 Welcome to another edition of Unfettered Freedom, your weekly Gadoo-slash-Linux-News-video podcast. Packing so much freedom into each episode, it ought to be illegal. We put out more freedom in each episode than the Proprietary Garbage Podcast put out in an entire year. On this episode of Unfettered Freedom, Facebook has now joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member, which means Facebook has a seat on the board of directors at the Linux Foundation. Also, trial by Proprietary Software. More and more court systems are turning to proprietary video conferencing software like Zoom to have people attend court. Whatever my thoughts on that, we're going to discuss that. Also, why are more and more software projects choosing App Image to package their software? We're going to discuss that. Caden Live recently saw a huge release. Version 20.08 was released and it is gigantic. A ton of new features. We're going to discuss that. Also, are we doing new users to Linux, a disservice by the way we talk, by the way we write, as far as our Linux tutorials, our how-to information, our documentation, the way people that do video content such as myself, the way we present Linux to the new user. We're going to discuss that and more on this edition of Unfettered Freedom. So the first story is the gigantic news that Facebook has now become a platinum member of the Linux Foundation. Now, Facebook has been a member of the Linux Foundation for a number of years, but until now, they really haven't bothered taking that next step of becoming a platinum member. Now, platinum membership requires, I think, a $500,000 yearly subscription. I think it's half a million dollars. I could be wrong about that particular number, but by paying that, you become a platinum member and it also guarantees you a seat on the board of directors. So by upping their membership, now Facebook has a chair sitting on the board of directors and Facebook has what they call a head of open source. It's a lady named Cathy Cam. She is Facebook's head of open source and she will occupy that spot now on the board of directors. And Ms. Cam is recently quoted as saying, quote, the Linux Foundation has played and continues to play a crucial role in the successes, not only of the Linux system, but also of the broader open source ecosystem. So she's talking about, you know, how important a role the Linux Foundation plays, not just in Linux development, but also just the broader open source ecosystem. And I completely agree the Linux Foundation does play a vital role. One criticism of the Linux Foundation is the fact that it is run by corporate sponsors. For the most part, I mean, all the platinum members for the Linux Foundation, they have seats on the board of directors and who are the platinum members of the Linux Foundation? Well, corporations like Google, not exactly what we think of as a nice company, especially those that value freedom, right? Google Oracle has a seat VMware. VMware was actually sued one time for violating the GPL. That's what kind of corporation VMware is. Samsung, of course, Samsung has a lot of skin in the game because of course they make all those phones that run the Android operating system, which runs Linux. So it makes sense for Samsung to be a platinum member. IBM is a platinum member. Intel is also a platinum member. And of course, Microsoft is a platinum member. And that's right, Microsoft, the company that tried for years to kill off Linux and pretty much any other technology that it deemed as a threat to its operating system monopoly. Microsoft has actually been a platinum member on the board for four years now, which brings up this point. When I first saw this story about Facebook becoming a platinum member, I actually thought, wait, wait a second, Facebook wasn't already a platinum member of the Linux Foundation because the Linux Foundation has all these other big corporate players that are platinum members. And Facebook is a gigantic company that heavily relies on Linux and Linux related technology for its business, its billion dollar business. I was actually kind of surprised that Facebook wasn't already there at that platinum level. So considering their prominence in the tech industry and the fact that they built most of their infrastructure around Linux, that their decision to become a platinum member really, I think, is long overdue. Now, Facebook, when we talk about freedom, when we talk about things like the free software movement, you know, Facebook is not championing that cause, right? They are very much an anti-freedom kind of company, right? They spy on everybody when it comes to privacy, especially. Facebook is really a horrible company and, you know, they're data mining all their users and just doing really immoral and unethical things to the people that use their products. But you do have to give Facebook some credit because they do help promote open source software and they do have some open source projects of their own. They have a number of major open source projects, including things like their deep fake detection challenge, which is an attempt to spot fake videos. The data for good program, which looks to use data sharing to solve humanitarian issues such as the spread of COVID-19. They also have an open source project called the telecom infra project. And that looks to spread reliable internet to previously underserved populations. So Facebook does do some good work out there. They really do, but obviously they still have a rather low score in the overall freedom aspect of their company and what they do. And our next story is trial by proprietary software. And because of the COVID-19 pandemic, you know, so many businesses and government institutions and various organizations and, you know, you really can't have in person interactions anymore. And that's the same with our court systems, our court rooms. Now they want you to appear in court through a video conferencing. And what is the video conferencing software these courts are using? Well, they're using proprietary solutions almost always. And the number one proprietary solution that they typically choose is zoom. So the story comes to me from the free software foundation website, fsf.org. And this particular article is called trial by software. It was written by John Sullivan. And it's a really interesting read. I'll link, of course, to the article in the show description for those of you watching the video version of this podcast on things like YouTube and library. But basically what John Sullivan is getting to in this is the point that proprietary software versus free software. There are some serious threats posed by using proprietary software. We all know this, but especially when you're forced to use proprietary software and something like a courtroom. So the primary responsibility of the free software foundation is to monitor the impact, whether it's positive impact or negative impact that software has on society and on our basic human freedoms. Obviously the main goal of the free software foundation is to spread awareness about the free software movement and to warn people about the potential threats of using that proprietary software. Well, the problem is proprietary software such as zoom, they don't open source the code, right? And by not having the source code open where people can look at it and audit it and see what it's doing to them, that is a serious threat. Potentially that is a very serious threat because anything that doesn't have open source code is a threat. It just is. I mean, there's the potential there where immediately when you open source something, so many of the threats go away because you can't really do something scandalous to your users if they can just open up the source code and take a look at it. So that has always been the case in zoom. They take things even further because of the licensing agreements with it. I mean, they actually make their users promise not to ever reverse engineer the zoom software, which is something that the free software movement completely stands against. I mean, reverse engineering is actually an ethical thing. You know, when it's done right, when it's done cleanly. So these courts are now conducting some of their proceedings over zoom and, you know, zoom. Technically it's software, but it's also a service. It also requires those using it to run non free software on their local devices, of course. And, you know, if you're using web clients who are using things like non free JavaScript when you're connecting via the web browser. Now, before I go any further, I do want to do this disclosure full disclosure. I use zoom. I have used zoom a lot in the past on my YouTube channel, especially sometimes I live stream video conferences that I hold with the community and typically we use zoom. And so I have zoom installed on some of my machines, but it's different for somebody like me because I understand the potential security implications of using zoom. I know that some of those connections are not secure. It's not encrypted. You know, people could potentially listen in on your conversations. You know, there's that potential from a privacy standpoint. Zoom is horrible, but I don't use zoom for private conversations. The matter of fact, I wouldn't even use zoom if I didn't do video content on things like YouTube and library, but I don't do zoom privately, right? I do it live on the internet when I do zoom, like I'm recording it. But most people that use zoom are actually using it to have private conversations for family members. You know, you're having a private conversation with friends and family or you're doing it for business or for school or in this case for their courtroom. I mean, your privacy is paramount when we're talking about your testifying in court using a proprietary software program like zoom. And zoom, they don't care. I mean, they don't care about your freedoms, right? The zoom is just all about making money, right? It's proprietary software made by a company. They are just in it to make money. And they are probably thrilled that so many government institutions like our schools and our courtrooms are basically forcing their product on people. Zoom is making bucketloads of money because of this. Why are our governments not promoting free and open source software? That's what I don't understand. It just seems like completely outrageous. It's so objectionable that our government would stand behind a private company like this as far as this video conferencing stuff. It puts zoom in a position where they're actually the gatekeeper for our rights under the law, right? The fact that they can change their terms of agreement for their software at any time really is scary when you think about this situation. Also, when you have an endorsement for a proprietary software project like zoom by the government, immediately it just validates everything that zoom is doing, whether it's good or bad, right? Well, the court says we have to use zoom. We have to use zoom and the more court systems and more schools that say we have to use zoom, then you have this perception where, hey, everybody's using zoom. I have to use zoom, right? That's typically the way these things go with proprietary software, especially internet services. Everybody is on that particular platform. I have to be on that platform. So those of you, especially in your localities, if your court systems are forcing people to use zoom, speak out against it, right? Tell those guys about free software, because that's what they should be promoting. They shouldn't be lining the pockets of a proprietary software company. They should be promoting free solutions, things like Jitsie, things like the big blue button and other free software video conferencing tools. Now, the reason the free software foundation is drawing attention to this is, of course, they want you guys to speak out against it, and I'm asking you guys to speak out against it, but understand this. You know, let's be real here. Don't do something that'll get you in hot water. So don't refuse to appear for your court date because you object to them using the zoom video conferencing software, right? As you can't say, I'm not appearing in court because I support the free software movement and you guys use zoom, so I'm not going. Well, if you do that, you're probably going to go to jail. So I advise against that. But just because I advise against that, if for some reason you have the brass gonads to actually take on the court system over this, I'd love to hear about it. And so with the free software foundation, when this bulletin they put out, they actually say, hey, you guys, if you guys make a serious stand against a court system, you know, and fight against this, they want to know about it. They want to hear about that story and they want to amplify your message and your story. And so would I. And our third story is why are more and more software projects choosing to package their software using the app image format? So a couple of weeks ago, I came across this blog over on the OnlyOffice.com website. OnlyOffice is an open source office suite. And they have a blog on their website and they posted this article, quote, need portable version of OnlyOffice desktop app use app image. And then they wrote this very nice post where they explain exactly what app image is and why they choose app image over other formats that they could choose to package their software. The number one reason that they mentioned as far as packaging for app image is the fact that it's a portable distribution format, right? It doesn't matter what your distribution is. You could be running some really obscure GNU slash Linux distribution that there's no chance that they're going to have only office package in their very small repository of software. But it doesn't matter because the app image, it works on every distribution. You don't have to worry about it. And again, it's portable. You can take it with you. You can take it from one machine to another machine. You can put it on a USB stick and just carry it around and you can plug it in and use it on any machine. It doesn't matter what it's running. And app image is a compressed image. It's got all the dependencies, all the libraries are already installed with the app image. So you never have to worry about missing dependencies. You never have to worry about when you have to compile programs from source. Sometimes you get dependency hill where you get dependencies. You can't even resolve. You don't have to worry about any of that with something like an app image. OnlyOffice talks about, you know, they used to do a tar GZ. It seems to be the standard format for a long time. Actually, for Linux packages, if you were unsure about what to package it as, you just stuck it in a tar GZ and called it a day. And that's what onlyOffice did for a long time. But they switched over to app image. Why? Because it excludes the problems that you have with the dependencies. Tar GZ, you still have to worry about the dependencies. You don't have to worry about that with app image. Also, you don't have to indicate any kind of sim links. You know, you just download the app image, you make it executable and you're done. You don't have to decompress it. You know, sometimes you got to decompress those tar balls, right? You don't have to decompress anything with the app image. It actually runs in the compressed state. Now, this onlyOffice blog post does mention that many Linux users do have very serious concerns as far as app image and security. And they mentioned that with app images, it is best to not run app images that haven't been verified by others, right? So if you're going to use an app image, go grab an app image from the developer of that software itself. So if you know you want to run onlyOffice as an app image, go grab the app image from the onlyOffice guys. And of course, there's download links on their website. Just don't go grab an app image of any random piece of software from anywhere on the web and then make that app image executable on your system and then start running it. You know, obviously bad things potentially could happen in that situation. The other thing the onlyOffice guys recommend is, hey, if you want to run app image in a safe environment, sandbox your app images. Run something like FireJill. That way you're running this app image in a sandboxed environment. And if there is something malicious or something funny with it, well, you've solved that problem a little bit because now you've basically got it in the sandbox that that's all it can play with is whatever is inside the sandbox. It shouldn't affect the rest of your system. And I'm seeing a lot more third party applications to revolving around app image. You've got things like the app image launcher, which, you know, helps you get your app images to actually appear in your run command launchers and your menu systems and things like that. Overall, I think app image is just a fantastic packaging format. And I love the fact that it is a community project and that it's not dominated by a corporation backing it the way snaps and flatbacks seem to be. Now our fourth story is the big news of Kaden Live. They just had a huge release. This release is version 2008. And it comes with a ton of exciting new features, including some that I have been waiting on for a long, long time. So Kaden Live 2008. What's the big deal with it? Well, for those of you not familiar with Kaden Live, it is a free and open source video editor. It's probably the best free software video editor on the planet. There are other free video editors, but most of them are seriously lacking in features where Kaden Live is actually rather feature rich. The one downside with Kaden Live and most of the other open source video editors, unfortunately, sometimes can be stability issues. Kaden Live, of course, is developed by the KDE guys. So it's a cute based piece of software as well. It uses a cute toolkit. It actually upgraded to 2008 a few days ago and the last couple of videos that I did, I actually edited them in the new Kaden Live 2008. And it's immediate as soon as you open Kaden Live that some things have changed. For one thing, you have new layouts. So now at the top right corner of the Kaden Live window, you have five buttons and they are labeled logging, editing, audio, effects and color. And when you hit one of those buttons, the layout of Kaden Live changes. And the layouts have a particular set of tools included with them, depending on the layout you chose. So if you choose the editing layout, it changes to a layout for video editing. Basically, if you choose the audio layout, it chooses a lot of the audio tools like the audio mixer tool and things like that. If you choose the color tool, of course, you get a lot of the color grading stuff in that particular layout. So you can quickly select these five different layouts within Kaden Live. And of course, you can also create your own layouts as well. And you can edit these particular layouts. But probably the biggest thing for me was I record my audio as separate tracks in OBS. I use OBS to make my videos. And when I record an OBS, I always write it to three tracks. I have the mic as a track. I have the desktop audio, such as the music that intro this podcast. That's on a separate track. And then I have another track that is a combination of those two tracks. So when I first launched Kaden Live 2008 the other day to edit my first video since doing that upgrade, and I imported a video, it imported the video and it imported three audio tracks. And the audio tracks can be separate as far as I can add effects to each audio track separately. It's really neat and it's something I've been waiting on in Kaden Live for a long time. And the reason the Kaden Live guys are doing this is because it takes Kaden Live really to that next level. Because once you can separate out tracks, audio tracks, so you record your video using multiple audio streams and now you can separate those tracks inside Kaden Live. You can edit those individual tracks inside Kaden Live. And Kaden Live becomes more than just a video editor. I mean Kaden Live at that point is almost as powerful as most audio editors, right? I don't need to go into something like Audacity for example to edit and clip and put together various tracks of audio, right? I can just do everything in Kaden Live. Kaden Live becomes like a one-stop solution for all your audio and video needs. Some of the other new features in Kaden Live 2008 include things like zoom bars are on the effects panel and the clip monitor. You also have the new cache management interface. You have some new keyboard shortcuts and that's one of the things you really want to learn when you get into video editing, especially you want to start learning all the keyboard shortcuts in your video editor of choice because it really speeds up the editing process. And we also have LUMO transitions, proxy icon added to clips in timeline, and they have changed colors for audio thumbnails. For those of you on rolling release, GNU slash Linux distributions, Kaden Live 2008 should already be in the repository for you. For those of you on static release, GNU slash Linux distributions, what you can do if you need the very latest Kaden Live 20.08, what you can do is you can go grab the app image. So we were talking about app images. App image is actually probably the best format to go get Kaden Live in. That typically seems to be the one that works the best for people. They do package as a snap and a flat pack as well, but from people that I talk to that do video editing that use Kaden Live, most seem to prefer the app image. For those of you that run Ubuntu or Ubuntu based distributions, you can also add a PPA to get that latest Kaden Live. Now our fifth and final story is not really a story, but something I just wanted to talk about today. I thought this was an important topic. Do we do new Linux users a disservice? By the way, we present help information, support request, video content, like the stuff I put on YouTube and on library of people that write about Linux. But anytime you present Linux as far as support stuff or how-to's, tutorials, are we making that stuff new user-friendly? And I mean it in this sense. Does your tutorial or your video tutorials, stuff like I do on YouTube, or the stuff you write in print, maybe you're adding stuff to a wiki, does it begin with something like, hey, the first thing you need to do is open a terminal? Because if I'm brand new to Linux, I just came from Windows or Mac, and you're telling me, hey, you've got this problem, it's very easy to solve, open a terminal, I've already lost that new user, right? They're already running back to Windows or Mac the minute you mention a terminal, the command prompt, and then, hey, we need to edit these files. Well, first of all, let's open Vim. Wait, what's Vim? And then once I open Vim, what the hell do I do with Vim? So this is something that I catch myself thinking about sometimes when I do my videos, when I do any kind of tutorials, is who is that tutorial for? Now, if it's something I know that no Linux noob is ever going to tackle, then fine. Open up Vim and Emacs, do everything at the command line, drop to a TTY and do everything at the command prompt, whatever, it doesn't matter. But most of the tutorial content we're putting out there is not for people that have been running Linux since 1993, right? It's people that usually just come to Linux in the last few weeks or few months. Can you open up graphical file managers instead of just opening a terminal and seeding around and doing all the bash commands for your file management? Can't you just open up Thunar or Dolphin or whatever file manager that you happen to have installed on the system? Do you have to edit those config files in Vim or Emacs? Can you use Nano if you have to do it in a terminal or a TTY, especially you have no other choice if XOR isn't running? Could you at least use Nano? But here's the thing, if you're in a graphical environment, can you open up a graphical text editor like gEdit or Kate or something like that? I think even though it makes no difference what editor you do this stuff in for a new user watching that video of its video content or reading that article or that blog post, immediately they feel much more comfortable with that sort of thing. I don't think enough of us really think about this, how off-putting it is the way we present some of this kind of content. Here in the last couple of weeks, I have been getting people contact me about their distribution choices as far as they just installed X, Y, Z distribution and they don't know how to do anything in it. They don't know how to do anything. They don't know how to add or remove software. They don't even know what the package manager on these distributions sometimes are. They install it and they're like, OK, now what's the package manager? They haven't even thought this through. They just installed something and I know why they didn't. They installed these distributions because somebody told them to. A video content creator said, hey, go install this. It's great. It's my favorite Linux distribution. You're going to love it. They don't think that it may not work for everybody. It's like when I run my main production machine distribution of choices, Arco Linux. You guys know I love Arco Linux. Before that, I ran Manjaro on my main production machine. I love Manjaro, but I have never told you guys ever, hey, everybody, go install Arco Linux. I would never say that because it's not for everybody. There is no one size fits all and video content creators, especially, but also sometimes people on support forms when, you know, a new user shows up. Hey, I'm new to Linux. I'm thinking about switching to Linux. What should I install? And sometimes you guys are not giving them the proper recommendation. Everybody wants to tell everybody about the distribution they're running. Many of us are not running distributions that are appropriate for the brand new Linux user. We're just not. So don't even utter the words out of your mouth the name of that distribution. If you know that person has no business running that distribution, but many of us just want to tell everybody about it, right? All the Arch guys, hey, by the way, I use Arch. Well, Arch Linux should not be your first Linux distribution unless you have some technical knowledge, you know, coming in unless you've done some homework and you got to be of the right mindset to see Linux. The community is a bit different than the Windows community or the Mac OS community, assuming they even have communities around those particular operating systems. But, you know, the people that come to Linux are a different crowd. They're the do it yourself crowd. They are. Hey, if it's broke, I'm going to fix it or they're the, hey, I'm going to figure it out no matter what kind of crowd. The problem is sometimes we do get those Windows users that come over that still have the Windows mindset of I don't know how to do anything with my computer. I don't want to know anything about how my computer works. I just want to sit down at my computer and I want it to magically all work. If you're that kind of person, Linux can be tough. And if you pick the wrong distribution, then Linux is going to be an impossible experience for you. I just think we need to do a better job in the community and the broader Linux community of how we present stuff to the new user and how sometimes our recommendations and even our tutorials and our guides sometimes are actually harmful to the new user. That's enough of me rambling on about that. So this was episode three of Unfettered Freedom. My name is Derek Taylor, also known as DistroTube on YouTube and on Library. Those of you that want to watch the video version of Unfettered Freedom, check out DistroTube on YouTube and Library. Those of you that want to support my work also consider supporting DistroTube over on Patreon. Those of you that want the audio only podcast of Unfettered Freedom, I try to release Unfettered Freedom every Thursday. It should appear in the iTunes store, Google podcast and over on Spotify. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Nate, Corbinian, Mitchell, entropy, UK, John, Devin, Fran, Arch 55 30, Chris Chuck, DJ Donnie, Dylan, George Lewis, Omri, Paul, Robert Sean to buy us and Willie, they are the producers of this episode. They are my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, episode three of Unfettered Freedom wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. Those of you watching the video version are saying a very lengthy list of names. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I have no corporate sponsors here. DistroTube has no corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. Alright guys, peace.