 Hi, welcome to the talk and we are here to listen to John Yeah, and he's about to speak about sustainable computing and He needs no more presentation If you were about to ask a question, please Ask for a microphone. Thanks. Thank you very much. It's my pleasure to be here and once again addressing dipkopf I am the executive director of Linux international that and $350 will probably get you a cup of coffee almost any place a Lot of people say mad dog. He's an evangelist for free software. He looks like Papa Noel But what other reasons for should we listen to him? Well, I started programming over 40 years ago and I've been programming commercially for 39 years I Used a large number of IBM mainframes in the very beginning, but then I switched over to Equipment fund digital equipment corporation PDP eights PDP 11's and so forth and Vax computer systems I've been using Unix since 1977. I was a senior systems administrator for Bell laboratories in the United States and In 1994 I met Linus Torvalds went over to using Linux and haven't ever looked back I've been a programmer. I've been a systems administrator. I've taught computer science. I've taught operating system design I've taught compiler design and Although I admit a lot of my C language looks like Fortran I've been in a lot of the places you've been and I've worked on very large systems and extremely small systems But most importantly, I've been both a vendor and a customer. I know what it's like to try and create code That meets the customer's needs. I know what it's like to be a customer waiting for that bug fix or for that extension And I know the difficulty of doing both and that's why I also believe in free software But then again, maybe I'm just an old man and this is one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons It says The person on the left who is the applicant for the job. I have all the job requirements that you asked for I have an IQ of 300. I've won several Nobel Prizes I have two centuries of Unix experience and the reason I could do that was because I invented a time machine And came back in time and I have an immortality drug that I invented and Dog and the evil HR person says that's a lot of words for just being too old But I'm here today to talk about sustainable computing and A lot of people say is this a trick question, you know, what is sustainable computing? Well, it's just what it says Computing that you can sustain computing that keeps going forward computing where you don't have to keep backing up in order to go forwards again and We need to think about several different things when we think about sustainable computing One of them is a low amount of electric usage a Small footprint on the earth. We'll see what that means in a few minutes It should be easy to use so that people can Utilize it in every part of their life We need to think about the people who are very very poor and people who are not so poor And I'll explain more about that We should think about the longevity of the solution. How long is it going to last? And finally, we should have a sustainable business model based around this and that last is very important I know a lot of you think of yourselves as technologists and engineers and that's fine But we also have to think about the business model of free software Because that's very important to keep it going Now the first one I'm the first point. I'm going to talk about is usage of electricity Some of you may recognize this the itupu power plant is the world's largest active power plant hydroelectric plant power plant It generates 14 gigawatts of electricity every hour. That sounds like a lot. It is a lot it produces 15% of all the electricity that is used by Brazil and 90% of all the electricity used by Paraguay Now if you take the average desktop computer that uses about 200 watts of power That means that this power plant can power about 70 million of those computers That sounds like a lot. It is a lot 70 million However, that's only powering the computers If you're in a South American country like Brazil Where you have a lot of heat and it's very gets very hot you need to also cool those computers And there's a rough rule of thumb that says for every watt that you use in powering the computer You have to spend one watt in cooling the computer So in reality, this is only 55 million computers that can be powered by this power plant Now that sounds still like a lot But we have to look back in history Now from the first 60 years of computer history from about 1945 to 19 or 2005 It took us that long to generate the first one billion computers. I Still remember the day that digital equipment corporations said we sold our one millionth Vax computer but today that still seems to be a small number and You know, so it took us 60 years to get that far Now most people say most economists say it only take us another five to six years to generate the next one billion computers and that's because of things like the price of the hardware dropping dramatically and the Capability of the systems going up dramatically the internet spreading communication spreading no longer do we talk analog Communications we talk digital communications and that almost requires a computer system of some type at the other end But the other interesting part of this problem is that that means there will be two billion computers out there But there's six point three billion people in the face of the planet Which means we need another four point three billion computers on top of that in order for everybody to have their one computer Even that is not enough because in the United States There are many many households that have computers spread throughout their house There's a computer in the living room. There's a computer in the kitchen. There's a computer in the bedrooms there's a computer in the basement and So there's lots and lots more of these computers sometimes more than one computer per person in the household Now I will illustrate that by a gentleman I met in a computer store in the United States We were going there to give a talk about myth TV and This gentleman shows up and he tells me that he has nine Pedabytes of data in his basement that he has recorded through his Recording TV system He has recorded every TV show. He's ever watched. He has copied every movie. He has ever watched He has a continuous stream of music coming into his house, which he stores into his systems and All of this he wants available all the time And I could only imagine that the electric meter on his house is going around like this Trying to keep all these discs up He admitted to me his electric bill was very high So this is the problem, right? We have computers now that are every place. We don't even think about them anymore It's kind of omnipresent. I mean you have a computer in your microwave oven You have a computer, you know in your TV set You know, I have a computer in my refrigerator Yesterday there was an argument between my refrigerator my microwave oven My microwave oven says I know what you have in there. It's really oaky in the refrigerator says you're gonna cook it no matter what It's horrible, you know, you come down there in the morning. Just don't want to hear the argument But this is even more the case this is mr. Thad Starner of Georgia Tech He is one of the original cyborg people He this is a project to see what would happen is if you had a computer all the time Always in front of you never off You use the computer as if you were using your glasses, you don't think about using your glasses You just use them. That's the way they wanted to think about computers and This requires a very very low power computer system and very powerful and powerful communications and omnipresent communications So again the type of thing we have to think about is power to run it power to cool it and If the thing is off, is it really off? Most modern computer systems are never off. There's something about them. That's always running You know TV systems recently in the United States. We did a study We found out that most TV systems even when they were off Would still be using 10 to 15 to 20 watts of power in the off-state These little dongles or what we call wall warts or transformers These things are not our friends They use a lot of power even when it's off if you feel it and it's warm. It's using power and We need to get better and more efficient ways of converting electricity It would be better if we didn't have to convert it at all If perhaps we could gather electricity from photocells, which produce 12 volts Charge a battery and then immediately use that 12 volts into our computer systems So that there was no conversion back and forth and It may be very expensive for people to get electricity. It isn't always that electricity is not available However, some people have to get electricity through gas generators or things like that We call these people off the grid One of my companies best customers was a Buddhist monastery in Canada They purposely had removed themselves from the electric grid because their philosophy being tied to the electric grid Was being bad. It was being tied to the world and the worldly things and so They purposely had Generators that would generate the electricity and so they were paying about one dollar per kilowatt Instead of the normal 23 to 14 cents per kilowatt that you would get if you hooked up to the electric grid or your electricity may be unreliable in Baghdad the electricity is typically on for about three hours a day and then it turns off and So if they're trying to run their computer systems They can't run them unless they either have a portable generator or they have some type of batteries If you can reduce the amount of power that your computer system uses You might be able to charge the batteries during those three hours and then run off of the batteries for the rest of the day Here's an example of a computer system and actually a telephone system this was a System that was used in Africa a lot. There's an asterisk PBX system in that box and This is made by a company called in Ovo and They go around and selling these to African villages so that they can have telephone Now you see a photo cell in there That's one way of charging it. But the other way of charging it is the bicycle with a generator and When in bono goes to these African companies villages and says which would you like the photo cell or the bicycle almost invariably they choose the bicycle and They say why the solar cell you have lots of good sunlight the solar cell would be so much easier They said well the photo cell is very expensive and It'd be hard for us to get another one in case it breaks But we have lots of broken bicycles and we have lots of cars that do not work, but their alternator is very good But most importantly if we use the photo cell We don't have a job for the person to pedal the bicycle So they have a different way of looking at things than most European or Other other parts of the world do They want to create jobs for their people Here's another problem. We have with computer systems This in particular is much like the landfill near my house It used to be you would drive down into the valley to dump your garbage and now you have to drive up the mountain to dump your garbage And if we keep dumping computer systems out We will have mountains of computer systems eventually Fortunately, we're moving away We finally understood the issue of all the bad chemicals that we used to put in our computer systems And now we have some compliance guidelines to produce computer systems that will not pollute If they are then and are easier to be recycled than if you use bad Chemicals and if you buy modern computer systems, you should look for the ROH brand ROHS branding on them to make sure that they are at least meeting modern-day standards for manufacture In the United States and particularly in California, whenever you buy a computer system You're actually paying a little bit of money to be able to Recycle it and decompose it back to its original parts to help with the landfill problem But another thing that small systems can do is save this desk space It's interesting to walk into companies and see this very nice desk that people had that's half covered by some large PC that's sitting there and Instead if you have a very small but yet powerful PC You could even do something like mounted on the back of your LCD panel and have nothing a Very small footprint on your desk or hang your LCD panel on the wall and have no footprint on your desk and With systems that have very low power. You don't necessarily need a very strong fan, which is going to create a lot of noise This also helps with longevity of the system and we'll see that in a few minutes One of the interesting things that hospitals are finding out is that a great place for germs to grow is inside of a PC The germs get into the PC. They find a very nice warm Environment and they sit there and they grow and then all of a sudden the PC says I'm too hot It starts up at fan and blows the germs all over the place So now a lot of hospitals are thinking about using thin clients at nursing stations and doctor stations With membrane sealed keyboards that are easily disinfected to keep down the number of germs they're spread around So recently I was working with a company called Kulu. I still do we're we're working with very very low power systems and We started thinking about what happened if your computer system only used 10 watts or less of power About one-sixth of the light of the power that's used by one of these light bulbs Because one of the things that people do is they turn off their computer system Because it's noisy because it uses a lot of power But if you reduce the power is used in your computer system, so you don't really feel guilty about having it on all the time Then your whole thought about the computer system changes It could become your alarm clock. It could become your calendar. It could become your telephone. It could become your TV It could become your radio It's all these things that your one computer system could be because you're leaving it on all the time and so we thought about the concept of always on computing and The long lifetime of a device that has no moving parts as completely solid state Would allow you to spread the cost of this not over a three-year Typical payback time on a computer system, but nine or ten years Think about the things in your house that you replace every so often in computers Versus your radio or your TV that have no moving parts. I Have a stereo system. It finally died on me. It was 20 years old and Now I go out and I find out I can no longer buy a stereo system. I have to have Seven channel surround sound stuff. It's quite daunting, but But your longer lifetime allows you to pay this off and reduces the overall cost Now a lot of the technologies that are coming out have experienced or are reacting to this need for power part of this was because originally in computer Server is a computer server centers The electricity was paid for by the people who ran the building and The people who ran the computers did not have to pay for their electricity as Soon as the shift was sent so that the computer center had to pay for the electricity That's when the computer center people started worrying about things like consolidation saving power and things like that and That put a strain back on the manufacturers who said maybe what we should be doing is creating systems that use a lot less power The AMD geode for instance very very low power chip The via new via systems coming out extremely low power and then the Intel Menlo chip sets Which not only have a low power for the CPU, but also do things like 3d graphics and relatively low power M-Peg compression and decompression in hardware other things and The Intel Menlo chip sets are very impressive in the fact that they will run in Operating temperatures of up to 85 degrees cell Celsius Now in certain places in Brazil for instance, it's easy for a person's house to get up to 45 degrees Celsius and So what you need is something which will operate in a temperature at least that high or higher Or else you may have a high failure rate of your systems when they're coming back to the manufacturer now this whole space of Economical computing is a great place for research a lot of the research which was done on Computer systems about the utilization of memory CPU versus memory CPU versus disk Accesses things like that things like locality of reference of the CPU for memory all these things garbage collection A lot of this work was done 20 years ago 30 years ago I think it's time to revisit this work as an example Most Unix systems do not Refresh the memory once they have swapped something out If the memory if the RAM memory has not been overwritten by another process The CPU and the operating system assumes that the data is still there and does not read the data back in off of disk This means of course that that memory has had to have its power on all that time Because if you turn off the power then the memory would forget Maybe we need to read we look at this and say we need two types of swapping One type of swapping where we swap the data out and we maintain the memory Because it's a small period of time others We're going to swap it out turn off the memory and Then when we need to swap the data back in actually go out to the disk and read it in and refresh the memory in Very large Bayo of systems with huge memories on each node. This would save a lot of electric power Now I like to switch to the ease of use thing This is my parents. My father is 87. My mother is 85 They have a problem with using anything that has more than one button to it And and yet they would like to use their computer because they would like to be able to send email They would like to be able to Browse the web But these are the problems that they have They don't want to spend hours every day trying to install the software or spend hours every day in fixing viruses Or spend hours every day in upgrading a system They want something that basically is like a lot of the other appliances in their house They either go over and turn it on and it works or they leave it on all the time and it works and They certainly don't want to have to worry about any networking issues and As far as my father is concerned Backups is something to do with the car to move it into the parking place They just want to email and surf the web Now they're one branch of this and you might say okay, they're old old people and there's no hope for them and everything else But there's another part the digital inclusion that is very important. I Still remember when the web was new and I was driving through San Francisco And I was driving down the street and I looked up in at the billboard at the top of a building and They're on that billboard. There was only one phrase www.bankofamerica.com No telephone number no address Nothing else was on that billboard except that URL And I said to myself they have just eliminated about three quarters of their customer base Because three car three quarters of their customer base really at that time had no idea what that meant and This is something we should not be doing We should be inclusive of people. We should move more people into The internet more people into computing and not take the cavalier attitude That these people are helpless or hopeless Because they don't know how what we do in using computers So Nicholas Negroponte Had this wonderful dream One laptop per child, you know the four billion extra people in the face of the earth. We're gonna give them laptops and We're going to bring the internet to them and I said that's a wonderful Dream Nicholas But you know, I've been to some of those places that you've talked about and I don't see the internet there And he says, oh, it's there. I said, well, no, let's take a look right here right here Look Do you see the internet? I? Don't see the internet. I See a tree with maybe one child sitting underneath of it with his little laptop with the antennas coming up And Nicholas said well John if you turn around There's the internet behind you. I said Nicholas. I have turned around and there's only more trees and more planes But I will give him credit that he got people thinking about this and thinking about digital inclusion and thinking about lowering the price and Thinking about bringing the internet and so let me show you my African planes There they are This is a favela in Brazil is Very high density there they have electricity But the internet is about 50 feet away from them not 500 miles and what I think is a great thing Is that if we could bring this internet? Only that extra 50 feet and make it available to all these people That it would still have a huge impact and I say You know Nicholas, I'm glad you worried about that one kid in the middle of the African planes But I'm worried about the 2.4 million kids in places like Sao Paulo Or Buenos Aires Or Chicago Or Watts Because even in the United States there are places that have no internet no digital inclusion We need to address that and people have been trying to do this a Large computer company with the I won't say what their name is but their initials are HP was working on a project one time called the Volksputer and They were trying to put four video cards and four keyboards of four mice into one system box So the four people could share the same CPU and That was nice and it was a they could have it is either disc full or disc less And that was a step forward it was something that used imagination to cut down on the price of bringing computing to people Here's another example of something that was a good idea. It's called the Simputer This is a project that was done in India and it was the idea of a community computer That the community would own the computer and each individual person would own only a flash card and So when you needed to use a computer you would go to the village leader The village leader would loan you the computer sign it out like a library and you stick your flash card in and then you could Do all the computing and communication you wanted to and then you would pull out your flash card and give the computer back and That was how they would do it Unfortunately, it was a little bit too expensive at the time and didn't have quite the types of things that they wanted to see But it was still a reasonable idea But I went to the Brazilian government and started talking about thin computing systems and stuff like that Cesar Alvarez who was second in command to Lula met with me and he said mad dog All these are great ideas But you know people don't want a dull plain little box even though it's low power and low cost What they really want is sex I says well, you know, I want sex, you know, no, you don't understand. He says they want something sexy They went like a notebook. They want something like a phone or something like that They want something that they can proudly show that they're not they didn't get this just because they were poor They got this and it's the same as everybody else is using and I said I understand that So fortunately what's happening now is we're having projects like open moco come out The free runner and other open phones that people can put free software that's on there open software And people can start using it in ways that the telephony companies couldn't possibly Think about or push Because you take a million minds and put them together and all of a sudden you've got great ideas coming out That is hard for a telephony company to think about it But I have to keep reminding people that this is not just a phone But in reality, it's a computer And what I want to do is to take that board and instead of holding it here I want to put it down here with a nice big battery on it and then I want to become a cyborg And I want to be able to utilize a computer like a computer and then have all sorts of Interesting peripheral devices hooked up to it so that I can see what's going on And this is one of the reasons why I think having Debian on the free runner is so important Yes, you could put something like Android on the phone But then you're seeing somebody else's vision for what it should be by having Debian on the phone you Automatically open it up for anybody's vision of what the phone should be Not just what Google thinks it should be or what even open moco thinks it should be It's a variety of different things So item one for our last mile is a rugged affordable efficient sexy system Next thing we have to think about is communications. We have a wide variety of different communications models to choose from We need to think about all of them together. There's a lot of people talk about wireless mesh There's a lot of people talking about, you know Oh Ymax things like that But I think there's some of the most interesting parts or some of the projects going on like fawn Like the Wi-Fi free Wi-Fi in Beijing China. I Was at a conference recently and I met with one of the people from Beijing who was talking about the work They were doing there and the government decided that they were going to open up the wireless network And allow have people to have free access to Wi-Fi in any of the government buildings Then the government went to universities and said if you open up your Wi-Fi Then when you come to our government buildings, you can have access to our Wi-Fi also And then once that was done the government went to a Private industry and said if you open up your Wi-Fi And we'll show you how to open it up. So it's safe and secure and people only using a portion of your bandwidth Then every time you come to a university or come to a government building you get free Wi-Fi And finally they went to the homeowners who had Wi-Fi in their homes and said if you open up your Wi-Fi And we'll show you how to do it Then when you come to a university or to a company or to the government you get free Wi-Fi And now almost all the parts of Beijing you go to you can get free Wi-Fi But a very simple fact of the people had it every anyway, and they said why not open it up and These types of things are making Wi-Fi ever more prevalent Around the world in areas That you can now have almost omnipresent Wi-Fi So item two for our last mile is high-speed communications and a support strategy to keep that going Again sustainable. We need it to be sustainable Now a lot of people say well mad dog the reason I buy my software from large companies is because it's sustainable The large company I said no always going to be there and I say oh really large companies like Apollo Wang data general Raise your hand when you remember one of these Digital equipment corporation. Yes, compact. Yes No, these were all at one time one of the largest computer companies in the face of the earth and while digital was bought by Compact and compact was bought by Hewlett Packard. There was a lot of technologies which simply disappeared and that's a problem and One of the one of the things that really is sustainable is free software Because even if a person stops working on the project as long as the source code is available Somebody else may pick that project up and continue on with it And at least you have the ability to make the business decision About whether you're going to continue with that software or not so I Go out and I traveled to many different countries around the world and I see lots of good intentions Rooms filled with donated soft hardware that unfortunately are locked Because there's nobody who can run the hardware anymore There's nobody who can upgrade the software anymore and there's nobody using these rooms full of donated equipment People say well will train people to do this and they go out these little villages And they train people how to run this equipment and it works for a while Until all of a sudden the person says I'm very trained I can leave this little village and go to the big city and I can earn twice or three times the amount of money And the big city that I can in this little village and they leave and they don't train anybody else So as part of these plans for these things we need to be able to Show these people how they can make a good living not just a reasonable living not just a marginal living but a good living So that they will stay there and before they leave if they're going to leave they will train the next person Maybe we need as part of these business models that there's always two people in a particular place The person who's running it and their air that's going to move up when that person leaves Now a great example of this is the Indian phone company A lot of times in an Indian village there will be a phone that somebody will purchase And that person becomes the phone company If a telephone call comes into that phone They will answer it and then they will carry the phone to whoever's house is actually being called And that person will then pay them money To receive that call with their house Likewise if somebody wants to make a call they walk to the person's house Who has the phone and they pay them to make the call and this person makes a living Off of being the phone company for the village There's also telecenters these have been very very Popular and very successful in a lot of places They not only bring computing to the community, but they also bring communications to the community Whether using asterisk as a pbx system or whether they're just a simple voice over ip There's also a place where you can get access to scarce computing facilities like high-grade printers or scanners or things like that A friend of mine who does a lot of work in Thailand Said you know mad dog we talk about e-government and we talk about things like having huge databases And we talk about things like having electronic voting machines and the issues with that He says let me tell you what e-government is in thailand If you're a farmer in thailand and you need to sign a paper with the government It means you leave your farm and you walk for about two days to the government building They have you sign the form and then you walk two days back from the government building That's four days worth of work that you've lost But now what you do is you go to a telecenter They email the pdf document to the telecenter the telecenter prints it out you sign it They scan it in they email the same document back And that is e-government in thailand right it saved the farmer four days worth of walking And that's four days they can put to working on their farm So again, you know a lot of the a lot of the complex solutions that we may think of as something that they need They actually think of a much simpler solution What they need is communications and they need the electronics Here's a telecenter which is in the in the heart of toronto canada Not exactly a third world nation But there's a lot of people in the neighborhood who make use of the telecenter Because they either homeless or They Don't just don't have access to computers or they're learning how to use the computer Now these telecenters could provide their services for my mother and father If my mother and father had a very very simple computer in their house That it was just a web browser The telecenter could provide the service space for them It could provide a setup of applications for them And this is not some far-off company like Google This is a very local place We can go and you can talk with the owner of the computer center And you can form a relationship with them They can sit down and show you how to use the software they can answer your questions And you may pay them a small amount of money every month to do this They would do the backups for you This person would earn a living doing this and you would get much better support On a much friendlier basis than a long-range company Now one of the reasons why free software technical companies fail Is a lot of times there's a single person who says I want to start up a consulting business And that's fine And you go out and you do consulting and everything But a lot of times businesses look at you one person and say What happens if you die? What happens if you get run over by a truck? You know you really need to think about The longevity of you or you as a consulting partner with the company or the or the business that you're going to And so one of the things that I do is I go around and talk to people about ways of making money with free software How do you create a sustainable business? And I remember one time that I was going to the usenix organization And during their conference I was going to give a talk on how to make money with free software And they said well Nobody will come to that talk. It's on the last day We're all technical people But when we got there the room was filled with people And I asked a very simple question and I'll ask you here How many of you Have the title of either ceo of your company CTO of your company CIO of your company Or otherwise you're in a company where you have to wear a hat that's both technical and business Right And this is why you need to think about the business aspects of free software as well as the technical aspects of free software What does it mean to your customer? What what what is missing from your offerings to your customer that would stop them from using free software? Business is not what we call in the united states a four letter word All of the curse words in in english seem to be four letters, right? But business is not a four letter word You know financing and cash flow and marketing And doing all these things to find out what your customer wants and how you can provide their services to them It's a very big part of the free software business And what I keep doing is I go around and talking to people about free software I go it is not the cost Of the software that is the issue It is the value of the software I give an example you go out you buy a cd at a store and You take it home and you install it on your computer. It takes you an hour of your time You pay five pesos for the cd and an hour of the time to install it. That's the cost of the solution You start up the software. It does absolutely nothing So the value of the solution is zero You go back to the store you buy another cd five pesos take it home install it an hour of your time But when you start up the software immediately your dog can let itself in and out of the house without help Your spouse comes home kisses you in the cheek goes in the kitchen makes a fantastic dinner Takes you upstairs. You make love the entire night Let me tell you at the age of 58 that alone is a miracle Your kids come home from school. They have the straight A's for the first time in their entire life And the tax collector calls you up and says we made a mistake and we owe you $200,000 and it's all because of the software on that cd That software to you is infinitely valuable and you don't care. You paid five pesos and an hour of your time It was deviant if it was a bunto they only would have found a hundred thousand dollars But but this is the point You have to I make your customers understand that they're no longer ruled by the value that the producer of the software created for them They're now free to create the value of their own imaginations This is the part of business that you need to get across And so when we're talking about digital inclusion, what type of jobs? What type of opportunities could you create for the village? To be able to use free software so they can create sustainable businesses so they can buy more of your services This is a part of this Free software is a business enabler. It allows business to increase And this you know in their own language with their own culture This is the type of thing we should be pushing not just the technical part of the system It allows better government The Places and aids where you're trying to investigate aids You really need to use geographical information software Because it doesn't make any sense for you to advertise about preventing aids in places where they they have virtually no aids But on the other hand if there's places where the aids rate is 70 percent or 80 percent That is the place where you really need to advertise about the use of contraceptives condoms even abstinence But this is the place where you use these tools to figure out where to put your money in doing this There's all sorts of applications out there way above the linux kernel and one of the things I really enjoyed was learning about The the the project of putting together these packages of software I think they called it the dish project Of putting together packages of software so people can easily find the software they need to do their work And if you are thinking about putting a business or starting a business up with free software What I strongly recommend is you consider the concept of using a cooperative Where you get together with a group of other free software developers And you share resources such as legal secretarial sales resources marketing resources It also gives the customer A entity a legal entity that they think will be around longer than the single person It gives them more faith That if they come back in two years with Another problem that that entity will still be there So one more story about my friend in thailand, which I think is interesting He had this farmer come to him I should back up a little bit One of the criticisms of the one laptop per child program has always been should we give the child a laptop When they don't have food Or clothing or things like that I firmly believe that the child needs both They need access to the information that the laptop represents And they need the food But my friend in thailand had a farmer come to him and said you have some land You're not using it for anything. Could I grow a crop? My friend said of course So the farmer went to the bank Borrowed the money Got some seed Planted the crop Unfortunately the land was very wet And the crop rotted in the fields was no good So the farmer lost everything he had The next year the farmer came back to my friend said I'd like to try again But first I want to use the internet To see if there's another crop which would work better So my friend let him use his internet the farmer spent a couple days there Had an idea Went back to the bank Bank who listened to the idea let him some more money The farmer got the seed for the crop Planted it The crop thrived The farmer made huge amounts of money And he paid back the bank for both of the loans and everything was great Can anybody think of what the crop was that he raised? No Rice rice would have been a good idea The only problem is the rice is so cheap In Thailand he would have had great competition and he wouldn't have earned that much money really Frogs He got a whole bunch of little tadpoles Put them in the pond on it the the fact that tadpoles turned into frogs They thrived in the wet land because of all the insects they become very fat He sold them to the restaurants and made a lot of money He became the frog king of that part of Thailand So the internet is an idea generator And that is what people need They need to know how to make clean water They need to know how to make business and how to share ideas Here's another example a simple business of basket weaving If the person has a connection to the internet They can create courses in how to make baskets They can sell their baskets through the basket weaving They get much better money than trying to sell them in a native marketplace And these are types of things very simple businesses But it's useful And if you think that this is just An example that I've dreamt up There is a group of women in India Who have formed a cooperative. They're selling their baskets through Macy's department store in New York And making a lot of money for their village Self publishing books and magazines and articles about native culture Here's an interesting part in South Africa. There's a town called Soweto Very very poor township. It was the place where the first riots of apartheid started I went there one time with a friend of mine who worked for the government And as I looked out over Soweto, I said this is a natural bowl. It's a perfect place for mesh networking My friend said sure no never happened in Soweto And I started talking to him about Soweto. I says I'll bet even in Soweto They have people working on open source software He goes no way not in Soweto But he went back to his government and they asked about it And sure enough they did find one person in Soweto He was not only working with free software out of his house He was conversing with Lena's tour vaults about a problem in the amd microprocessor Memory management system and was helping Lena's diagnose what was wrong and fix the problem And the government was so impressed by this that they opened up A satellite open source development center in Soweto to do both training And have people work with it So Adam 3 for the last mile is a suitable sustainable business plan for free software So here's my summary. I believe the internet should be omnipresent And until it is we haven't finished our job The computer should be on all the time and be of such low power that we don't care that they're on all the time That information accessibility should be a right and not a privilege And that emerging economies include center city chicago appellation in the united states And New Orleans after Katrina And I always like free software because I never know where the next albert einstein is going to come from It could come from Soweto It could come from Watts it could come from argentina And free software allows us to see who is good allows the cream to rise to the top so we can skim it off We can find those people closed source software hides them from us You know Maybe the next albert einstein of computer software will come from us unlikely a place as Helsinki finland And so with that I'd like to thank a whole bunch of people Kulu Incorporated for paying my salary and IBM who helped me with sustaining funds to come here The conference organizes for giving me a chance to talk the free and open source community and you of course And if you want to see the most important person in free software You get up in the morning. Just look in the mirror Thank you very much