 So, let's, uh, get... There's a lot of technology involved in this, ladies and gentlemen. There are so many moving parts involved with this. It is insane what we've got going on. I'm looking at... I've got two screens down here. I've got a camera up there. I've got an earpiece in my ear and talking to Swapnil down there. And I'm looking up at you, but he's down here, and it is... I'm having to fight all of my instincts not to look down at Swapnil, just to talk to him. Don't look down at me. You should be looking up at him. I'll put the screen up here so I'm looking up at Swapnil. I didn't mean that metaphorically. I meant that literally. Since you're a fiction writer, I have to be careful what you say because your words do carry a lot of weight. Yeah. So, yeah, before... I mean, you are better at intros and stuff like that because you are an artist, you know? I'm just... So, let's, you know, before we get into this, what we are trying to do, can you talk a bit about, you know, when and how you started your open source journey? Sure. Why it matters to you? Sure. And, yeah. I was teaching back in 19... I think it was 95. I was an adjunct faculty member at the University of Indianapolis where I was teaching in the theater department. I have a bachelor's of science and an MFA in acting, so my background is actually from the world of theater and I had a 20-year career as an actor, but while I was teaching back then, it was the first time I actually had to buy a computer. I had to have one for my classes to do all the things I needed to do as a teacher and it's funny when I look back and I paid like $3,000 for this Pentium 75 computer and it came with Windows 95. I think it was Windows 95. Yeah, it was Windows 95. So, I was so excited about this because I'd never used a computer before and it was... Well, I had briefly used one, but that was back in undergraduate school when we had this Macintosh farm, but it was using OS9 where I was charged with creating all of the play bills for the theater department, so I was doing graphic design on those and interesting little sidebar. Way back then, somehow I managed to crash the entire Mac farm at school. I had used a disc that was corrupt for some reason and I put it in and then all the Macs went down. I can't explain that. It could have been just coincidence, but that's my story. So, I'm teaching this class and I'm working on Windows 95 with this Pentium 75 and it kept blue-screening on me. It kept crashing and I was losing... Just left and right, I was losing data and it was getting really frustrating. So, during that process, you know, I struggled through because I didn't really have the time to dedicate to learning something different, so I struggled through it, but during that next year, I knew that I had to find something different because Windows 95 was just killing me. So, I started searching around and this was back, you know, with bulletin boards and all that and I found mention of this thing, new thing called Linux. So, I kept looking at it and reading about it and reading all the warnings that how challenging it was and it was new. And eventually, I finally went to CompUSA. If you're old enough, you'll probably remember CompUSA. So, I go to CompUSA and I'm looking around and I always went to CompUSA because I was always looking for new software or games and such because I was really into like cyberpunk games at the time and so, I was going down the aisles and I went down the operating systems aisle and of course, it was just nothing but Windows. But then down on the bottom row, there was, there were three or four boxes and one of them was Red Hat 4.2 and one of them was Caldera OpenLinux 1. I like the name Caldera. So, I bought Caldera OpenLinux 1 and it was like 70 bucks at the time and I went home and I, you know, it was first time I'd ever bought an operating system. I'd used a computer enough that I was familiar with how they work but I'd never purchased an operating system. I felt like I was reaching a new level of geekdom. So, I fired the computer I put the discs in and I sat back and waited for the magic to happen. Little did I know way back then it was, you know, the whole installation was end curses and all that. So, the first scream came up and I was like, oh no, what's going on? I was kind of afraid of it but I realized that, you know, I had to do this. I had to just dive in feet first because that's the way I am by nature. I just dive in. So, I clicked OK and installed it and it was rough going at first the installation because I was so unfamiliar with it but eventually I got it installed and I booted it up and the interface was somewhat, it was FVWM95 so it was similar to Windows 95 and click on the start menu and there's all this software because back then early on Linux distributions just installed this massive amount of software and a lot of scientific stuff and things that I knew that I wouldn't really need and of course the first thing I needed to do was get online and that was when the real struggle began and I didn't realize it at the time but I kept trying and trying and trying to get this computer to get online something that just happened when I used Windows and I thought, oh no, what's happened? I can't get it to work. So, I kept struggling and struggling and struggling and eventually I I gave up on Caldera Open Linux and I went back to CompUSA and I bought the bullet and bought Red Hat. I brought Red Hat home installed it. I was kind of used to the end curses installation by now so installing Linux was kind of a breeze which was crazy at the time but I installed Red Hat and the interface was a little more familiar, a little bit more at the time I would say modern but it looked better but I still couldn't get it online no matter what I did I could not get this computer to get online and I thought, well, what good is it? So, I went to my roommate's computer and I did a little searching and I discovered to my dismay and chagrin that my computer had in it and I'm sure anybody listening knows what I'm about to say say it with me, a wind modem. That's right, it was a wind modem. It wouldn't work, period. So, all of the suggestions on this one particular bulletin board that I was going to, said go get a 366 external modem and it'll work just fine out of the box. So, once again I go back to CompUSA I purchased the US Robotics external modem I come home, I plug it in, I reboot the computer and BAM! I was online and after that there was no more needing Windows 95 and I could do my work and at the time I was using StarOffice so I had StarOffice, I had Red Hat and I didn't have these crashes anymore so I could do my work and I wouldn't have to worry about losing my data and I never had a problem and what's really what I find so interesting about this is that you hear all these people complain and moan how difficult Linux is but I was new to computers. I had used Windows 95 for a brief amount of time and I installed Linux and you remember this is early on this was back in 96 97 when Linux was just starting and if you compare Linux now to Linux then Linux now is ridiculously easy Linux back then was pretty challenging so I didn't have any problems at all and I had nothing but problems with Windows it was like a switch was flipped for me and it was like going from night to day and all of a sudden the clouds parted the angels sang and my computer actually worked for me instead of against me and from that point on and I didn't use it it took me years to have to actually go back and use Windows and the only reason I had to go back and use Windows for something was for a job that I was doing but personally I didn't have to use Windows for anything Windows for anything anymore and then all of a sudden another interesting little fact was back in those early days once I got the computer back online I found another bulletin board and I found this guy and I can still remember his name his name was Mark Green I started asking him all these questions and then he gave me his email address at any time you have a question feel free to email me and then we got on AIM and the AOL instant messenger and then ICQ and we would chat and I was single at the time so I was up until 3am chatting with him about Linux and then he got me hooked on the after step window manager and between us we got this thing configured window transparency and it was just totally tricked out and when people would come and see my desktop at home they would freak out they would be like how do you do that I want to do that with my computer it's like well it's Linux it's not Windows so there's a whole you know at that point I had to put months and months of time getting this desktop configured the way it was so I guess early on I was weaned on challenge with Linux it just became so easy eventually that now Linux has almost become boring but that's a good thing yeah boring is good yeah and and then everything was kind of solidified I took a break from acting I took a short hiatus and when I did that I was so enamored of computers at that point I decided I want to go study something else I want to go get my bachelor's degree in information systems technology and I went to a school here and while I was this is really this is not embarrassing but while I was there I joined the Linux users group so we met once a week in the basement of the engineering building and I it was like one of the first few meetings and I remember we were everybody was talking I said yeah I just got Diablo working on wine and everybody's like what and so I told them I showed them how to get Diablo working on wine and then this guy came to one of the meetings and he was from a new website that was being built and he said we're looking for writers in particular we're looking for writers to talk about Linux and I was like me you want me I'm the guy you want you want me let's talk and we had a quick meeting and I had never written anything technical before but I had written other things I had written stage plays I had written short stories and things like that and my grammar was fairly good and I could write a story so I submitted something to him and he said okay here's a topic write something give me a topic give me an article on Linux so I wrote him an article on Linux the next thing I know he said I would like to do as a contractor to write four articles a month on Linux and I was like oh my gosh this is amazing and then I I I tried to continue on with the information systems technology degree but then I got into an argument with the chairman of the department and I went to the chairman of the department one day and I said why are you not teaching Linux and he looked at me with all seriousness and he said because Windows has the market share and I said I looked at him and I said you are trying to educate and graduate all of these students who are going to be dealing with networking technologies and they're not going to have any idea about the technology that powers the backbone of the systems and you're okay with that and he said yeah and I said then I'm done I walked out of his office and I left the school and I didn't look back so at that point I was and that website that came to that users group was tech republic and they wanted to start they were actually starting at the time they were going to start a Linux Republic and we started and they built it with me and I wrote all this content for it and then someone else kind of took over and again they said Windows has the market share so blah blah blah and they said we're going to scrap the Linux Republic and I was like you really don't want to do that you really want to keep this going because trust me when I say that one day Linux is going to be so crucial to business they will not know what to do without it and if you keep this going you will have something really special well they didn't listen to me because I was just me I was low man on the totem pole and but I'm still with tech republic I still write a ton of content for them and Linux is still my primary operating system I do use macOS for two things really video editing and when I get my books back from my editor I have to use pages but honestly when I think about it I don't know where I would be had it not been for me not discovering Linux for me if I had not discovered Linux I would not be where I am today and I am very grateful for Linux I mean open source has built and made my career pretty much I can see that on the on the tattoos on your body I've got the old red hat logo and I have the old Ubuntu logo now red hat is working on their new logo so you will have that's a very good I think that's a very good journey in your venture into the Linux world mine was a bit different what is funny is that in the school days because I grew up in India I think when in the fifth or sixth grade you were offering a computer or Hindi language and back in those days it was like computer you go in the room you do the whole basic flow chart go to and all those things I don't even know which year was that and we went there initially but after that I lost interest in it because I was a science fiction writer so I was more into science kind of stuff where I can actually do things so I had a chemical lab in my home experiments so I did not see much that I can do beyond what they were telling me so you are telling me to do this and it does that it's finished so that's not something new or creative or exciting so next year I chose Hindi language over computer so I gave up on computer totally and you won't believe that I did not use computer at all till 1990 that's when I internet came to the town you used to go to cyber cafes and stuff like that and then I found that that's a very because I used to go to libraries to do research for my stories and you know the fiction that I was writing that was my bread and butter I used to make electronic devices for other people and that's how I used to make money back in those days and that's how I started writing because I created a circuit diagram and gave it to a publication it was called electronics for you no not electronics for you it was a Hindi magazine and they published it and that's how I was I think 16 or 17 years old when I started getting paid for writing and I kind of enjoyed kind of fame because I was also on all India radio I will go and you know recite my stories there so when I will go to the local post office the postmaster when he sees me he's oh you're Swapnil yeah yeah oh yeah yeah I heard your story on radio like come inside so every time I go of course back in those days we had to post the stories there was no email you know so I have to physically type the story and I used to type writer you know I will type the story and post and he will always invite me to come inside and give me a special treatment then I found the internet so I would go to cyber cafe and use there I would just sit whole day you know I would go in the morning and come back in the night I still did not have a computer once I was writing a long book then I borrowed a computer from my friend Vishal said and he lent me the computer at school so I will borrow his computer every weekend and use it and give it back to him because I never saw I had a typewriter and I was more than happy with the typewriter then I moved to New Delhi and that's when I started the filmmaking course and the journalism course and that's when I met a filmmaker he was also the head of the department of where I was getting my filmmaking and journalism course and he saw me that I was doing some you know video editing okay there's a long story behind that is when I was when I finished my I don't know what they call here but college there which is 12th grade I had you know I come from a belt where they go into administrative services which I don't know what is the equivalent from here but it's like federal government services which you know highly paid job very reputable my brother was into this so there was a big pressure from my family to do the same thing I did not want to do that so I lied to them that I'm going to Delhi to pursue a course for that particular kind of job I went to Delhi I stayed with my friend I explored certain things and I did not like you know all those you know those kind of jobs that's when I found this in the university about filmmaking and journalism I went there took the test and then you know I I think that year it was for TV anchor something like that and of course I did not have a TV presence back then I was very slim you know when you're in the student days you know you're very slim and every I don't think I still have any camera presence but so I came back to Lakhimpurkiri my hometown and I went back again for the next season and this time I contacted a lot of established writer because my sister was already established writer in Hindi literature and she was doing her PhD so I was following a lot of writers who were based in Delhi so I you know kind of touched bases and one was Asgar Vajahak you know he's a very prominent writer in India and I called him and he said hey Swapnilji come tomorrow and we'll meet so I went to the university I met him and he said hey why don't you start as my assistant you know you start I mean I have so many things to do you can assist me in translation from Hindi to English and go to meeting we can do a lot of things so you just I said well he's I mean he I used to be his fan as a reader you know and he's a very prominent writer why not and that will kind of you know bring me to that field as well so I started working with him and then he was working on he was a head of department of this you know multimedia section of that university so one of his friend he had some very old folk music and he was trying to digitize them so he asked Swapnilji you can you do that and I did not own the computer till then you know I did not have a computer I said yeah sure but my only good thing was I was very good into electronics so I was very good into learning things so I used this computer and I you know we got a tape recorder and stuff like that I started digitizing and then I started using the window software used to be there for for audio you know so I was trying because it was old audio so I was trying to recover the tracks so so the head of the department of film and journalism of course he saw me working on these files so he and I applied for that course and I was selected into that course I joined that course so he said hey Swapnil I live just you know three minutes walk from here you live so far you take a bus in the morning why don't you you know just move in with me because like I have five house rooms there in my house and you can also help me with my filmmaking projects because I do a lot of documentary filmmaking so I moved in with him and I started doing the filmmaking with him and it was Mac back then and that's how I learned you know more film editing through him and through my course then I finished the course then I started looking for the job I wanted to go to Mumbai to pursue filmmaking but I knew that I was only 25 I guess by that time and I know it will be too much wastage of my time to go to Mumbai so I said let's just try to do something in Delhi so I tried to find print job my first job was with the tourism magazine I worked there for three months I did not like it it was just like you make up stories about how things are good and there was no real stuff there that's when you know a job opening for electronics for you magazine group came out and that was the magazine that I used to read in the childhood days that was my favorite magazine so I applied I met Rahul Chopra who was editor and you know I got you know kind of you know I got a job and so they were starting a new property called EFI times and then needed somebody to kind of had it so I kind of become as a senior correspondent I started the site then they hired more journalists under me new internist kind of thing and there was at one time there was a team of nine journalists working so we were like you know creating news items for because they had four or five public magazines print magazines so we are creating you know news for each group but the site itself grew so much it was meant to be an intranet but it grew so well that it became internet and it was amazing because in the early days keyhole company which was acquired by Google which is now known as Google Earth the city of the company was in India so he contacted me to meet him I said okay I can meet so that's how I started building contacts the exposure to Linux the way it happened was they were using Fedora core LTSP server on the terminals not Windows machine and I hated it and despised it it was so crappy and I will always complain about it because I was a Windows user but also the the IT admin guy was I mean he was friendly but he was not doing the Linux preaching thingy as much as you would expect because he was already kind of tired for the whole day managing all the servers and systems that's when though he will come to my home because he lived near where I lived so he would come and use my system and install putting on it to look at his servers I don't know why he didn't want to log in from his system he didn't want his boss to know where he was so because you have the logs you created the logs so your boss will know where you log in from anyway then another guy joined they used to have a magazine called Linux for you magazine group another guy joined in called Atnuzatta and we kind of hated each other because he was heading that magazine and the same year they organized an event called Linux Asia it was in 2005 and that's when I met Mark Shutterworth and we walked around the whole building and we interviewed him and that's when I met Jim Zemlin and that was the time even Linux foundation was not formed I met Klaus Knopper the guy from Knopix my school you name it and they were there and we had I interviewed almost everybody talked to everybody except for Linus Torwells and RMS and when I met these guys I was like amazed I was like what because I came from a science background and for us science people patents you know and these things are very precious you know you care about your copyright and patent and like what these people are developing these technologies and giving them away for free that makes no sense but you know the whole discussion that I had with Mark and all the Klaus Knopper and all those people that changed my kind of perception and when I looked at it I was like wow I mean this is kind of it gives a kind of purpose to your life because otherwise as I said you know I was a drifter I was a science fiction writer but it was so I was like wow that's amazing so I actually started writing more for Linux for you magazine group and even for EFI times I started doing more and more Linux stories and that's when the whole ODF thingy happened so I did a really big story around ODF and OXML I talked to almost everybody and that next year was also the year when I got them their first interview on Linus Torwells and he agreed and I interviewed them him and that was their first I mean the magazine has been for so long but they never managed to give it that got me even more excited next year RMS was coming to India so I offered to my editor the hey he's coming I have done a lot of research on him and he's looking for somebody who can accompany him you know while he's in New Delhi I would like to be that guy because I will get a story out of it at the same time I'll get to understand so I spent 3 days with RMS while he was in India it was crazy it was crazy because he would not drink this lady water so we like picked him up from the airport and it was 11 am and he came with his girlfriend it was 11 pm at night so I had to find a store in India which does not sell this lady water and then it was every time we set up an interview so we went to meet a lot of government officials where we talked about via free software matters actually I will be talking to Richard Stallman next week I was setting up a meeting with him but I got flu and everything though anyway so this hap kept happening and that's when you know Linux became my kind of career I had been writing about Linux since then then I got married I moved to Germany and Germany doesn't have an English speaking language so I had to kind of break I signed a muck to wear site just to keep myself updated with what's going on though it's not paying you cannot make money from AdSense unless like PewDiePie or you know whatever Casey Neistat so then we moved to US and that's why in 2013 we moved to US in September in 2014 first Linuxcon happened and I met Jim Jowlin Libby Clark and everybody and then I started writing Linux foundation then I started writing for CIO and then I started writing for Newstack and I write for Linux Pro Magazine Admin Magazine so I mean I write for a lot of for some reason one story may have a different angle different story may have a different angle and that angle may not fit in this story so I kind of got so addicted to this freelancing thingy that now I just do it even if you know there is no job security there so I have been doing all that thing but over time and also I was using Linux you know as but over time I saw that Linux desktop is not going anywhere so I kind of moved to enterprise segment because my publishers will not you know they are not interested in KD or NOM you know all those magazines so I moved there but you know I do both like for the KD community on Google plus I started a community then you know they ask me hey something can you know so I just kind of donated the community to them so I have been involved with you know Linux and open source for a very long time the only difference is that I don't sit in a basement and then I write about what I think I actually go out and meet people to be fully informed and educated so that's my tiny journey of Linux and open source and not as exciting as yours but that's what it is I think it's interesting that when you talk to people about their stories of how they discovered Linux and how an open source there's always this common thread at least for a lot of the people that I've met in the common thread being the tools that they had at their disposal weren't working and they had to find something that would work and that go ahead that was the case when my system got corrupted because of a virus came it was called Kamasutra and it was corrupting all the JPEG files so it corrupted my system as well that's when I moved to Mandriva Linux and then I used Debian I hated Ubuntu back then because also it needed more RAM and my system had only 456 MB of RAM 256 MB or something like that but then I moved to Ubuntu and then I became our Linux user and then I became open source user so I have been using Linux all the while and you're right it was more about tools but I have just like you I also use macOS Linux both. Windows is the only thing that I cannot tolerate because the workflow doesn't work it's not Unix per se I mean on macOS I get the pure Unix shell as well I can live in terminal so my workflow works better between macOS and Linux than with Windows but I'm a strong believer of what is your ultimate goal do you want to use tool to create a work of art or do you want to use like are you boarding a flight because you want to go somewhere the thing is the destination versus journey thingy so my goal is that I depends on the use case I use a tool to get that job done so I really don't care whether the tool runs on Linux or mac whether it's open source or not only thing that is critical to what that tool does if that tool is really getting access to my you know it's really about for example when I work on my novels you know then it always sits on my local server it doesn't leave it because when I have pictures of my son and kids you know they live on my local server I never upload them but there are a lot of other things like for example if I'm working on a story that is going to be published tomorrow I don't mind working on the story on google docs if I'm editing an image I don't mind using adobe photoshop but dropbox I'll be careful I am not of you being that oh pure open source you know privacy because I do understand what privacy and security means I do understand so I pick and choose kids by kids well that's been one of my problems with I did an article about predictions for 2018 and one of the predictions that I made was the rise of groupware not groupware suites but office suites on linux and that their office would improve drastically and tools like soft maker would be more accepted and I couldn't believe the flack I got because people were saying soft maker is not open source but it doesn't matter what matters is that it runs and it runs reliably and it runs on linux and it runs well on linux and if you have people that you have to collaborate with and those people are working with only with Microsoft Office then your best bet might be soft maker office and just because it's not open source doesn't mean it's not a viable option and I think you know and I get it I understand the need for some people to have pure open source software on their machines I get that and I respect that but for me that idea ends when open source software can't fill my needs for example and I mentioned this earlier video editing there is simply not a good enough tool on linux to do video editing at the level that I need and I try I used open shot for years and I struggled with it and and I made it I made do with it until they finally moved up to the I think the 2.0 version and kind of broke it all and the old version would no longer work and I said at that point I said I can no longer create the videos that I need I've got to find another tool and I looked at every possible video editor on linux even even closed source options and none of them would work because because the the the video drivers the communication between the software level and the hardware level on linux with regards to video editing is just painfully bad so I finally and and this was kind of also precipitated by the fact that I was I got hired to do another job for a company that the software that they needed they they needed a plugin for all I think it's called on 24.com and the on 24.com did not have a plugin for linux or Chromebooks and I would not use windows at the time I ever get near windows I feel like it's going to crash on me so I said okay fine I'll buy a Mac so actually I talked to you about this and you kind of helped me kind of win me over to buying a Mac so I bought the Mac and next thing I know I'm like well let's see what the video editors like so I downloaded Final Cut Pro trial and I was like oh my gosh wow that's what video editing is supposed to be like and I know that there are people that prefer other other solutions and I know that a lot of people were kind of upset about Final Cut Pro the latest version because it was so different but because I hadn't tried any of the Final Cut Pros before this was just like it was magic to me and it made video editing so easy I know I used to be I have always been a KD Plasma user and I used to be KD in life user I wrote all the stories about it but no it doesn't work in the workflow you have gave so many examples for me when I go to these events I shoot in 4K and I have multiple cameras set up I have to sync audio from 5 different devices and I have bought a lot of plugins to get I mean you are creating a piece of art right you don't like you are telling GRR Martin that I don't care about whether Cersei gets the throne or you know then there is get the throne just use LibreOffice to write the story that's the only thing I care about that you should use in the G-Edit or LibreOffice no right just use the tool that they need for their job at the same time as you also mentioned for a lot of people it may be the tool that is more important than the file than product like for example I am a lot into RC cars I don't drive those cars that much as much as I repair and customize them right so like I have a 3D printer and I just print this sawtooth from from you know what you call it Zero Dawn Horizon but most of the time I spent I use printer you know tool is more important than the outcome you know so it's not like I just make them and I put them in the corner and decorate them so you are right that you know for a lot of people it really matters that you know they have pure open source I am not that person you are not that person you need the right tools but at the same time we are also kind of the way I look at it is that I know a lot of people in the open source work they themselves don't use the platform and they have done much more to promote open source than those people who live in terminal right so my job is not to run Linux on my system my job is to be fully educated fully informed and then talk about it just because Elon Musk is you know just because you are a rocket scientist that doesn't mean you should not drive a car right so that brings me to I remember after I bought that MacBook I was so enamored by it that for a brief moment I thought well maybe my next because my main computer is a system 76 Leopard Extreme which is an absolutely amazing piece of hardware but when I bought that MacBook I thought well maybe I should go ahead and go full in and get an iMac and my wife was like are you kidding me you have hung your hat on Linux for so long you can't do that and I thought well I could use parallels and still run Linux but then I thought yeah she's kind of right but even so I'm so glad that I have that MacBook because here's a great example of kind of what we're talking about a while ago a few years ago I was trying to find maybe a new tool to write my books because I'm also an author and I write all sorts of fiction so I was looking for a possible new tool to write my fiction but this was before I started writing my first drafts in Google Docs and someone and I was doing my searches for them and someone actually said why don't you just write your books in doc book or in markup are you kidding me this is a 60 or 70,000 word book I'm not going to take the extra time to write it in markup language do you realize that I would get one book done a year at that at the most because this is a full length book we're talking about this isn't a term paper and so the very idea of writing an actual book from the command line is insane and I know people have done it but I remember a very long time ago way back when I first started my writing career I thought it would be really cool to write a story from the command line and I tried it and I think I got a half a chapter into it and I was like this is stupid I can't do this my energy needs to be focused on creating this world and these characters and this dialogue not on programming the words to get from the terminal to a file right people have already done that it's called LibreOffice and when I am writing I also write fiction though I'm not as proficient as you are you have I think just finished a novel called POTUS we'll talk about that also so when I write my novel when I'm working on my fiction for text stories I don't care I use Ulysses on Mac, I use G-Edit on Linux, I use Sublime Text I form on both then I want the font rending to be perfect when I italicize something when I make something bold you know when I put something in quotes I want the impression that I'm actually hearing my character talk yeah so because I am in a totally different world at that moment so I don't want bad font rending or whatever it is in my way so I mostly write my and I'm very particular about font rendering and how it looks so I mostly do my fiction work either in Microsoft Word I pay $99 to them or pages because the font rendering LibreOffice doesn't have that good you're right and as you mentioned in your article earlier that you know it cannot even deal with the huge piece of work so that brings us to another interesting point that is that why are we doing this before we talk about that what is POTUS all about POTUS is I wrote this other book called Punk Ass Punk which is it's a story about a punk band that is hired by the NSA to take down a drug lord and I wrote that a year and a half ago or so and after 2016 happened I realized that there was something building up inside of me and I won't get too deep into it but I desperately needed a release I needed catharsis from what I was feeling from this landscape of whatever you want to call it whatever you can call it a nightmare whatever but there was all these feelings welling up inside of me and I knew that I needed to vent all of that out otherwise I was going to absolutely lose my mind so I came up with this idea for a book and the idea was what if I put somebody in a race for president against an incumbent president that's very much like the one we have now and if I put somebody that's completely opposite of a politician in a way that the president we have now could not have fathomed and instantly I thought what about the lead singer from my punk band what if he ran for president but even better what if he was asked to run for president by an official legal group I won't get into too many details so I realized that was the book that I had to write at that time because I'm very much about writing whatever the universe tells me to write I don't I keep an editorial calendar for my tech stuff but I don't keep an editorial calendar for my books because the universe is going to tell me what to write when it's time for me to write it so I started writing this book and it was so cathartic for me so many things I could say it from a narrator's level I could say it from a character's point of view and I drew from some of the things that I posted socially about the president and how his speech patterns and so I drew the character of the incumbent president from that and it's going to be a series I hope it's in the hand of beta readers the first beta readers already got back to me and she absolutely loved it and my fear was that it really was just a book about me just lambasting and bashing on the president instead of the story fortunately I actually wrote a story but as soon as I get it back from beta readers and I send it off to my editor then I'm going to start trying to find an agent for it I work with one small publisher but for one series and all my other stuff I indie publish it but I've reached the point I've written almost 40 books now and I've reached the point where it's time for me to try to go back to the big six publishers and find an agent and go that route and I think that this book is that book that I need to use for that because it's very timely because it was so cathartic for me I think it would be very cathartic for anybody that is feeling this angst right now and like I said to write it I use Google Docs to write all of my first drafts and then I send it off to my editor and she uses Microsoft Word and we go back and forth when I get it back I use Apple Pages and then once I get it when it's finalized and I I open it with Libre Office and I format it with Libre Office and then I save it as an HTML document and then I use Calibra to convert it from HTML to either EPUB or Mobi so a lot of the tools I use are open source but just a couple of them aren't that's my workflow for all of my books and that's excellent workflow and as you said most of your workload is open source and I think that's the direction we are moving towards because I cover Enterprise Word and from Microsoft to Facebook people don't know but Facebook is actually the biggest open source company in the world they don't sell any product but everything runs on Linux and they are one of the biggest contributors most of the projects they have open source everything even they have open source their whole stack and if you go to any Linux and open source event you will see a Facebook booth and they have the whole stack of servers and Google everybody is contributing on those actual hardware so people don't know but there is a lot of open source happening it's just the consumer space which is a tricky market but I think that needs to change but the problem is that it's not changing because the conversations that we are having in the desktop Linux space are the wrong conversations yesterday I was watching a video on YouTube about Ubuntu is collecting data and when I looked at the video I thought of Alex Jones you know that's the kind of label of discussion that is going on it's fear mongering it's treating technology as religion that if you are a Muslim you cannot be a Christian I mean that's happened only in religion right you cannot be a Christian and Muslim but for technology I love technology I don't care as long as I get the freedom to choose the right tools for my job it could be Linux it could be macOS windows I'm not very sure but that's why I have Samsung Galaxy Note which runs on Android I have Nexus I have Pixel I have iPhone X I want to enjoy everything why should we be deprived so the conversation that I wanted to have is that our love for technology I mean right now I just that we are kind of surrounded by technology just to record this video but how to kind of bring the open source community into the mainstream and how to bring the mainstream user base to the open source world that's the kind of thing that I am more leaning towards so from your perspective what is your idea about what we are trying to do here well it's very similar to what you discussed there's this strange thing that happens with technology we have the open source zealots that don't care about the end users and then we have the end users that don't care about the developers and there's this big chasm between them and in reality if the open source zealots didn't have end users to use their products they wouldn't be necessary and if the end users didn't have the open source zealots creating the products they wouldn't be able to do anything and so I have spent years trying to bridge that gap to try to look at the developers and say look you have one job and that job is to create a product that the end users can use and end users you have a job to use the product and there doesn't need to be this huge rift between you developers shouldn't be developing for developers they should be developing for users because if they don't then the scope of their audience is going to continue to shrink and there was a brief period long period in time with open source where that was happening where developers were only developing for developers you had the GNOME developers who only listened to what other developers asked or said they never really cared about what the end users said same thing with all of the other platforms and I think that and my perspective may be a little bit skewed but I think at one point in time it was Ubuntu that finally said oh maybe we need to listen to the end users now of course there have been periods where Ubuntu said we don't need to listen to the end users but the truth of the matter is is you do so my goal I think is to try to help people understand that we are an ecosystem a very delicately balanced ecosystem wherein each side of the coin depends upon the other and hopefully with dialogue and reason and understanding those two sides can open their eyes and say oh okay I do need to listen to the other side otherwise I may as well just be speaking to a wall or I may as well just be developing for myself and that's not going to do any good if you keep preaching to the choir the choir is never going to get any bigger and for the longest time that's what open source developers did they preach to the choir well the choir's already been sold on your product you need to sell the product to the people outside it's been more 27 years now it was created like more than 27 years and it's been 27 years and we are still under 1% or 2% market share and I think you have touched upon the core point that so going forward for the next episode of this show we have to actually find a name of this show also it depends on how it is received so I think our readers and viewers can share their opinion what should we call it Jack Swap or something so going forward what kind of I don't like the word content because it's what kind of discussion people can expect in this show we'll probably talk a lot about about the needs of the end user and the needs of the developer about desktops about the right tools to use and the wrong tools to use I think that probably we'll not talk about market share because I think market share is a word that really has only value to people who crunch numbers and even then there are so many false flags involved with market share I mean and I've always felt this way what I was thinking I don't want to interrupt you but I think we can also talk about market share in a way that doesn't really matter exactly second point is that I was watching another Alex Jones sea like this is the problem that I faced when I go and search Linux on YouTube it's really hard to find mature content out there right right right so this is that's what I want to change so people were like oh Linux has marketing problem no it does not it has platform problem people don't use operating system people use applications to get work done right if marketing was a problem sorry marketing was the challenge Microsoft would be dominating the xbox word Microsoft would be dominating the mobile word they have all the money in the word but no they failed so it's not a marketing so I think we can discuss those topics as well because that can be of interest and as you said mostly I think the impression that I get is mostly that it will be kind of a bridge what developers want and what users want because you and I are users we don't sit on computer to fix oh the audio is not working because I have seen a lot of YouTube videos where people spend half of their video in just fixing the audio on Linux systems so I think those are the things and we can decide on the next story what should be the next story and I think we can see where we go really quick on what you just touched on was I think that Chrome OS proved that platform doesn't matter because it's a web browser it's a glorified web browser and how many people get their work done on Chrome OS a lot so Linux does have a I think Linux has two problems I think they have a platform problem and a marketing problem but I think the marketing problem would be solved by solving the platform problem so if you look at the marketing problem I'm giving you my own experience is that I have never seen a Chrome in any store that I went to they don't sell here in the DC I have never seen any Chromebook but yeah I mean they all they have either Windows or what you call it Mac OSes but nothing running Chrome OS at the same time you don't see pixels also on a store it's not about putting the device in the store it's more about that one person uses the device and that person finds it actually works it solves the platform problem that person can get the work done that person does word of my mouth but this person is not a techie there's a big difference when techies tell other people it never works my wife doesn't listen to me and when her friends talk to me as a techie they do know that but they will buy no matter how much I say they will buy whatever their friends buy so it's I still think it's more of a platform problem because we can talk about the marketing in the next episode if that is a problem and how other platforms succeeded look at Chrome Microsoft controlled Windows word Google did not have anything to put in the Microsoft word to promote Chrome why? because it worked the platform problem I think we can have a different perspective on different topics my personal point of view I think I am very much interested and excited about talking I've been following your writing for so long both in fiction and nonfiction domain so I'm really excited to be working with you on this show where we talk about Linux and open source and have some great conversation there so I hope the readers will like it too I agree and I think one of the things that you mentioned a number of times to me personally and in here is that finding a mature conversation about open source has become rare and I think that's one thing that we can offer in a mature conversation we may not agree on everything but we can maturely discuss it and show the people out there be they developers or users that there is an alternative and a mature alternative and that the idea of finding the right tool to get the job done in the most efficient and reliable way you can is the single most important thing it's not about being a zealot I have been the Linux zealot for a while and for a while I fought tooth and nail in business and in personal life to say I lost a lot of friends I lost a lot of friends because they were Mac users and I would call them names and it ended there and now it's all about I just have to get my work done I think we should just think about the gist of this is that instead of putting technology in center and put people around it let's put people in center why we do anything why we watch Game of Thrones why we read your book why we watch the alternate carbon what is it called the new show alter carbon whatever reason you watch that computers you buy it forever you're right more realistic conversion not where you just oh we should do for the sake of doing it as a zealot now and you're right we have to put people first you have to put people in the center of the discussion and once you do that I think problems will solve themselves all the problems will be solved if you put people in the center no matter whether it's politics political or technological exactly ok then you are a senior writer than me so you can wrap it up and then we'll look forward to the next episode ok well thank you everybody for listening and watching me and Swapnall in this as to be yet unnamed video cast we will hopefully by the next time we do this we will have a name for this if you have a suggestion for a name please leave it in the comments be nice or not we can ignore those not nice comments if we want but seriously thank you for tuning in to us we appreciate it open source community appreciates it we appreciate you we appreciate the open source community come back next time we'll have another specific topic to talk about and we will keep it mature and we will keep it fun