 Hey, so the PHP community did this really cool thing called join.in, who's heard of that? Basically they roll their open source a little bit differently over there and they've got some really interesting views and I've spent the last couple of years going to a bunch of PHP conferences and learning about symphony and learning about a lot of other things. Join.in is a PHP community platform upon which you register your event, you put in all the talks and the speakers claim those talks, put in the descriptions and what have you, and the audience of each session can rate those talks thereby helping other conferences assess whom to invite and so on. It's a great idea and I highly recommend if you organize an event to just take advantage of this. It's an open source resource. It's cool. This is the, I was about to say no, it's the page for this talk in one of its early versions, I forget which one, and more positive ratings, thank you very much, is a completely different number if you want to put in negative ratings, I forget what it is right now. By the end of this extremely rushed 35 minutes, I'd like you and I want all of us to remember as empowered practitioners, okay, technologists building the web, building the next generation of digital interconnected technology, we need to build our products and projects in ways that empower all of us to make the world a better place and that lies within our power. We need to remember that we're privileged in our knowledge and our abilities and we're gatekeepers and controllers and we should build applications that are safe and secure by default and they should not be RTFM hard and technical. I want you to remember that digital rights are human rights and we have an opportunity and a responsibility to enable others less technical than ourselves to enjoy freedom and privacy and security. So what do I mean idealism is code? You can read it a lot of different ways. And I see open source, I see Drupal in a history of communities that have defined themselves by ideals. So the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights is a very powerful set of documents. I think it's a, my personal opinion is that their current application and practice is questionable. But there's some really fascinating things. The Fourth Amendment says the right of the people to be secure in their person's houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. And no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause supported by author or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. I think in the American context, the stuff about the NSA and the stuff about the whistleblowers and what have you is certainly in the breaking encryption and blankets surveillance is certainly questionable viewed through this lens. Be that as it may, much more relevant to us and applicable to us in terms of idealism as code. Sorry, I'll get back there now. The First Amendment says, among other things, Congress shall make no law respecting and a or prohibiting the right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances. So in before 1800, this is a terrific sentiment. I have the right to petition my government, but before 1800 in 1830 in 1950, it's very difficult to do. You have a country almost as large as Australia with people spread out much more evenly throughout the continent and to create a petition, you have to make mountains and mountains and mountains of paper and distribute it and get it signed and then collect it again and count it, it's very, very laborious. So anyway, hey presto, Drupal, open source, the White House has something like, I don't even know, 1730 GitHub repositories now, that's amazing, right? So it all started when White House.gov went Drupal and we the people is the Drupal application for petitioning the government. And it allows some really, it allows, this is another theme of idealism as code, we have this abstract stuff. If you're old enough to have started when computers were, you know, green on black or black on orange or something, code now, we can effect change in the real world and it makes us, as I said, very, very powerful and we need to be responsible with that power. So one bit of real world change that was affected by this particular petition was that the number of signatures that you need. So the government at this point said, when they implemented it, they said, if you get 25,000 signatures, we will respond. Now it's 100,000 signatures. The government did respond to this. Does anybody know how the government's response to this petition began? This is not the response you're looking for. Yes, so that's fun and they cited a lot of reasons why the national death star is simply not a practical idea right now. If I'm a government and I have 100 money to spend in a traditional economy of scarcity, I might choose to build a bridge between two places for 100 money, thereby allowing commerce to, you know, things, goods, people to move across there, stimulate commerce, stimulate the economy. It sounds like a good idea. We'll build it. We'll see how it goes. I've spent that money and I get a result for it. Probably good. I can choose governments generally considering themselves, certainly in our perception of what government should be, governments want to make the world a better place. So they might also decide for 100 money they're going to send vaccines to the developing world because better outcomes in the developing world will produce better outcomes here if you're concerned about immigration, if you're concerned about what have you. I spend 100 money on vaccinations. More people live longer. The world is a better place. Wonderful. I can also spend 100 money on bombs and I can flatten somewhere if I think that the world is a better place for that. Some governments behave that way. It's not my, you know, it's not my style. It's not my choice. I don't agree with that. But this is how governments act and this is a traditional way to spend money. If you build government infrastructure, like a citizen transparency participation portal like with the people or other things, if you build government infrastructure with open source software and you spend 100 money on that, you're going to get a result for it. But you can also pass it on. Any other government, any other organization can use and reuse that bit of infrastructure and every time it's downloaded and every time it's reused, it becomes more value and the amount of good that you have done in the world or the amount of potential that you've done in the world for 100 money increases. This is an open source superpower that we need to keep in mind. It allows, it's called an economy of plenty and it's a very, very powerful thing that we've got on our hands and I think we're very lucky to be part of it. So PHP is a dominant web technology as part of the LAMP stack and convergence with things like Composer and the PSR standards, meta projects like Drupal 8 where we have Symphony and Guzzle and all kinds of front end libraries and all sorts of components are changing the face of the web. PHP already runs 80% of the web but now when we improve the Symphony rooting component to make Drupal 8 what it needs to be, we're improving other open source software projects along the way. We're improving Symphony CMF which uses the same component, we're improving easy publish. We are becoming more influential because we've always had crazy great ideas. We've just been using really crazy word code but now people are paying attention to us. We're doing this for the Drupal project and you know, Symphony people think that Symphony is getting larger and more influential. They don't realize that they've met the Borg now, right? So successful, free, Libra and open source software, if I say free software, if I say open source or whatever, I mean all of those things generally, free software and open source software are very, very close and I'm happy to have that conversation over a couple of years if you need to have that out. We should be building applications that are safe, secure, compelling and empowering by default. This is me. Akkig.com slash podcast is very active. You can also subscribe to that on iTunes. I'm setting up the SoundCloud account for that right now. This presentation and the presentation I did a couple of days ago are all on slideshare.net. I've got a bunch of videos on YouTube. Please contact me. I'm pretty active on Twitter. Well, I'm not so jet-legged. I want to thank my employer, Aquia, who sent me here and gave me this super cool title, open source evangelist. Yeah, so I've been working there a long time. It's a great place. How many of you build websites or applications for clients? And how many of you run Drupal within other organizations, like within an organization? And how many of you do something that I haven't said yet? Oh, I don't mean like, I've got kids in a house and I mow the grass. I mean, like, oh, how many of you have a startup? Cool. Oh, nice. Awesome. And are building a product with Drupal. Very cool. Okay. So how many of you contribute to Drupal? So who's submitted a patch or pull request? Right. Keep your hands up now, please. And who's filed a bug report? And who's downloaded Drupal and gone to a Drupal community event? If somebody doesn't have their hand up, look, it's not just the people who write code who are contributing to this, okay? It's not, we are all, by virtue of being here, we are all contributing to open source, okay? And our fundamental mission and our fundamental design decision as Drupal can only really happen if we're not all just coders, like a lot of other projects. I was talking with Angie, I guess, a year ago about this. And she said something, she said something which I, in my shorthand, this is Drupal's fundamental design decisions. It's really powerful. Oh, stop. Wait. I get excited about it and that sort of work is, so can you turn that up a little and then we can? I think the real power in Drupal and what I get excited about in that sort of work is, you know, essentially what we do as Drupal developers is we make really abstract, complicated, you know, programming concepts accessible to non-developers. You know, when we write things like the views module, you can do very sophisticated queries and charts and maps and all kinds of things just by clicking a few buttons without having to understand all the code that comes underneath it. So what I get really excited about is the idea that Drupal and particularly Drupal 8 could be this vehicle through which we create really easily accessible, you know, things that could be piped through a mobile application or usable on the internet and used as a tool to help those people who are on the front lines trying to make the world a better place and we could build technology to enable that. Yeah, so let's remember, our fundamental design decision is empowerment. We've put all of the power of the code into the user interface. Almost nobody else does that. And we're helping people make the world a better place. Amnesty International Greenpeace, the Australian government. Universities, visionaries, organizations of all kinds. And it's really powerful. So here's a great example of idealism as code. There was a hurricane, a tornado, something terrible. I think it was a tornado in Oklahoma City right when Drupal Component was starting. And about 70 people stayed up for 24 hours and built the Help for OK app, which is also open source reusable infrastructure and allowed us to step in and essentially build what could be government services, right? But it allowed us just to step in and start helping people by putting up this platform. So people who needed a place to stay, people who needed a ride, or wanted to offer to help, right? And so, you know, first of all, I'm really proud to be part of a community that just steps up and does that in the middle of our main conference. Like, OK, stop everything, we're going to help these people in need. But this is an expression of idealism as code. So I said that I see us in a continuity of communities of idealism. I talked a little bit about the Constitution already. So I messaged the Congress this later, but this is now called the State of the Union Addressing the United States. FDR defined four freedoms that he thought were important. And clearly in 1941, you know, these were very, very powerful statements considering the state of the world at that point. Especially like the freedom from want and the freedom from fear. I think that's very, very powerful. And who recognizes this logo? Really? OK, so if I gave this present, I did, actually, give this presentation in San Francisco, I believe. All the hands in the room have got, because this is the logo for a little thing called Burning Man. And, you know, you must have seen photos and videos of all these crazy half-naked people dancing with fire and stuff, right, in a huge bit of desert. But it's actually also a community of idealists. And when you talk about radical inclusion, when you talk about self-reliance and self-expression, when you talk about communal effort, participation, you know, responsibility, these are values that really speak to us as software practitioners, as Drupalists, as open source people. RMS, Richard Stallman. Yeah, so Richard Stallman is the guy who wrote the free software definition. Richard was pretty much right. And, you know, we haven't taken him nearly serious enough in the world. And his fundamental point is that free software is about freedom. And we need to control the things that we use and not be controlled by them. And I think this is incredibly relevant today. So this is the first free software definition. It's powerful. I don't think it's particularly elegantly phrased. It was then refined a little bit. So it starts, and of course you can tell we're dealing with real geeks because it starts with freedom zero, right? Freedom to run the program, freedom to study the program, freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor and you can see here how Richard is a real idealist. So you can help your neighbor. And then the third, fourth freedom is, you know, explicitly saying you can share your copies another way, which, anyway, this guy's called Bruce Parents. He ended up being the main author among a group of people who wrote the open source definition, which came out of the Debian community. So that's the open source definition. And anyone who's been in Drupal issue queues, right? Essentially the open source definition, I mean, it's all valid, right? But it's the freedom to bike shed at this point, right? Yeah, so that's also online. And the philosophical difference between open source and free software can essentially be defined that Richard Stallman is very concerned about our freedom. And open source is a pragmatic approach and a, I don't like saying business friendly, but its pragmatism is in method and a typical open source license. So a free software license is the GPL, right? You run software in the GPL runtime and that is also free and it has to be free and it infects, if you're a copyright lawyer, everything around it, which is very powerful and it makes a very powerful statement that Drupal is GPL software, okay? You can sell it all you want, but anyone you sell it to can then just pass it on to anyone they want. And a typical open source license is something like the MIT license, which allows you to also put code in proprietary products and sell them and prohibit others from certain kinds of usage. So, but most open source software is free and most free software is open source. I mean, so anyway. When I talk with business people about what we do or when I talk with our community about how to talk to businesses about what we do, I boil it down to these four freedoms. You're free to use it. Nobody can take it away from you. Nobody can turn it off. You're free to understand what you're getting in business terms. This is hugely important. You should talk about risk mitigation, right? There's no one stopping you from assessing the code yourself and if you don't understand it, you can hire or ask anyone whom you trust to do the same. For me, NASA uses it and the city of London uses it and Al Jazeera uses it. So, for me, Drupal's good enough but nobody's stopping you understanding it. So, freedom to understand what you're doing. You can make changes. So, for businesses, you can build the ideal tool set to realize your vision, to get your work done, whatever it is that you need doing and those changes you can pass them on. So, you build AGOV, which is an ideal solution for running government websites in Australia that meets all of the security accessibility standards. Well, any department, any government department, any government agency can use that and the government itself said, hey, this is a great idea. We're gonna partner up with AQUIA and with previous NEX and with some other people and we're gonna build this GOV CMS, which is a layer on top of AGOV, essentially. So, we're building on the shoulders of science we're working together. I got interviewed last year on an old free and open source site called Tux Machines about Drupal 8 and about, ended up talking a lot about the sort of freedoms inherent and licensing and so on. I enjoyed doing it. So anyway, read it if you like. Let me think here for a second. All right, and the point is, the point about these licenses, I guess, is that GPL-based businesses are really, really hard and it's a balancing act that we get caught up in Drupal a lot and we can't have an app store, right? For example, so, and we can't have, we can't sell products and just say that you can't copy them or whatever. It's challenging. It makes us think and it creates an ecosystem for us that's a lot of service providers, right? There's a great book that predicted pretty much what happened with open source software, democratizing innovation and he talks about this. This is great if you have to explain to people what we do and why it's important to have open source software. He talks about a model, the old model, you have manufacturers and you have consumers and a manufacturer makes something and essentially broadcasts it, distributes it to consumers who consume it and use it as it is. Open source software, well, we use the stuff that we make, right? So we are our own manufacturers and consumers. Therefore, we can build the ideal tool set very specifically for what it is that we need to want to do. So that's really cool and keeping that in mind. Lawrence Lessig, the guy who created the Creative Commons licensing scheme is now concerned with the corrupting effect of money on politics. The introduction to his book, The Outsiders, one way forward. He's been, it's a couple of years ago now but he was very busy interviewing people from the Tea Party movement as far right as you could get in United States politics at the time and the Occupy Wall Street movement on the other end of the spectrum and people from both of the groups said, oh, well, we're open source, we're open source political movements, right? So open source, the idea, because we use the tools we make and make the tools we use, good ideas get better fast. If you wanna compare proprietary and open source, all IT projects have costs associated with them. It's very important that you never tell anyone that it's free because it's not. If you need to, you can say it has a license price of zero, right? But at the point when you don't pay a licensing fee, right, you're free to invest in your vision, in your team, you're allowed to buy what you want when you need it. You're not locked into vendors. You can build or find what you need when you need it. So it's very, very, very empowering and I could talk about this slide probably for an hour and I know it's helped a lot of people pitch Drupal, so just don't call it free, right? So we have all of this to help us and I want us building successful open source software to empower successful digital businesses. This is another half an hour of the talk, right? Businesses need innovation and cost savings and efficiency and risk mitigation and that comes from, right, this comes from as a direct consequence of the four freedoms, right? If you're free to change it, right, then you can keep it on the cutting edge and it has a licensing price of zero so you can spend your money on what you need and not just the permission to try it out and because we're working together in open source at scale in Drupal, a lot of the, you know, we don't have very many unique problems that we can build on each other solutions for the things that we all need and the fact that we can understand it and whatever really, really helps us renegade, renegade MISC and successful digital government is very, very similar and digital government frankly today, it needs all of these things too but it should empower collaboration and transparency, participation and innovation as well. So how are we doing? I apologize a little bit for the shorthand here but I wanna make sure that we get out on time. So how are we doing? Are we helping make the world a better place? There's some great headlines, you know, open source is doing very well in Europe, in the government space, certainly here in Australia, it's great to see. Cediv Munich invested a huge amount of money over the last decade, made their own Linux distribution, their own open source form tools, I mean, they really, really, they made a distribution called LeeMux which is the Linux form in Munich and just absolutely magnificent investment. There are rumors almost once a month that they're gonna drop it and go back to Microsoft but it hasn't happened so far. They've reassessed it a couple of times it seems to be working. This is cool though, politicians, right, not just bureaucrats, not just technocrats, not just us, politicians are even starting to understand that so Hamburg could be, right, going to open source and this politician says, switching to free and open source software enables innovation and increases security, right? And she's not talking about it's cheaper, we should use it because it's cheaper, right, she gets the actual benefits of this and how that could be important. This is a city of a couple hundred thousand people or maybe even less, it's a really small town, maybe it's 50,000 people, I forget. It's an hour from where I live. The IT department was two and a half people, they switched the holes, everything they could in the city to open source without asking anyone for permission, without telling anyone, without making a big deal, they just went and did it, right, and the city's running an open source now and it came out and everybody's happy with it, it's working fine, but you can just do this now, it's really, really wonderful unless it causes dissatisfaction, of course. And this is so, hooray for open source, last year the UK government defined ODF as the standard document form across all UK governments, right, which caused, you know, magically, all of a sudden Google Docs could export ODF within minutes, which it never could before. It's cool, it's progress, I think it's great, but there was a lot of debate coming up to it and you know, listen, let's be serious for a second. Software shouldn't be chosen on the basis of the file formats it supports, but on user productivity. This clearly transcends the cost or otherwise of any license. I'm not sure what or otherwise is. Yeah, so, right now, okay, so the cost or otherwise of any license. Adobe Experience Manager, Acquia ends up pitching against Adobe quite a lot now, you know, our salespeople go up against the really big systems. There's a video online from a relatively recent Adobe conference where a vice president of something or other at Adobe says the average deal size for Adobe Experience Manager is $450,000 and the services package that's sold on top of that is two or three X, much transcendence do you need. How much Drupal can you deliver me for $450,000, right? That's just the permission to turn the thing on. There's some bad news along the way. I gave the first time I gave this talk, I was in Berlin, large room of a thousand geeks or so. Well, somebody got the right meeting, somebody from Microsoft, there's dissatisfaction up there, they got the right meeting and they're probably going back to Microsoft and that is causing a bankrupt city, a very bankrupt city. Guarantee that's costing them millions of euros over the next few years, right? Well, then you read this text and it's like, they're using a version of OpenOffice, which is not even the cool and exciting branch anymore, from 2010 and people are complaining that it's got compatibility problems. So, right, and I was delivering this talk in front of a room of people who literally for the price of pizza and beer and a room to sit in for a weekend could completely rebuild the city's infrastructure and instead the city chose to go back to Microsoft, we have to be vigilant, we have to be better about explaining the value and we have to be better about explaining the concept of free as in five minutes, 10, 55, five. Free as in puppy. Jeff Robbins of Lullabot said this years ago, open source is free as in puppy. You have to take care of it too. And this is a shining example of a big screw up on that front. Gonna have to really rush through this, okay? Proprietary or open source doesn't matter. This is Vincenzo Rubano, he was at Drupal Comportland at the time he was about, I don't remember, 18 or 20. He's Italian, he was at high school, he was born blind. He runs a website that he built in Drupal. He found our community, it was very accessible. He loved it, he got involved in the issue queues, he helps Mike Gifford in the accessibility issue queues now. He built this website that blacklists projects and websites and products that are not accessible, but any developer who work with them, he tests it so that it does become accessible, right? It's amazing. And people who tell you that, well, he could use my proprietary system because all my users care about his features and functionality, well, are you gonna give a high school kid from Italy a free installation to make the world a better place? I don't think so. We did that, right? Drupal did that. In the United States in the restaurant business, they say you gotta own the bricks, right? If you rent a space and you build a successful restaurant, the landlord's gonna come back a year or two later and say, I love your spaghetti, I'm doubling your rent, right, and you can't move because restaurant business is all about location. If you own the bricks, if you work in a building that you own, nobody can double your rent, nobody can sunset your system, nobody can take away the software that you've spent five years building your vision into, right? I don't want my citizen services built on government, you know, infrastructure that my government doesn't own and control. You really need to use open source software to own, you gotta own the bricks, okay? Are all Balkan? An amazing thinker, he's running this thing called Indie, it's incredible, I don't have time to explain it. But look, if I have to say trust me, don't trust me, right? Open source is about transparency. And there's a radical hotbed of, well, of, you know, a hotbed of radical thinking. The Norwegian National Accountants Association made a submission to the government when they redid the cash register standard for the country and they said true auditability of these to, you know, avoid tax evasion and so on is only possible if we use open source software in every transactional system in the country, right? Amazing, people are really getting it. We were talking about this earlier. If you, you know, so DRM backdoors, well, they don't matter. This is a stupid coffee brand that I hate in the United States, it's very popular and they make you buy these completely unrecyclable plastic single-serve cups of coffee but it's incredibly popular, right? Very popular with geeks and they DRM'd the version two of these so, so you can't use competing cups in their machines and you can't even use genuine cups from their own brand in these machines. Now, how long did it take, like, you stand between a geek and her coffee with DRM, how long is that DRM gonna last? Microsay, well, okay, so it doesn't matter because we're smart but, you know, what happens when you can, you know, you've got remote controllable thermostats in people's homes? What about cars that drive themselves? How long is it gonna take, you know, before someone in some government somewhere says, well, you can't have these unless we have police override codes in them, right? And how long before that gets out? Because governments are really good at keeping these secrets, right? And how long before cars are diverted? Whether by a, you know, and what if you're in a state where you actually can't trust the government itself? You can't, you have no control over the vehicle that you're in. All kinds of bad things could happen. You could be redirected, God knows where. Traffic lights, hearing aids. May I? Artificial legs. Gordon has an amazing prosthetic leg that has a knee joint that moves that adjusts the angle of his foot when he walks up hills. It's the world's most expensive pedometer, right? It's got USB in it, it's got software in it. He's not allowed to look at it or modify it or control it. Now, he'd like to, he'd like to hack it, he'd like to fool around with it, that's cool. But what about pacemakers, right? What about hearing aids that tell someone else what you're listening to? Or filter what you're allowed to hear, right? All of a sudden, if you have closed systems in your body, this becomes incredibly insidious and incredibly dangerous. This is why we need to make applications. The internet of things is coming. This is really important. We must make things that are safe and secure by default and empowering and transparent and open. The Linux Foundation has this thing called the All Scene Alliance, it's got an all join standard which is like an internet of things communication standard that a lot of companies are behind. I think it's one of the answers to this particular situation, you need to remember that Richard Stallman was right and free as in freedom is incredibly important and we need to be building things that are safe and secure and compelling and I'll just say, in the second that I have left, when I say compelling, you have to build government services, you have to build websites. You know, you can't build command line applications for general consumption. People have iPhones and and and and and and and tablets that are beautiful and easy to use. The stuff that you build has to be compelling, that beautiful, that easy to use by default, okay? So I really hope we care. I really know that we're empowered to do this and when you're out doing your job and when you're talking about other people, about what we do, remember why it's important and what lies within our power. Thank you.