 Tēnā koto, tēnā koto, tēnā koto katoa, no koto rīna oko tīpuna. I whānau o i zambia, ko mawingo te waka, ko zambizi te awa, ko kem gōn te mōanga. ēnare ko te fonganui ātāra toko tīno kainga, ko don Christi toko ingiwa. Nā mai haere mai, mojizuka bwangi. That was my little peepee, just introducing my heritage. I'm of Scots descent. I was born and brought up in a wonderful country called Zambia. I encourage you all to go there, if you get the chance. Thirty years ago or more, I was fortunate enough to land in New Zealand on a little boat called Mowingo, which is Swahili for Little Cloud, appropriately enough. I've lived in this wonderful city, Te Fonganui ātāra, Wellington, Shinsen. I'm really fortunate. Welcome to you all. I really enjoyed Laura's talk yesterday. The fact that we both support the best rugby team in the world, I think it was pretty good. She certainly said a bar. I was thinking about keynote speaking and getting the hangover shift. I'm quite grateful that I've got that. Thank you, David, for organising that. Just whilst I'm doing the thank yous, one of the sort of things that isn't always acknowledged is the amount of work that goes into organising these conferences and David Sparks, while you've been in boots and all with your team. Thank you for that. X equals Dallas for all your care. Thank you very much for that. Alex for your just unending and un-dying enthusiasm. Thank you. Everyone else that's been involved in organising this conference. My talk today, really, the subtitle, is really the main title, Kia Whakatō Muru Te Haere Whakatō Moa, which is a concept of Māori Aotearoa New Zealand concept which talks about how you think about the future, really by learning from what you've done in the past, so looking backwards as you walk, looking to the past as you walk backwards into the future. So I'm going to talk about free and open source software where my journey started and New Zealand's journey has taken us. And we're going to talk about some of the successes we've had and what we've done. Also going to talk about some of the failures I think we've seen and being responsible for as well. And I'm going to try and get us thinking about maybe an approach taking us forward to the future. I'm going to be bringing in some Indigenous Māori concepts, not as somebody that's Māori, I hasten to add, but as somebody that's learning from our New Zealand cultures and learning some of these concepts and trying to work out how they apply to the free and open source worldview and how we can learn from those concepts going forward. So who am I? That's an old Unix Linux command. I'm a C programmer from way back. As I said, I arrived in New Zealand 30 years ago. I'm a co-founder of Catalyst IT. It's amazing that in this room many people that I've worked with have helped me learn and helped us on our journey, Josh here at the front. I know Sean was talking yesterday in the call. Ashley, you're around. Gold. Brenda Wallace isn't in the room, but you'll hear a reference to her soon and people like Penny Leach and so on. Real leaders that have helped me understand the direction we're going in and what the possibilities are with free and open source software. I've broken a lot of stuff. Over the 25 years we've been in business we've had about nine companies, four or five of which are still in play in Australia. Canada, UK. We've got a New Zealand cloud company based on OpenStack. But also right now I'm really worried I can see a lot more broken things around us and they're based on technologies that we've produced as a community. I'm thinking about how we can address some of those issues going forward because I do think we're at a bit of a crisis point. My open source journey began with the release of a networking protocol out of the Pentagon by Vince Surf called TCPIP. Back in 1991 I was working down in Cromwell on a big dam project, the Clyde Plough project, and we were developing a system to monitor whether the hillsides were going to crash into the lake and drown a bunch of people further downstream. And as a backpacker that was a real good, you know, cushy number. They were paying us to live in a hotel, a food allowance, an hourly rate. It was beautiful and then we discovered how to network these Unix machines and Electricity New Zealand, ECNZ, worked out how they could save a ton of money by moving us back to Wellington to carry on in the work. So that was my first interaction with internet protocols IP. On the way back up to Wellington, my partner Alison and I were going through the Marlborough Sands, which is a beautiful area just at the top of the South Island. This is the Marlborough Sands. It rained for about three days and we were walking around and just loving it. And we said, God should be lovely to live here, wouldn't it? And then one of us said, Yeah, but we can't work here. We were both in IT. And I looked up at the telephone lines. I said, you know, I think we could. I think we just need this thing called a modem and so long as we've got a telephone, we'll be fine. So that was the first time I started thinking about the internet. The same year, of course, as well, that Linus Torvalds released Linux, that Tim Bernards-Lee released the HTML, Hypertext Markup Language Protocols that became the worldwide web, which we now still call the internet. So heady times in those early days of the internet and open source, you know, kind of the two going together, Apache, Linux, Postgres, Pearl. God, we've still got Pearl systems that we look after. It was exciting times and in 1997, five of us got together and we were determined that we would set up a company that was based on, you know, a bunch of technologists who really believed in the internet and really believed in free and open source software. And in that we were helped a lot by somebody called Ewan McNeill, who's still around Wellington, Andrew McMillan, and some of the people I've just named. Richard Naylor is somebody from Wellington and that same year he basically hung a fibre optic loop up around the bus cables around the CBD of Wellington. So Wellington became the first city to be fibre optically linked. And we, in 1997, we paid the princely sum of $8,000 to join that and begin our hosting journey. So that was the sort of power of the internet then and we were in quite a good space there. Back to Zambia where I was brought up. Last time I was there it was probably about ten years ago actually and I had time flies. Visited this school in Sinanga, a small town in the very western province of Zambia. It sits on a cliff overlooking the mighty Zambezi and the flood plain that stretches out actually into Botswana and becomes the Kalahari desert in the end. And one of the things you learn about living in countries like Zambia is just how the human thirst for knowledge is unquenchable. This school, it's a high school, a community high school, they have 70 students in every class. When I was at school in Zambia we only had 50 students. But boy we learnt a lot and the thirst for knowledge as I said was huge. And so for me as a personal thing, the idea of internet, of free and open source software was the idea that we could have unfettered access to knowledge and learning. And that was a very powerful concept to me. Talked a little bit about some of the people that have been with us on the journey. This slide is actually a slide for my Drupal South presentation in 2014. It's a conversation between myself, Josh and Brenda Wallace, another open source luminary of Wellington. Brenda used Drupal 4.6 according to this conversation to develop a WAP. Does anyone remember WAP? Anyone old enough to remember? She was sick of hand-coding WAP menus for what was then telecom. And so she picked up Drupal. When was Drupal 4 out? What year was that? Before 2207, right? So as a company and as a movement we've always brought into this idea the open source society, open society, open minds, open data, open everything, that's what we're all about. And we did pretty well. Let's have a little scan of what we've done in the free and open source community. Well, let's start with Linux. This desktop, apparently Linux was never going to work on the desktop, but look, I've got a seamless presentation. Linux Foundation has over 1,300 members. There's 30,000 contributors to the various projects at Makeup Linux. It dominates the cloud market. Who runs anything on Windows servicing the cloud, really, unless you're forced to because you're the New Zealand Government? And 82% of the smartphone market. Yes, those Android phones are Linux at heart no matter what Google has wrapped around it. This is a Drupal conference. One thing I'll say about Drupal.org, it's very bad at giving you marketing information. But we think there are 1,800 Drupal sites in New Zealand. The thing about Drupal is it really dominates that heavy content management market. We've got all the blog sites on WordPress and systems like that, but Drupal is really dominant in those hard-to-build, complex business systems. People say to me, sometimes clients say to me, this is a website. It's not. It's a business system. It's complicated. It happens to run on something called the Internet and it happens to use a bit of HTML. But this is not HTML of 1993, believe me. This is HTML of 1993. This is the infamous blink tag. Who didn't have shares in Red Hat? Yeah, bugger. $34 billion IBM bought them for. That was the largest software company buyout ever. I think it still is. I don't count Twitter. One project that we've been associated with since 2003 is Moodle. When I talked about the learning journey, this is one that I'm really proud of. We worked with Moodle back in 2003 where it was fairly unheard of. We installed it for all the polytechnics in New Zealand. We contributed a bunch of code back to make it scalable. These figures for Moodle are only the figures that are reporting back to Moodle HQ. So not every Moodle site reports back. So 300 million users. It's phenomenal. Talk about enabling learning. 1.8 billion courses. About 41 billion something else. 180,000 sites. It's absolutely phenomenal. Moodle doesn't get the recognition it deserves because this is incredible. We have clients like the University of Cambridge, all the London universities, LSE, UCL and so on. All using Moodle. It's a phenomenal. Bring it back to New Zealand. There's a couple of world famous except in New Zealand Open Source projects. Moodle started in 1999 for the Hora Fenua Library Trust up in Levin. Levin's a small town. About an hour's drive north of Wellington. And they had a Y2K problem with an unsupported software package they were using. So they paid a local Wellington company to develop an internet-first site. And were persuaded that making it open source was a good way forward. So in 2000 it was released and the first patch came from a Detroit car manufacturer. Out of nowhere. It's now the most widely used library system in the world. Globally. Except in Danny Burke where they're not sure whether it's scalable enough to cope with their needs. I kid you not, by the way. Similarly with Mahara. This was a project that was born in Catalyst with a partnership of Massey University back in 2006. And again, a small percentage of the sites that report back to us. It's used globally. It's a student portfolio system. It's all about student-centred learning. And we know of at least three million learners out there on the Mahara platforms. Some of which are huge. There's something like 1200 schools in the state of Hessen in Germany that use Mahara. And as a movement, we've all been about permissionless innovation. This is the picture back here Wellingtonians might recognise. It's probably one of the first computers that were built. It's a moniac. Built by a kiwi called Bill Phillips who after being a prisoner of war ended up at the London School of Economics, studied economics, and built this computer to try and map dynamically how national economies work. So it's water-based. It has dyes, it has pipes, it has chambers. And in economics, you hear people talk about solvency, about flows, and all that sort of dynamic water-like terms. They all come from Bill Phillips' computer. He did that without having to pay anyone licenses. He didn't have to have any permission to do that. It's the same with the Detroit car manufacturer that first contributed code to Kauha. That's permissionless innovation. And that's what we achieve in the resource community. We also campaigned, as we thought, we campaigned for freedom. Some of you may remember the copyright blackout campaign that was born in Walkworth at Kiwifu, led by a number of Wellingtonians. And it went global. And I think we were wrong with what we were trying to do with that campaign. And I'll explain why later. For two years in the late 2010s, I was on the council of Internet and Z. And the catch phrase for Internet and Z at the time was open and uncapsurable, which meant we spent a lot of time opposing government regulation of the Internet. We dreamed up all sorts of special licenses and ways of not having Internet providers or Internet-based companies regulated by government. I think we were wrong on that, even though I was one of the participants in that. Because things don't always work out as anticipated. We were a bit naive. We were a bit stupid. We kind of failed, I think. As I said, we held our governments at arm's length. And what happened was that organisations with massive resources drove in and captured the Internet. We basically created a space for multi-billionaires to create unregulated industries and do untold harms, in my view. We created meritocracies, which were exclusive. Sometimes racist, sometimes misogynistic. And we took a long time to address those sort of issues. We should have been listening to minorities. We should have been listening to Tangata Fenua. We should have been listening to other voices than the sort of voices we typically hear at these sort of conferences. Sorry, I'll just have a quick sip. On Friday, the 15th of May, over 50 Muslim New Zealanders, our fellow Kiwis were murdered at their place of worship by a terrorist who'd been influenced and taught by white supremacist manifestos that were delivered to that person using the platforms that we'd spent so many years protecting. YouTube, Facebook, and others. The government's response to that was a Christchurch call. I sat in on meetings at Internet NZ where those communities expressed their concerns. They told us how, for years, they'd experienced threats to the community through Facebook and other platforms. How they'd complained. How they'd asked for action to be taken. And how no action was taken. I watched in horror as our government actually and organisations like Internet NZ refused to address the elephant in the room, which was that there was no accountability, no responsibility, absolute immunity from these organisations for their actions. And we're now at another point in time. We've all, I'm sure, been using machine learning and AI to create point solutions that work and make a lot of things better, whether it's a cure for cancer or looking at sheep shit on a slide and determining whether we should drench the flocks. Those are really good uses of AI. I'm not arguing against AI here. But I am arguing about the immunity that these organisations have that we have created by the way we've advocated for freedom. Google in releasing palm 2 admit that this system is toxic. In other words, it's racist, it's misogynistic. The spokesperson goes on to say, we're really excited to make these models broadly available externally because we want to see what people can do with them. No shit. We've seen what people can do with them. For $8, they'll create a false sex video for you. They'll create disinformation. They'll push agendas that quite frankly are extremist and evil. I've got another question for many of us in the room. How much over the last month did you earn Jeff Bezos? Zero? That's one person. I know because even with Catalyst Cloud, services companies like Catalyst probably now about 30% to 40% of the revenues that we generate, whether they go through us or whether it's our clients paying it, 30% to 40% of those revenues are going to AWS. When we started on this free and open source journey, did we imagine that we were just going to be fancy resellers for Jeff Bezos? Is that where we wanted to be? Did we just let Microsoft steal our GPL code and represent it stripped of all the freedoms that we put into that code? All those meetings, all that time, I've never once heard Google or Facebook acknowledge or apologise for their responsibility in this whole wider topic, not once. They don't have to. So this is the point in the talk where I can drop the mic and walk off. But I can't do that because I'm a keynote speaker. And anyway, I think we need to learn and move on. So one of my first lessons that I learned quite a few years ago, I got given a bit of a serve around this, is that no one, whether we're talking about code, an artist, somebody that looks after should be forced to be open, no one. It should be open by choice. One of the things we've done in the free and open source community is actually create governance structures and ways of governing our projects, whether it's Koha, Mahara, Lutl and so on, Drupal, that can enable good governance, can enable voices to be heard otherwise be heard, and different perspectives. I do want to talk about a Māori concept, Mataranga Māori. We have these indigenous knowledge systems that are not necessarily unique to Māori. In fact, if we dig deep enough into many other cultures, including my own, we'll find similar concepts and ideas if we only listen to them. But there are real concerns about how knowledge and data have been used, particularly against minorities or in countries that have been settled by unicolonised, used against certain parts of our cultures and society, because there are inherent biases in that data. Mataranga Māori is about the governance of knowledge going back hundreds of years. I'll give you a personal example. I often tell a story about my grandmother who was not only the smartest woman I ever knew, she had to leave school at the age of 12. Her daughters both benefited from the fact that post the Second World War there was free education in the UK right up to tertiary level. In that one generation there was a massive change in their economic outcomes. I tell this story in another talk. What I've come to realise is it's not my story to tell. It's actually my mother's story, my aunt's story. It's my sisters, my cousins. So under a system like Mataranga Māori, I would know what knowledge had been gathered about my family, my whānau, my hapū, my iwi. And I would know for what purpose that knowledge was going to be used. I would know who had the authority, the one-a-go, to disseminate that knowledge. Our sort of very open everything systems kind of ignore those nuances. So I think again one of the things about our movement is that we need to understand some of these values because we can work together and we can learn a lot from those. Kīnuranga Te Uiratanga is all about sovereignty, self-determination, autonomy. The Treaty of Waitangi for Māori was very clear that they did not cede any sovereignty. This worked by Dr Tayuru from the University of Canterbury. He spent quite a lot of time looking at concepts, digital concepts around open source on the internet and kind of mapping them to Māori concepts. This is quite a powerful mapping that he's done here. I don't know if everyone agrees with it in Tangata Whanaua, but this whole idea that free and open source software is the equivalent of self-determination of sovereignty and so on. It's something I think we can really pick up on. I like the fact that he talks about commercial and proprietary software systems could be referred to as colonial because when you think about that, that also affects everyone in this room in New Zealand, in Australia. Te Manararunga is the Māori Data Sovereignty Council and they've spent a lot of time looking at Māori data. Again, I sort of touched on this a little bit earlier about just how important data knowledge is and its understanding how it's applied. The Waitangi Tribunal, which is an important body in New Zealand because it kind of interprets a founding document Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Treaty of Waitangi, in a modern concept and writes some of a few of the wrongs where this country didn't honour the Treaty. The Waitangi Tribunal recently, in two cases, has said that, yes, data is a taonga, it's a treasure, therefore it's covered by the Treaty. Started off with health data and health outcomes are really important and we just know about the biases in health data and how that can work against different groups in our societies. So we're fortunate in Aotearoa to have groups like this thinking about data because as a country we've been very, very lax about how we think about data and privacy. Europe, Japan, Australia are actually a long way ahead of New Zealand on this and so we really need to be getting in behind this work and supporting this work and understanding this work and understanding some of the licences that a taonga defender were thinking about and coming up. The Kaitiaki Taonga Licences, this is from Te Heku Media who for a very long time have been building up works of Māori language that is controlled and owned by Māori-dom. So not just letting Google suck up all your language and give you a Google translate and then everything belongs to Google and you can determine how they use that data in the next palm to release but something that is totally under control and I think I don't fully understand all these licences yet but I think we do need to understand them because I think they can help us be more relevant and take us on the next phase of our journey. I can't, as an African, I can't go past a buntu and what it means. That humanness, that interconnectedness, this is a quote from Archbishop Desmond Tutu his translation interpretation of a buntu is it being open and available to others, affirming of others and this is something again I think we need to think about a lot in our communities. So this is New Zealand election year and one of the things I want us to think about is that legislation and regulation in well functioning democracies are features, they're not bugs and I feel that people like myself have treated them as bugs in the past. We need to be much more thoughtful and much more purposeful about how we bring understanding of the threats and opportunities of the technologies that we're working on bringing to our communities, to the people that represent us so that we can respond in a much clearer and smarter way than we've done in the past. Let's say fair just doesn't cut it anymore. So at its best, the free and open source community will continue to be a community for good. It will be equal regardless of ethnicity, gender identity, nationality or wealth and we should remember that we're a global community as well. And that's what I think we can achieve and that's what I'm hoping you're going to go away with thinking about. Just one more thing. Can we start selling Drupal 10? Let's stop selling Drupal 7 upgrades and start selling Drupal 10. It's wonderful UX. It's great contributions. It's 48,000 modules and all that other great stuff. Let's start selling Drupal 10. Thank you very much.