you can't blanket hate on just one term i mean it might not be the right manager might not be the the right word so i

i'll take uh the opposite i'll play devil's advocate here. And I don't know if it is fair to compare the community of Jupyter Broadcasting to the community of, say, a well-established open source project. I don't know if that's fair or not. I would guess the Jupyter Broadcasting community size probably dwarfs many open source projects that aren't super famous, right? Easily. Yeah. So, you know, we have a huge community, huge.

And I very consciously have chosen to, whenever we start up a new aspect of the community somewhere, to generally sort of wind my involvement down. I'll kind of, I don't know if manage is the right, curate. I'll curate the community there for a bit and then sort of wind myself down as I notice certain personalities in the community sort of stand up and take on leadership role. Not even leadership role so much

as much as like just, you know, I don't know how to explain it. I really don't. But let's take this mumble room that we're all in right now. This is something that Blaster, on his own initiative initiative went out and created and and now he is the operator of our mumble room i i didn't set that up blaster set that up and everybody knows that it's blaster's

creation here and that that is that is in my opinion community taking on their own leadership and in a much more organic and real way than when you have an artificial manager who really kind of more ends up playing PR guy and try to smooth things over. And a lot of times kind of keeps the community at arm's length from the business. So the business is allowed to make the decisions it needs to make to be a profitable business. And then the community manager ends up being the guy who tries to sell it to the community and tells everybody we're having a great time. And it's really because of your participation that it's all working out. And that drives me crazy.

It does, and that's the mark of a poor community manager. If you're working on stuff like Operation Lightning Rod, which I've actually known people that worked on an operation called Operation Lightning Rod as a community manager, it exists. If you're in those situations, yeah, that's a bad situation to be in, and that's honestly a bad role to be in. But at the end of the day, if something happens with Jupiter Broadcasting, generally speaking, you or Angela or maybe even one of the producers will reach out to the community and say, hey, by the way, we're going to do this, that, and the other thing. There's some information passable. Right. We have a more distributed system where there's right yeah there's producers and staff and and but generally speaking you take on that role a lot of it especially it's like hey by the way this is being rescheduled or hey we're going to be having this guest on or we're going to be doing that you're going to be making that communication happen you do need some kind of leadership in some fashion and sometimes it does fall to a

person that is hired for such a role. It really just depends. I do agree that when you get to a certain size, it does become easier to just make it a person's responsibility because it can be one of the things that gets neglected. And also that sort of fits in better with how businesses are structured. All right, well, this is your responsibility, Bob, and you're going to manage the community. But I wonder if maybe there isn't a bit of a different approach that needs to be taken when you are deriving some of your success from the fruits of labor of that community. I think there needs to be a guide. I think there needs to be like a community, like everybody gets together, including the communities themselves to say, look, here's how not to be a D-bag when

you're talking to us. Here's how to actually have like a level of go, because a lot of times you are talking about like, let's say Red Hat and the Fedora Project or whatever it may be. You do need someone in between those things to actually make that conversation happen. I've lived in this world for a long time. You just do. Let's toss it to Popey. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this, Popey. Go ahead.

I've read Aaron's post and I could see see i can see an argument there that that's worthwhile i can see how it could be misconstrued that someone who works for a corporate entity who tries to rally people around and basically do their bidding for them for free uh is not a pleasant person to be right and and i and i i can i can see how there's a good argument for that that being not an appropriate person in a community it's not a community person but i i would flip that around and say that i would i would say a company who is comprised of a bunch of people who aren't necessarily close to the community, who have a product that is used by a wide community of people, there needs to be an interface between them.

And if you hire people in the company who have never worked in an open source company, you've got to be able to interface those people to these random drive-by community contributors and say, look, this guy who just fixed a typo in your code, he's trustworthy. He's a good guy. You should accept that code contribution. That person could serve as an advocate for the community. Right. Or it could be just a drive-by edit and they're gone and you'll never see them again. They were just scratching an itch because in their language, that word didn't make sense.

So they fixed it, right? I do feel like the core argument that Aaron's getting at, that there has been a, quote unquote, like perversion of what the term means and what that role does. I get really, I think for a lot of companies becomes, this is, a lot of times companies grow and all of a sudden the community almost becomes – like their view of them changes and the community shifts from asset to liability. And now it's like this thing we need to manage so that way they don't damage our public perception and we need – and it becomes like this distorted time of – it's not community management so much as is keeping the community sort of boxed and and and that's not a good thing i can see how that that perception can happen because i you know i've seen that that happen and i've seen people being labeled as you know the pr guy or you know the guy who fixes when you know uh when there's a when there's a problem in the community from my from my perspective that's that's not the role I play.

But, you know, I can see how that could be seen. The problem is that a lot of people outside of, like, a particular community, and obviously I'm speaking from experience in the Ubuntu community, look in and only see someone with a public face like Jono, for example, and only see his public blog posts and his public, you know, conversations with people and think that's all he does. Right. Doesn't see the day-to-day.

Right. And the full calendar he had talking to – I'm not talking in the past tense as if he's dead, but just because he's no longer with the company. The late Jono Bacon. Yeah. with the company. The late John O'Bacon. Yeah. He had a calendar that was full of meetings with people inside the company,

making sure that the community's needs were addressed and that any decision that was made in the company was made with full thought and respect for what the community wanted. And whatever name you give that role, yeah, manager, he's got people under him in the company okay he's a manager he deals with the community a lot yeah okay let's put the word community in there right right right you can you can futz around with the with the job title yeah

but the fact is that he's a very pro community guy who is who is doing his best to interface a corporate entity with a community of contributors who are doing what they're doing willingly and they can walk away at any time and they do you know right i i find i i object to aaron's post mostly because i think he has a very blinkered view of the term community manager and what a community manager is bingo yeah i i mean i i totally see it from the and when you when you get, when you come at it from the inside of how a business works, like it makes so much more sense versus when you look at it from the outside, where you just kind of end up seeing them continually play that PR buffer zone.

And I look at this and I think there is a lot of ways you can parse this. There's a lot of ways you can change around the terms, but I wanted to give Daredevil a chance to kind of get in, because I know he's had a couple of thoughts on this daredevlin is that is the semantics of this something you wanted to touch on yes because i don't think even the term is applied to to the community i also think that the post is uh uh is actually looking at the community creating informing itself around the company when actually a lot of times the companies go and join the communities that already exist. And it's like making the posties under the impression

that the community is dependent on the company when it's most of the time the other way around. It can always go on their own. And suddenly there's no point. And I see the manager to be actually a manager for the company as yes like like poppy pointed out so i i completely agree and like i get people pm me on irc and say hey i've seen this uh once you phone thing i'd like to help out what what can i do and my response yeah i'm the right person they should come to because i i can point them in the

right direction, right? Is that a community manager? Well, that's not what my business card says. But, you know, that's arguably what I'm doing. People are coming to me and saying, hey, I'd like to contribute. And I say, well, what do you know? What do you feel passionate about? What do you want to contribute to?

And these are people who, you know, have lives. They've got other jobs. They've got families. They've got other jobs they've got families they've got other stuff they need to be doing but they're willing to contribute to a product that's made by a corporation you know and if they're willing to do that yeah they can walk away at any time if they're willing to do that and they want to contribute then it makes sense for the company to have someone who is a point of contact for them, someone who can facilitate that conversation and find the bugs that that person can fix or poke the right people inside the company in order to fast track a bug through

or release a piece of software or whatever it is. That's what the community manager does. It's not like running around the streets, grabbing, press-ganging people off the streets and putting an Emacs in front of them and saying, you, code for me now. That's your job now and you work for me, bitch. That's not what a community manager is. That's what it seems that Aaron is kind of implying. Not last time I held the position? No.

Actually, it wasn't. I wanted to give Eric a chance to chime in because, Eric, I know that you've done a lot of work with community management and taken training in it specifically. Do you think – do you agree with Aaron's point that the term community is sort of being muddied down here? It's getting sort of distorted by these corporations and not – and it's sort of devaluing the term community and what it actually means. Do you think that's an issue? I think it depends on the corporation. Basically, you've got a lot of volunteer management going on or community management as it's called it's called

you still have to have somebody who's acting as a liaison between the community and the company when that person becomes a pr person that's where it's getting a little fuzzy the person does have to inspire the community to do better things but at the same time they also need to be pointing the community toward the vision of the company and saying this is kind of what we have in mind do you guys like this and here's why we think this is a good idea blah blah blah so it's it there's a lot to it yeah um it there's a lot to it more than being a pr guy a lot to it more than just talking to the community it's all it's a lot to it more than being a PR guy, a lot to it more than just talking to the community. It's a lot of trying to vision cast, as I call it, the vision of the company to the community at large. That's a huge part.

Okay. And also getting them involved in company events as well. as well you know the the community manager in the past in ubuntu would um send out all the invites and figure out who were the the kind of people that you needed at an ubuntu developer summit and would send out invites to like 100 people to get them along and get them involved in conversations and planning about what's happening in the next release and i've just had to do this i've invited a bunch of people to come to a sprint in Washington to help us form Ubuntu Phone. And these are people, yeah, they're giving up their own time to come along and help us figure out

what a free software phone should look like in the future. And you need someone to do the crappy work of figuring out what flights they can go on, working out what their visa requirements are. Trust me, I've had to do this. So this so yeah this is exactly what a community manager does it's not it's nowhere near as nefarious as aaron makes it out to it might be in some companies but not in my experience yeah i guess that's the difference is when you get assigned community manager as your job title what do they have in mind for you is Is your job to mollify the community and keep

them from sending hate mail to the company or is it to get the most out of the community that you can to get as many of those people involved in actually forwarding the project along or what? I would say the latter, Alan. That's it. I would say all of the above. It's different with each company, why they decided they needed a community manager. That's why it's not black and white because it is literally different for every single case. It's ambiguous.

It's become a buzzword for a job title that could mean anything. The first time I heard it, it was when a company hired someone to manage a forum about something. This is the part of aaron's post that i that registers with me is this has actually bothered these kinds of things have bothered me for a while alan since you're here would you would you can you give us an overview of how this works for free bsd they you guys have assigned liaisons is that how it works not really like there are certain people who volunteer to try to be that matchmaker type person like Popey was describing. There's, I think it's FreeBSD help on a couple of their Twitter accounts that when they see somebody tweet,

I'm having this problem with FreeBSD or whatever, they'll be like, hey, well, does this help? Make sure you file a PR. Oh, that thing you're asking about. Well, why don't you talk to this person who's the guy that worked on that most recently or whatever, kind of like Publi was describing. But the FreeBSD foundation doesn't pay someone to do that. Gotcha. All right.

Well, I want to cover Mark Shuttleworth's response because I actually really liked his response to Aaron's post. And as you'd expect on one of Aaron's provocative Google Plus posts, the comment thread is about a mile long. And just as I was about to abort, because I was getting a little burned out on the comments, I saw Mark Shuttleworth dragging, and I had to read his post. So we'll read what Mark Shuttleworth had to say. But first, I want to thank Ting.

Go over to linux.ting.com. That's right, linux.ting.com. That'll take $25 off your first Ting device. If you've already got a Ting-compatible device, too, they'll give you a $25 credit. That's also a great option to go if you're going to get one of their dedicated data units, like a little LTE hotspot device. So what is Ting? Well, Ting is truly mobile that is different.

No contract, no early termination fee, and you only pay for what you use. Flat $6 for the line, plus the taxes the man's going to take. And then it's just your usage. Ting takes your minutes, your messages, your megabytes. They add them all up at the end of the month, whatever bucket you fall into. That's what you pay. It's so much better than paying for the amount of minutes and data and text you may or may not use. That's such a freaking ripoff. And the best part is, too, if you've been feeling what a ripoff that is and you're like, okay, it's time to do something differently, you can go over to linux.ting.com, try out their savings calculator. Get an idea of what you'll save over

like the two-year contract period that you'll be getting away from. And if you're ready to make the jump, but you're still in the contract, well, Ting has an early termination relief program, ting.com slash ETF, where they'll help pay $75 per line that you have to get canceled. That just sort of supercharges your transition over to Ting. And if you are an Apple user, and you have an iPhone 5S or 5C, Ting has launched the countdown to when you can bring the 5S or 5C over to the Ting network, which is a great option if you are on that device now because you can take it and just get even more use out of it. And if you're thinking about getting perhaps a different phone down the road, you could take this iPhone and convert it over to Ting and then just pay for what you use. What a great opportunity. What a great way to get value out of it.

I've got the Nexus 5 on the Ting network, too. Matt's got the Note 2. They both absolutely rock. I love the Ting network paired with the Ting devices because then you own them outright. They're yours. You never have to worry about getting screwed in a contract. They have an amazing dashboard. No-hold customer service at 1-855-TING-FTW anytime between 8 a.m. or 8 p.m.

East Coast time. And a real person answers the phone. Linux.ting.com. p.m. East Coast time, and a real person answers the phone. Linux.ting.com. Linux.ting.com will give you $25 credit if you've got a compatible device like the iPhone 5S, 5, 5S, or 5C, or any of the devices available on the Ting store. Lots of good stuff. Linux.ting.com. Check them out. Maybe even give them a call. See just how great that customer service is. And a big thanks to Ting for sponsoring. Linux unplugged. Okay, guys, let's parse Mark Shuttleworth's response to Aaron Sigo.

Mark Shuttleworth wrote, From my perspective, the great people in this kind of role really love the people and the project and help unblock things which would otherwise cause a project to stagnate. It's perfectly possible to stick a fraudulent label on a job, yes. There are companies that think they can get people to work for them if they have a manager for those people. But those cases usually don't work out very well. By contrast, invest in people who love both the goals of a huge project

and the opportunity to work with folks who can only participate part-time and some magic happens. That's worth investing in, in my opinion. I like that he leaves the H off. I'm like, I'm not going to put H in that. So John O'Michael, David, Daniel, and others are wonderful to work with, and I'm very proud of the things they've done and the things they've enabled to get done by others. Whatever label people might try to attach to them, those are my heroes.

He said something in this post, pretty short, but something that I think is perhaps the most realistic day-to-day task that a good community advocate or manager or organizer has to do is, a lot of times in an open source project, there's a lot of people in your community who come and go. They can't contribute a lot of hours. And if they are on a regular basis, it's very limited. And so because of their time constraints, they need an enabler to help them when they do have the time. And that is a critical role that that community manager, whatever you want to call it, could play. And at the end of the day, that is truly about enabling people in your community to help work with you. And it really is a two-way street in that case.

And that kind of thing, I think, is a great example of a good role a community manager can have. Any closing thoughts, you guys, on this before we wrap up? Well, that just tells me that Canonical has a great idea of where they want to go with community. Or at least Mark Shellworth does. He is the dictator, as it were. And sure. Well, and of course, Aaron did reply to Mark. If you guys want to see Aaron's response to markets further down in the comment throw, were you going to say, Matt?

I was basically just going to point out when we see things like this, two things that, you know, first of all, when you start off with just a really ugly title like that, you know, fraud and all this stuff. You've lost me already. So even if he has like relevant points throughout the article, you lost me at the title. Just ugly, ugly stuff. The end point that people need to remember with stuff like this is that it's apples and oranges with every company, every community. There are some real D-bags that are just total placeholders in certain companies, and they exist, and I realize this. But there's a lot of times where these people are doing this stuff because they actually started out as members of the community that were perhaps brought in to fill a void and they have a really unfortunate title oh no it's got the word manager in it maybe we can call them the community advocate

or the community hug guy or something i don't know but whatever makes people feel warm and fuzzy but at the end of the day they have a critical role if it's a company you want to do business with or if it's community that you want to be part of if it's not go away yeah that would be my i walk away mostly mostly thinking you know you can't make it black and white but i i still remain slightly skeptical of the position i think it in my in my case it's i wait and see actions speak louder than words and i'll treat each case individually there you go yeah because like i said there are some exceptions there's some real deep access I'm not debating that at all. There really are.

I don't think anybody's going to debate on that topic. I think we all pretty much agree. The internet is full of DBAGs. Matt, so that's going to wrap up the show today. Actually, we do have a post-show topic. So if you're going to be listening after the music, stick around for that. I'm curious to hear what you think about this next topic coming up. But Matt, on Sunday, I got two different topics that I'm brewing right now to see which one completes. And whichever one finishes first will be the one we roll with on Sunday. But I like both of them as much. So we'll eventually do both of them. But I'm not sure which one we're going to do first.

Tune in on Sunday and find out with us. JBLive.tv, Sunday, 10 a.m. Or just come back here next Tuesday. JBLive.tv. We do this show in the afternoons. JupiterBroadcasting.com slash calendar to get it in your local time zone. All right, Matt.

Well, I'll see you on Sunday, okay? All right, see you then. All right, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday. I see a lot of companies out there right now that are sort of in this transition phase. Like Amazon's really developing into something interesting too. Like with the Fire Phone and the tablets. And they seem to be having some success with the Fire tablets. And we don't really know, but they seem to be. Yeah, Fire Phone seems to be flopping.

I think part of that is because it's only available on AT&T. But then you've got the Fire TV, which from all accounts seems to be a pretty credible product. I'm tempted to pick one up one day myself. Also Android-based, right? And then you've got folks like Apple that are slowly turning out this TV stuff. It's really

in this weird phase where they're entering into watches, they're entering into TVs, and they're entering into home automation stuff, which we've really just seen the very beginnings of. And I'm just kind of watching all this. I'm thinking, gosh, you all are kind of working against each other. And because of that, none of it really appeals to me because, like, I don't want to be stranded in one person's ecosystem or one company's ecosystem. This is why the watches don't appeal to me because, me, because I don't want to have to buy a watch

that I've got to buy a specific phone. That's no fun to me. That's why I was glad to jump straight up from Apple when I did. And I think, you know, the Android Wear has the advantage of you can move it between different Android devices, but I don't even like that restriction, which

kind of means I'm screwed, I think, unless I'm just happy with something like the Pebble. And that's not really a compelling device to me personally, although I know Chase really likes his. But I kind of want to want this stuff because I do want some of the convenience they offer at the same time. I just am so sick of the lock-in. Yeah. I can wait. Yeah. Yeah. I can wait. Yeah, yeah.

I think so. Yeah, and, you know, a lot of people in the GNU world would say, you know, why give up your freedom like that? WikiLeaks says, Google is a disgusting ad-selling hypocrite company that pretends not to be evil when their entire business is based on having and using your personal information. Ouch. I don't know if they're hypocrites. I think they're kind of upfront about that. Yeah, they are. They'll tell you like it is. I think they're kind of up front about that. Yeah, they are. They'll tell you how like it is.

I guess we're all kind of negative on the watch thing. Really? Nobody in here wants a watch? I wouldn't mind an Android one, but I mean, I'm not going to spend that much money on a watch. I just want a dummy watch. Something that is able to receive a few instructions from something remote. And I don't

think a watch having processing capabilities is going to be of really any good use. I think it's kind of a device to use as a gateway to any other company or place that you are in and just maybe some very simple functionality. Mostly a receiving device. I think what I want is something I could do messaging. And the problem is that, and I don't want advanced messaging.

I just want something that does voice dictation or voice notes. And that's when you get... Why would you use that? Huh? Seriously, where would you use voice dictation on a watch? What do you mean? When I'm driving. Right.

So why would you not use your phone? Well, normally I have my phone in my pocket, which is just kind of like, you know, right there anyway. So yeah, I could just grab it. The thing is, when I'm driving, sometimes I have like the phone in a spot where my audio is actually connected to a Bluetooth system. And so then I'm using a different microphone

that doesn't work as well for the dictation, whereas if the mic was built into the watch and I could speak more clearly into it, I think it would work better. Okay. What are you on about? You won't be driving for too long. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, see, there's – okay. So this is the other thing where – I mean, I don't want to get all, like, Zen Master about it, but, like, I think we've already crossed a threshold with our smartphones. Okay. I think – okay. All right. already crossed a threshold with our smartphones okay i think okay all right so don't you guys feel like like do you guys go to restaurants and stuff and like you look around and everybody's got their face in their phone and maybe it's getting it's going on it's gone a little too far and that yep and that sometimes like do you get the sensation that maybe people are like avoiding

like being alone with their thoughts for 30 seconds and jumping in their phone so that way they don don't have to deal with, you know, being a human being or something like that. Like it, I, I have watched the progression over the last five years where like, I remember a time where it was kind of considered inappropriate to have your phone at the dinner table in a restaurant. And that was kind of like considered bad taste. And now I go out and everybody's buried in it and it happens everywhere I go. I do it. My friends do it. My family does it. Everybody's got their faces buried in these phones. And I'm thinking, geez, we already are so distracted that we don't even look up and just like look up at the moon one day. We're always looking in our phones. And so I worry that these watches and especially things like Google Glass take it so much further that it actually isn't

maybe healthy for the way our minds process information, and it could leave us, I think, oversensitized or overexposed to this stuff. I don't, for example, particularly want Google Now notifications on my watch. In fact, I'm thinking about turning Google Now off. So then that sort of pretty much makes an Android wear useless. Well, when I look at it, I see two things. I see, one, that modern work environment and people have to relocate.

That's kind of why those gadgets fill a gap. It's right there. It's like people are going to another state or living in another country for large periods of time and those devices do feel a gap that they have that's a real gap that's the real modern world and that's when you find most people but people that are just on the local sharing with people that they know and live nearby, it seems that when some time passes, they eventually start gradually decreasing the usage, especially among friends.

That has been my experience. It's like people got just bloated. It was new. It was shiny. Yeah, I could see that. Maybe. But if you're dealing with actual remote relationships, then it fills a gap. So you will find that.

And also, like, when you go to a restaurant, you're kind of already doing something that is remote. Gradually, with age, people technically, depending on the country, of course, but culturally also start moving to eating at home, eating with family, eating with friends. Yeah. And it's not so much the restaurant thing either. So I wonder if these watches will – could these watches become podcast clients? Could this be a way to listen to podcasts where you don't have to bring your phone if you want to go on a walk? I would be all down. Of course, you have to have your phone with these watches, right? All of them require your phone.

What happens if they can't operate on their own just with minimum functionality, local functionality? I think they would like just time keeping and whatnot. Well, and maybe media playback? If you could put a Bluetooth headphone in or whatever and listen to you could uh you know put a bluetooth headphone in or uh or

whatever and listen to a podcast while you're on a walk and not need your phone i would love that i think it would last 10 minutes um we'll actually push uh further for mesh networks of wi-fi networks oh man wouldn't that be badass if everybody's watch formed a secured mesh network well why not just do that now with phones, right? Again, we go back to that. You could do it with a phone. You're wasting battery over something important. That's true.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. Leaves your phone available as a communications device. Yeah, and also we're now at the current stage of software as a service that companies do have an incentive of having you connected at all times not just through data plans of telecom because ultimately a lot of other things will start to factor in like because the amount of devices is also huge um and the expansion is not as quickly if you're relying on just on just the telephone operators.

True, true. The last time I had a watch, they were called Swatch. And before that, it was a calculator watch. I think that was the 80s. I'm just not a real watch guy. I do kind of feel like actually there's a point to that. I kind of feel like maybe I was – I think when the smartphone came out, I was like, oh, finally, I don't have to wear a watch. Right?

I mean, I don't know. It's just something else for me to break. I don't know. There's that. And charge every night. Don't forget that, too. Oh, gosh. No kidding.

There is the problem with that as well. That's it. I really. Not backless chargers and your desks and workplace being filled with those. Chargers everywhere is what you're saying. Yeah. But then it's actually not as – so when you take the watch off, like in the case of the Apple Watch, it like doesn't – it deauthorizes your capability for payments. It doesn't track your health stats.

Like it becomes significantly less useful when you take it off your body, which you have to do at least once a day. Yeah. When the hell are we going to get decent batteries? What do you want to pay when you're sleeping though people are trying on the battery front yeah they are whatever happened to that one battery that is actually a capacitor invented by a teenager that lasts like for all day if not more he was murdered by the oil industry and then they destroyed the no i'm kidding no no no him and water car guy went up to another. So, you know, you asked what would you why would you want to wear your watch at night?

I track with a Fitbit. I track my quality of sleep. So I know how I'm doing with my sleep apnea. And so I actually a crucial part of the Fitbit is the functionality I use for it while I'm sleeping. It's actually I probably would consider that more important than the step tracking for me. So you were saying that there are people who are sat in restaurants out of the house who can't stop with the digital connectivity. Oh, yeah. You don't see this? You're doing it in your sleep.

Everywhere. I'm not staring at a screen, though, and I'm not distracted by it. It's different. It's more actually what I like about it. Yeah, that's different. That's completely different. Well, because my point is, like, it's passive tracking. You go in and get the data when you want, but these phones and these watches are active, require your attention, distract you from the fact that something's bad in your mind that you're not paying attention to.

Or, you know, they're like these bursts of, like, indulgence on, like, let me take a selfie and make sure I get some mics. I'm just kind of pulling your plunker a bit. But I can see what you're saying. I was at a wedding a couple of weeks ago, and it was in the middle of nowhere, and there was no cell reception at all, and there was no Wi-Fi. Nobody had their phone out,

other than for taking photos of the bride and groom. The rest of the time, everyone was talking, dancing, drinking, having fun. Wow. Nobody had their phone out. It was amazing. It was the best wedding. Aside from the fact it was a fabulous steak, it was the best wedding I've been to for a long time.

We are now reactivating the Wi-Fi. You may now turn your smartphones back on, and everybody got quiet. Should I have a satellite cage over places so you don't connect to Anthony? No, we have trees. Into the countryside. That'll work.

That'll do it up here too sometimes. I was in the ER, and I couldn't make a phone call out. That a weird thing the deal is okay i need to open a company that just sets up signal blockers for weddings and events yeah yeah no they have those already we have a post-show topic this is an interesting one in fact i didn't put it in the main show because i've noticed almost zero discussion online about it it It seems like nobody gives a crap. And I care, so I just wanted to ask. It's probably important. Usually it's the stupid crap that everybody gets all

testy over. Right, yeah. Like U2 albums being auto-downloaded to phones and things like that. Exactly. It's like, oh my god! Chris, can I just say that I personally guarantee if you buy an Ubuntu phone, we won't force a U2 on you. Alright, deal. So speaking of buying stuff, I personally guarantee if you buy an Ubuntu phone, we won't force you. Okay, good. Thank you. All right. All right, deal, deal.

All right, so speaking of buying stuff, Micro Focus has bought AttachMate for $2.3 billion. Of course, AttachMate is the company that owns SUSE Linux. Oh, that is kind of a big deal. Don't you think? I think so. SUSE Linux is what percentage of AttachMate, though? Not that much, but I suppose it's still, yes, it matters. Well, I don't know. That's what my concern is, is maybe it doesn't matter to them, because

they make their money off mainframes and writing COBOL apps. That's where they make their money. Yes, they sell visual COBOL. That's interesting. Yeah. OpenSUSE have posted their response to say basically nothing changes. Yeah, okay. Good, good. I mean, it seems like it would be complementary to a mainframe business. I mean,

they've got a good, strong position there in the market. AttachMate Group owns SUSE, Novell, and AttachMate. AttachMate is based in Seattle, Novell is based in Provo, Utah, and SUSE is based in Germany. So it's kind of an interesting thing they just picked up. So they say, yeah, no changes for SUSE are planned. The business structure and leadership remain. There's no need for any action taken. Commitment to open source.

SUSE remains passionately committed to open innovation. Commitment to open SUSE is fully committed to being a sponsor and supporter of open, highly independent. I guess I'll just kind of boil it down. Yeah, well, it sounds like AttachMate bought Novell, and then it turns out that didn't make them any money. Right. And so then they had to sell because they had to pay back those loans. Yeah, well, and they sold off a bunch of patents. Ah, there you go.

Yeah, there you go. There's that. That's awesome. All right. Yeah, so there you go. There really was not much to say, is there? It just seems to be kind of a non-big deal. Yeah, as long as business continues for the Sousa project, I think everybody's happy.

Do you think the constant sale of Novell and Sousa devalues the Sousa brand? Yeah, I think everybody's happy. Do you think the constant sale of Novell and Sousa devalues the Sousa brand? Yeah, I think it's weird, too. I think it's weird that it keeps getting pushed around like a hooker. Everybody thinks that they can make money with it, but it turns out they can't. Well, but that kind of makes it sound like Sousa's a loser.

Well, she sounds more like a hooker with a PayPal swipe. I don't know. You know, at the end of the day, everybody wants to be the next Red Hat Hat because Red Hat made billions, right? Yeah. You know, though, I mean, for all we know, it has nothing to do with SUSE. Maybe SUSE is the only thing that makes any money at all. Yeah.

In this case, it's a line item that's kind of buried in there. Well, you know, SUSE is way bigger than Red Hat over in Europe. I mean, way bigger. Yeah. So if you're putting a SAP ERP system in, if you're going to put it on Linux, you're either going to put it on Red Hat or SUSE. If you're in the US, that's probably Red Hat.

If you're in Europe, possibly SUSE. So, yeah, it could be some big iron. You asked me, but you didn't answer the question yourself. Do you think it devalues the SUSE brand? I think it kind of does. It does kind of does. It does kind of, it's like the blue-headed stepchild, or the

green-headed stepchild keeps getting pushed around. It feels like sloppy seconds to me. And the other thing is, when you're trying to pick an enterprise platform to base your entire server infrastructure on, stability of the company is a major component. In fact, some people will pick the stability of the company, IBM or Microsoft, over the stability of the actual software a major component. In fact, some people will pick the stability of the company, IBM or Microsoft, over the

stability of the actual software product. Right. That's scary. Yeah. And so when you see this keep moving around, it casts doubts because you never know if the next time it changes hands, if that'll be the time they decide to end it, right? You just never know. And maybe that would never be the case.

I don't know. And I actually think the enterprise product's a really good product, too. So it seems like it should be a moneymaker. I don't know. And I actually think the enterprise product is a really good product, too. So it seems like it should be a moneymaker. But I think this damn Ubuntu LTS thing came around and sort of ate their lunch in the cloud. Yeah, big time.

Son of a gun. All right. So it's interesting to look at Linux's version of long-term support and see how different it is from what companies actually look for. It turns out that companies actually want, like want insane levels of long-term support. They want to stick with one version for 10 years. Like banks running Windows 2000 kind of thing. Well, Red Hat, Enterprise, Linux, and CentOS are around for like freaking ever. Well, they're almost five years, I think.

No, more than that. We're talking like seven or eight. Well, previous data is five,, I think. No, more than that. We're talking like seven or eight. Well, FreeBSD does five, but in CentOS it's the same. But Xenuis is basically making their version of FreeBSD that has 10 plus years of support. Yeah, I think that's meant to compete with HPUX and all that other stuff that is like support for like 50 years or something insane. It's specifically to replace the product they already have, which was SCO. So you can actually pay for what they call extended life support on Red Hat. Well, you'll actually get patches for 13 years. Yeah. But you've got to pay out the butt for it, like $5,000 per server or something like that.

Is that actually a radio button on their web page? The butt charge. I like GNU news is good news. I also like community D debate. I like all the system D references. Man, the people who disagreed with our overall end opinion on our system D discussion, I were really upset by that. Did you guys see?

I haven't gone back in there, but that feedback thread's like a record setter for Linux unplugged in the subreddit. Does it make me evil that I actually popped popcorn for that when I was reading it? That's what I should do. I did too. I literally did, because I just found it so amusing. I mean, I didn't mean to insult anybody. No, just the interesting

views. It's just like, okay. I don't know what these people think my background is, but I've managed servers for a really long time, and I think SystemD is a great advancement for server management. So when I see these server guys that go in there like, I don't want it for my server, I'm like, are you kidding? I want it for my server.

What are you smoking? I don't get it. Alright, so I'm going to refresh the vote page, and I understand. Honestly, I don't want to force anything on anybody. If they want to use open RC or whatever have at it I'm fine with it well here's the problem everyone always gets so fired up about it and what they really need to be talking about is