0:00

I'm really excited. You know, I didn't realize that

0:02

we needed this hero. But Oracle

0:04

is swooping in to keep Linux

0:07

free and they say they can't

0:09

afford not to. You see, in 2006, out

0:12

of their goodwill and for the people

0:14

of this world, Oracle launched

0:16

a RHEL-compatible distribution that

0:19

offered support and lets you run your

0:21

applications like it were RHEL. And

0:23

they did that and they chose RHEL, they write on their blog,

0:27

because we did not want to fragment the Linux

0:29

community. And our effort to remain compatible

0:32

has been enormously successful.

0:35

And all along, Oracle has done this for us,

0:38

not so that way they could undercut

0:40

a competitor, not so that way

0:42

they could try to control the

0:44

stack in a free software world, but because they

0:47

wanted to prevent fragmentation and

0:50

they didn't want the user to suffer. And

0:52

while Oracle and IBM have compatible Linux distributions,

0:55

they have very different ideas about

0:57

the responsibilities and the open source stewards

1:01

for an operating system under the GPL version 2, Oracle

1:04

writes. And they're pretty upset about

1:06

the change that Red Hat has made. Of course,

1:09

they attribute it to IBM and they say, quote, why did IBM

1:11

make this change? Well, if you read IBM's

1:14

blog, which if I check,

1:17

links to redhat.com, but if you they say, they

1:20

write, if you read IBM's blog attempting to

1:22

explain its rationale, it boils down to, quote,

1:25

at Red Hat, thousands of people spend their time writing

1:27

code to enable new features, fixing bugs,

1:30

integrating different packages, and then supporting that

1:32

work for a long time.

1:34

We have to pay people to do that

1:36

work. Well,

1:38

Oracle writes, isn't it interesting?

1:40

IBM doesn't want to continue publicly releasing

1:42

rail source code because it has to pay its engineers,

1:45

they ask. That seems

1:47

odd, they write.

1:49

And given that Red Hat has a successful, independent

1:51

open source company,

1:52

they chose to publicly release the rail source

1:54

and pay its engineers for many years before IBM acquired

1:57

them in 2019. Something has changed. change

2:00

they imply. Something

2:02

is amiss.

2:04

But Oracle's going to stand up and they're going to fight

2:06

IBM. Oracle, they

2:08

write, will continue to release

2:11

a rel compatible distribution to the extent they

2:13

can.

2:14

They say in the path they had access to rel source code

2:16

because man that made it real easy. But

2:19

from a practical standpoint, they believe Oracle is

2:21

going to remain as compatible as they can

2:23

even through the

2:24

future. But you know, they

2:26

have some words of wisdom. They

2:28

write, if you're a Linux developer

2:30

who disagrees with IBM's actions and you believe in

2:32

the Linux freedom the way we do, we're hiring.

2:35

Come work for us, Red Hat employees, essentially what they're

2:37

saying. And then they have an observation

2:39

for ISVs. You know, places out there

2:42

that maybe run CentOS for

2:44

customers. They

2:46

write, IBM's actions are

2:49

not in your best interest.

2:51

By killing CentOS as a rel alternative and

2:53

attacking all my Linux and rocky Linux,

2:55

IBM is eliminating one way your

2:57

customers save money and make

3:00

a larger share of their wallet available

3:02

to you. If you

3:04

don't support your product on Oracle Linux, we'd

3:06

be happy to show you how easy it is. Give

3:09

your customers more choice. I

3:11

really love this paragraph. This is my favorite

3:13

in here, maybe my second favorite because it

3:17

is Oracle essentially advocating to

3:19

have everybody chip away at the very foundation

3:21

of which they built their product on top of. Stop

3:23

contributing to rel and come contribute to Oracle

3:26

Linux. Well, that's how

3:29

does that work when you base your product on rel? And

3:31

where does that lead? And then they wrap it up.

3:33

What they say a big idea.

3:35

Big idea for you, IBM, they say.

3:38

You say you don't want to have to pay all those rel developers.

3:40

Of course, they never said that. That's not what they said at all. It's

3:43

an obvious twisting of their words, but

3:45

they continue. Here's how you can

3:47

save money.

3:48

Just pull from us, become a downstream

3:50

distributor of Oracle Linux.

3:52

We'll happily take on the burden.

3:55

And that's the line that betrays their

3:57

motivation

3:58

behind this entire thing.

4:00

and shows you they are capitalizing

4:02

on the under-informed and the emotional reactions

4:05

out there. Because you couldn't do this.

4:07

There would be no Oracle Linux

4:09

to base on if there was no RHEL.

4:12

This is an absolutely preposterous

4:14

thing to say that

4:15

is leveraging low-information fools out

4:17

there to get them all riled up.

4:31

Hello, friends, and welcome back to

4:33

your weekly Linux talk show. My

4:35

name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name

4:37

is Brent. Hello, gentlemen.

4:39

Well, coming up on the show today, the fallout

4:42

from the recent Red Hat Enterprise changes has

4:44

grown to a whole new level.

4:46

You might have just gotten a taste of that. And Fedora

4:49

is proposing telemetry collection for

4:51

Fedora Workstation 40 going forward.

4:54

Say it ain't so. It's true, Wes, but

4:56

never fear. Red Hat's Director of Software Engineering

4:58

will be joining us in a little bit to dig into the details.

5:00

And I do

5:01

indeed ask him the hard questions. And then

5:03

we'll round out the show with some boosts, some picks,

5:05

and a lot more. So first, let's say good morning to

5:08

our friends over at Tailscale. Go to

5:10

tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged.

5:12

If you don't know, Tailscale is a mesh VPN protected

5:15

by Wirecard. You get it up and running in minutes,

5:17

builds a flat mesh network that you can

5:19

do everything on top of. No more inbound ports

5:21

for Wes, myself, or Brentley, probably. I

5:24

don't know.

5:25

Doesn't really count. Wirecard. Once

5:27

he has Starlink, though, then we're really going to find out. We love it.

5:29

It's going to change your game. So go say good morning to our

5:31

friends over at Tailscale. Tailscale.com

5:34

slash Linux Unplugged and get it for free for up to 100 devices.

5:37

And of course, time-appropriate greetings to our virtual

5:40

lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello, guys.

5:42

Hello. Hello, everybody.

5:47

Thank you for joining us today up there.

5:49

I think we'll need them. Now, a quick

5:51

reminder before we go too far into the show.

5:53

Brent's going to be in Berlin and a meetup on

5:56

Saturday, July 22nd. Meetup.com

5:58

slash Jupiter.

5:59

casting for that. We just want to mention it now because

6:02

it's coming up very soon by the time you hear this. Any

6:04

new details to share with us, Brent? I

6:06

think my new detail is that I'm really

6:09

highly considering doing two meetups again this

6:11

time. Last time we did that last minute, I think we

6:13

should just plan on doing that. So we've

6:16

got July 22, that's the Saturday.

6:18

And then I was thinking maybe the following

6:20

weekend, like the 20... Um, um,

6:22

Brent. The corner site. Yeah.

6:24

We don't want

6:29

to put this in the show, but I don't know if you should tell

6:31

them, right? It's like you tell the one meetup so that way

6:33

as many people show up and they're like, oh, surprise,

6:35

we got another meetup, you know, because otherwise

6:37

people might just punt the first meetup altogether.

6:40

So I don't know. Yeah, you want them to feel like they've

6:42

missed their only opportunity to see you and

6:44

then surprise. It's like the call for papers

6:46

has a deadline and they always get extended a little

6:48

bit. But like that deadline brings a lot of papers in.

6:51

So I don't know. All right. Well, anyways, back to

6:53

it. The bottom of silence. Yeah.

6:56

So meetup. Well, only one meetup for sure. Only one meetup.

6:59

Yeah. Com slash Jupiter broadcasting. You

7:01

better make it. I'll be there for two weeks, but I'm really

7:03

busy. So

7:04

yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He doesn't

7:07

want any food and chat with people and socialize.

7:09

This is no good. No good. All right. Well, let's

7:12

get into our first story this week.

7:14

And that is sort of the furthering

7:17

of the Clone Wars that we saw after

7:19

Red Hat Enterprise Linux announced that their source

7:21

RPMs would no longer directly

7:24

be available and that Red Rail source would

7:26

be available upstream via the Sentos stream.

7:28

Get hub.

7:29

We've been watching

7:31

Rocky Linux and Alma Linux and Oracle

7:33

Linux all have their responses

7:36

and we'll get into some of the updates there. But

7:38

I think one of the bigger things that happened this week is

7:41

SUSE made quite an announcement.

7:43

SUSE announced that instead of using open

7:46

SUSE, you should use their new rail fork.

7:48

And they have also announced they're going

7:50

to put $10 million of investment

7:52

behind it.

7:53

They write, quote, we have a responsibility to defend

7:56

these values. Talking about free software. This

7:59

investment will.

7:59

preserve the flow of innovation for years to come

8:02

and ensure that customers and community alike are

8:04

not subjected to vendor lock-in

8:07

and have genuine choice

8:08

as well today.

8:10

And of course, this is a hypocritical statement by SUSE

8:12

because they would probably trade their left arm

8:15

to have the market share Rell has and to have the vendor

8:17

lock-in situation Rell has. And

8:19

this is the only kind of position they have. It's

8:21

a position of weakness as

8:23

they want Rell's market share.

8:25

So they're going to start producing a Rell clone.

8:27

They write, SUSE is

8:29

committed to working with the open source community

8:31

to develop a long-term enduring compatible alternative

8:33

for Rell and CentOS users.

8:35

And SUSE plans to contribute this project to an open

8:37

source foundation, which

8:40

will provide ongoing free access

8:43

to alternative

8:44

source code. So they're going to set up a foundation,

8:47

Wes. So we're going to be hearing a lot more about this. I

8:49

see that they managed to get Edge and

8:51

AI slash ML into this announcement.

8:54

Nice work. That's the marketing

8:56

people at SUSE

8:58

getting their paychecks worth there. So

9:00

you remember a year ago or so, the

9:03

rumors of Liberty. Oh, right.

9:05

SUSE

9:06

and Liberty and limits. That was something

9:08

they were cooking up where they were considering making

9:10

a CentOS clone

9:12

sort of more akin to Rocky and Alma after

9:14

the original CentOS news. So

9:17

like, here's a path for you. Let's say, you know, you're using

9:19

SUSE, but you got some Rell boxes

9:21

there you're not really happy with. We've got an

9:23

offer right now. And they also have that patching

9:26

sort of

9:27

umbrella service that patches and covers

9:29

support for both SUSE systems and Rell

9:31

systems, which this would sort of snap in

9:33

nicely with.

9:35

And then the word that came

9:37

out from staffers that

9:40

could reveal with certain details on background.

9:42

But the word that came out was they

9:44

killed the project internally before the announcement,

9:46

like right kind of early

9:48

or kind of sort of at the late at the last

9:50

minute, I should say, not early. Because

9:54

they raised a concern that we raised on an episode of Linux

9:56

Action News when we heard the news.

9:58

And that was...

9:59

just going to create Red Hat's original problem.

10:02

They're going to have a Sentos clone that competes with their

10:04

bread and butter. And

10:06

now in this case, it's not even necessarily

10:09

going to be compatible with their main product. At least

10:11

with Sentos, there was application compatibility.

10:13

So if you wanted to

10:15

upgrade or whatever you want to call it,

10:17

step up to rel, you could

10:19

just move your applications. Hell,

10:22

there are scripts that just convert a Sentos

10:25

box into a rel box. I don't know if you should do

10:27

it, but they're out there. Right? I mean, that's the kind of compatibility

10:29

we've been talking about before. Now

10:31

we're going into an era where that won't necessarily be

10:33

the case. And with SUSE's offering, whatever it's

10:35

going to be, it's

10:36

going to be like

10:38

apples and oranges between their two

10:40

enterprise products now.

10:42

Would you wonder out of Oracle

10:44

or SUSE or some of the other ones, do any

10:46

of them have enough leverage to get some

10:49

of the value of having things certified

10:51

for their version of

10:53

the ecosystem? How do you even get it certified?

10:56

How do you do that? Well, I just mean, do

10:59

they have more of a at least background and staff

11:01

who can reach out to other places that

11:03

are certifying for a rel now? What is the certification

11:05

like

11:06

damn close to rel stamp? Or more like

11:08

more product saying works with whatever the SUSE

11:10

fork of rel is.

11:13

The other thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth

11:15

is SUSE uses

11:18

quotes from Greg of CICU and Rocky Linux

11:21

to like emphasize their position.

11:24

And Rocky Linux doesn't

11:27

even really seem to be associated with this. In fact, Brian

11:29

Clams, the project manager at the Rocky Enterprise

11:32

Software Foundation

11:34

wrote on Hacker News that

11:36

they haven't teamed up with SUSE. They don't really know why they were quoted.

11:38

The announcement from SUSE included that CICU was

11:40

teaming up with them.

11:42

But

11:42

that doesn't seem to be the case. I mean, they're open, it seems

11:45

to using, of course, whatever SUSE

11:47

throws over the fence.

11:48

Of course they will

11:50

because then they're taking the legal liability.

11:53

And then he continues to write, Rocky is always

11:55

going to try to be a one to one compatible,

11:58

bug for bug compatible with rels that can.

12:00

Okay, we'll see how that plays out.

12:02

And then he goes on to say, and this

12:04

really shows you the group thing at Rocky in my opinion.

12:06

He says, quote,

12:08

I believe we Rocky Linux, we're

12:10

pretty specific about how we're going to get the source

12:12

in the announcement. And then he links to the announcement we've covered

12:14

two weeks ago.

12:15

We're going to get source RPMs from UBIs.

12:18

That's the cloud images that are rel

12:20

based.

12:21

We're going to spin up cloud instances, et cetera.

12:23

I always like it when

12:25

somebody's snarky about how specific they've been.

12:28

And then one of their specifics is, et

12:30

cetera.

12:31

We're going to vaguely figure out how to pull

12:33

things out of these container images.

12:35

We're going to find a cloud provider that won't shut

12:37

us down for doing this, but we don't really

12:39

know where, and we're not really going to say which one, but

12:42

I don't know why you're accusing us of not giving you specifics.

12:44

That's literally the logic here. That's

12:47

the Rocky team logic right there. Well, the next sentence

12:49

too, includes the only intentional admissions

12:51

are. Yeah.

12:53

It even says there's intentional admissions. I

12:55

know. This is the Rocky

12:57

approach.

12:58

You've got the SUSE approach. All of these

13:00

feel pretty sketch.

13:03

The SUSE one, it's a little unfortunate, right?

13:05

Because

13:06

you're never going to see Red Hat market like this. They

13:09

don't do this kind of marketing when

13:11

SUSE is down and

13:12

SUSE has been sold for the third time. You

13:15

don't see Red Hat coming out and joking about how,

13:17

or making light of the factor, doing blog

13:19

posts about how rel's been with one company this

13:22

entire time.

13:23

They don't really do that kind of marketing. So it's a little unfortunate

13:26

to see SUSE do it. And then of course, quoting Greg,

13:28

who's running Rocky Linux, who's just trying to find the

13:30

biggest loophole he possibly can to keep

13:33

this thing going.

13:35

Alma's going to take a different path. And I, I

13:37

fear, and I'm curious to know what you guys think

13:39

that perhaps, you know, they're going

13:41

to suffer in, in user share as a result.

13:44

Sounds like they're going to try to build

13:46

from SENTOS stream

13:49

and it's going to be a more active development process

13:51

for them. Looking at these different

13:53

takes, Neil, Rockies, SUSE

13:55

and Alma's, I'd be really

13:58

interested to hear your perspective.

13:59

Well, I would say that

14:02

I think people

14:04

don't understand exactly how close

14:07

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS Stream are.

14:11

I know Karl has made many statements about

14:13

this on the Fetaverse about

14:15

how close they are vis-a-vis

14:18

between a rel minor version and CentOS Stream.

14:21

Furthermore, I think he's also said at one point

14:24

that most

14:26

of the packages that are in CentOS Stream are basically

14:28

with the user space are identical to

14:31

what they're in rel. And the stuff

14:33

that changes tends to reconcile fairly

14:35

quickly between the two because

14:38

CentOS Stream is where

14:40

rel development happens. So

14:43

necessarily,

14:44

at some point, they've got to be similar,

14:47

if not the same. And more importantly,

14:49

they have to

14:51

be compatible with each other because CentOS

14:53

Stream is ultimately where rel

14:56

begins. Right, you can only

14:58

let them diverge so much before you're just making a bunch

15:00

of additional work for the next rel release, right?

15:03

Absolutely, right? And so,

15:04

I mean, the real sticking point

15:08

that I've seen from some

15:11

of the rocky folks

15:13

in particular has been the kernel, right?

15:17

And up front, yes. The kernel is

15:19

probably the one package where everything's going

15:21

to be a little different because

15:24

the kernel is very aggressively

15:26

actively maintained, even across

15:29

rel minor versions. But everything

15:31

that is in the rel kernel is in CentOS

15:33

Stream. They may not necessarily be in

15:35

the same order or the same sequence. But

15:39

if you know what to look at, it's not hard

15:41

to figure out what makes a rel kernel from

15:43

a CentOS Stream kernel. You

15:45

just have to kind of do the work. And as someone who

15:48

makes a derivative kernel

15:50

from CentOS Stream for a

15:53

distribution, the CentOS hyperscale variant,

15:56

right? I know how it works. And

15:59

I'm able to... work with it

16:01

fairly easily to

16:03

maintain a kernel for the CentOS

16:05

Hyperscale workstation and other

16:08

deliverables that are being made for CentOS Hyperscale

16:11

SIG. So I mean, if I

16:13

can do it, I'm just one person doing it on the side

16:16

in my spare time, I'm

16:17

pretty sure anyone else can too

16:20

if they paid attention to it enough. I

16:22

don't have a lot of sympathy for

16:25

those who

16:27

aren't willing to roll up the sleeves and contribute

16:30

to the community. And I

16:32

am really happy about

16:34

where Alma is going. I

16:36

mean, the situation sucks for everyone, of course, but

16:38

like, I think that this is going

16:42

to make Alma better long

16:44

term. And it's going to introduce

16:47

more participation

16:49

in the enterprise Linux ecosystem than

16:51

we've ever had in the past. And

16:54

the open contribution model within

16:56

CentOS stream, I'm looking forward to seeing

16:59

contributions come in from Alma Linux. I know for

17:01

a fact that at least one member of Alma Linux has

17:04

actually

17:04

been sending merge requests to

17:07

CentOS stream to fix

17:09

bugs and, you know, introduce

17:11

features and stuff like that. And

17:14

and we're just waiting to see them land. Yeah, what do you

17:16

think about my concern, though, that ultimately

17:19

why people have chosen these clones is because

17:23

it's the easy button and they can kick the can

17:25

down. They can have something that's rel compatible.

17:27

And that's truly what sells these clones is

17:30

that rel compatibility. That's why Rocky leans so

17:32

hard on the bug for bug compatibility. And

17:35

Alma is going to be able to say probably what application

17:38

compatibility, perhaps.

17:39

Well, so if you look at what

17:43

where these where these distributions tend to be used,

17:46

depending on what type of market segment you're in,

17:48

some of it may or may not matter as much. So

17:51

the main level of incompatibility

17:54

that Alma Linux will experience compared to

17:56

Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

17:57

Again, we don't we don't know how.

17:59

that's going to work out for them. We haven't

18:02

really seen them deal with it for the kernel,

18:05

and that's the kernel stuff. But

18:08

for most people, we're talking

18:11

about building open source

18:13

kernel module drivers for all the Linux

18:15

so that they can either enable hardware that's been disabled

18:18

in the rel kernel officially, or they

18:20

add additional features, or they're using add-on

18:22

components of some kind. These

18:25

are all able to be built against any

18:27

kernel and be tested against any kernel

18:29

for compatibility. I don't

18:33

foresee as much of a problem. The user space part

18:36

is much easier to deal with. There are very

18:38

few cases in which there's

18:41

a

18:42

binary interface breakage between

18:45

rel minor versions. Off the top of my head, I

18:47

know of two, and that is Qt, and

18:50

that is LLVM.

18:51

Most, if not all applications will work

18:53

just fine, even if they're

18:56

just primarily sourcing from Sentos stream. You're

18:58

deploying some particular proprietary app

19:00

that you can't really update or change that needs that

19:03

particular interface, and unless

19:05

you have that, maybe you're not going to run into too many problems.

19:08

Well, they have to reconcile anyway when you

19:10

go to a new minor version in rel anyway.

19:12

It's going to happen no matter what. When

19:15

you're looking at, say,

19:17

the main incompatibility issue that

19:19

people would have a problem with,

19:22

it's going to be proprietary kernel modules,

19:24

which Red Hat and the community's position

19:27

is proprietary kernel modules shouldn't

19:29

exist and aren't really supported. If

19:33

you're going to try to do weird stuff in the kernel, prepare

19:36

to get bitten. Again, I should remind

19:38

people, even Red Hat Enterprise

19:40

Linux does not guarantee ABI compatibility

19:43

at the kernel level between rel minor

19:45

versions since rel nine.

19:47

Even on rel minor versions, you have to

19:49

rebuild the kernel module. If you're

19:51

being compliant

19:53

with the kernel license, your

19:55

kernel module needs to be open source.

19:57

If it's open source, then somebody can build it. and

20:00

do their own things. So in practice,

20:03

I don't think it's as much of an issue as everyone is making

20:05

it out to be. All right, I appreciate that perspective

20:07

because that's,

20:08

I think, similar to how we see it. And-

20:11

It does make them feel much more like, you know, their

20:13

own entity. Now I'm looking forward to that.

20:15

Could be a space for some innovation there. And they're open to

20:17

that idea by reading their post. When

20:19

I look at Oracle's reaction, I look

20:21

at Rocky's, Alma's, and I look

20:23

at Sousa's. Oracle

20:26

and Sousa are standing out to me right now. Oracle

20:28

is so unbelievably disingenuous with their

20:30

posts. Like you're worried about preserving free

20:33

software

20:34

and you're worried about the custodians of the GPL2,

20:37

then open source ZFS.

20:40

GPL ZFS, if you're so damn worried,

20:43

what a bunch of liars. And

20:45

if anybody remembers what happened to Sun and

20:47

open Solaris

20:48

after Oracle bought them,

20:50

then it's laughable to say that they are the defenders

20:53

of free software.

20:54

There is so much irony and hypocrisy

20:56

in that post that I'm actually angry about

20:58

it.

20:59

And it's just unbelievable the way they're

21:01

like vultures taking

21:03

advantage of this situation. It's shameful behavior

21:06

from a company that's been around way longer

21:08

and has unfortunately never behaved the way they should.

21:11

Wouldn't it be great if this like, meant that the Oracle and

21:13

Sousa stuff in particular meant like, oh, a whole

21:15

new cluster of activity

21:17

in upstream,

21:18

you know, helping do these things, making

21:21

sense of the stream really great. Almost the only one. the

21:24

most clever way to kick the can without getting sued.

21:26

That's what they're all trying to do.

21:28

I mean, Rocky's at least being fairly transparent

21:30

about it in their kind of sales pitch way.

21:32

But almost the only one that's taking the reasonable approach

21:34

that's not only the most obviously legal one,

21:37

but may even lead to some future innovation

21:40

in RHEL because they're

21:41

gonna have their own bug

21:43

catchers now. They're gonna be doing their own testing. I

21:47

just, it's gross the way these

21:49

competitors kind of turn and capitalize

21:52

on this. And I guess that is what they do, but I

21:54

just,

21:55

Oracle has always disappointed me because

21:58

I've watched them for a while.

21:59

But Sousa. You know, with that whole preserving

22:01

software and the whole thing is just such

22:04

crap. They would love to be in Red Hat's

22:06

position. They would love to. And

22:08

I just, I don't know. Well, I think the biggest thing that

22:11

stands out for me is, again, Alma.

22:13

With Alma, they seem to be actually

22:16

showing some actions that support what

22:18

they're hoping to do, where everybody else is just kind of

22:21

making promises. And we've yet to see

22:24

it come to fruition.

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slash unplugged.

24:12

Well, moving from the world of Centaur

24:14

stream over to Fedora, we

24:16

want to get a little ahead of some potential

24:19

controversy out there as a proposal

24:21

to implement

24:22

quote unquote privacy preserving telemetry

24:25

in Fedora Workstation 40. So,

24:28

you know, to get the straight facts, we're

24:30

inviting Christian Schaller back to the show,

24:33

director of software engineering at Red Hat.

24:35

Well,

24:36

Christian, welcome back to the show. And

24:38

once again, you've joined us. It's been just about a year.

24:40

So it's about time. It's about time you

24:42

come back and tell us what's going on. So thanks

24:45

for being here. Well, thank you for having me. Much

24:47

appreciated. So the reason why we're chatting

24:49

this week is because there is a proposal

24:52

brewing for Fedora Workstation 40. So

24:55

in a couple releases to enable

24:57

what the project is labeling privacy

25:00

preserving telemetry.

25:02

And of course the Linux community is traditionally been

25:04

pretty sensitive when we're collecting telemetry

25:06

about our systems. So could

25:09

we maybe start with

25:11

why and then we'll

25:13

get to how you guys are going to do it differently and whatnot.

25:15

Yeah. So sort of why is that I

25:17

think we have very very often for many years now

25:20

come to conclusion that we are making a lot of decision

25:22

based on assumptions essentially.

25:24

So I mean, so I have discussions in Fedora about

25:27

like, hey, it's a time to turn off support for

25:29

an old generation of CPUs, for instance.

25:31

It's like, well, based

25:33

on, you know, what we see around us and what we

25:35

hear, we think this is fine because we

25:38

think there's nobody or not a significant

25:40

amount of people using this anymore, for instance, or

25:43

for that matter in terms of choices, right?

25:45

I mean, I think there have been so many times over the last

25:47

few years where I like, for instance, listen to your show and it's

25:49

like, hey, I use GNOME, but you know,

25:51

without that one extension is useless to me. That's

25:54

sort of like

25:54

a statement I heard quite a lot. And

25:56

then of course I am sitting there like, okay,

25:59

how representative. with that claim, how true

26:02

is it? And like, so I ended up having

26:04

to all this parse data in this, like,

26:06

and make guesstimates based on all the best experience,

26:08

like, is this relevant or is this because,

26:11

hey, like Chris really loves to do calls. So that's why

26:13

he has economic extension doing solving of Sudoku

26:15

or Persil. What about something more recent,

26:18

like the LibreOffice decision to switch from packaging

26:20

to Flatpak? Would, do you think there could be

26:22

a scenario where this telemetry data could

26:24

have been used to make a more data-driven

26:27

decision there?

26:27

Absolutely.

26:29

And LibreOffice was a hard one to really know

26:31

for because it's pre-installed in Fedora Workstation.

26:34

Right. So, so we don't know whether that's

26:36

in there. People never start it or

26:39

use it or if actually everyone was

26:41

using it. Right. So it's, and I mean, another

26:44

important thing for us, right, is that, you know, we have this long-term

26:46

vision of moving maybe towards more

26:48

something like SilverBlue, which

26:50

is an immutable core system. But

26:52

there's a lot of things in the way of doing that. Like

26:55

for instance,

26:57

there are certain printer drivers that you then have to

26:59

either do a complex job of layering onto the system

27:02

or whatever to get it in there. And

27:05

once again, with modern printers and printless

27:07

driving, no, driverless printing, sorry, that

27:11

might not be a problem. But once again, maybe there's

27:14

a hundred holes in Fedora users

27:16

who happen to have one of those older print models still

27:18

in use. So there's a lot of these things

27:20

where we're getting a system for gathering

27:22

metrics can make us help us make better

27:24

decisions basically for the Fedora community.

27:27

What about the art of it all?

27:29

Like, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll steel

27:31

man this for just for a moment. I think Fedora

27:34

workstation has turned out pretty great

27:36

and has become one of the absolute

27:38

leading edge distributions. That's really kind of

27:40

shown the way forward for a bunch

27:42

of other distributions and has made a bunch of decisions

27:44

that seemed

27:45

semi-risky at the time.

27:48

System D, pipewire, ButterFS,

27:51

would a data driven distribution have

27:53

made some of those same decisions. What about the

27:55

art of it?

27:56

Well, I mean, obviously there's certain decisions

27:59

that a few. metrics probably can't help

28:01

you with. It's like, is

28:03

making a choice to do something?

28:06

For instance, it will bring in a whole new group

28:08

of users.

28:09

The other metrics on the current

28:12

user base probably will never help you answer that question.

28:14

And

28:15

at the same time, I don't think about at least the way

28:17

we look at metrics. You

28:20

know, it would affect the things like our investment

28:22

in PyPyr as a good example. I mean,

28:24

that was partially thinking, okay, hey, how can

28:26

we make life easier for pro audio users? And

28:29

how can we stop having the

28:31

audio stack being such a

28:34

mess, basically, and at the same time also get

28:36

similar line of support for video? So

28:41

obviously, certain things, metrics will not help

28:43

us with. And that's, I guess, where the art of it comes in, where

28:45

we have to sort of make

28:47

some call about strategic and

28:50

educated decisions about where we're heading that

28:52

we can't necessarily prove a front with data.

28:55

So there'll still be some gut involved, of course.

28:58

Okay, so let's talk about, let's talk about how you're

29:00

going to do this. Because one of the things

29:02

I've noticed reading through the proposal and

29:04

then the discourse conversation,

29:06

it feels like there's

29:07

a lot of thought about how

29:10

to do it in a way that doesn't use a

29:12

third party system like Google Analytics. Sounds

29:14

like there's been a lot of thought about doing things that

29:17

don't capture identifying information,

29:20

even like things like, you

29:21

know, not looking for looking at proprietary

29:23

installed apps, because maybe somebody has

29:25

some sort of custom binary they run that might

29:28

hint at who they might be like, you guys have thought a lot

29:30

about that stuff. But I see

29:33

less thought on what you actually want to collect

29:35

as the conversation has gone on. It seems like there's kind

29:37

of been a realization of,

29:38

okay, we probably do want to track that, but we have to do

29:41

it right.

29:41

It seemed like in the initial proposal,

29:44

there was this attempt to be like, well, we think we want to watch

29:46

these things. But as the conversation has gone on,

29:49

that window seems to be expanding a little

29:51

bit. What are your thoughts on the critical

29:53

things and just sort of the way this might go? And my

29:56

initial criticism of there's been a lot of

29:58

thought put into the technical implementation. presentation,

30:00

but not a lot of thought into the actual practical

30:03

collection

30:04

so far. When we put all the proposals

30:06

over to our thought was,

30:09

let's start agreeing upon the process for

30:11

how to do it before we start digging into those.

30:13

And for us, we thought, like, you know, instead of having

30:15

a predefined list of these are the things

30:17

we have been thinking about. Let's instead focus

30:20

on the fact that let's have a community driven process where

30:22

we have elected community members who will be

30:24

part of decision making for what metrics to gather

30:26

or not so that it becomes more about the process for

30:28

how we do it, as opposed to

30:31

individual items. I mean, I agree, of

30:33

course, based on feedback, we realized that we needed to provide more

30:35

examples because people like, okay, how are you

30:37

going to check my browsing history? Or I mean,

30:39

what are you trying to do here? And so

30:42

we're trying to add that now and bring that in.

30:44

But it, you know, it's also this sort

30:46

of weird situation

30:48

when you do development in open is that on one side, people

30:50

say, Oh, why isn't your proposal more fleshed

30:52

out? But at the same time, if you come

30:55

with something that's super fleshed out, like, Oh, the decision is

30:57

already made. It isn't involved with from the beginning. Fair.

31:01

Yep. Yep.

31:02

And it seems like there

31:04

is a lot of technology

31:06

available that's thought through this a lot.

31:08

Reading through the proposal, it seems like a lot

31:10

of the tech that's going to be the back end is

31:12

going to be stuff that was created by endless

31:15

for their platform with some

31:17

modifications, it seems. And can you talk a little bit

31:19

about why endless is implementation

31:22

and how it's going to work a little bit differently for Fedora?

31:25

Yeah, so the background for it was that

31:27

quite some years ago, no, I was a goad in

31:30

Greece, and Rob McQueen, who's the head of endless,

31:32

he was actually talking about their, their

31:34

metric system. And the

31:38

topic of talk was like, how do we do metrics in a way that

31:40

isn't sort of murky to users?

31:42

And one of the things he pointed out was like, hey,

31:44

let's make sure the data captures open

31:46

source, so people can all get that code. Let's make

31:48

sure the server is open source, so people can all get that

31:50

code, and make sure you

31:53

know, it's easy to turn on and off for people so they can, you

31:55

know, he's locked out. So I thought like, oh, yeah, that's actually

31:57

so reasonable, because I think a lot of the gift reaction

31:59

people have against any kind of metrics gathering is,

32:02

I don't know what's happening on my system. There's some people looking

32:05

at what I'm doing and taking

32:07

some data out and I don't know which data this or what's

32:09

going to be done with it. So by trying to

32:11

be sort of super transparent about it and having

32:13

like everything being open sourced, everything being

32:15

hosted in a clear way and having

32:18

even a community process for deciding what to gather,

32:21

we're sort of hoping to alleviate

32:24

those fears, right? And I

32:27

think at the same time, we did some changes because

32:30

Fedora is different from Endless in certain

32:32

ways. So we felt we wanted to err

32:35

even more on the side of caution when it came to

32:37

how we did it. So for instance,

32:39

like, so that's why we did some changes to

32:41

the endless call. But at the same time, we're trying to basically work

32:43

with Endless to have a shared call base so that as

32:46

we improve this thing, it's

32:48

useful for everyone. And of course, also other distros, we

32:51

might want to

32:52

start using this can also take the same system.

32:54

One of the things that I thought was really kind of neat

32:57

and gives me a bit of peace of mind is it

33:00

sounds like it would be theoretically

33:03

possible for the user to point the metrics

33:05

collection at their own server back

33:07

end and then they could actually look at the exact

33:10

data being sent to the server.

33:12

That's neat. That's a neat implementation. So okay,

33:14

on the client side, it is going

33:16

to be on by default

33:18

for brand new installs so far that

33:20

if the proposal goes forward with workstation 40. How

33:24

will that practically work? I've got a brand

33:26

new install. I've just done my first

33:28

login. Are you collecting information about

33:30

my system? What's being sent at that point?

33:32

Yeah, so not nothing is being sent. But

33:35

the system is collecting data and we

33:37

are discussing whether it's better to wait. I

33:39

mean, it's also about like, if you wait, then maybe we

33:41

miss critical information that could be useful

33:44

to let's say, a figure of the bug that's happening on the

33:46

system, right before the first login as

33:48

an example. So what's going to happen is

33:50

that the system looks by default. And

33:53

then once you get the initial

33:57

system setup screen, it will ask you whether you want to do metrics

33:59

or not. And if you say, they know that it'll just turn off everything

34:01

and delete whatever it collected so far. Could

34:04

be, as I said, based on discussion that we end

34:07

up turning it on at that point as opposed to

34:09

having it on from the get-go. I

34:11

feel that's a minor detail, but I mean, I think for some

34:14

people it matters more. But to be

34:16

clear, the collection is on.

34:18

Right now, the proposal is the collection will be on,

34:20

but the uploading is not on

34:23

and does not get enabled until the user clears

34:25

the privacy screen where they have the checkbox to

34:27

turn it off.

34:28

Yes, correct. And

34:30

then once it's on, or say you're on a 39

34:32

system or a 38 system

34:35

and you upgraded to 40

34:36

and it's not on yet,

34:38

there's going to be a new UI created

34:40

in GNOME settings?

34:42

Yes, correct. So there will be

34:44

a UI there, people can go, I mean, let's say

34:46

you did a fresh install and then you regret

34:49

your choice later on, be that you turned it on or

34:51

off, you can go into GNOME settings and change

34:53

it. But also for people who did upgrade, they

34:56

will then be able to go there and turn it on. And

34:59

we are talking about like, whether on the road you can come

35:01

up with a good way to present the UI after

35:03

upgrade. I mean, part of the problem is at the moment we have

35:05

nothing in Fedora that would sort of easily

35:08

enable us to present the question

35:10

to users, say, do you want to open into

35:12

this

35:12

now since we have this new thing? So

35:14

that's why at the moment it's only

35:16

for fresh installs. But I mean, maybe with the online, we come

35:18

up with a way to do that in a non-annoying

35:21

way. Right. Interesting.

35:23

I mean, because I think it would be kind of,

35:26

I think it'd be kind of maybe jarring for users

35:28

that upgrade that had it off to have it turned on by default.

35:30

So I think that probably is a safe way to at least start. Okay.

35:32

So I want to, I want

35:34

to kind of talk about the overall idea and

35:37

goals here, because we have some implementation details.

35:39

They seem pretty solid. They're going to follow

35:41

a lot of the endless stuff, which they've done a really

35:44

comprehensive blog post on that is

35:46

fantastic,

35:47

that I'll put a link to in the show notes if people want those details.

35:50

So my question to you is,

35:51

if this goes forward, what are like the must have

35:53

things from a 50,000 foot level

35:57

managing the project view that you'd really like to have,

35:59

like the data points. that you don't

36:01

have that are your pain points right now?

36:03

I think it's definitely, I would like to

36:05

be able to see more about,

36:07

I guess, certain technology

36:09

choices, as we talked about, right? I want,

36:12

for instance, know, hey, when is it fine

36:14

to stop caring about a certain class or hardware, for instance.

36:18

I also want to see, you know, what shell

36:20

extensions are popular, so we can see, I'd like, do we

36:22

need to try to integrate them closer? I mean, it doesn't

36:24

necessarily be that, hey, okay, it turns

36:27

out that 60% of Fedora users use a specific

36:29

extension, so let's package that in Fedora. I mean,

36:31

that might be the output, but it could also be that Alan Day,

36:33

who's overhead designer, maybe he will

36:35

take that as input to go back to the gnome community and say,

36:38

hey, what if you try to integrate this feature

36:40

into, you know, myself, because it turns

36:42

out, you know, there's a huge subset or

36:46

even superset or users who wants

36:48

this specific feature. Another

36:52

thing could be, you know, mention

36:54

Butterfest. You know, I don't know how

36:56

many Fedora users are still on XFS versus

36:59

Butterfest, so I mean, in terms of, for instance, starting

37:01

to try to take advantage of certain Butterfest

37:03

features, I need to know certain

37:05

that, okay, no 99% are over in Butterfest,

37:08

so I can start sort of assuming almost that that's the

37:10

default for a Fedora install. There

37:12

are also things like, when

37:14

you, for instance, want to convince a new hardware partner or

37:17

not even a partner, if you want to convince a hardware maker to

37:19

start supporting the LVFS for firmware,

37:22

if I can say, hey,

37:24

I know for sure that there's 50,000

37:26

Fedora users that are going to have your hardware

37:28

and they would love to get firmware updates for that. That's

37:31

a lot stronger argument to make, both

37:33

for me to them and for them internally, than if I say, I

37:36

think there's quite a few somewhere out there who probably

37:38

uses for stuff. That data opens doors, I would

37:40

imagine, starts conversations for

37:42

sure. So, okay, so one of the other areas I saw

37:44

discussed is,

37:46

and I suppose you could look at this with a perspective

37:49

of, I'm sort of shocked this wasn't already

37:51

there, of course it's not, but I'm sort of shocked

37:53

because any other commercial software packages would

37:55

be there, GNOME Software.

37:57

There's discussions in their tracking about, well, when

37:59

does somebody actually...

37:59

click on a banner in Nome Software,

38:02

do the people actually use the featured app section

38:04

and just really, really

38:06

basic information about

38:08

just the standard stuff, how users are using

38:11

Nome Software. I never even thought that that

38:13

information wasn't available. I for some reason

38:15

thought maybe there would be like analytics

38:17

in there, but of course there's not.

38:19

And to me, it seems like

38:20

obvious that how do you really improve

38:23

something like Nome Software without having an idea

38:25

where the rough parts are. But what if, now let's just,

38:27

let's play just fun here.

38:29

What if something comes back, and I doubt this is gonna be the case, but

38:31

what if something comes back and says like,

38:33

4% of Workstation users

38:36

use Nome Software more than twice or something. Like

38:38

it's such a, could there be a moment

38:41

where

38:41

upstream at GNOME or

38:43

the Fedora project goes, you know, we're actually just gonna

38:45

stop working on something, could there be that

38:48

kind of radical shift? What do you think the ultimate

38:50

end result could be for something like that?

38:53

Well, I think definitely it could be cases

38:55

where we, for instance, realize that, hey, this

38:57

tool that we thought were something Kotash

39:00

Mark everyone was using, nobody is using. And

39:02

it would at least trigger some kind of rethink, right? I

39:04

mean, there's no point in, I mean, we are investing

39:07

quite a bit in GNOME Software in

39:09

terms of having like an engineer more or less full-time on it.

39:11

And if it turned

39:13

out that nobody was using GNOME Software, then A,

39:17

the question is, why is that? I mean,

39:19

of course, maybe we would start probably by figuring

39:21

out what, because to some degree it would feel naturally

39:23

like, okay, people probably need some software tool to

39:25

use, really, everyone just used the NF command line or

39:27

what's the story there. But

39:30

of course, worst case scenario, we might decide, okay, well,

39:32

if nobody's using it, why are we, maybe that engineer

39:34

can instead go and work on this other feature that, you know,

39:36

we've seen from the data people are desperate for, but

39:38

we currently have nobody working on.

39:40

Right. I mean, I'm sure it does, right? I'm sure

39:42

it gets used. The popup comes up, scissors updates, people

39:45

click it, it launches GNOME Software, I'm sure it gets

39:47

used. But I just thought it was an interesting thought

39:49

experiment. I guess my other thought that

39:51

I just

39:52

generally, and this is kind of going for your personal

39:54

opinion on this one, I've seen kind of a trend

39:56

where there's people and groups out

39:59

there

39:59

to capitalize and take the opposite

40:02

position of anything

40:05

associated with Red Hat does. You know what I mean? So

40:07

if Red Hat comes out and says, we're going to do this, they'll come out and

40:09

say, we're going to save the users and we're going to do

40:11

Y and come join us. Are you concerned

40:14

at all about this

40:15

metrics telemetry stuff getting

40:18

spun as anti-free software or anything like

40:20

that?

40:21

Well, yes, I

40:23

guess I am. I mean, obviously I do

40:25

not want that to happen. At the same time,

40:28

I always feel that you need to be sort of confident

40:30

enough about that you're doing the right thing. That

40:34

fear doesn't deter you from doing it because

40:36

I mean, at the end of the day, I believe that this data

40:39

will allow us to make Fedora significantly better. And

40:41

I think that will pull in a lot more users. So

40:43

for me, I think that

40:45

always, you know, any noise on

40:48

the internet, basically around it. Yeah,

40:51

it's generally noise. I think you're right. I think if

40:53

Fedora stands out and if Fedora has gotten better over

40:55

the years, and I think

40:57

we've seen it, right? It's grown in

40:59

popularity and its praise and

41:01

rightfully so, because it earned that through it through

41:03

just being a good product.

41:05

And this really is just we're talking workstation,

41:07

right? We're not necessarily talking some of the other flavors

41:09

or spins. This is just workstation right now. Yeah.

41:12

So I mean, and this, of course, is a gnome

41:14

only distribution. They designed this specifically

41:16

to track data and gnome. But that

41:18

said, of course, big chunks with are usable.

41:20

So what we have said is that if any other spins wants

41:23

this, they are free to, of course, to work on

41:25

making sure that this is integrated into

41:27

their spin and works for them. But

41:30

at the same time, I want to keep the data separate because

41:32

I guess as an example,

41:34

I mentioned in one of these discussions we had internally,

41:36

I said like,

41:38

you know, I want to, for instance, know whether, well,

41:40

I mean, what is an interesting data point for me

41:43

is, for instance, how many gnome users are

41:45

using on terminal versus console,

41:47

for instance, what is not from

41:50

a Fedora workstation perspective is important for me is

41:52

like, is whether KDE users are using console

41:54

or not. And at the same time, with that,

41:57

again, might be useful data for the KDE spin, right?

41:59

They want to verify. Oh, people are actually using over the fault

42:01

terminal application. Um, so, so

42:03

I think we will probably come up with a way that if, if

42:06

someone, the spins decides to do this, we will have

42:08

a sort of separate repository for them because some

42:10

data of course is valid across the spins,

42:12

but

42:13

you know, KDE probably couldn't give care

42:15

less about which, you know, extensions people use

42:17

or not. No, maybe they'd like to know

42:19

what plasmoids I'm using though. Cause I do have a couple.

42:22

Um, okay. So really my last question for you is

42:25

just again, to just sort of steel man this a little bit,

42:27

it's actually in totality. I think this is a great thing. And

42:30

I think you guys have a really solid implementation that respects

42:32

privacy.

42:33

But let's just say like you say you're getting a really,

42:36

there's a few data points that are coming and you got some great signal

42:38

and somebody at some point by auditing

42:41

this discovers.

42:42

Actually, I do have a way to deduce

42:45

somebody's potential identity from this

42:47

metric. Have you thought at all about a process

42:49

for how you'll

42:50

wipe that data out or if you will, if you'll,

42:52

if you're going to keep taking that signal, if you'll get rid

42:54

of that, that particular telemetry point,

42:57

what are your thoughts there?

42:58

Yeah. No, I mean, I think our thought is that if

43:00

that happens, we will basically on the database level need

43:02

to do go and do some data laundry. I have

43:05

a hard time imagining the scenario where

43:07

it will be possible. I mean, like I was

43:09

trying to think about it and like say, Hey, like if

43:12

you're happened to use an Acer laptop,

43:14

maybe you're the last person in the world to do that and

43:17

if I know you and I know we use an Acer laptop, I know

43:19

that we got that data from you, but

43:21

that means I have to already know

43:23

that you're using an Acer laptop for me to know

43:26

that that was your data point and you need

43:28

to be the last person in the world using

43:31

that Acer brand laptop. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So,

43:34

I mean, if it happens

43:36

to you, of course, jump in and then do surgery

43:38

on the database to, to purchase, but I have a,

43:40

I have a hard time imagining the scenario

43:42

where, where this comes together like that. Yeah.

43:45

I mean, reading through it, it really seems like the number

43:47

one priority is avoiding user identifiable

43:49

information, even at the cost of losing out

43:51

on useful information.

43:53

Yeah, correct. Yeah. Well, Christian,

43:55

thanks for coming on and answering some of my questions and

43:58

keep us updated on how it goes. We'll keep an eye on.

43:59

of the discussion and Fedora Workstation 40 as

44:02

well as it develops. Thanks again. Can I

44:04

actually add one last thing before we leave? Sure,

44:06

absolutely. So one thing that came up a lot

44:08

in the internal discussion and I want to address it is people

44:10

are like, because a lot of things in Fedora

44:12

Workstation has been about should signing

44:14

up for this be something that has a, we have a, you

44:17

know, this privacy panel saying, do you want

44:19

to join or not? And then the question is, what's the default?

44:22

Should the default be joined or not to join? And

44:24

a lot of people feel that if you even suggest something,

44:27

you're doing something wrong. But I, I

44:29

ended up actually reading some

44:32

studies from Cambridge University today, who had

44:34

actually done studies on like

44:36

opt-in and why do people behave the

44:39

certain way when they see opt-in things. And the

44:42

primary thing to point out was that when people see, for

44:44

instance, a question asked, Hey, do you want

44:46

opt-in and it's the false? So yes, they take

44:49

that as a recommendation from the people making the

44:51

survey. And of course, if we

44:54

are asking people to sign up, obviously, we want them

44:56

to sign up. And that's implicit. And

44:59

then of course, the two other things I mentioned was like ease

45:01

of choice. I mean, of course, not time to go and click no,

45:04

it's a little harder than just clicking

45:07

next. But it's it

45:09

was more about fact that people like I don't care

45:11

enough. So I'll just click next as opposed to

45:13

I don't understand it. And I click next, right.

45:16

And an interesting of the last thing I mentioned was

45:18

that people tend to choose to

45:22

default just because they consider it the

45:24

status quo, basically. But

45:27

I mean, to me, the most important thing is like the

45:29

thing that really struck me was this whole thing about like people

45:34

see that choice as a recommendation from the people

45:36

asking. And I feel that like, if you're going

45:38

to ask people or have a telemetry system,

45:40

obviously, you need to believe enough in it to

45:42

feel confident about recommending our users to use

45:45

it. And so

45:47

I think we are looking at some, you know,

45:49

design tweaks to try to compromise

45:51

with people on that. But at the end of the day,

45:54

in order to also get the volume in it, because once

45:56

again, right, I don't want people if it's

45:59

sort of only the hard.

45:59

core and sub signing up, for instance, then you

46:02

sort of like, oh, so the most popular ID

46:04

is still Emacs. I never realized, you know, well,

46:07

everybody's on I3. Wow. Who knew they

46:09

switched over. I didn't know. Yeah, absolutely.

46:12

They're, yeah, they're all using tiling extensions. That's,

46:15

and I think that is a good point is you want to try to

46:17

cast a widest net as possible. And I

46:20

think the thing that gives me some peace of mind

46:22

as a user, and I don't know if I ever would, but

46:24

if at some point

46:26

I felt like I wanted to opt out,

46:28

it's just right there in gnome settings. And I can just go

46:30

check that box and that's

46:32

nice that I don't have to like invoke some sort of command

46:35

line

46:36

magic, you know, to get it to do, to turn

46:38

off some sort of service or something like that. I just go check

46:40

a box. Yeah.

46:41

Yeah. And it's worth mentioning that, you

46:43

know, Fedora used to have this opt-in tool back in day

46:46

called smolt. I never tried it. Yeah. I

46:48

was going to mention that I forgot, but yeah, I

46:50

remember it almost had like a,

46:53

God, it like, it had like a previous

46:55

era UI to it. It was really, it was an, it was

46:57

a different time back then, but it was kind of a

46:59

more primitive version, right? It was not, not

47:02

nearly as, and yeah, I imagine. And

47:04

it sort of also proved that opt-in doesn't

47:06

necessarily work because it turned out that only people who were motivated

47:09

to run it were the people who like, Oh, my system

47:11

doesn't work correctly. So I'm going to run smolt to

47:13

submit that and hopefully I'm going to fix my system. The

47:17

problem with that is that you go to database that made it look

47:19

like the leanest community was only using weird systems

47:21

basically. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I would

47:23

skew the results I would think, or you got guys in

47:25

there like my system so awesome. I want to submit

47:27

it with my six monitors. Yeah,

47:30

exactly. And then, and

47:32

then if you're the sign new system, assuming everyone alter has six

47:34

monitors, you're probably missing part of the market. I

47:37

mean, I imagine there's two, there's going to be a lot of software you'll have

47:39

to create on the backend to visualize all this and view

47:41

it and understand it. Right. That's going to be a whole project

47:43

in itself. So yeah, I mean, of course, as

47:45

long as we have it, I mean, you know, one of the restrictions

47:48

we're putting is that it's all going to be

47:51

independent data. We're not going to create like a user

47:53

profile

47:53

with like linking things

47:55

together. So it makes, of

47:57

course parsing it a little simpler in some ways,

47:59

because it's like. okay, so 40% of

48:01

Fedora users like to use Inkscape.

48:04

It's like I cannot necessarily that easily correlate it

48:06

with it, like, you

48:08

know, and they use GIMP too, kind

48:10

of, right? Because they're just two separate data points.

48:12

I mean, maybe if the percentage is very close, I would assume

48:14

that, you know, maybe these are some of the same

48:16

people who are artistically inclined.

48:20

But it

48:21

means,

48:23

you know, the sort of analysis we can do, at least

48:25

as long as we keep that model of having

48:28

everything completely independent is a little

48:30

bit more limited, but, you know, still a

48:32

lot of useful data to be had. That's an example

48:34

of the privacy trade-off that the project's going to have to make,

48:37

yeah.

48:37

And I could, you know, of course there's

48:39

commercial vendors that are going to go way farther and go

48:41

way beyond, but I could see wanting to walk that

48:43

line very carefully and respectfully

48:45

as a free software project, because you'll probably

48:47

be setting an example for other projects.

48:50

Yeah, and hopefully, and I mean, you know, we obviously have

48:52

learned from what and this they are doing, and I think they did

48:54

a stellar job with their tooling, and we are trying

48:57

to take it and sort of adopt it for our use case. And

48:59

I think that's the other thing is like,

49:01

I feel this is trying to do, you know,

49:03

metrics gathering the right way, as opposed

49:05

to, like, people probably think about, like, as

49:07

I said, like, you know, weird hidden things in your system

49:10

that gathers hidden data in a mysterious

49:12

way. Right. It's in there. You

49:14

know it's doing something, but you just have no idea what. That's

49:16

the Windows experience, and we don't want that. No,

49:19

exactly. All right,

49:20

Christian, thank you for coming on and answering my questions and

49:22

explaining it to us. Yeah, well, thank you for having

49:24

me. Let's start to make it less than a year

49:26

next time. Sounds good. Thank you.

49:32

collide.com slash unplugged.

49:34

If you work in security or IT, and

49:36

your company is Okta, you need to listen to this.

49:39

If you've noticed that over the past few years, the majority

49:41

of data breaches, you

49:43

know, hacks that maybe you read about in

49:45

the news, they seem to have something in common, don't they?

49:48

The attack vectors often the employees.

49:50

I mean, sometimes their device gets hacked

49:53

because of unpatched software. I'm looking at you old

49:55

Android devices. Sometimes,

49:57

unfortunately, employees leave sensitive data in

49:59

an unsecured place.

49:59

Sometimes they just don't know better. And

50:02

it seems like every day a hacker, you know, breaks

50:04

in using credentials they got from some phished

50:07

account or something that leaked online.

50:09

Just, it's a huge problem to deal with at scale.

50:11

And the problem here isn't really end

50:13

users, is it? I mean, they're

50:15

not, they're not doing it intentionally. And

50:18

it's

50:19

the solution so far that enterprises have been provided.

50:21

They just haven't really prevented these breaches.

50:23

They just don't do enough. It doesn't have

50:25

to be that way though. Imagine a world where

50:27

only secure devices could access your apps. In

50:30

this world, phished credentials are useless to hackers

50:33

because you can manage every OS, even the Linux

50:35

machines from a single dashboard. And best

50:37

of all, you

50:38

get employees to fix their own device security

50:40

issues without creating a whole bunch of work for IT.

50:43

And the good news is

50:45

you don't even have to imagine this. It's actually available

50:47

with Collide. That's what Collide does. It's a device

50:50

trust solution for companies with Okta. And

50:52

they ensure that even if a device isn't trusted

50:54

and secure, it won't log in to your

50:57

apps. That's powerful and it stops

50:59

problems before they happen. So go to collide.com

51:02

slash unplug

51:03

to watch a demo and just see how this works. It

51:05

isn't magic. They've really figured it out. So you go

51:07

to K O L I D E.com

51:09

slash unplugged. That's

51:11

collide.com slash unplugged.

51:17

As usual this week, we got some great feedback.

51:19

Thank you very much for that. If you want to leave us

51:21

some, maybe about what Christian and Chris

51:23

just shared, we would love to hear it.

51:26

Linux unplugged.com slash contact

51:28

for that. And, uh, I'll even read it personally

51:31

for you. Now, Matias

51:33

sent us a little note and I thought, Chris, you

51:35

might add this to your, maybe your wishlist. Matias

51:38

says,

51:39

I have a book suggestion about IT

51:42

security.

51:43

I do have to warn you though, after reading this, you

51:45

will feel a strong need to move

51:47

out into the woods in

51:49

a Faraday cage. The book recommendation

51:51

is this

51:52

is how they tell me the world

51:55

ends. The cyber weapons arms

51:57

race by Nicole Pearl.

51:59

Oh man. And we have a link to a

52:02

Goodreads insert on that, so

52:04

have a look. And Chris, are you gonna get this one? Boy,

52:07

I already have run out into the woods tendencies.

52:10

I don't know, is this... Next to a Faraday cage, I

52:12

think. Hm,

52:14

can I build a Faraday cage into the RV

52:16

bedroom? Is Jube's a Faraday cage?

52:19

Maybe sometimes. She's got plenty

52:21

of radio signals inside.

52:23

Interesting. Okay, alright. This

52:26

is how they tell me the world ends, the cyber

52:28

weapons arm race. You know,

52:31

I always find getting information

52:33

on this fascinating, even if, you know, maybe it

52:35

only affects a small percentage of those

52:38

on the internet doing, who knows, maybe

52:41

nefarious dark secret things. But

52:44

it's always kind of interesting because even if it increases

52:47

your own, you know, mindset

52:49

or protection or the steps you take for yourself

52:51

by, I don't know, five, 10%, well, that's already

52:54

a win for you personally. So I say go

52:56

for it. I mean, if it's an audio book,

52:58

which I don't know if it is, but if someone finds it, please let

53:00

us know.

53:01

Why not? Yeah, you got me.

53:03

You sold me. All right. Thank

53:05

you for the... I really appreciate the book

53:07

recommendation.

53:11

And now it is time for the

53:13

boost. A delicious name, Noodles with

53:16

the Z rights in, and they are our baller

53:18

this week with 93,650 sats. Hey Rich

53:20

Luster! Sent it in via

53:22

the podcast index. They write, hey guys, just sending a boost

53:26

after a long kerfuffle with strike and getting sats because I had

53:28

my identity

53:30

stolen in the past. Oh, so KYC that stands for know your

53:32

customer, which is sort of law here in the West, makes

53:35

it near impossible to get sats for guys like me. Anyways,

53:37

I've been listening since around episode 250. So

53:40

a long time listener, but a first time booster. I just want to

53:42

say love the show and I hope it goes on for infinity.

53:46

Or near it. Well, as best we can. Right? I

53:48

mean, look at, look at these two

53:49

guys. They look like they got years left on them still.

53:55

can

54:00

save these sats for robot bodies? Yeah,

54:02

definitely. You know, the robots are going to

54:04

be taking sats for sure.

54:06

I actually would love to know more information

54:09

about the whole like identity

54:11

stolen, how you got the sats after that and the troubles

54:13

you ran into because I got to imagine that could happen to anybody.

54:15

Thanks for jumping through all the even more hoops.

54:18

You know, it's also a zip code boost

54:20

there, Wes Payne. Yeah, looks

54:22

like it's coming in from Fresno,

54:24

California. Hey, not

54:27

too far away.

54:28

They're also noodles.

54:30

One, two, three, two on Matrixorg,

54:32

if anybody wants to chat from Fresno.

54:35

Very nice. Thank you. Rotted mood boosts

54:37

in with 50,003 cents. Oh.

54:41

Hey, Rich Luster. Hey, Rich

54:43

Luster.

54:45

I was wondering where you all get the most value

54:48

for the show, the membership or

54:51

the boosts. If one were to have to do

54:53

one or the other, which provides the most

54:55

for the network? Also, here's another

54:57

boost just to say I'll miss Linux action news

55:00

during its break. It's what brought me in

55:02

to the network. Oh, that's always interesting. I always

55:04

like to hear that.

55:05

Thank you. Yeah. So what

55:07

I don't know if I would say one, particularly

55:09

over the other, I think the memberships I

55:11

look at as a nice, predictable

55:13

kind of this is what we know we can afford to

55:16

produce on

55:16

an ongoing sort of. Yeah. And

55:19

so, you know, that's

55:21

pretty important, a pretty important metric. I

55:24

look at the boost as a way to

55:26

try to finance that individual episode

55:28

as sort of

55:29

like so

55:30

if the membership covers

55:32

the baseline production,

55:34

the boost is sort of covering our

55:37

time and a little bit extra because some of it goes

55:39

to Drew, some of it goes to developers.

55:41

So it's kind of like a thank you for that particular production

55:44

and the value you got from that particular episode.

55:46

So I kind of see them as sort of two separate things.

55:49

But my answer is, is whatever works best for you,

55:51

right? Like if you don't want to mess with the Sats,

55:54

totally understand where the membership would go. If you're ready to

55:56

experiment with something that's pretty fun and technically interesting.

55:59

than the boost there. And they seem to be really,

56:02

really popular for people that are on new podcast apps

56:04

too, because if you think about it, you're just listening along

56:06

and the feedback button's just right there. You just hit that button

56:09

and boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boom, you send it in.

56:11

It's a nice way to say thank you if there was an episode that you thought

56:14

was really useful.

56:15

We also touched on this topic quite a bit,

56:17

Chris, in episode 32 of Office

56:20

Hours. You can check that out in officehours.hair where

56:22

we're trying a bit of a new model

56:24

if you haven't heard of it yet. Chris, can you give us like

56:26

a one sentence

56:29

what we're doing over there? What are we doing over there? A

56:31

bounty for production?

56:32

You know, it's a community show and we're setting

56:34

a modest bounty.

56:36

And when we reach that or get near it, we start producing

56:38

the episodes

56:39

with short, quick, like little updates on what's going

56:41

on in the feed in between from time to time.

56:43

So it's a new model we're trying. So the idea is

56:46

that we have, we're

56:48

not kind of like putting the show production on credit and

56:50

then hoping we make it back maybe, which

56:53

we probably wouldn't. And so what we're gonna

56:55

try instead is we'll do a bounty. And when that bounty

56:58

is getting close or reached, then we will

57:00

begin production on the episode. And we know we can safely produce

57:02

the episode and not put the network at risk. Office

57:04

Hours Pre-Pay Edition. Yeah, you could say it's

57:07

a new experiment we're trying. You know, we'll see, we'll

57:09

see. What

57:10

about LAN? Well, it's the reason why we didn't

57:12

do it with LAN is because our

57:15

goal with LAN is to really keep it lean and tight. You

57:17

know, I mean, if we can get really solid

57:19

information in under 15 minutes, that's a win for us.

57:22

And so if we, you know, the only way that I think the

57:24

value for value model really works is it's not,

57:27

it's not a payment technology.

57:29

It is a format. And so

57:31

you have to do the shout outs.

57:33

You know, the community comes

57:35

up with like the row of ducks and the rich lobster

57:38

and you

57:38

know, like that's all community driven and

57:41

it's part of the value for value format. And

57:43

I don't think LAN, not all shows, at

57:45

least I think right now,

57:46

are particularly well formatted

57:49

for that. If you want something that's 10 to 15

57:51

and 25 minutes is a long episode, I

57:53

just don't know if it works there.

57:55

Maybe, I mean, maybe you could do like a short version

57:57

of like the top two or top three boosters or something. But

58:00

that's maybe why we start with try things like

58:02

that in office hours. And then, you know, if it's wildly

58:04

successful, we can say so office hours is

58:06

that's just a good that's a great point. That is our test ground

58:08

show where we just whatever like the wildest thing we're trying

58:11

on the network,

58:12

we're trying some new technology, we're trying some

58:14

back end thing,

58:15

we're trying out a new format. We do it in office hours.

58:17

It's sort of a skunk works.

58:19

So the reason I ask about this is because

58:21

I remember when Linux action show split

58:23

into LAN and LOP, right? And the idea

58:26

back then was the two

58:28

components of Linux action show would be decomposed

58:30

into

58:31

tighter, more focused shows.

58:34

But,

58:34

you know, LOP is designed to respond to LAN.

58:37

And if you don't have LAN like so.

58:40

So where does the where does

58:42

the inflow come in for being

58:45

able to have the commentary of the news from from

58:47

the JB perspectives? How do I

58:50

guess I don't know. Does it mean that you want to pull pieces

58:53

of land back into into LOP and

58:55

make the show again? It's very

58:57

rare that we do the same topics in both shows.

59:00

It's probably one out of every four episodes or

59:02

so of LAN.

59:03

OK, we're basically doing what we just did

59:05

today is

59:06

we're pulling in

59:07

the topics that are worth discussing.

59:09

The reality is, and, you know, outside

59:11

of this Red Hat news, there's not a lot there's

59:14

not a lot of news during the summer in Linux. Yeah,

59:16

it's usually a dead time. Yes. And Thanksgiving

59:18

are pretty dead. Right.

59:20

So it's sort of like the time to do this for

59:22

LAN. And we can take that extra load

59:25

on now.

59:25

When summer ends, new cycle picks back up, developers

59:28

get back to work.

59:30

You know, we'll see. And maybe the advertising market will be changing

59:32

by then, too.

59:33

That's a possibility.

59:35

Cyber Gray boosted in two, three,

59:37

four, five, six satoshis.

59:41

Started listening during 2020 and have been

59:43

an avid listener since all of Jupiter's

59:45

shows are awesome, fun, and the entire

59:48

JB team is a delight to hear from.

59:50

Oh, geez, I don't know if

59:52

I could go on, guys. I'm blushing so much over here. Yeah.

59:54

I would love to attend a meetup. Any chance

59:57

there can be more over by, say,

59:59

Alex?

59:59

or in the general East Coast

1:00:02

of the US generally. The

1:00:04

boost is a nearby zip code, by the way.

1:00:07

Virginia Beach, Virginia, or

1:00:09

there were bounds. Wouldn't that be great? Yeah,

1:00:13

travel is tricky because A, it's

1:00:15

expensive,

1:00:16

and B, I got three young kids,

1:00:18

and C, I got a tiny farm. So it's tricky right

1:00:20

now,

1:00:21

but it is absolutely one of the highest goals

1:00:23

I have, is I'd really love to be able to travel more and get out

1:00:25

and do

1:00:26

more meetups and more live shows, because when

1:00:29

you do something for a really long time,

1:00:32

going out and getting that kind of recharge, it's

1:00:34

like, yeah, anytime you get a chance to do that, it's

1:00:37

so great.

1:00:38

Every time we have a meetup, we're like, let's go! And

1:00:40

it really gives us a nice boost because there's such

1:00:42

great people, great conversation, and

1:00:45

all of that. So that's a long way

1:00:47

of saying, inevitably, yes, I don't

1:00:49

know when, we really had a great

1:00:51

crowd in the Raleigh area.

1:00:54

So that I could see doing again soon.

1:00:56

If we could find really cheap flights,

1:00:57

or if we have a listener out there, they can get us a cheap flight.

1:01:00

Or if

1:01:01

I could get a source of a lot of gas,

1:01:03

and I could just drive there, I'd do that too. One

1:01:06

way or another. We take the train and we podcast

1:01:08

the whole line. Oh yeah. Oh yes. Can

1:01:11

you take a train all the way there? Can we do

1:01:13

that? Let's find out. That would be great.

1:01:16

V, it probably almost be as long as taking the RV.

1:01:18

Lebann comes in with 20,000 Seth using

1:01:21

Castamatic, which I

1:01:23

hear is great on iOS. Interesting to see

1:01:25

Oracle bashing IBM and Red Hat for the recent

1:01:27

rail decisions.

1:01:29

Yeah. He says, it's one Titan

1:01:31

fighting another. However, should Oracle

1:01:34

be the one to throw the first stone? I know.

1:01:36

I thought Oracle was just not gonna say anything. I

1:01:38

think that's why I was taking so aback by such a tacky

1:01:41

post. They would just keep quiet, do what they're gonna do.

1:01:43

They're like a huge tech Titan.

1:01:46

Lawyer driven.

1:01:47

They don't need to say anything. And

1:01:50

then to have a post that sounds like it's written

1:01:52

by a tech bro who's cock of the walk of his

1:01:54

department and nobody can tell him to say anything different.

1:01:57

It's like, wow, I can't believe this is coming out.

1:01:59

This is coming out of a hundred person company. It's unbelievable.

1:02:03

Uh, anyways, that's my take.

1:02:05

Uh, sorry, I didn't mean to go on. The

1:02:07

band goes on to say, but alas, Microsoft course

1:02:09

corrected years ago

1:02:10

and arose from everyone's S list, pushing

1:02:13

Google down in the process.

1:02:14

Perhaps it's time Oracle do the same.

1:02:17

The easy way to do every, oh, I know. He

1:02:19

says the easy way to everyone's heart is for them to

1:02:21

GPL ZFS. I

1:02:23

agree. I will have a thank you appreciative

1:02:25

Oracle episode

1:02:27

if they just GPL opens ZFS

1:02:29

or whatever Oracle hearts open

1:02:31

source. The interesting thing about Oracle's

1:02:33

relationship with open sourcing things people want.

1:02:39

I will make an observation and you can make

1:02:41

for what it's worth.

1:02:44

Um, Oracle relicenced D trace,

1:02:46

which had been wanted for a decade in Linux

1:02:49

from right. Yeah. Harris

1:02:51

license to the GPL after nobody

1:02:53

wanted it anymore.

1:02:54

And after at that point, you know,

1:02:57

a BPF trace that came on board and

1:03:00

system taps a D trace portability

1:03:02

framework was reused for a EBPF

1:03:05

and things like that. Yeah. At

1:03:07

that point, Oracle relicenced D trace

1:03:10

into GPL and incorporated it into Oracle

1:03:12

Linux. So I

1:03:15

don't know what that says about how Oracle

1:03:17

does stuff, but it is an observation

1:03:20

that I've had about how

1:03:22

they seem to approach taking Solaris technologies

1:03:25

and making them available

1:03:27

for Linux. All right, quick, everyone pretend

1:03:29

CFS is trash. Yeah. Pretend

1:03:31

you don't care about it and then Oracle will open source it,

1:03:33

you know, because they don't want to fragment Linux and they don't

1:03:35

want to cause any heartburn for Linux users because they

1:03:37

care so much about free software. Hey, maybe they

1:03:39

could be a Linux unplugged sponsor. Yeah.

1:03:42

Wouldn't it

1:03:43

Oracle go get Oracle Linux. It's just like rel,

1:03:45

but now not quite as much. J-moon

1:03:51

boosts in with 7,777 sets. Boost!

1:03:56

With the simple message. Boost!

1:03:59

Thanks, J-moon.

1:04:00

Love to know you're out there.

1:04:03

Pascal comes in with 2000 sats from

1:04:05

the Konshacks web app. Hey,

1:04:07

oh, that's a great app. Hey,

1:04:11

Linux team. Thanks for using the podcaster

1:04:14

support page for your podcast. Time to tell

1:04:16

your audience how easily they can post

1:04:18

a message and send you some support.

1:04:21

Also, if you have any suggestions, please

1:04:23

let us know how we can improve Konshacks.

1:04:25

All the best from Pascal. How great is that? What? They're

1:04:28

kind of like passing on. It's like passing on the message

1:04:30

about the service via boost and that's

1:04:32

great. So Konshacks is a great dashboard.

1:04:35

If you launch a value for value podcast that uses

1:04:37

boosts,

1:04:38

you can. Pipe it into Konshacks

1:04:40

and then it also generate a support page for your

1:04:42

audience so they can go and see like if it's

1:04:44

something we could potentially use with office hours. So I'm going to, I'm going

1:04:47

to look more into it.

1:04:48

It could be something there. Radman comes

1:04:50

in with 5,000 sats is looking forward to this every

1:04:53

single week. Thanks guys.

1:04:55

Olliewyn comes in with 4,000 sats

1:04:57

just to say great show. Also from

1:05:00

Konshacks web. Look at that. Hey,

1:05:02

okay. Might be part of the Konshacks crew

1:05:04

there.

1:05:05

User 56823579 comes in from Fountain with 2021 satoshis.

1:05:14

First time booster from NL. Now I'm

1:05:17

just going to pretend that's Newfoundland. A

1:05:19

postcode boost with Fountain earns sats.

1:05:21

See postcode. I'm telling you, it's Newfoundland. Listening

1:05:24

to most of the JB shows.

1:05:27

Got a postcode boost. Ah,

1:05:29

sorry, Brent. It's from the Netherlands in

1:05:31

Harlein. Harlein? Hey,

1:05:33

that's great.

1:05:35

Thank you for boosted in and thank you for the

1:05:38

zip code. Are you thinking West when you

1:05:40

see these, you thinking maybe I should just build into the script.

1:05:42

When somebody says something about a postcode,

1:05:44

it just like looks at the satom out and go look that postcode

1:05:47

up. I hadn't, but now I am.

1:05:50

Coming in hot with the boost. Jean Bean

1:05:52

comes in hot with 8649 sats. You've

1:05:55

all been talking a lot about XMPP. Is

1:05:58

there an end to end encryption available? for

1:06:00

it. I think many years ago end to end was

1:06:02

not there. That's what led me to other places.

1:06:05

XMPP has a hot, it's hot again. It's

1:06:07

people are talking about it again. They've looked at the alternatives

1:06:09

and they go back and they say to themselves,

1:06:12

I wasn't so bad. But

1:06:13

I do think the end and encryption must

1:06:15

have been, I don't

1:06:17

know. I mean, that must have been client side because I could

1:06:19

have sworn it was part of off the record conversations.

1:06:21

Oh, that's right. I knew there was something.

1:06:24

Yeah, back then it was called OTR, off

1:06:26

the record.

1:06:27

And it encrypted the messages

1:06:30

and then threw away the decryption key

1:06:32

after a period of time. So you couldn't go back

1:06:35

and see the messages. That's what led them to be

1:06:37

quote unquote off the record. That's cool.

1:06:39

I think we should, I think we should set up

1:06:41

just a really, really early Snapchat.

1:06:44

Oh, matrix. Yeah, of course. Yeah, you could do it with

1:06:46

matrix as well. The difference between matrix and XMPP

1:06:48

on this is that the decryption key is preserved

1:06:51

by default. You could destroy the decryption

1:06:53

key whenever you want and make all of your messages

1:06:55

unreadable. Yeah,

1:06:58

all our all our Star Trek chats destroyed

1:07:00

like that. So sad. Bear 454 boosts in

1:07:03

with 10,000 sats. Oh,

1:07:06

boost! From the podcast index.

1:07:09

While I get your takes on the Red Hat

1:07:11

source decision, I don't agree.

1:07:14

For me, Red Hat has broken the promise

1:07:16

of providing support for a free product.

1:07:19

The product is now only freely

1:07:21

available after you've paid for support. And

1:07:24

while it may be technically legal under the G.P.O.,

1:07:27

it definitely is not free Libre

1:07:30

open source software. This is

1:07:32

something that I've been that has kind

1:07:34

of been a peave of mine for a long

1:07:36

time. OK, what they think that it's

1:07:38

not G.P.O. anymore.

1:07:40

No, no, no, the support thing like what they're defining

1:07:42

as support. Right.

1:07:44

When when you look at open source stuff

1:07:46

and you look at what is actually involved

1:07:49

in making I mean, even in proprietary software,

1:07:51

like what support entails is

1:07:54

not just hey, you file a

1:07:56

bug and we and someone responds

1:07:58

back and does.

1:07:59

something with it. Or

1:08:01

it also includes basic

1:08:04

things like being able to do

1:08:07

the development to make the software work,

1:08:10

add features and security

1:08:12

fixes and stuff like that. It's engineering

1:08:15

effort. It's customer experience

1:08:17

effort. It's documentation effort.

1:08:21

It's life cycle. It's certification

1:08:23

effort. All these things require

1:08:26

people to spend time

1:08:28

and energy on. A lot

1:08:30

of this is difficult to do on

1:08:32

a volunteer basis. Some of it is straight up impossible

1:08:35

on a volunteer basis. Are you going to

1:08:37

ask somebody who can only spend 30 minutes

1:08:39

a week on a project to do ISO

1:08:42

certification or common

1:08:44

criteria or FIPS? No.

1:08:48

That's unreasonable. Those

1:08:50

kinds of things require

1:08:53

people to be paid to

1:08:55

follow through

1:08:58

with everything to deal with all the gnarly

1:09:00

bits of these things. Also

1:09:03

to keep the software working for a longer

1:09:05

period of time than anyone really should. These

1:09:08

kinds of things take effort

1:09:11

and time and money.

1:09:14

Nobody can live off of, you know,

1:09:16

you can't live off of, in

1:09:19

the art world and in the actors world,

1:09:21

you can't live off of exposure. In

1:09:23

the open source world, you can't live off of GitHub

1:09:26

stars. You can't live off

1:09:28

of appreciation. Appreciation

1:09:31

is great. I barely get any of it for the open source

1:09:33

work I do. But

1:09:35

I can't live off of it. If I got

1:09:37

all the thanks in the world, it doesn't change the fact that if

1:09:39

I have no money, I can't live in my house and

1:09:41

I can't get food and I basically would

1:09:44

be a dead man. Like, no, you

1:09:46

got to eat. You

1:09:48

need to survive somehow. And by the

1:09:50

way, Rel is for businesses. It's for enterprises

1:09:52

and businesses that make money.

1:09:54

That's its customer base. That's

1:09:56

truly its customer base. And I think

1:09:58

where I can kind of

1:10:01

jive with bear here is like, I

1:10:03

would, I do wish all of these

1:10:06

CentOS changes and RHEL changes over the years

1:10:09

were done on an enterprise timescale

1:10:11

where it's like at the end of the supported release, we're

1:10:13

making this change.

1:10:15

I, you know, I've been, I've been informed

1:10:17

that, you know, it's like,

1:10:18

this has sort of had to be done because the

1:10:20

infrastructure that we use to produce those SRPMs

1:10:23

needed to be addressed. And so

1:10:26

there was just several factors at play, but

1:10:28

I do wish the time, I think with where I kind

1:10:30

of agree with bear there is like, I do wish the timeline

1:10:32

could have been better

1:10:33

and more user-friendly. It's complicated to, you know,

1:10:35

weigh the interactions of all

1:10:38

entities, corporations, people with their own agendas

1:10:40

and goals in the open source, you know, mixing

1:10:43

bowl. And this is just one factor I think to

1:10:45

keep weighing as we watch what happens and in the future

1:10:47

choices and where you want to be in the ecosystem. You

1:10:49

know, I want you to think about this,

1:10:51

the viewers, the listeners, everyone.

1:10:54

How bad is it to pay $400 a year for

1:10:58

all the software, all the open source software

1:11:03

that, that underpins your applications,

1:11:06

your workloads

1:11:08

to run essentially forever,

1:11:10

right? How bad is it to pay $400

1:11:13

a year to pay for the engineers

1:11:16

that spend all that time to work on it? Well,

1:11:18

especially if the software you're running makes you a million

1:11:21

dollars a year. Right. Like, and

1:11:23

you know, in the desktop space, you know, we've talked about

1:11:25

how there's this general assumption that,

1:11:28

you know, there's no money in the desktop, but you could

1:11:30

buy

1:11:31

desktop Linux. You've always been able to buy desktop

1:11:33

Linux. Uh, Red Hat

1:11:35

offers Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation for,

1:11:38

I think it's like $200 a year per system. Uh,

1:11:43

like you can go to redhat.com slash store and

1:11:45

you can just go see it for yourself as an individual. You

1:11:47

can buy workstation. You can buy

1:11:50

server and use

1:11:52

it on your own machines. Red Hat is

1:11:54

gracious enough that for individuals, you

1:11:57

can get 16 instances of RHEL with all

1:11:59

the content available.

1:11:59

available for free through

1:12:02

the Red Hat Developer subscription for individuals

1:12:04

that you can get at developer.redhat.com. But

1:12:06

if you want, you know, be able to file support

1:12:08

cases and stuff like that,

1:12:10

you could absolutely buy it as an individual. And

1:12:12

if it's something you depend on and you want

1:12:15

reliability, unmatched reliability,

1:12:17

pay for it. I mean, it's not even just with

1:12:19

RHEL, right? Slezz has had, SUSE

1:12:21

Linux Enterprise has had paid off options for

1:12:25

decades. Like it's been there for both

1:12:27

distributions. You go to SUSE.com

1:12:30

slash shop, I think, and they have them there.

1:12:32

I used to buy the box version of SUSE all the time.

1:12:34

Loved it. Just pay for something like paying

1:12:36

for a subscription. You know, we

1:12:39

talk about how doing code contributions and documentation

1:12:41

and stuff like that. My philosophy here

1:12:43

is that you contribute and support

1:12:46

open source with either

1:12:47

your time and effort or with money.

1:12:49

You could do a mix if you'd like, if you're

1:12:52

not skilled in everything, but like those are usually

1:12:54

your choices. And I tend

1:12:57

to choose more often than not that I spend

1:12:59

my time and effort helping open source projects,

1:13:01

but where I can't, I obviously give money instead.

1:13:04

Or sometimes I do a mix if I can't help a lot,

1:13:06

but I can try. Like if you

1:13:08

care about the success of the

1:13:10

Linux desktop or the Linux server and the Linux

1:13:12

ecosystem,

1:13:14

start by trying to pay for the

1:13:16

stuff that you consider

1:13:18

that gives you value, that enriches

1:13:22

your life, that makes things great

1:13:24

for you.

1:13:27

It's been a real problem for, we've

1:13:30

been talking about it for as long as, I don't know, all

1:13:32

the way back to freaking Linux action show way

1:13:34

back in the beginning of how there's this

1:13:36

problem about funding open source work.

1:13:39

Red Hat is the largest company that

1:13:41

I know of doing open source work, and

1:13:44

it's the largest pure play open source

1:13:46

company I'm aware of.

1:13:48

You don't want to support and enable

1:13:51

them to do more of that. That

1:13:54

money helps make all that stuff happen

1:13:56

and improve it and make it go better. If

1:14:00

you want to have open source be the

1:14:02

default, if

1:14:06

you want open source to win,

1:14:09

you can't take it for granted and you can't

1:14:11

just not be

1:14:13

willing to support it. Like

1:14:16

that's my piece on it. We agree. Listener

1:14:19

Brent boosts in to say, thank you, Neil, for

1:14:21

everything you do for open source. And

1:14:24

we've also got a boost from

1:14:26

listener SWAT, 2,317 Satoshis.

1:14:31

Long time lurker and first time booster

1:14:34

here. B-O-O-S-T. By

1:14:36

the way, the Satoshi amount is half

1:14:38

of my Dutch zip code.

1:14:40

Good luck Wes.

1:14:41

Please keep newbie content available in

1:14:43

the show, even if it's just a remark here or there.

1:14:46

I noticed that the younger sis admins or programmers

1:14:48

don't always know or remember the

1:14:50

old stories and don't have the knowledge we

1:14:53

older folks take for granted. Apparently

1:14:55

there are still some people that we

1:14:57

need to onboard.

1:14:59

All right, Wes, track them down. It's

1:15:01

somewhere in the Netherlands. Oregon,

1:15:04

all zoom, one strict.

1:15:07

Boost in and let us know maybe a little

1:15:09

more closely where you are. Yeah, and how good

1:15:11

he got that. Yeah, we are still taking feedback

1:15:14

on technical content versus newbie content.

1:15:17

We're always trying to get that balance right. We,

1:15:19

I think, personally like to skew a little more technical, but

1:15:23

also we don't want to be unavailable. And newbies too,

1:15:25

we want to be approachable by them.

1:15:27

Sort of a hard Venn diagram

1:15:30

to actually nail, but that's why your feedback

1:15:32

kind of helps us nail it down. Unknown

1:15:35

sender, a mysterious sender came in with 6,777 sats

1:15:39

with no message, but we just wanted to say thank you. And they're

1:15:41

using Castamatic, which

1:15:44

runs on iOS.

1:15:45

Zagatec comes in with a Rorodux.

1:15:49

A little behind on the boost, but wanted

1:15:51

to thank you for your perspective on the whole red hat

1:15:53

soap opera.

1:15:54

Your coverage of it in 517 really brought

1:15:56

a different perspective. I appreciate it.

1:15:58

Well, we appreciate that.

1:15:59

And it does register with you when you get a little value

1:16:02

from it, you thought to boost in. Thank you,

1:16:04

Zach Attack, for that row of ducks. Thank you, everybody.

1:16:06

It really does feel like a soap opera at this point. I

1:16:09

know. I know. I know. We

1:16:12

got a boost too from Dan Johnson in the Mumble Room who

1:16:14

boosted in their

1:16:16

noster earnings in the last week.

1:16:19

Man, Dan, I

1:16:20

got to get my noster

1:16:22

game up. I got to figure out how to link my noster

1:16:24

identity. And I've been

1:16:26

enjoying the discussions over there, but I'm just a lurker.

1:16:29

I'm just a total lurker. Well, some

1:16:31

of those sets are yours. Oh, OK. Yeah,

1:16:33

I did. I did give Dan a zap. So

1:16:36

you boosted into your own show. Bonus boost

1:16:38

that's relevant from a Debris 17,000 sets.

1:16:42

Should JB continue to be technical? This is response

1:16:44

to 503. Yes. That's one of the main

1:16:46

reasons I love these shows. Can I go deep and break down

1:16:48

what's being talked about in a way that's understandable? I'll

1:16:51

explain it along the way. Well, we appreciate that.

1:16:53

And I'd still like to get some signal on that and

1:16:55

see if we can continue

1:16:57

to get there. I think everybody who did boost in,

1:16:59

not all of them do make it on the air, but we try to get

1:17:01

most of them. We had 18 total boosters

1:17:04

this week, which

1:17:04

is awesome across 20 total boosts. A

1:17:07

couple of people boost in a couple of times.

1:17:08

And we earned a grand total of 241,232 sets. It's

1:17:12

a bit low this week, but

1:17:15

still appreciate every one of them.

1:17:17

And we'll put them to work.

1:17:19

Thank you very much, everybody. And I had a question for the boosters

1:17:21

next week. Oh, you got a question. I'll ask you live

1:17:23

if you noticed any particular habits that your

1:17:26

dogs have developed due to like your podcast

1:17:28

listening or just listening to content on your phone.

1:17:30

Here's an example. So Levi

1:17:32

likes to stay in whatever room I'm going to be

1:17:35

in. And if I leave

1:17:37

a device playing a podcast in a room

1:17:39

and I step out, he stays in that room because he

1:17:41

knows I'm coming back. But if I take the phone with

1:17:43

me, that's playing audio and I leave the room, then

1:17:45

he follows me. That is clever.

1:17:48

I'm going to have to look out for that. No, I've noticed mine,

1:17:50

you know, when I put my wireless earbuds in, they're

1:17:52

like, oh, going for a walk. Oh, yeah,

1:17:55

yeah, yeah, yeah. That kind of stuff.

1:17:57

If your dog does that, boost in and let us know because

1:17:59

I love dogs. Uh, you can boost in by getting

1:18:02

Albie. Just go to get Albie.com.

1:18:04

Little web extension that brings the lightning network to your

1:18:06

web browser. You top that off either directly, or

1:18:08

you can use something like strike or the cash app. And

1:18:11

then you just go find Linux unplugged on the podcast

1:18:13

index. We have that linked podcastindex.org

1:18:15

and then

1:18:16

you can boost right there from their website or go

1:18:18

get a new podcast app at podcast

1:18:21

apps,

1:18:21

podcasting, to no revolution podcastapps.com.

1:18:25

Fountain, Castomatic and Podverse.

1:18:27

I think are the favorites among our audience. And

1:18:29

they're constantly getting new updates.

1:18:31

Podverse just got a great update for Android, really

1:18:34

solid.

1:18:35

Um, and Fountain has been a rock on my

1:18:37

iPhone for a while now. They really nailed it over

1:18:39

there. And I hear good things about Castamatic.

1:18:41

So thank you everybody who boosts in. And of course we'll be

1:18:43

thinking our members later as well, but

1:18:46

we are thinking about you too. We've

1:18:49

got not one, but two

1:18:52

fantastic picks this week.

1:18:54

I just wanted to give a shout out to Thunderbird115,

1:18:56

the

1:18:57

supernova release.

1:19:00

It looks so good. I think I'm going to give it a go. Uh,

1:19:02

they have redone the UI quite a bit. I

1:19:04

really like it. They've

1:19:06

made it super fast. They say a bunch of new

1:19:08

stuff in here. Got

1:19:09

a new logo,

1:19:11

improved calendar design, new

1:19:13

menu system, new unified

1:19:16

folder system, I mean, it's just checking

1:19:18

boxes for me, Westpain. Pretty sure the,

1:19:21

uh, updated versions already in Nix packages

1:19:23

too. So it should be easy to try. Love

1:19:26

it. I know they've been working on that. So

1:19:28

congratulations to them.

1:19:30

And then our second

1:19:32

pick this week,

1:19:33

I was so blown away. We had to have two picks.

1:19:35

I can't believe it. Maybe it's, maybe it's

1:19:37

because we shamed them on air.

1:19:39

I doubt it. I doubt it.

1:19:42

A while ago, I don't know if it was in the members stream

1:19:44

or if it was

1:19:46

actually in the show, but I mentioned as little

1:19:48

disappointed in RustDesk because they

1:19:50

were really dragging their feet on Wayland support

1:19:52

and RustDesk is a fantastic

1:19:54

true team viewer alternative. I'd say

1:19:56

superior to team viewer in every way. Been a really quality

1:19:59

tool. I mean, Nivia's bunch for doing live production.

1:20:01

Oh man, back when all of our systems

1:20:03

were on X11, I would do

1:20:05

entire shows remotely produced, routed

1:20:08

through the studio, and

1:20:09

Rust Desk was helping me activate all that software

1:20:11

based stuff. It was so solid.

1:20:13

Then I made the transition to Wayland, and when I

1:20:16

installed Rust Desk, it came up with a little box

1:20:18

and it says, oh, Rust Desk doesn't work on Wayland.

1:20:21

Would you like us to fix it?

1:20:23

And if you say yes, what they do

1:20:26

is they go alter your system and change

1:20:28

it to run X11, and they were Wayland. That's

1:20:31

what their fix is. Right. I was so incensed by

1:20:33

that. I just stopped using Rust Desk.

1:20:36

Well, Rust Desk 1.2

1:20:38

is out. It's completely rewritten in Flutter.

1:20:41

What? Maybe that's going to be a good thing.

1:20:43

Beta support for IPv6. I

1:20:45

thought I'd never see it.

1:20:46

Hardware encoding for

1:20:49

H.264, H.265 in beta.

1:20:51

AV1 codec support. And

1:20:53

the big one, it is a beta, but a big one.

1:20:57

Wayland support. No way.

1:20:59

Headless Linux support.

1:21:00

Resolution adjustment.

1:21:02

I did see a comment here. It looks like this is pretty new.

1:21:05

Surely there's bugs. Ha. Yeah.

1:21:07

Just noticed KDE Neon doesn't seem

1:21:09

to work. So far, we only are

1:21:11

testing it. This is a quote on their GitHub.

1:21:14

Only tested on mainstream stable Ubuntu 2.204, Arch,

1:21:17

and Fedora.

1:21:18

All right. So it's a mixed bag on Nix

1:21:20

probably. We'll see. Sounds

1:21:23

like it's not going to work so well on my Neon system. But

1:21:26

I can wait. This is progress. Just

1:21:29

use Fedora. Yeah, there you go. That's all

1:21:31

of it. This is fantastic progress.

1:21:34

And I want to express a lot of gratitude for

1:21:35

the Rust Desk team for taking this

1:21:38

work on. Rewriting into a new toolkit.

1:21:40

That's no major job.

1:21:42

Hardware encoding.

1:21:45

Huge thing.

1:21:46

And then Wayland support.

1:21:47

Yeah. Maybe a little word, you know, like not knowing what

1:21:49

the plan for Rust Desk was. Was it ever going to continue

1:21:51

to be a good player or something I could recommend? Even

1:21:53

if we're not using it, something to recommend for other people because

1:21:55

it was so easy to get. I mean, I've used it

1:21:58

to support, you know, my mom's laptop in the past.

1:21:59

Yeah, so be nice to have it around We'll

1:22:02

see how it does. I'll be curious to see exactly how they're

1:22:04

implementing it, too Oh, man, oh,

1:22:07

we're just gonna put it back on the kids machines. That's

1:22:09

gonna be so nice The RDP

1:22:11

stuff's been a little rough.

1:22:13

Oh, I'm excited about that.

1:22:14

Well, if I if I if I do it I'll report back. I'll

1:22:17

tell you how it goes

1:22:18

I'd also like to put a request out to the audience for your

1:22:20

thoughts on these most recent developments in

1:22:23

the rel soap opera that we've

1:22:25

been witnessing unfold This

1:22:27

feels like we've entered the beginning

1:22:29

of a really new era and

1:22:31

Alma's the player that I'm personally

1:22:33

the most interested in but I also worry

1:22:35

and I'd like to know what the audience thinks That

1:22:37

this strategy may cost them those

1:22:39

users that are truly looking for that kick the can

1:22:42

bug compatible I don't want to pay rel

1:22:44

solution and Will Alma

1:22:46

kind of get punished for that strategy or will they be successful

1:22:49

because they're kind of doing it the legit red hat

1:22:51

way Which

1:22:52

fire an enterprise I'd be wanting to work

1:22:54

with a distribution that's doing it the most legit sustainable

1:22:57

way possible Which seems like what

1:22:59

almost doing so I'd like to put a request out there

1:23:01

for the audience's thoughts on that

1:23:03

Now we're gonna have to switch the studio to Alma I

1:23:05

know like you know Like two episodes

1:23:07

ago when we talked about all the rail stuff. I felt

1:23:09

like I had a really fine resolution on my thoughts

1:23:13

On all these most recent developments. It feels a lot

1:23:15

more vague

1:23:16

and a lot of promises and just I don't

1:23:18

know Yeah, it's a little awkward something

1:23:20

we get to watch for I suppose a while to come

1:23:23

enterprise timelines after all. Yeah, that's true It is

1:23:25

gonna and the whole foundation has to get spun up.

1:23:27

It's it's gonna take a while

1:23:29

Maybe by the time Linux fest Northwest comes

1:23:31

along. We'll see some serious progress. Hey, I

1:23:33

hope we see everybody at Linux fest Northwest

1:23:36

Details at Linux fest Northwest org. It's gonna

1:23:38

be in October. We're gonna have lady joops

1:23:40

there We're gonna have some cooking going crews gonna

1:23:42

be there It's gonna be a great time

1:23:44

If you want a little more show remember we do get together every

1:23:46

single Sunday at noon Pacific 3 p.m.

1:23:49

Eastern over at JBLive.tv See

1:23:51

you next week same bad time

1:23:53

same bad station

1:23:55

and a very special Thank you to our members

1:23:57

unplugged core comm where you can support the show

1:23:59

you get an ad for

1:23:59

free version or you get the bootleg version,

1:24:02

which we really try to add some value to that. So I feel like

1:24:04

you get like double the show, which could be

1:24:06

if you want more Linux show, maybe you're going to go on

1:24:08

a long ride. I don't know.

1:24:10

Get the member feed, get the bootleg feed. Jordan Pennelyn,

1:24:13

Jordan's Dad RV approved. Yeah, that's for sure. Road trip approved

1:24:15

for sure. And of course

1:24:17

we appreciate that because that support

1:24:19

maintains production and you can support all the shows

1:24:21

if you really want to go all in at jupyter.party.

1:24:25

Links to what we talked about today are over at linuxunplugged.com

1:24:28

slash 519. That's

1:24:30

the website with all the links and deets, including

1:24:33

that blog post from endless OS

1:24:35

that goes into very

1:24:37

expanded detail about how that telemetry

1:24:39

collection is going to work. So if you really want to be informed

1:24:41

on the nuts and bolts, the

1:24:44

endless implementation is pretty solid and they documented

1:24:46

it over there and a good portion of that will be used by

1:24:48

Fedora and love your thoughts

1:24:51

on that as well. linuxunplugged.com

1:24:53

slash 519. You got it. And of course

1:24:55

the contact

1:24:55

page is over there as well as our subscribe

1:24:57

page and all that other good stuff. Thanks

1:25:00

so much for tuning this week's episode of the Unplugged program

1:25:02

and we'll see you right back here next Sunday.