 Thank you. The next one is three thoughts. I'm going to go to the three softwares. Thank you. Hello, everybody. Welcome to DebConf. I was not really aware of this. It would be my talk. This is the first to introduce in DebConf. And maybe that's the reason because not so many people are here because I doubt that it's a weather condition which makes this room so... less crowded because the weather in Scotland is either cloudy, rainy or foggy, so it's quite normal today. At least this is my precondition. I wasn't here before. Sorry. Now to the talk. Well, there is no free beer served in this talk. I'm very sorry. Not in the early morning, but perhaps in the afternoon. The intention of this talk was to explain my mother and my colleagues what I'm just doing. I learned that it's quite hard to explain what are you doing with this stupid computer and everybody says something about free software. What is it? What are you doing? And I had serious trouble. And so I slept some nights and thought, well, perhaps I should prepare a talk. And in this talk, I want to give some... I want to explain some thought. What is software at all? What might people understand software was a little different point of view compared to hardware. And then I will go very few over the patent issue and come to the main point that free software means free of charge, but something more. Moreover, I want to talk a little bit about knowledge, knowledge also compared to free software, free knowledge. And I will tell you about some alternatives to commercial knowledge if you think about some dictionaries you have to buy or whatever. And at last, I want to tell you something about the power of your distribution. Well, we are in the Debian conference. We are building a distribution and why I think it is very powerful. So now to the part of the heart and software comparison. If you think about anywhere, a renderer and a renderer have the chance to write the where. And in most cases or quite often the price is dependent from the white if you buy one kilogram of sugar, two kilogram double the price or whatever. You can bite on it. You can have a disk and bite on it. That's fine. You can do whatever you can do with a physical thing. And both people, Renderer and Wendy are able to check the where. You can go to the marketplace and check whether it is fresh or good and fit your expectations. And the Wendy has some certain rights. He has the ownership. If you buy the chair, you can put your chair in your home, sit on it. It's fine. You can change it. You can think, well, this chair is nice but well, it could, I would like a red color and you paint it red. Fine, it's your perfect right. And finally, if you think right was not the right color, I try to sell this chair. You can do it and nobody would care about it. If you think, I would like to duplicate this chair. It's not the best idea if you are not very good in handicraft and it is better if some professionals do duplicate of this hardware. So you will normally not think about it. What about software? It is really aware in the sense I told in the previous slide. Does it have a weight? Well, not really. So the comparison was the double weight, the double price doesn't work. It is checkable. Well, if you go to the shop and want to buy a box, you have mostly no chance to check whether it fits your expectations and so on. So what is your right if you buy a license to use the software? Well, you have the right to use, okay? But you have not the right to change something and the right to use, perhaps you know it, people learn that if there is an installer and you click on the installer from the license screen, there is blow on the bottom, it's a check box, you have to check it and say next and this works. Nobody will care what is this strange text which is hard to read and it just works if you click the button and next. So, and you mostly are not noticing that you have not really also the right to sell the software to somebody else so the rights are very restricted compared to the hardware you might have bought. But duplication would be normally easy and so it is prevented by technical means whatever this means are. You know, different examples and so the difference between hardware and software is in the rights of the usage and also that you are not able to verify if the software is fulfilling the purpose, the vendor is promising. So, if you go to the marketplace you have some odor of some bad smelling fish and you know this guy, people come to him and he will be forced to sell fresh fish and you have no idea whether the software stinks or not and well sometimes it is quite hard to find out that the software is not doing what it is supposed to do that it has bugs and you have to care about the software you ask the company whether they could fix the bug and so it is very different if you compare this hardware and software stuff. So, this is one side I want to explain for the software in general. Now I come to something which is an interesting effect because you have patterns patterns are nice thing for investigation but also here we have a difference between software and hardware. For instance, if you see this progress bar you know it is quite a simple thing if you see a race or so the runners are running from the start to the end and you see some progress it is a simple process there is no real invention in this thing if you use it in software but perhaps I should have used the patent of the firm IBM and so I think they will not care about my slides but you see there is also a difference in patterns if it is about hardware or software there are so stupid simple things patented in software which simply makes no sense or for instance in Germany or in the complete EU you store your files with file names that have a date inside so if I store a file today it was 2007 0616 as the date of today then and I make it available over network drive I will break the I will have to pay license fee to this company so there are some very stupid things which are possible in software and patent issues so this was about the commercial software people at least these people I wanted to tell about free software tend to talk about freeware they just say freeware what do they mean with freeware there are three different things about so called freeware this is for most people it is just one thing but I think at Debian conference we should differentiate between the download here software you can download binary software and use it this is kind of free beer you can go to a pub get drunk getting drunk is not the only thing we want we want a little bit more we want to know whether the beer we have drunk is poison or whatever we don't know so it is good if you have the code of the software and can look into the code and do what the code is doing on your machine so there is a second type of freeware the code you can hear everything what is said in this code but you can't change it you can't say anything about what means making new code and make a better program and now we come to free software free software is by definition something where you can have all rights to change the code do whatever you want with the code and this is the main point it is not about the price of the software it is about the right to change the software so the free is more centered on the rights you have and not on the price so where is the catch everybody asks where is the catch if there is something what doesn't cost anything it can't be worth something the catch is free in our sense does not mean free of charge so as I said the main focus is on the right to use the software and it is more in the sense of the free speech and free speech is not always simple if you are living in a country where the free speech is not so well the government does not really like to have people free speech then it needs some strengths to do some speeches and you need some competence to do clever some speeches and you need also some time to prepare the speech and so in these three points for examples the person who does the free speech has to be able to do the speech and he needs some time and he just have to do something for living and so these costs are hidden in the free software what exactly is free software is defined in the free software guidelines this presentation is online and there is a link and I think everybody will find it so what about free knowledge? Do we have alternatives to freedom also in the knowledge because software is also some kind of knowledge which is just turned into functionality free knowledge you might know Wikipedia if not just look at wikipedia.org and look up your special field and you see well this is good free knowledge or you see this is not so good and then you have the chance to make it better just try it and the interesting thing is well this is some kind of spam mail the interesting thing is that these people claim that their source was Wikipedia and this is interesting because our enemy takes us honest and this is interesting we also have some free knowledge and this is a point that from some point in time the enemy thinks well there is something we should not ignore anymore so what is the user expecting from software in general a user wants some long-term continuous functionality this is important to do the day-to-day work and do not really care about the software is free or not free they just want a program that works and the users also have some expectations in the program and the service they get if they have some trouble with the program they want some service to get the program running and the user has a budget and this budget to program and service if the program is for free it's more money to get the service and so he is probably happy with free software open source is living from contributors and so the idea is if I get more people using open source software I get more contributors so my customers as a free software provider are contributing back to me and are in this way contributors who can enhance my code so in general the quality increases with the number of users I have for my program at least if they understand the principle that software is not something they have to accept and send bug reports or whatever then I can enhance my software and so they get a better product for their own work this is I have many colleagues who are not involved in the free software world and they really wonder if it has any sense to send a bug report to the producer of their software so the producer of some software has once issued this nice advertising I really like it it was not only to promote Linux more the other thing but it's called gets effects and what can we learn from it well Gandhi said first they ignore you then they lauded you then they fight you and then you win and it is nice to know that since 2002 the phase 3 where they fight at you very sorry since 2002 we are in phase 3 where they fight against us and this is very optimistic in my opinion because well phase 4 is approaching I think so what about the power of distribution well imagine we have a user who was has happily bought some hardware and thinks well I have heard there is some free software around and well I just want to try my luck and in some operating system this is called Linux and I found for free in the internet now I need some graphical interface and he had learned well Linux is not so nice but there are some for instance of course there are others but just for example and the user needs a browser and well he always grabs the source from the net, compiles itself and is a very brave user and he also installed a mail client and well I don't know how long it takes if a user the source gets compiles on his own machine does this also from scratch but I think even if it is a quite clever user after this step he is not so happy as he was before because he spent at least one day of time if he is quite good if it comes to some office suite or some type setting system and nice drawing program he is even less happy because it takes very long time it would be much faster if he would well crack some programs or so and use the installers which are only free of charge and so well it is not real fun until he is able to install free web servers and databases and so this user is wondering what is the sense of this free software and well perhaps until he reached this stage one week to get the free system running and perhaps he was able to gain to earn money of £1000 in this week and so he was able to buy all the software on the commercial side but well this is not really the sense of free software and so you can compile your programs yourself but why not asking others to do it for you and so others did it and built a distribution this is a distribution the user can put on his computer and the time he spent is worth some money and this slide quite clearly explains something it is worth one week of work for the user and so this is my answer if people ask me well I have seen a box it cost £100 also I thought it was free I have to pay money for all this work which is done in this box this is the most reasonable way to install free software but I think you have the right to do the work but you don't need it what is the difference to Debian Debian is also kind of a box and the user can install it on the computer but he has not really to pay money because Debian is a free distribution and the interesting thing about Debian is that all these people the Debian developers I'm one of these funny people have some interest to well put these software into the Debian distribution for their own use so they do it anyway and if these people do this work to take the source compile the code and upload it to get it in the distribution they think well we can do it for somebody else and somebody else will do some other program and so this distribution is built on a community effort which is interesting alternative but for instance here I told you I'm one of them and there's somebody else in the room who's also building some software the alternative is we are not really people who have an interest to bring our software to the customer in the first place we just want to build a very good operating system for our own we have no interest to make money with this and this makes some interesting difference a distributor the commercial distributor has the mass market to make some money this is fine some special software is missing in his in his boxes because well the mass market is kind of a general thing and you cannot earn much money if you try to support for instance schools or if you try to support small market niches or try to support some special kind of sciences these people the distributor expects that these people take over the work I described before for their special software and the solution in Debian is that many specialists like these funny people build the software they are interested in, they are in need and where they are interested in and put all this into the distribution so Debian grows to quite large distribution this Debian is the largest distribution but this doesn't matter it is in this way interesting because things are included that are not in any other distribution well nice image, what does it mean every red circle is a place where one of these specialists is sitting in an old map unfortunately we have no current map but you see the red circles are spread all over the world unfortunately not so as empty places it would be nice to have some sitting there and all these people are connected by lines and every line means one Debian developer who is sitting on one red circle and the other developer and they exchange their keys so they trust each other it's a problem if you have a network of people who are working together how can they trust each other how can they know that somebody who claimed to have done something that really has really done it or was it somebody else and so we have to build this network of trust and the form we try to build this to show graphical how we are connected so I've told special programs are interesting in Edebian the development of free software is kind of an evolution process and it is very successful if you have many users for a program so it is no problem at all to find many users and many developers for web browser so it is perfectly clear that Firefox has so many users that are amongst these users are very talented if gifted developers who develop this software special software has quite a small user base so if you think of my hobby horse is medicine if you think of doctors running a practice there are not so many gifted programmers and even less people who are clever software engineers who try to work on free software so this is a problem to get very special software in a free software distribution and we have a certain profile for this specialist it is normally not reasonable effort to install upstream programs so if there is some free software which fits the needs of a specialist he is if you think of a doctor is just busy to care for his patients and not for his software so he needs somebody who does the work for this program for him they are also not interested in administration these specialists want a computer who just works who they will not try to care about any configuration of Apache or whatever and the interesting is they need only a quite defined subset of available free software which is as I mentioned before not available in commercial distributions because this commercial distributor does not expect to get a good market share from this special software the profile of the administrator for those specialists he has also limited time frame because he has to care about many different things and he has also a lack of specialist knowledge so I know it from my field or I know it from the Debian Edu people and teachers who are in this group who develops such a distribution for schools but there are also programmers who have no idea how schools are working and who have even no idea who are schools working in different countries and so the administrator in principle we also administrators of the user always an idea what his user really wants and this is kind of a problem I faced quite frequently so well this is also a user who has installed Debian who just managed it and he is looking at the descriptions of the 18,000 packages and well it's just confusing because the 18,000 package descriptions are written in the language he doesn't really understand and if he understands the language he understands maximum 50% of the content so how to help these people we can do the following we can make some focus on this really huge software pool and this focus is for instance if I'm a teacher I think well I'm interested in the education of software and I'm looking for only the piece of Debian that contains this software and so some people sit down and say well we want to support those people and made a so called custom distribution which is called a Linux everything around is not any more interesting for those people they just focus on this software they really need and well I entered Debian in 1996 there was quite less software I don't know how many packages and even then it was not possible for me to browse all the packages that are available and I had to do the configuration I needed for my special purpose and it's a current stage 10 years later it is really impossible to find all these things and really notice which programs exist in Debian I know many people who thought well I just got the source from this program and compiled it and asked why didn't you use the Debian packages oh the Debian packages nice so we just take over this work and there's another project Debian made which is my hobby horse a little bit and I do I'm doing the same for medical persons who can be split up in medical practitioners which are not really good supported because there is not so much free software for these people but there is also some biological software microbiological software that is we have about 40 packages inside Debian and the support for those people is just to make them aware of this software I know many biologists who need certain software but they have no idea which free software exists and so we can give them some support in this way we say just we can give them some support and this cares for the installation of all the stuff you are interested in what we have in our distribution so this is in my opinion this is a real power we have we can prepare ready to run system for for all users not only here's Debian distribution but we can also care for people who are specialized to fields that are not mainstream and not just an office suite or whatever if we learn that this is a real power we have in Debian we can get even more users who are really happy with Debian and let's see how it works so I think it is a little bit premature for euphoria and we are on a nice level I told you somebody else is fighting against us this is a very good sign and you know some other examples companies make some agreements about not issuing somebody else and so it is interesting time where we live I hope that this interesting times end in a state where we are even more happy than we are now we as developers really appreciate support from everybody so if everybody learn something from this talk which I would be happy about just join us tell us your problems we really like to care about your problems because we it's just fun to fix problems and not only for the sake of it to fix problems but it is nice to see people who are smiling if they are using also yes we had some first competitions with property systems so there are some rankings between famous web browsers and well I think the tendency is not bad so there are some rankings between some famous databases and well we are not really bad and if you think you learn something from this talk you can ask your software producer also some questions for instance what is the sense of a dongle I have working institute there are many computers featuring a dongle on the back and it's the USB ports not enough some dongle stacked one over the other it's not really fun but users don't ask well it's a software and the dongle put it in it it should work but they don't ask what's the sense of this how fast can a bug that was asked for fixing is really fixed did you ever try to call a service hotline if they are able to fix a bug this is really interesting I'm not saying that every bug in free software is fixed immediately but for instance in Debian you have a certain person who is responsible and you know who is this person and this is one reason why bugs are normally quite fast not always but you can ask this person what's wrong can I help you is it possible that somebody else can fix this bug this is quite a difference of calling a hotline waiting some loops of nice music until you reach somebody or sending a bug report and getting some email can you give some more information or just as easy I fix this this is some difference then you can ask companies what will you really lose if you release your code for instance if you remember the story of Firefox it was formally Netscape and they the company Netscape had some trouble with the most famous web browser one times and then they lost some market share they lost more and more and finally they thought we have no real chance we just release our code or you have seen as an open office this is an interesting effect that companies who are providing a commercial software or a proprietary software and see we cannot compete with the market just release their code because this is the only chance to survive and finally if you look at those projects like Firefox and OpenOffice they were the winner in this process to survive because they really survived so the question is what will the company lose if the code is released and perhaps some other questions you might have for companies so I do not want to talk anymore in this place you can find these slides on this web page and there is also a written version of this which is a little bit more perhaps a little bit well not so bad pronouns English I'm sorry for that and if you have some questions it's your turn now I can give you the mic I come down what is your opinion of the dual licensing I have friends who have two licenses on the same program I have a question okay is this on yeah his concept was one license for contributors excuse me one license in order for contributors to help a second license for them to make a profit from service okay if someone must use this model what would you advise as the contributor of license and what would you advise as the service model of license well this is a little bit hard to give advice because as I said if one license is free for contribution or whatever and also people can use it for commercial reasons who allows to make some other profit from it it is hard to decide or you rate this business model I think it is nice if people have a free license and a different license to make some money because these people have to live and if these people are not able to run their company the software would be bad and this would be bad so it is a little bit hard to give advice which is the right license you have to ask a lawyer to give a competent answer for this I'm really no lawyer as long as you are giving the source to somebody else and it is free that is okay but if you have a proprietary system and you grab this for a proprietary system that is not allowed in the license that is a very tricky legal question as to how you do that it depends from the GPL wouldn't allow this what you say but if you use a BSD license which is also free it was interesting for me because I didn't understand the sense of this BSD license to base closed software on this this is allowed but the sense was explained to me in private because the United States want to spread knowledge between the people and also the companies and the companies are also part of United States and so these should also profit from this software or this knowledge but it's quite okay for them to base also closed software on this works some of the licenses are very good for the big proprietary company who steals the open software I don't think that it is stealing if I'm the author and I think it is okay for me if people use the software and close software then it's the decision of the author is not stolen and the author is not aware of the differences of the license you should explain him but I think it's not really stealing okay somebody else the mic is there it would be fair to describe your sort of company or the charity based company can you repeat the question would you describe your company as I'm not a technical person but if I look at that presentation would you describe yourself as a charity based company because surely you are not competing well in Europe would that be fair to say I mean on your map when you looked at Africa for example you don't have many systems there are you trying to target Africa or do you compete mostly in Europe well we are just the organization who everybody is free to join we are not advertising people that all of you are not ask people to join us they just can join and if we would be happy if people from the white spots would join us and as I said the map is not really up to date the white spots are not so white anymore but there are large white spots and the problem that if there are areas which have not so good infrastructure they have not so many computers and the knowledge that there is free software is not so widespread as it is in other countries so if these people grow up with computers they will get the sense of free software that especially in these countries will join much more people than from anywhere else but we have not the power to ask those people to come to us that's not our point ok, thank you very much anybody else if not we will make a 5 minutes break until the next talk 5 minutes