 Welcome to another edition of Unfettered Freedom, your weekly GNU slash Linux news video podcast. Packing so much freedom into each episode, it ought to be illegal. There's so much freedom packed into this podcast, I'm pretty sure this episode is a violation of some codes of conduct. On this episode of Unfettered Freedom, we're going to talk about removing Google from free and open source software. How can you get Google out of your lives? How can you de-Google yourself? So there is a U.S. court that recently ordered, basically they're trying to silence a patent troll victim. So this guy who is a victim of one of these patent troll law firms, the court system is actually siding with the patent trolls. We're going to talk about that very disturbing story. Also enough with the Linux security thud. Too many people try to spread false information regarding Linux, how secure it is. Some people want to try to make Linux seem more insecure than what it really is. Also Firefox just had a big release, Mozilla Firefox 80.0 is released, and we're going to talk a little bit about that, some of the security, some of the features that were added. And does installing Arch Linux help you learn Linux? Some people would have you believe that. The Arch fanboys would have you believe that, but is it true? All of that more on this episode of Unfettered Freedom. I am your host, Derek Taylor, also known as DT or DistroTube over on YouTube and on Library. This podcast, as well as all of the video content on the DistroTube channel, is community sponsored. Because of the community support that I receive, there are no corporate sponsors, there's no product shilling of any kind in these episodes. And I can thank as I please, and I can say the things that need to be said because in short, I can be independent. And if you'd like to support my work, I'd greatly appreciate it. Please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. So our top story is going to be removing Google from free and open source software. Because we all know Google, it's very hard to get yourself away from Google. It's hard to de-Google your life because of the internet. If you're on the internet, so much is tied into the Google search engine and various other Google services, YouTube, Gmail, Google Docs, and then in the mobile space, if you have an Android phone, increasingly laptops, everybody's buying Chromebooks. Google is Google everywhere all the time. And free and open source software, you would think there wouldn't be that much Google in that stuff. But there's Google stuff, Google trackers and Google analytics and Google search. So much of that stuff is tied into free and open source projects. And we have somebody that's finally trying to call people out on this. So I found this post over on Reddit, on the r slash de-Google subreddit. And I'll read this very briefly, quote, we're a community working to remove Google trackers from open source projects and to inform people of corporate spying and free and open source software. Unfortunately, many free and open source software projects contain spyware. That must be changed. We have created a website that provides alternatives to Google services. And they have also submitted over 100 issues and or merge requests to various free and open source projects, basically asking them to remove some of this stuff, things like the Google analytics and Google search and Facebook SDKs and things like that. And if you go to their website, what's really cool about their website is they are hosted over at reverseeagle.org and they list a lot of good alternatives to things that are not exactly freedom respecting, such as Google fonts. Everybody knows the Google fonts website. It's a font repository. And they suggest alternatives like defont.com, fontlibrary.org, font squirrel, just to name a few. They also have Slack listed on the website. That's proprietary garbage. And they list free and open source alternatives such as element, which used to be called riot. They recently renamed it to element. That is a matrix client. They also suggest other free and open source chat client such as matter most and rocket chat. They also suggest alternatives to GitHub. And I really wanted to spot like this. GitHub is owned by Microsoft and GitHub itself. There is a lot of proprietary closed source stuff to GitHub. And the reverse eagle guys here are suggesting a lot of other Git repositories because you don't have to be on GitHub. People think that because GitHub is the largest repository of software, if you have a project, you have to host your source code on GitHub. Like like their strength and numbers. That's not the case. You can host your code anywhere. And other than GitHub, you know, you could put your code on something like Codeberg, which I've never heard of, but it's free and open source software licensed under the MIT license. There's also Disroute, Git T, which I have heard of. Git T is a great repository to host your stuff. Gogs, not a bug, a source hut. And of course they mentioned GitLab as well. GitLab is free and open source software. They also spotlight Visual Studio Code, another Microsoft project. And VS Code is interesting because a lot of people mistakenly think VS Code is free software. Well, it kind of is and it kind of isn't. VS Code, their source code is licensed under the MIT license. You can go to GitHub and grab the source code. And if you build it yourself, yes, your build of VS Code would be considered free software. But here's the thing, nobody does that. How do you get VS Code? Well, you go and get the binaries for VS Code from your distributions repositories or Windows executables or whatever operating system. You know, you go and grab the official Microsoft binary builds of VS Code. That's how pretty much 99% of the people that run VS Code install it. The binaries of VS Code that Microsoft ships, those are not licensed under the MIT license. Those are actually licensed under upper proprietary license. So if you really must use VS Code, for some reason you just can't use any other IDE or text editor, what this website suggests is go build VS Code yourself. Go install VS Codeium, which is a binary version of VS Code. But they've taken the trouble for you of stripping out all the Microsoft branding, all the telemetry, and the problematic licensing issues. The Reverse Eagle Project also has a website where they list various free and open source projects that they have identified as having some of this Google tracking and proprietary bits in it and that they're trying to eliminate. They also have a list of free and open source projects that they have personally contacted, meaning they have opened issues or merge requests. And some of the projects that they have already filed issues with include things like Riot, which is now Element, again, that's the Matrix client, matrix.org, ProtonMill, Rocket Chat, Telegram, Jitsie, Lutris, looks like they've also contacted people about their websites using things like Google CDNs and Google Search, Google Analytics, Google Fonts, and they've contacted Vim about their website, Neo Vim about their website. They've contacted GitT, they've contacted WordPress, and they've also contacted a number of news sites that focus on free and open source software, because you would think if you have a news publication, an online news publication that primarily focuses on free and open source software, you would not have things like Google Analytics and Google Search boxes on those pages, but a lot of them do, including ItzFos, Veronica's, Linux Uprising, TechMint, Ubuntu Buzz, also they've contacted many free and open source operating systems about some of their websites and forums, web properties, including Linux Mint, OpenSusa, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, NetBSD, Kubuntu, Fedora, Elementary, PopOS, and so many of these sites have the Google Search box because it's basically like an affiliate thing. People use the Google Search box on my website. I get a cut of their percentages, right? That's why you have big websites like the Linux Mint website feature prominently that Google Search box. Yeah, for free and open source software, you don't want that thing there, but the Linux Mint has to make money and it's an easy way, I guess, for them to make money. We have to find alternative ways of monetizing rather than sucking on the Google tit, right? I mean, let's be honest. We just have to get away from Google, especially as a free and open source software community, we gotta get away from this stuff. One of the most disturbing things that I discovered the other day was Google, we all know, is a platinum member of the Linux Foundation. Google dominates the Linux Foundation and Linux development, but did you also know that Google is a major contributor of the Free Software Foundation? In particular, the Free Software Foundation Europe, the FSFE. If you go to fsfe.org and look at their donor list, number one is Google and they have an asterisk by Google's name because Google contributes more than 10% of the yearly budget for the Free Software Foundation Europe. That's right, more than 10% of their budget is contributed from Google. You wouldn't think Google would have that big of a hand and what goes on with the Free Software Foundation, but again, it's just, they're tied into everything and we have to try to find ways to solve this. I really love the fact that these guys that over at Reverse Eagle are doing what they're doing. They're really shining a spotlight, I think by filing these bug reports and these issues and these merge requests with these Free and open source software projects, they're going to see gains here because some of these projects are going to change because once you publicly make a issue of it, you know, on GitHub or GitLab, hey, you've got this Google tracking, these Google analytics, these Google fonts, the Google search box, some of these projects are going to strip all of that stuff out now that they've been called out on it and I really want to applaud the good work that these guys are doing. And our second story is there is a court here in the U.S. that is trying to silence a patent-troll victim. This particular story comes from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website. So the EFF posted this just a couple of days ago. Courts shouldn't stifle patent-troll victim's speech is the title of the post. So there is a judge in the Western District of Missouri. This judge is named Roseanne Ketchmark and let's talk about the legal case here. Mycroft AI, you guys probably have heard of the company Mycroft. They are a small company of about nine employees. They make open source software, they make open source technology, specifically voice technology, voice command technology. You give a robot this voice command and it does it, you know, they work on that sort of thing. And they have been threatened by a patent-troll called Voice Tech Corporation and like all patent-trolls, Voice Tech doesn't really do anything other than sue people. They don't really make products, they don't offer any services of any kind. They're just this law firm that collects patents so they can sue people over these ridiculous patents that they own. And that is the only reason these patent-troll firms exist is because they are actually profitable because especially when you sue small companies like Mycroft, they can't fight it. Voice Tech apparently owns two patents that they describe as being related to voice commands. So if you give something a voice command, you can't do that because we own the patent and it's a stupid lawsuit, right? There's no way if you actually fought this in court that Voice Tech would win this lawsuit but a small company can't fight it. You know, if Voice Tech sued a company like Apple or Microsoft or something like that because you know, those companies have devices that accept voice commands, but Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, companies like that, they have teams of lawyers, they would go to court, they would fight it, they would win. And then they probably turn around and reverse sue Voice Tech over their ridiculous lawsuit in the first place. But Voice Tech goes after the small guy because the small guy, you're gonna sue him for a million dollars. You're gonna threaten him and say, hey, we own these patents. I could sue you for millions of dollars but I tell you what, you write us a check right now for, in this case, $30,000 is what they're demanding. For $30,000, we'll go away. And that's what most companies would do. They just write that check because they can't fight. Well, Microsoft decided they were gonna publicly fight this. They went to the website for Microsoft and Microsoft's first officer is a fella named Joshua Montgomery and he wrote in their blog, quote, math isn't patentable and software shouldn't be either. I don't often ask this, but I'd like for everyone in our community who believes that patent rolls are bad for open source to repost, link, tweet, share this post. Please get the word out by sharing on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or email. So he's basically saying, hey, we're being persecuted here by this patent roll. I want all of you guys in the free and open source software community to help get the word out about what's happening to us. And of course, the open source community is all in an uproar over this. And it didn't just stop there though. Montgomery went on to use even harsher language, stronger language. He says, quote, I've always wanted to be a troll hunter and it's better to be aggressive and stab, shoot and hang them than to solve them in acid. He actually put this on their blog. That's some strong language. Hey, I wanna be a troll hunter. I wanna shoot, stab, hang them. That's tough language. And VoiceTech went to court over that and they've asked a judge to make Microsoft remove all the blog posts that are what VoiceTech calls harassment. And they found a judge in the Western District of Missouri that sided with VoiceTech and they have told them to remove all those blog posts, the ones that were kind of threatening in some way, but also the ones where they were just asking the community to help them out, the community to spread the message about the patent roll. And it's just sad. And this kind of stuff has gotten to the point it's so prevalent in the U.S. At some point, we really need to start thinking about changing laws. What we really have to do at some point, we just have to completely disband the entire patent system because there's nothing ethical about patents. I don't want to go off on a long tangent here, but when you think about it, you have an idea. What makes you think you own the rights to that idea, right? Like I think of something first, it's mine. Just the whole system of patents is really quite antithetical to the free software movement and to open source as well. By the way, this story again came from the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, their particular website. The EFF is a great organization to be a member of because they really fight for your freedom, they fight for your digital rights and privacy and security and things like that. They are one of the two organizations I often tell you guys you really should be a member of. You should be a member of the EFF and you should be a member of the FSF, the Free Software Foundation, because those two organizations are out there really fighting the fight. And as a member of those organizations, if you ever find yourself in trouble, hey, you've got people that have your back. The next topic is enough with the Linux security fud because every couple of days, it seems, there's another Linux security story out there about how insecure Linux is. Another exploit is found, another whole is found and most of the time, these stories are way overblown. Most of the time, these stories are just completely fake or fake news. They make these problems seem much, much bigger than they actually are. And a lot of this comes from people outside the Linux community, mainly just trying to trash Linux at every opportunity and we really need to start calling these people out on this. So over at ZDNet, Stephen J. Vaughn Nichols, he is a free and open source software journalist, he works for ZDNet, he does a lot of Linux coverage and he wrote this article, enough with the Linux security fud and he goes on to write that like all operating systems, Linux isn't absolutely secure, right? Nothing is perfect when it comes to security. Nothing is impenetrable, right? There's always going to be flaws, there's always gonna be holes that people can find and security is kind of like that, right? It's a process, it's not a product. Security is never a finished product. You never lock something down to the point where we never have to worry about it again, right? There's always new exploits to be had and to be patched and that's with any operating system, whether it be Windows, Mac, Android, Chrome OS or in this case, Gnu slash Linux. And these kinds of stories really bother me, the overblown Linux security stories that come out. For example, a couple of weeks back, right? We got the whole boothole scandal, right? That there is this way to get into your Linux box through the bootloader and this exploit is called Boothole which is the most ridiculous name for an exploit I've ever heard of. I mean, think about telling your friends about Boothole. Hey man, your Linux system is insecure because hackers can get in. Oh, really? How can the hackers get in? Dude, they get in through the boothole. Could we find a better name? But anyway, that whole boothole story was just way overblown. Like all of our machines were just wide open and it's so easy to get in. And now you've got the Drovo rub thing, the Russian security malware thing that's going around. And it is stories in the past. I remember a few months back, there was the evil gnome story where a gnome extension could potentially take over your system because you'd go grab this third-party extension on GitHub, some random script, and you would change the permissions to executable and run that random script you found on GitHub and it would hose your machine like that was news. People were actually making articles about this thing like that was news. Like we don't already know, don't go grab any random script from someplace like GitHub that you don't even know what the script is doing. You didn't even read the script and then you just execute it and then later wonder why your system is trashed. And as somebody that often covers news related to Linux security, I don't cover any of these stories because I recognize the fact that most of these stories are way overblown so I don't give them coverage. I purposely don't cover a lot of these things on my YouTube channel, non-library or here on the Unfettered Freedom Podcast. I'm not going to focus on what I consider normal everyday mundane security bugs. Like again, every piece of software has security vulnerabilities. They're always gonna be there. They're always gonna be new ones cropping up. Old ones will get fixed and the people will find new ones then those will get fixed. It's a never ending process. And I think why a lot of people make it a big deal with Linux is because the community has done itself a disservice here, the Linux community. For a long time, many of us trashed the insecurity of Microsoft Windows. How insecure of an operating system Microsoft Windows is and it is it has a lot of security flaws. And you know, that's the Linux fanboys. Hey, our operating system, we don't have to worry about viruses and Trojans and all these worms. And you know, we really rub it in the faces of especially of Windows users. So naturally when these Linux stories come up, those Windows fanboys, they wanna rub it in our faces. And I think that's really all most of this stuff is. I also think that a lot of the Linux and pre and open source software journalists out there that cover this stuff, some of them blow it up more than it should be because you wanna come out with a really scary title for the click bait, right? You don't want to say that boothole is not something people shouldn't be worried about, right? You want boothole to sound like it is Armageddon about to happen because you want people to actually read your story because when they click on the article and read it, there's ads showing. And of course you get paid for the ad impressions and that, you know, that website makes a little money. The journalist that wrote that article might make a little more money. But I do think we as a community, we have to start calling more and more tech journalists out for some of the ridiculous stuff that they post. And our fourth topic is the big release of Mozilla Firefox 80.0. And I say it's a big release. Actually, you would think it's a big release because it's such a nice round number, version 80.0. But it's just another normal release for Firefox but there are some nice new features that I do briefly wanna discuss. One of the cool things is now with version 80, Firefox can now be set as the default system PDF viewer which most people know you can read PDFs in the web browser but most people probably also have a dedicated PDF reader installed on their system. I think most GNU slash Linux users do this but you don't necessarily have to. If you're a Firefox user, you already have Firefox installed. Why not just use Firefox as your default system PDF viewer? It does make a lot of sense. They also worked on a lot of security fixes. I won't focus too much on that but one of the other big changes is that Firefox on Linux now supports the VA API acceleration on X11. That's the video acceleration API. And that's a big deal. That's something that we've been waiting for for a long time as Firefox on Linux users. In fact, I would say that's probably the number one feature for Firefox 80 is the video acceleration. That's one of the big complaints people have had about Firefox for a long time getting that working now. That's a big deal. Most of the other changes in the changelog are really quite minor but those of you that are running Firefox, hey, version 80 should be available in the repositories. It looks like it's going to be offered to release channel users on August 25th. For those of you on rolling release systems, Firefox 80 may already be in your distros repositories. For those of you on static release distros, you may have to jump through some hoops to get the latest Firefox. I will say Firefox has gotten so much better with each and every release, especially in the last year. They're putting in a ton of work on the Firefox browser. And if you're one of those people that left Firefox for Chrome or Vivaldi or some of that proprietary garbage and you haven't checked out Firefox in a while, why not install Firefox right now? I think some of you guys, again, if you've left a long time ago, you haven't checked out Firefox in a long time, I think you will be impressed with what Firefox is doing these days. And the fifth and final topic I wanna touch on is one of these, what I think is a myth that has been prevalent in the Linux community for a long, long time is we have this tribalism in our communities about certain distributions. Certain distributions are for nubes and certain distributions are for the advanced user, the power user, the elitist. And one of the most often heard myths on Linux forums and IRC channels is, it goes something like this, and I guarantee you every single one of you have heard what I'm about to say. Hey, if you really want to learn Linux, install Arch. You hear that all the time. Hey, if you really wanna learn about Linux, install Arch. And you also hear this occasionally with other distributions. You also hear people say the same thing about Gen2, if you really wanna learn about Linux, install Gen2. And is that necessarily the case? I have long argued that this was not the case because you don't learn anything by opening up the Arch Wiki or the Gen2 Wiki and reading their install guide and copying and pasting commands in the terminal. You don't learn anything. All you learn to do is you learn how to copy and paste. You learn how to read the Wiki, which hey, that's important, but you really don't know what those commands you're copying and pasting are doing unless you take the time to actually dive a little deeper. And that I think is what people are trying to imply. Hey, if you install Arch, you're gonna learn Linux. Well, you could learn Linux by installing Arch. That doesn't necessarily mean most people will because there are a lot of people that install Arch and have no idea of the commands that they ran. They don't know what those FDIS commands did. They don't know what the partition do. They don't know what file system they created. They just copied, you know, Extend 4, whatever from the Arch Wiki, whatever it suggests by default. And they don't know the difference between Extend 4 and ButterFS and CFS. They don't know any of this stuff. They don't know MBR versus UEFI. They don't know any of this stuff, right? That they're just copying and pasting stuff from the Wiki and at the end of it, they're hoping when they reboot, everything works. And most of the time, everything will work for them, but they still don't understand what they did. What really bothers me is there is this group of, quote, Linux elitists out there that think learning Linux is really about whether your installation process is a graphical installer or whether it's a command line installer. Or actually there's three kinds of installers. There's the graphical installer. There's the text-based installer, something like the Debian installer. And then there's the command line installer. And there's things like Arch and Gintu, some server distros also have command line installers. And if you do that command line installation, that's where you really learn Linux because you had to type stuff on the keyboard. That graphical installer, it lets you click okay with the mouse as if that magically makes a difference. It doesn't matter what GNU slash Linux distribution you choose to install, whether it has a graphical installer, text-based installer, command line installer, you can learn as much as you want to learn about Linux using any distribution regardless of the installer. You could install something very new user-friendly like Linuxmin or Mancharo and learn everything that there is to know about Linux using those distributions. You can study the kernel and the file system and all of that stuff using those very new user-friendly distributions. You could also use some really advanced distributions what people would have you think are advanced like Arch and Gintu and things like that. And never learn anything about Linux. All you learned is how to copy and paste stuff in the terminal just to get it installed. After that, you really don't know anything. Maybe you've learned a few basic commands to update your system every now and then but you don't really know the nuts and bolts. You don't know what's really working underneath the hood. And I know I'm just ranting a little bit here. I don't want to be too long on this point but really when you see people start telling especially new to Linux users this, hey, if you want to learn Linux because that's the one thing new users often ask when they first come to Linux. Hey, I just installed Ubuntu for the first time. I just switched from Windows. I really want to learn more about Linux. What do you guys suggest? And instead of giving them websites to go read articles on or books to read or stuff like that, you're going to have one or two people in that forum post or in that Reddit thread and say, hey, if you really want to learn Linux, install Arch. And we need to, again, as a community, shut that crap down right away. Stop telling people to install Arch to learn Linux because that one has nothing to do with the other. And that's it for this episode of Unfettered Freedom. This was episode four and I try to release Unfettered Freedom every week on Thursday. Before I go, I need to thank the producers of episode four. I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Nate, Corbinion, Mitchell, Entropy UK, John, Devin, Fran, Arch5530, Chris, Chuck, Claudio, DJ, Donnie, Dylan, George, Lewis, Omri, Paul, Robert, Sean, Tobias, and Willie, these guys. They are my highest tiered patrons. Over on Patreon, they are the producers of this episode. I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen, those of you watching the video version of the podcast. These ladies and gentlemen, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode you just listened to wouldn't have been possible. You'd like to support my work. Look for Distro Tube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.