 Yes, James Hello, welcome back everybody the next talk is about aims and the talker Jonathan Carter enjoy Cool. So my name is Jonathan. I work on a few there being an ability derivatives and systems based on those and Today I'm going to tell you about aims desktop. It's one of the paid for derivatives that I'm working on So if I can tell you about aims desktop, I'll tell you a bit about aims itself It stands for African Institute of Mathematical Sciences It's a center of excellence in Africa for for the study of mathematical scientists and it It has as a it other students from all over Africa and promotes it aims to be the MIT of Africa basically and tries to advance mathematics and sciences in Africa so It's all history is very interesting and I'm going to go a little bit into that as well And it was founded by professor to rock and his Wikipedia page doesn't even do him completely justice as impressive as it is There's lots of interesting YouTube videos and interviews with him, which I can recommend He comes from an activist background his family had to fled South Africa in the 1980s because They they were very against apartheid regime and they'd face a rest and I've fed the country and during all of this he continued to study on and and achieved great academic and scientific accolades When he came back to South Africa he found it aims in 2003 and the story of that is also a bit interesting because Place to where his parents live there was this old hotel that can house 80 Which has 80 rooms and it was falling apart and going down the way side and His father said well, you know, you always want to start an institute for mathematical sciences in Africa Why not what can't we buy this building and when I found out what it cost? it was prohibitively expensive and it was a big problem in in getting it and Nils father just started sending faxes to everyone in those to asking them You know, can you support us? Can you help us? We want to start this institution What can you do to help us so? the response was overwhelming and they raised enough money to buy the building outright and some of the buildings next to it eventually and They founded this institution that could improve mathematical sciences So it's actually quite nice. It's close to the beach. You can't really see it on that picture. I see but it's nice for students and People from all over Africa come study for a few months to do their courses and is and is also It's also a cooperation between a bunch of other local universities and international universities that have found it Since it was originally founded it expanded to more countries, so There's now sent in Tanzania, Cameroon, Ghana and Senegal There's also one being founded in Rwanda next it's the next country it's expanding which should be quite interesting and the whole project of All the aim centers combined is called the next Einstein initiative and Yeah, like I said by 2023. There should be 20 centers in total. That's a goal that they're aiming for That sense of activism is also still strong in in the spirit of aims, so More than a third of the students are women which doesn't seem ideal But it's a lot higher than a single digit numbers that you'd find in other universities in mathematical sciences They also study areas that are relevant in Africa and important like AIDS in Ebola And one student in Cape Town this year even did a study on shock detection, which was really interesting But that's a very brief introduction to aims I guess we can move on to the software which is a bit more interesting might be So In 2003 they decided to go with Linux from day one Yeah, I'm the IT manager they made a big case for saying that, you know, we free software is good and it's the way to go initially people weren't convinced but they started using Python and SageMath RStudio Kinoctave and the bunch of other related software and it worked really well In 2004 they did move to Bintu, which is what a big part of my talk will be about And also I mentioned one point the advocacy work remains ongoing. So what that's about is we often have Visiting lecturers coming in from Europe in North America and often they want to use proprietary software like Matlab and a Bunch of others and then the local lecturers they'll typically say, you know what you don't need this proprietary software to teach We can easily adapt this to SageMath or some of other software that is used and after they've used it and see that it actually works they They tend to go back and teach this back home as well, so that's a really positive effect of this as well so I'm just going to talk a little bit about some of the Packaging work that's important so Ames contributes some of the SageMath build networks for Debian and Ubuntu and The feedback from the Sage developers was that it helped a lot of the release because the Spark test went a lot better before it was the first time where they didn't have to retest all bunch of extra things on release day and do rebuilds Sage in Debian The SageMath, the Debian science team is doing a great job of getting it into Debian 75 out of 94 of the standard packages are up to date and unstable and there's actually If you look closely, there's actually just about five or six packages that's still there and we're not involved at Ames in this Specific effort, but we want to get more involved and get more of the people in the organization Debian maintainers and get them involved in this effort and the previous slide actually missed something so Currently that work is Ames maintains the PPA for Ubuntu and the PPAs are really nice features of Launchpad and for Ubuntu. I don't think they could have it makes things a lot easier so Why did they switch to Ubuntu in 2004? Well, I think firstly a lot of you might remember back then and Woody was quite old at the time and so it took a long time to release so it was a bit of a bumpy time for For Debian and Ubuntu had lots of promise so If you remember back then I'm going to go into some detail about what the crack that Ames and a lot of people to Ubuntu at the time so if you remember Ubuntu in the Windows disks had Labels on it says do not make illegal copies of a disk when Ubuntu said legally free to copy modify and redistribute And at the time another problem with Fedora and Red Hat was they stopped Red Hat Linux in In exchange for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the licenses changed so that the binaries went Redistributable and you had to get a license just to access it and Mark Shuttle have talked about this and criticized him for that quite strongly as well and Ubuntu had back then had this thing called Ubuntu promise and talked also about humanity to others and I am what I am because of what we all are and Kaniq also said that You know, Kaniq won't charge license fees for Ubuntu now at any stage in the future and This was reiterated in things like the Ubuntu book like our software should not come with a license fee That we should be able to share our software modified and share modifications as well on top of all the Humanity and spirit of sharing the Ubuntu desktop also became very polished over time and it was a good reason to stick with Ubuntu and there's also features like the Ubuntu install it as Is very easy as he's talked about people that are killed or people that we kill by wasting time choosing a mirror Partitioning is something that users struggle a lot and we've found that the Ubuntu install is absolutely great for For many new users, and I think many of the users that end up installing I'm dressed up outside of the aims organization Wouldn't have done it if it wasn't this easy because you can just drag this is how much I want for my other operating system This is how much I'm dressed up and If it's it's simple like that So we also made some changes to the arms there stuff As I said that we don't pretend to be Ubuntu too much or that we don't we make it clear to users that it's not a completely pure Ubuntu system that they install so it sends the artwork to reflect being called aims desktop consistently everywhere in the installer and In the live eyes and even the PC issue. We also don't install airport because we don't want bugs that's in Ames desktop to be automatically sent to Ubuntu and pollute their But they crash database so Recently there's been lots of discussion about canonicals IP policies and the problems around that and I Didn't initially pay too much attention to it because I thought it was difficult trademark licenses and licensing that just protects a brand and that you can't make you another Ubuntu Product in the same field, but this recently I looked into it a bit more and I'm going to read a bit through the some as excerpts of the IP rights policy So first step is you can download install receive updates for Ubuntu for free Fine Ubuntu is freely available to all users for personal or in the case of organizations internal use It is provided for the use without warranty or implied warranties others claim to the fullest extremented law So I thought it was trends that they mentioned for personal on the case of organizations internal use But I'll read on anyway. You can modify Ubuntu for personal or internal use You can make changes to Ubuntu for your own personal use or for your organization's own internal use So when I was reading this, I thought well sure that's normal rights you get with any free software and Then the next one says you can redistribute Ubuntu, but only where there has been no modification to it That's a bit odd. That doesn't quite fit in with what Ubuntu has been about in the past And you can redistribute Ubuntu in its unmodified form compete with the installer images and packages provided by canonical And that includes virtual machines and any redistribution of Modified versions of Ubuntu must be approved certified or provided by canonical if you're going to such into the trademarks Otherwise remove and replace all trademarks and we'll need to recompile the source code to create your own banners Canonicals community team also says additionally to that that if you want to make any modifications to Ubuntu as a system you have to recompile all the banners For that they use trump clauses in The the permissive licenses in Ubuntu to add additional restrictions to how you can Distribute Ubuntu and so what does this apply to? The disc CD installer and system images together with Ubuntu packages and binary files. I mean it gets a copy right of canonical and All of all of those packages are subject to the IP rights policy I was going to need to say that Ubuntu is built by canonical in the Ubuntu community We share access rights owned by canonical with the Ubuntu community for the purpose of discussion Development and advocacy we recognize that most of the open-source discussion and development areas offer non-commercial purposes And we therefore allow the use of canonical IP in this context So this was a lot to unpack for me at the beginning. I was like What's going on and there was been lots of blog posts and discussions about this in the community and I also thought you know how I was just going to impact And so I Approached the end I team manager and told him, you know maybe you should get in touch with canonical and And ask about this licensing and what kind of license will need if any and I will even if we do get a license to distribute it freely It's not really ideal because those conditions aren't really exactly what we sign up wanted when You know when we chose Ubuntu wanted to go with that Because we want our software to be free software and redistributable and all the users should be active able to access it so young got in touch with canonicals legal team and They basically gave a License, but it actually just added more restrictions than what was already stated in IP policy So I can't post the exact thing but here's a snippet of that as well and they prohibit commercial distribution which includes Distribution of I'm just up to anyone other than I'm South Africa I'm sent is globally African universities whether or not affiliated with I'm alumni Researches of I'm so basically if I take an open to CD put some free software packages on it and hand it to you today Yeah, they've gone. It would be illegal and I'd be breaking open to redistribution rules which I think he's quite messed up and Not quite what what the Ubuntu promise initially set out to be so I So yes, but having said that canonical people are really nice I don't want to demonize them at all because even yet they've gone and two people From canonical actually said, you know what if you if you create the Aliath project for the day for the Ubuntu install it they'll they'll put it to debut and they'll and They prepare to up on that and And I want to encourage aims to switch to Debbie and if The Ubuntu licensing situation doesn't prove but it takes a lot of work because we need that install it to be easy that little partitioning thing makes a difference between Thousands of people installing it on a personal machine or not. It's it sounds silly, but it's that simple also we have to make the desktop really nice and and Consider security updates. Maybe we'll get it all the packages into Debbie and eventually and just make it a pure blend That would be the first price And it would be really easy to maintain in the future But we'll need a lot of help on that because I'm not working full-time on that project with them and There are small team and that are quite stretched already Especially with all the expansion going on. It's difficult to I enough I think people to Keep up with all the demand So my one thing I would like to consider is if someone can still considers in the winter as a free software or open source Then by what definition do you do that because I don't know one that actually Fits and then another If anyone yet they've gone for is willing to get involved in aims desktop and help us so that there's a community Who's interested in supporting it on Debbie and Please email that address and say that you are that you're willing to help because one of the concerns that I'm just as is that they've been doesn't have as big community as Ubuntu and I think currently the devian community is several factors bigger than Ubuntu community And it would be nice to show this to them I ought to prove this to them We've already had two people who said that they were they're willing to spend another Month around they've come from Cape Town next month and and come in and out out and work on this So if we if I can show more of that then maybe we can Easily twist aims is on to the switch to Debbie and I've been an ex cycle So yes, that's it. I still have five minutes for questions. So if there's any questions or comments Feel free to do that now I didn't really follow what Ubuntu does with its policies or anything But the way I understood is that this is a distinction between trademark and Copyright so what in my opinion doesn't really make sense is this requirement to to recompile the binaries because why? Yet, I think this is a little bit like Firefox and Ice Weasel where they basically just try to protect the name of their product for their own reasons So how much do they restrict the actual copying of of source as Opposed to a restricting the use of the name unless you got a license. Okay Okay, there's a few questions. Let me just do back that Okay, so in terms of copyright business trademark Their IP rights policy isn't just a trademark policy. It's it contains some copyright as well So the argument is that on a copy left licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses They can impose additional rights on the binaries So the the source packages are still completely free and you can rebuild your you can rebuild all canonical archives and Use those packages and that would be fine. They can't enforce anything on your death. But if you want to use their binaries You have to recompile them if you want to do that in your own system And it is similar to the Firefox Issue but I don't think they need to go as far as stop you from distributing the binaries to protect their trademark I think that's where we're going instead too far some We first back to that. How would Enforcing that work when we get in deviant reproducible builds set up so that they get the same binaries as we have So that enforce that our binaries are not to be used to Yes There's also a lot of unanswered questions and people have been trying to get answered answers from canonical for a while now Because I seem very overzealous about removing every instance of Ubuntu everywhere where it gets displayed but Ubuntu is even present in the version numbers of package versions and Within debium. Yes So I think that's that's completely unenforceable if they upload packages to debium of an ability to name in a vision There's another question so so you mentioned the The things that was nicer with the with the Ubuntu installer compared to debium for deployments Have you have you tried to to get in touch with the like the debium installer team of How easy or how difficult would it be to to adopt some of these things? I mean if the source code is there, maybe they could we could adopt the functionality instead of thinking of you picking Staying with the Ubuntu. I think in that case it's more of a UI issue In the text version I talked to some Ubuntu some debium installer team members in the Ubuntu team in the past about that and It is a bit difficult, but I think it might be possible But it seems like it's a shorter way to get ubiquity into debium than to get debium installer to get those UI elements natively Maybe there could be some kind of text version where you can press left and right to just shift between How much percentage you want for your other operating system in debium? That would be fantastic, but I'm not sure myself either, but I think I'll speak to some more debium installer people Maybe we can find some better answers for that Of course that will immediately put us on a battle path with the FSF right because then we're promoting the other operating systems on the computer Sorry, can you repeat that? Yeah, we'll be promoting the other operating systems on your computer Which we're not supposed to do according to the FSF Well, we have to be pragmatic about it People still want to use some old software on the other systems, but if we can get debium on more systems That's what we want and that's what we'll continue to push Maybe eventually they'll decide that the old system isn't Important to them anymore and just get some disk space back Maybe if we can we if we only offer the option to shrink the other system but not expand the other partition Then we're still pushing it. Yep indeed anything else. Thanks a lot