 It's four o'clock up next. We will have Zach be presenting Debian in the dark ages of free software Can you hear me better? So hello everyone welcome again to that come for guests It's a great pleasure to be back again It's some at one that comes and a great honor to be doing one of the opening talk I confess I wasn't really expecting that honor I just wanted to propose a session which was supposed to be a kind of a self-head session for those of us that thinks that there is there are some worries to be had about the Where the free software movement is going in general and the role that distributions have to play in the current state of affairs So this talk will be about a couple of journeys at once so the first journey is sort of a journey through Emotions through good feelings about what we have achieved in free software over the past 15 to 20 or 30 years depending how long you've been involved and the second journey is essentially my own journey through Software freedom from the day I started discovering free software and what I've ended up doing since then so Starting with the the positive news. So this is how this is how I got involved myself in free software in 1997 I understand that there are people in the room that would have been involved Since way earlier than that other that have been involved since way later than that. Well, that's my story I hope you'll find restaurant points with your own story And when I started as a freshman in a computer science class in the University of Bologna That was a huge tipping point a huge hype point for the so-called open source movement That was the year the very influential essay by Eric Raymond has been published that was the year Well actually a few months earlier than let's escape decided to open source this its own code And that was the moment in the history of free software where people are trying to to sell to the industry What free software was doing and I'm not using that word in a cell in a bad sense So there was reasonable concerns that without involvement of the industry the free software movement was it would have even got far so they were trying to Tell about free software in an industry friendly way So essentially the rhetoric at the point was that if you do development of free of software in the free software way in a More open way in a more participative way You will end up having better software and that by merely opening up your code You will have these flocks of programmers coming to your project and end up helping you so a few years later I realized that I personally didn't believe much in that idea It's not that only because the software is open is going to be better But that was a fair thing to try at the time What I discovered a bit later is actually what stuck in me was essentially the the philosophy of free software the fact that Computer user should be in charge of in control of their own machine that should have some basic freedom So you all know about the four freedoms I'm not going to go into repeat them here But the my personal point is there is that the the way the narrative of free software is something that resonated with me a lot at The time as a student I realized that by having free software at my fingertip as a computer science student I could debug any single layer of the software stack and look at how things are going I didn't have to trust the teacher on how some operating system should be developed I could be I was able to open up Sked.c in the Linux kernel and have a look at the actual Scheduling algorithm that was in that had been implemented in a real kernel Not that I really grew up all of it at the time, but the possibility was just breathtaking for me and Later on I ended up distilling the main intuition of free software Which is the one I used to explain free software to people which is the intuition of control So I ended up believing that the main reason why I've been involved in this movement for About 15 years is that I really believe that every single computer user and that's a lot of people this day should be in control Over their own computations So everything you are doing with a device which is mediated via software is controlled by someone Either it is you or it is someone else and the best episode the best narrative to explain that to people that they've been Using for quite a while is this passage from the novel makers by core doctor which is a bit long So I'm not going to read in detail But essentially there is one character of the novel which is Lester which is explaining to another character the importance of Controlling your own devices your own tools and the first example It takes is example of a hammer a physical hammer and he goes on saying that if you own a hammer Essentially, you could do whatever you want with that you can use it for its main purpose Or you can use for something completely different which was not meant to be its original purpose But it's you that decide and it compares that with another device Which is a Disney in a box in the novel and it Disney in this book is the the big day evil villain which is oppressing people and Essentially Disney in a box is a glorified a 3d printer that can only print that can only print what Disney wants it to print For that day. So one day it will print a Goofy character another day will print Donald Duck, but it's not you who decides It's Disney that decides what the printer is going to print for you that day you own the device But we're not in control of what the device does and the the big quote for me is that if you don't control your life You're miserable and this notion of essentially oppression is what has been motivating me for all these years So the fact that if you are not in control of your own computation then someone is Oppressing you someone usually is the person or the company or whatever that has created the software That's the power to change that software instead of you and this is something that really sunk in me and What was I doing at the time with my computer what I was doing some pretty Standard stuff. I was using some the hardware that we added a time which was mostly desktops and local network servers I didn't have a laptop because it was really expensive for students So I did get a laptop much later and I was doing some content production some content consumption the kind of content I did produce at the time was mostly Office suites desktop publishing and this kind of stuff. I was doing some communications some emails I'm a RC some news girl which was very cool at a time for geek communities And I was doing some software development as a newbie, but that was what I was doing at the time I also did some content consumption So some gaming which arguably is content that someone else is producing for you to Consume I was doing some web browsing the internet was not as popular as it is today But there was some website you could find it interesting so in that situation with that kind of computing the actual path to Software freedom and to control was fairly clear It was difficult, but it was fairly clear to me as a new activist in free software What I should have done what we all should have done to actually liberate people from the oppression of people controlling our own computation So the idea is that well You have a lot of pieces of proprietary software Which you do not control and what you need to do is to replace every such a place every such a component of the proprietary software With a free software equivalent equivalent So we were using some local application some game and we needed to replace it with an equivalent free game We were using some client server software some male source some lay client some male server Some IRC clients some IRC server and what we needed to do to actually empower people and liberate people was to rewrite Those pieces of software with free software equivalence So it was difficult because it was a lot of stuff to be rewritten But it was fairly clear the plan was clear and also luckily we also add at the time All the EV lifting was already in place the GNU project has existed quite so since quite a while the Linux kernel Is this existed already and he was working so someone else with shoulder larger than the shoulder I had at the time had already done a lot of work for me and Me and together with other for software activists what I had to focus on was to rewrite Propriet application into equivalent for software equivocation possibly better so it was clear it wasn't hard, but it was fairly clear and And that's where I think the notion of a free software project comes from So we we use we use very often this term of a software project And I never ended up really thinking about that before a few years ago And I think the reason why we call it free software project is that there is an objective So there is a mission ideally a time-limited one and that mission is Writing a replacement for a proprietary application using free software, which is as good possibly better than the original and Having a lot of free software project around give raise to a lot of releases So what we were doing a lot at the time in the 90s was to actually manually install software on our own machines To be fair we also had our lab was running some radar machines at the time there weren't that many packages available and We had to fairly often install stuff by hand on the lab machines in our own directories and also on our computers at home And this is the procedure you all know very well So you download a terrible you run configure you run make you run make install the first time I saw that it was kind of a magic magical recipe for me Just follow these steps and you will get some software to play with well except that every single step could fail of course Well, let's let's keep aside for the moment the fact that the website might be down But you run configure and you miss some software you need to fetch it from somewhere else You run make your encounter some compilation this compilation problem you are making store Maybe the path will clash and so on and so forth So the problem with this procedure for installing software we were using by hand is that you're essentially conflating roles You're mixing together the role of software user the role of system Administrator and the role of software developers you need to have a little bit of all those skills together to be able to enjoy Software so in a sense a free software which works like this is essentially a very elitist thing It's only an elite which have all the needed skills Who is able to enjoy the benefits of free software and is able to be in control of their own computation? And this is essentially the reason why distributions much earlier had been invented Okay, so we all know very well here what distribution do they sit in between Software developers and software users and make it easy for you to actually use that software we do Installer work we create installers we create package managers we do all the integration work that make different pieces of software work well together and We actually make life easy for final users So for me something that I started believing is that the the ultimate mission of free software distributions It is to actually democratize free software to enable users Which do not have software development skills or do not have system administration skills enable them to enjoy the benefit of free Software, so we offer very simple interface We offer the equivalent of what these days are called up stores in which with one click You can just install some software and they join the benefit of that software in particular of free soft so This is for me the historical mission of distributions, so later on 1998 our lab decides to switch the end and I was really happy about that We switch from radar to the end and I look up about this project I start learning about what this project does and I find out that not only this project Dabian was actually up to the mission of empowering user by making it easy for users to use free software if you if you read the original announcement of Ian Marduk announcing The the band project will found this notion of being competitive with proprietary operating system and it's really clear that the point is empowering users and I End up reading about this project and not only I found out that the mission they're up to is the mission I believe in but I found out that the key intuition there is to make the project a community project So not only the target are the users and empowering them But also the way to reaching that objective is creating fostering a community that will work together to that goal So I got immediately booked. I vividly remember the moment a colleague of mine a student explained to me the Anatomy of a day on source package The fact that it was a dot or a gz the fact that there was a diff gz with the difference with respect to upstream And all those made a lot of that was really thrilling for me a former technical point of view. So a few years later. I ended up Joining the NM process. I was doing some OCaml development at the time There were some libraries OCaml libraries in Dabian others are missing and decided, okay So maybe I should help and create some libraries for for the project as well. I went through an M and And There are a few things I've learned during an M and also in the subsequent 10 years or 15 years or so so one thing I've learned in all these years in Dabian is the Importance of being principled. So that then is a project that did not start from Only technical means but also decided at some point that they needed some guidance some clear guidance on what should do technically what he shouldn't and Important documents where we have distilled this notion are the DFSG Okay, they've been free software guidance, which has been very influential on the free software movement as a whole They've been used as a basis for the open source definition as you know And what was very thrilling for me is that commitment that we had in Dabian in keeping the main archive Completely the FSG free keep keeping it completely free software. This committed is depicted here by those fearsome character and his owner On a couch and it's mediating and triggering the new queue supposedly and the new queue is not necessarily the best way We could implement a system which triaged all the software in the archive to ensure it is the FSG free But it shows our commitment to actually only follow the guidance that we have set for ourselves It was really motivating for me And the second thing I've learned and which will come handy in a bit is the importance of the legal knowledge and legal geeks In the free software movement like it or not free software as an ideal is Philosophical mainly but the its main implementation is through the legal system is to copyright licenses So truly to really grow up what's happening in free software in general and to understand what's where the free software movement is going Figuring out and really understanding what's going on the legal system is very important and in Dabian We know that pretty well That's a stumbling block for many people when joining the Dabian project It's something we insist people are at least basically familiar with and that's pretty A pretty characteristic of the Dabian project So in the end what I've learned is that in this quest that I feel very much myself Against the oppression of someone else controlling your own computation Low if you act around it smartly can be a very useful ally a very useful device to liberate users Time passes there was supposed to be an image here, which for some reason disappeared and We might argue That these days we have achieved a lot since that moment if I look around the industry or in general if I look around Computing as people are doing that Well free software is a little bit everywhere in the industry It is there are some stats that claims that essentially every single software product you find on the market as a little Inside of it at least a little bit of free software code And if you look at all the different applications text we have from web servers to education to clients to smartphone You find a lot of free software Free software infrastructure that are everywhere. Okay, so these are just some stats I figured out in the in recent years And for instance if we look at the one of the key target market for Debian that of servers We'll find out that one website over 10 on the internet in general It's running Debian if you include also some of our most popular derivatives such a boom They will find that more than 20% of the website are running something which comes from our own work and some of the Recent hype on free software is coming from has been coming from the Snowden revelation And most people are starting to be concerned about what the software they're using is doing and it's turning to see free software And it's turning to stuff like tails which is heavily Debian based to actually see in which way we can help them Foster their own security. Okay, so in some sense, we have achieved a lot in a very enough in Everything we do in computing there is a little bit of what we have done in free software And also a little bit of what we have done in Debian and this is pretty impressive for me We are in a place where I wouldn't have dreamed being when I started in 1997. That's very impressive On the other hand There are some reasons of concerns and this is the main thought I wanted to share with you and There are some technical reasons which we discuss often in free software circles like the fact that Okay But most of these platforms are not are not 100% free software If you look at smart phones smart phones, for instance, you will find a lot of non-free code every here and there and The point can be made that either you have full control over your own computation Or you're not in control at all because if your software stack is a single layer Which is controlled by someone else and is mediating all your communication Well, maybe you're not so sure that you are the real owner and they're your controller for your own device And that's absolutely a fair point We can be made some more technical points about for instance No free JavaScript more and more for our computations are happening in our browsers and they're happening through code Which is delivered to our browser by Remote servers and those code is not free at all. And I absolutely agree with that But the point I want to focus on for today is actually What we call the cloud. Okay, so I have all my images are gone. I had a very nice image there. Sorry So The remaining point and is my main reason or concern is what it's been called the cloud Let allow me to be a bit generic here for a moment I know there are very different parts in what we call the cloud and we'll be more specific in all of them in a bit But for now I want to focus on the common trend that the cloud is bringing to computing these days So computing today for most people is not much different from the kind of computing. I was doing 15 years ago Okay, that's the kind of computing that we do on very different hardware So we have way more smartphone way more tablets than in the past and that's true That the kind of activities we do producing content consuming content is very similar The big difference is the kind of technological stack we are using and where the computation are happening So for most people today Our kind of office suite we use is no longer a software which is installed in your machine, but it is Google Docs I'm an academic myself. I'm very often forced to use some Google Docs Application to work with others. Otherwise, I'm free not to work with them Okay, because it's a ton of technological choice. We should be made by someone else for many people Email as you know, just main Gmail. Okay, and all the all our emails Even if you're not using Gmail ourselves are passing through some Gmail servers a synchronized communications still exists But it's very often mediated to software like skype or jit all and so on and so forth We have seen this list very often. Okay consuming content there as well We are still doing gaming we're still doing browsing But it's often mediated by platform which are far away from us and just stream content to us Or in the specific case of web browsing There are more and more often hosted by a very few authors in the world Which we often refer to a wallet garden that can do whatever they want with our content Okay, so the point here is not demonizing those services People are using those services because they are Convenient and there is a lot of network effect going on that makes it easy for other people to just start using those services So it's really not the point of demonizing those services the point here Is observing that interesting computations that we are doing as a final as our as our job as our As our life are no longer happening on our machines But are happening another machines which are far away from us and which are not under our direct control In this context for me, I confess What actually is the road to software freedom and to control to enable people to control their own computation is no longer clear Is no longer enough to say well, we just need to rewrite Google or facebook or twitter in free software That's not enough because even if you do that you have the problem that When you are using a server you don't know if the code it is running is the one they claim it is running So that's a very difficult problem to solve and even if it were the case Well, where do you deploy yourself a google like architecture or facebook like architecture? You simply can't Okay, so it's no longer enough to just say we just need to do some software development And we just need to make it better than the alternative There is a real tricky combination between software development and software deployment, which is not easy To see how to fix it At least for me, it's it's your very in a very muddy water So what about distros? So we are distro people we're doing one of the most popular distros in existence So are we winning or are we losing in the situation? How are we doing in terms of of our efforts? So in a sense, we are very much winning A lot of our work is being used to deploy those infrastructures A lot of the infrastructure of the big companies are deploying on top of free software If not directly on top of our very own systems Maybe modified here and there where they need to to make things better as it is their own right given It's all free software. Okay, so in that sense we're winning. We're increasing market share We are using we're being used a lot to make infrastructure But we are also losing In the sense that we are really not empowering user to be in control of their own computations Okay If our final users are the CIS admin that are running those infrastructure for them, we are doing great We are making them be sure that they are in control of their own infrastructure But for the final users of those services, we are really not empowering them at the moment So what I call the free software dark ages, which is an expression which I actually borrowed from from Bradley Kuhn and the fire and they find it quite inspiring is a situation in which We win on the end user market So every single device out there in the end of people Desktop laptop even smartphones where right now we are not doing very well All of this is running free software. All of that is running Debbie Okay, so total word domination as we were talking about a long time ago But all interesting computations all the final user application which has been used to Bring on with your digital life are no longer happening on your devices Happening far away from you on computer. You do not control Sometime with free software sometime with non free software, but in any case outside your own control So in a sense, this is very worrisome for me because we have this euphoria of saying we are really popular Okay, we are winning the war. We were using a lot of this A war like terminology When I started but the word that we are winning It seems to be coming increasingly pointless because it's not being useful to actually empower user to be in control of their own computation To make things worse There seems to be some some cultural problems That might be just you know a perception of mine Maybe I'm being too pessimistic, but it seems to me that as developer communities as hacker communities We are becoming way more lenient way more lax about the lack of control on the tools and on the infrastructure We use to make free software More and more often we see free software developed on Non-free infrastructure meaning infrastructure which are built using non-free software and which are anyhow centralized in the end of a few hosters, okay, and We the new generation developer which is coming up seems to be totally fine with that So I'm not going to argue this point in much detail There is a great essay by macro that I encourage all of you to read free software needs free tools Which actually make a couple of points one is that By using non-free software to make free software we are sending out a very bad message We are telling to the world that free software is good for you That's why we are developing it, but it's not good for us because we are using non-free tool to make it So that's a kind of a catch 22 in our advertising message But it's also making the software we are creating indirectly less free because if the Favorite way to contribute to that free software is using some non-free infrastructure some non-free tools Where indirectly we're making people that only want to use free software less apt to contribute to that software So really recommended reading that essay, but also technically we are going back to a sort of a cage problem Which is also a problem Which has been called the problem of the bug that no one can fix by the fsf I think and essentially we're Creating software stacks in which some part of it is entirely free software that we can debug and some other parts are Non-free software or any other software run by someone else So we have lost the ability to debug the full stack When I was starting to Learning programming the easy idea that I could debug everything from the end user I was writing myself for an assignment down to the kernel level was just exciting for me And we seem to be losing sight of this a little bit As a second cultural problem We seem to be losing sight of how much help we could get From the legal system and from new legal solution that we might be in need of finding An example of that is the post open source software post debate Which some of you might have run into And that's a debate which actually observed that the new generation of Free software developers actually don't care about licenses They just want to kick out their code just put it on github not declaring a license at all and they're just fine with that Okay, so they want to be had to do have the hassle of deciding first of all a license second of all also some Governance model for their projects. They just want to be hacking and doing and not caring about those unknowing details This could be interpretively interpreted in positive ways like says that we want the Right to to work on the code and to do whatever we want with that by default We do not want to be explicit in which kind of rights we give and that's a very positive interpretation of this phenomenon But in the end for now It is creating a huge bunch of code that we could not use as free software yet For instance, we cannot include in that and something that does not have a license at all Okay, a second example is the debate about the non-freeness of agpl If you look up the history of Free software, there's an argument that the gpl itself is not free. It's an argument that was being used 20 years ago when the battle between copy left and liberalizing was very high was very harsh and it's just recurring again So maybe for some syntactical interpretation of our own guidelines We could make the point that something like the gpl is not free Maybe but the point is that the way we distribute software to final user is really changing 20 years ago 15 years ago the main way to enable some user to use a piece of software Was actually to make a copy of that software and give it to him or to her via the network or on some media And that was conveying that kind of conveying software is clearly distribution And that kind of activity used to trigger some sort of license clauses These days the software is no longer be distributed that way in large parts Is being used over the net and something like the agpl Is the equivalent of triggering some licensing condition via the main way of distributing of giving access to some software So I want to enter in details this debate Those are just examples for me They are example of the fact that we are kind of losing faith in how much the legal system and free software are intertwined And this actually mixes very badly with the situation in which Users are losing control because computations are moving away from that I think this situation in general is not going to fix themselves and we as distribution people have a role to play in fixing it So what could be a role for debian in all this computing situation we have these days so The common trend in the so-called cloud seems to be that computations are moving away from user devices And we cannot just say well, just don't use anything cloudy because it is convenient people will want to use that We need to do something different So as distribution people we could do a lot I think and I have a couple of thoughts to share with you That are different depending on the On the service model the so-called service model of the cloud So one of the first service model of the cloud you might have heard about is the infrastructure as a service where essentially you have servers that Give virtual machines to people and essentially you can you get to administer your own machine Which is a virtual machine on a virtual machine servers controlled by someone else This is potentially very good for people Because it is lowering the barrier you need to have your own server when I first set up my own server with friends in At the end of the 90s while we had to buy some machine to find someone kind enough to host it Paying the hosting fees and so on and so forth and it was something that was by far Not at all accessible to the random user these days A lot of people can simply go to some virtual machine provider Rent a virtual machine with one click button and they have their own machine to administer Maybe they don't have the skill to administer the administer it. That's a different problem What we are definitely lowering the barrier to access to have your own server and do your own remote computations So as debian, we are doing pretty well in this area I think we are offering technologies like open stack and other competitors of open stack which are seems to be the market lead on that market which are entirely free software But I think we should be investing more in offering a Trivial deployment experience for debian users We should make trivial for people to have their own virtual machine servers If they are not computer geeks, they should be able to flock together friends which have Software system and ministry of ability and have their own local Iaas and have their own virtual machine without having to rely on Big oyster provider that offer virtual machines to everyone in the world This is would be a great step toward autonomy. So as debian, what is the best deployment experience we can offer For people that want to set up their own virtual machine servers Then there is another service model which called paths platform as a service This is a kind of service model in which essentially you have oysters of application engines you develop application targeting specific application engine And sorry application servers. So you target specific application service an example of this is a google app engine Okay, and I think in some sense this service model of the cloud is mostly orthogonal To what we do as a distribution because either you are using a full-fledged distribution and you do your own system administration Or you are developing an application for a specific application server and you rely on someone else to do that administration So yes, I think that's mostly orthogonal to what we do But might also be a symptom that there is a reject from the application developer community I reject from the way they need they can target distributions like debian So if it is very difficult to have your own application running properly on debian because we have old software Because we change libraries because we do not accept Multiple copies of the same libraries and so on and so forth If it is too difficult for application developers to target debian They might be more and more tempted to target application servers like paas So there might be something we could do this here like finding better synergies between containerization technology We have some work being done in debian And the way we usually develop some We usually maintain a distribution. There might be something we could do about this here Oh, and I didn't mention this but I have no hands no specific answer to give to you Just train of thoughts that I wanted to share with you and what we could do to improve the situation And the final service model we have in the cloud, which is I think Worrisome from the point of view of user of user experience of user control is SAAS Software as a service they're essentially use your own device your own computer only as a thin client and rely Entirely on a remote server to do your own computation So we are back to the mainframe thin client distinction of the early days of computing And here there is a lot we could do I think but also a lot we could not do Here most of the work should come from upstreams We need better free software and federated replacement for popular centralized and proprietary applications In which users can participate in some kind of network by using their own node Okay, and this is work that should not come from distribution itself It should really come from application developers upstream, but still there are still there are useful things we could do here So we already have a lot of building blocks We have stuff like on cloud data next media gobbling pop.io We have yasi we have a lot of good building blocks most of them are not yet up to par with the centralized proprietary equivalent, but I'm confident we could get there what we lack Is the equivalent ease of deployment of these services on user machines in some sense if we have democratized the installation of software 20 years ago with distributions Well these days to face the challenge of Control over our own computation We need to make it as easy as using a package manager to install Your own nodes using those applications ideally everyone in the world without Nothing more than basic computing skills computer user skill should be able to have its own machine at home Doing some anonymous browsing doing some mail handling doing web hosting doing storage calendar Doing encrypted peer-to-peer backup and so on and so forth. I'm maintaining my own mail server And it is a use of work. I struggle myself to keep up with the need of knowledge and of surveillance that I need to make to my own mail server to be able to To run it properly and I Get blacklisted from time to time from big providers and it's a pain It's something that no one without having at least some basic system administration ability could do properly This is the thing we need the the nut we need the nut we need to crack We need to empower everyone out there to have its own computer with its own node of those services And of course you are all thinking at the freedom box now And that's a great example of a project who wants to take all precisely that problem It is a project that's been Announced by ebb and mobil in a few years ago at a debcov if my memory serves me well It's heavily based on on debian and it's doing exactly that But my question from the debian point of view Is maybe this project should not only be a spinoff of debian should not only be A derive a derivative distribution of debian Maybe we should think of making something like this as first-class citizen in debian I don't know exactly what that means yet. It's something we could Think about having the main administration interface for debian something that target these specific scenarios We could generalize that we do not need to target only specific Plug devices because people at home might have desktop computers might have media center They might want to have something like the freedom box at home and collaborate with other immediately My point here is that if our mission back in the days was to democratize free software by making it easier to install software on your machine Well today our mission is democratize free software by making it Previous to install some node of some federation of free services on your machine And another thing we could do and this is the last one for me today Is to step step in the free service debate When I started looking up these arguments a few years back I was surprised by the fact that it's still not clear. What does it mean to be a free service? Okay, when I started working on free software 15 years ago, it was fairly clear what does free software mean Sure, there was some terminology debate between free software and open source which still exists today But the basic freedoms the basic rights that you should have to call something free and open source was fairly clear That kind of intellectual debate had already happened at the time Today where the problem of computations moving away from individual user is raging There is no clear consensus on that matter There is some great work. For instance, there is a frankly street statement on free network service I think that's the full title dating back to 2008 at six years ago In which you find a lot of very useful recommendation for users For software developers and for system administrator to make sure that you maximize Your control over your own computation on the network But they take no issue no no sense on what does it mean to be a free service? Okay, is it enough to have something which is free you doing it more in the specific license? There are some recommendations on that point, but still there are no clear answers to this question. Sorry There is another work by rms 2010 about software as a service or service as a software substitute as he calls it And here essentially what you have is a main recommendation about Don't you not using software as a service at all? Essentially there is a recommendation of doing your own computation on your own machines I think that might be well, that's generally good recommendation But it's not going to scale is not going to be enough in my opinion to convince people not to use very convenient services I think we need more gradual and blurry lines saying encouraging people to keep computation closer to them To rely on federation of friends of people to do computation together And we as distribution people could make it easier for them to do so And then there is another work Which is network services aren't free or non-free which is a couple of years later still by rms Which essentially try to work the fine line between what's the difference between a pure service So a service that just for instance convey messages as opposed to a service Which does computation that could have been done instead on your machine And that's a very fine like to work. It's very difficult to stay there And what we might need there is a Is a stronger position actually in which you try to replace everything which is centralized with federated equivalent and say that We as free software people distribution people should work in that direction So what we could do in the ambient? Well, I think we should try to step in this debate Surprisingly for me, we still have no clear answer to what does it mean to be a free service today? And we have quite a bit of experience in that again in leading debates in the area of free software We've created the fsg which has been used as an example for many other communities We have participated in the gpl v3 discussion for instance our decision in terms of Free licenses are looked upon a look up by other projects. So we might have a The authority and the reputation to step in these debates and we also have A lot of technical knowledge in the area So being a free software distribution committed to free software We know a thing or two not only about software freedom, but also about how you deploy software Okay, how difficult it is and how difficult it should be for people to deploy free software So I think we are in a just the sweet spot to actually enter this debate with the needed authority and Make a contribution to actually help people realize. What does it mean today to use a free service? So the concluding question I have for you is so what's Debian take today on liberating users? Would be Would we be happy enough to have Debian on every machine in the world if people are using Complete remote services and if we were not well, what should we do? What should be working on to change that future which seems Very much the future that we have at hand So Yeah pictures are gone. So there was a cloudy network cloudy A cloud or any cloud on the left. There was Debian here and a sun here. So Latex bimero ticks or something is playing tricks on me. So that's all I have for you I hope you have I've given you some food for thought for this week And if you have any question or comments for in these topics, I'm very much happy to hear about that. Thanks a lot There seems to be a mic which is floating around down there It's not quite a lot and quite brilliantly about what cloud computing Buzzwords mean for free software But I think one important battle that we're actually losing Is for hearts and minds of people Why is it that young developers or newcomers to free software don't care about? Software being free Why don't they care about non free using non free tools? Why don't they care about? Which licenses they declare for the software if any licenses at all and so on you mentioned that problem But what do we do about it? Do you have any ideas? Well a friend of mine when asked a similar question, I think one sounds word Well, what could they say more than all of those young kids? So I don't know. Maybe it's our fault. Maybe we have failed as As a generation to convey the importance that being in control of our own computation add or maybe it's just that the Public that is open to Coding and hacking is much larger than in the past. So we are reaching out to other communities And it's very good for them to be coding because I think every citizen in the world need to have some basic knowledge of Coding to understand what's happening in the world But maybe they just have different mission than we had in the past So very good question. I don't have a very good answer. Sorry Aaron Hello, sorry is this It's good. Okay So I thank you so much for the wonderful talk and I think it's great to talk about these political issues and I see there's a A challenge between the sort of very individual focus of Each person being able to use their own computer as they wish which has its own values But there's a different sort of value that relates to Power structures in general. So we're talking about not just How free is each individual person? But whether an entity like twitter or google or facebook or some of these other services Is a very powerful entity that has power over The majority of us who use their services and so I wonder if And I'd like your thoughts on on thinking about it less as a is this software free but about Who is in power in the community and so in a democratic sense you could have the community that builds the tools together has governance structures or has mechanisms for handling power that Make the power more bottom up and more democratic and maybe that's As or more important than the technical status of each individual user Yeah, so as a concerned citizen and also as a political activist. I very much share your concern I think we need to focus on what it's At and reach for us as geeks in this circle and have this kind of discussion in different circles So as someone who is active in politics, I very much try and as a geek I very much try to actually explain to politician and to activist the role of What we're doing here in very technical ways and the impact that it has on politics in general And I think biella in the talk later on this evening might have a thing or two able to say about that as well So from our part, I need we need to Understand it in some sense Even if we advance a lot the status quo of user control over technology that we had 30 years ago We're also started to lag behind in many other areas Something that I wanted to mention before but I failed to do so is that When I were doing my computing in the 90s A lot of computation were mediated by clearly defined protocols So we had rfsc rfcs or equivalent documents by other organizations, which were like clearly marked paths to how to Collaborate technically on the internet and how to make software talk together in a sense that culture of interoperability of protocols has actually Started lagging behind a lot with respect to popular technology. So stuff like social networks Most of them except the the good ones that free software guys are trying to to build like pump.io like diaspora Well, all those stuff those technology started up without any kind of interoperability in in mind So technically I think we should we need to push against again On the direction of interoperability of protocols and that's a technical contribution that we could do that will have an impact You know code is low as lesi was saying and that would have a technical impact on the power structure. You mentioned That's that my thought on this matter So I have a an answer Or bit of a hello. Yes. Hello. I have an answer or sort of an answer to the to the previous question So this is of course the heart of the difference between Free software and open source the difference between free software and open source Isn't nothing at all and it's not about licenses. It's about Goals and aims and over the past decades Those, you know, many of us have chosen not to pick a fight with open source people Just for an easy life and you know, it's always easier to have somebody Who might share some of your goals and and to to be able to collaborate with them But less and less is it becoming the case that The goals of people who are doing open source are the same as the goals of people doing free software You can see that very clearly in The responses from people like google to things like the agpl And there are a lot of examples So one of the things that we can do To try and bring some of the new crop of developers along with us Is to actually make a bit more of a fuss about You know, let's not, you know, come over all stallman about that Stallman is not the best PR guy, but I think Debian can do a lot better than he can and we've probably got a lot more credibility And individually we have as well and what we need to do is we need to Explain our vision to those new developers who Mostly are just being, you know, they see an open source marketing machine and we are something different Thanks, so does not need to be a question and answer. So if you have comments feel free, so I think we're running short of time and we need to do one more question So maybe one last or Stefano one last or we can okay one last question or comment Just a quick comment if I may you talked about, you know, federated services and facebook and dropbox and that sort of thing Sorry, um, I think maybe the the issue here is is perhaps less about federated services, but it's about identity You know, if I have my own Dropbox alike and you have your own dropbox alike. The problem is Not necessarily that the two couldn't talk to each other, but we have no way of negotiation that sort of identity authentication Access kind of problem and I think maybe part of the answer your question is can we come up with some way of Allowing federated identity management for people in general rather than just us say So I think this is very much related to what I Answering before to Harron in the sense. Yes, we could we have shown in the past that we can come up with very Smart protocols that allow people to technically interoperate over the net, but we are We're coming too late for that So those big entities which now have the power to attract a lot of users to them developed before Those standard that we could have used to make smaller Entities interoperate could have been put in place. So yes, I agree with you There is technical work to be done But in some sense we are we are late in doing that work and the question now is not only How could we do the technical work that allows to have smaller entities that interoperate for authentication or for Everything else and also how do we migrate from the status quo to the ideal word that would be possible if those standard existed in the first place So in a sense we I think we are a bit late and now we have twice the work to be done before Reaching the optimal and more federated situation, which I think would solve the problem So thanks a lot