 Hello everyone. This panel started because BDEL suggested that panels are awesome but I think we're going to rope them into yet another one before the end of the conference. It also started because I'm fairly new to open-source software and hardware. I'm very new to Debian, you won't believe it, and I'm really confused about how Debian and open-source and all of these things fit in. BDEL said he could give a talk but then I realized that people are new to Debian and open-source and from the discussions in the past days, even people who are long not new anymore still have very conflictive views and different angles and different entry points. So what I hope to achieve through this panel is a conversation between a lot of very interesting people but also a conversation from the audience whenever you don't understand something or you have a different opinion. So we can really cover the whole space as much as we can about what is Debian and how does it fit into the open-source movement. Before I ask the panelists to introduce themselves, how technical is this audience? How low should we start at? Are there anyone who's absolutely new to Debian and software other than me? Okay, excellent. Right, so often... I didn't lie at least. So can I start with Steve? Steve, can you introduce yourself? We work our way down BDEL, John, Neil and Allison. I'm just a newbie, I'm the gopher around here. And then we start with the most basic question. What is open-source? Steve McIntyre. Okay, sorry, whenever you don't have a mic, please run the mic. Hi, I'm Steve McIntyre. I got involved in Debian back when I was still an undergrad just under 20 years ago. I haven't quite worked out a way to escape yet. I have been DPL for a couple of years. As you'll hear, there's other similar experience around here. I've done all kinds of jobs in Debian. I still keep on finding new and interesting stuff to work on and new people to talk to. It's really good fun. And Steve, you're really involved in open hardware as well. That's like a plan to take, isn't it? I'm a little bit involved in open hardware. More case of Andy keeps on press ganging us to help make his project work. And again, that's really good fun. It's another thing to play with. Thanks. I'm BDL. I tell people I made my first personal contribution of source code to what we later started calling free software in about 1979. And I've been actively involved in one or more projects ever since. I started working for the old Hewlett Packard test and measurement in the summer of 1986. And despite a couple of years of being off on early retirement and a little waving to and fro as the company has split and recombined and all that sort of thing, leading me to briefly work for one of the spinoffs. I've been involved with the company now pretty much for all the time since 1986. I now sit as a fellow in Hewlett Packard Enterprises Office of the CTO where my principal responsibility is to articulate the company's open source strategy. Like Steve, I was once a DPL. Some of you may or may not have noticed that I was on the technical committee for a little while as well. I've been very involved in infrastructure things in Debian since the earliest days of my engagement. I have to admit that in recent times I've mostly been involved in helping other people figure out sort of what the point of Debian is in their context, why I think they ought to be using it instead of something else. I do still maintain or try to maintain or do a really bad job sometimes of maintaining a handful of fairly important packages. But other than that, I have no official roles anymore, which is kind of interesting and cool. I'm John Sullivan. I'm the executive director at the Free Software Foundation. I've been at the FSF since 2003, which is also the first time I use Debian. And I became a Debian developer in 2010, but became executive director at the FSF shortly after that, at which point just about all of my free time evaporated. So I have not gotten to do as much work in Debian as I hoped to, but I still do try to find ways to contribute, plan to take this week in particular as a chance to fix some of the long-standing problems in my packages in addition to connect to people and learn about all their interesting projects. Well, probably, I think it's fair to say I'm the least technically knowledgeable person on this panel. So what got me into free software had a lot more to do with the distaste for proprietary software being forced to upgrade over and over and having to buy new hardware in order to keep up with the latest operating system and also have a background in creative writing and was engaged in a lot of collaborative projects on that side of things, which is another point of interest for me and Debian is just that idea of, and free software in general is the idea of collaboration working with other people to produce something. Great. So there's space for us non-IT people in there as well. Yes, absolutely. Everything I learned about software I learned after starting as a Debian user and after starting at the FSF. Cool. Cool. My name's Neil McGovern. I've been involved with Debian since about 2000 or so, something like that in that various different roles from security team, press, lots of release management as well, so a number of the releases were kind of, I sort of helped along with those until fairly recently I was a Debian project leader. Fortunately I found some other poor person to take on that rather illustrious role. For those who are watching the recording or online, he sat in the audience, so it's his fault now. You just blame him for everything. You're very successful in steering the panel away from... Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. So I didn't manage to, I think for the past seven or eight years, not maintain any packages in Debian at all, which means less work personally for me in case things go wrong. But yeah, I've also, I think along with Beedale, been involved with various other organizations around free software as well, so Software in the Public Interest which, similar to Conservancy, is a non-profit which helps support other projects. So it's been seen quite a bit of the good, the bad and the ugly of how free software communities and Debian has grown up over the years. So I was a free software developer in the 90s, and Debian was my first Linux distro also in the 90s. A few years later, a few folks came along with this name, open source, so when I use the word open source, I actually mean the same thing as free software, but I know that's not true of everyone. Just for me, they are synonyms. Let's see, I have never been DPL of Debian, but I have held DPL-like roles in a couple of other projects. So currently, I also work at Hewlett Packard. I manage a team that does all open source development. And I'm a president of the open source initiative as well as on the board of the OpenStack Foundation and the Pearl Foundation. I don't get to write a lot of code right now, but every chance I get, I do some weird little, I don't know, contribution statistics tracking per Python code just to keep myself from going entirely insane. But I think once I, you know, move on, you know, I always think eventually I'll be on the open source board for maybe three more years, and then I'll free up time. This is my last year organizing DebConf, so then I'll free up time and I'll get back to code. My name happens doesn't matter. We all think so. I just realized I was remiss. Everyone else is mentioned when they joined Debian. I joined Debian on the fall of 1994, actually, and before the first stable release, so it's been a while. Cool. I joined Debian last year. There you go. It's okay. Thank you very much. So now is your chance to be eternified in a quote. If you could write in a shortish quote, what is Debian and how does it fit into the free software movement? What would you say? You want that to be short. Twitter. Three characters. Maybe a little bit longer. Well, the clippy quote is life's too short for secret source software. I've used that one before. It's not new. So at some point, somebody wrote it up as Debian as an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. And I actually still really like that. If you disassemble that and sort of look at what the pieces of it say and what it means that there's an awful lot captured in that relatively short assertion. An association of individuals. It's not a company. Even if many of us have the luxury of being employed full time by companies to do work that's part of or related to Debian, the reason we're here is largely not because of that employment. We've been able to figure out how to get paid to do what we love as opposed to doing something just because we're being paid to do it. And I wouldn't in that sense pretend to speak for everybody, but it's been my observation that in the main, that's true. And certainly of the folks who make the effort to come in some cases very far around the world to be at something like Debian for every year, no matter where it is. I think that's very true. Who've made common cause. We've also agreed to work together fairly early in the history of the project when the number of participants started to grow. We ran into this problem where the casual informal communications with each other wasn't sufficient to ensure that everybody had a common shared set of core values and sort of all agreed on what we were trying to do. That led us to draft this thing called the social contract, which at the time was kind of a new idea in the IT world. I mean, the notion that you had a project that explicitly made sort of a set of commitments to its users. It doesn't seem so strange now. Lots of other projects have done similar things, but at the time it was sort of novel. And in the process of that, we realized that we kept saying free and we had to define what that meant, which led to the creation of the Debian free software guidelines as almost an appendix to the social contract, a necessary thing to explain what we meant in our contract. And then, you know, later that was picked up and modified somewhat to become the basis of the open source definition, which OSI has ever since used as the litmus test for deciding what is and is not an open source license, which it means that Debian has had this sort of significant role in helping to define where some of the intellectual boundaries are that sort of constrain sort of where the edges of our community are to create a free operating system or free software. I don't remember exactly what the phrasing was, but again, the emphasis on free and the fact that it was, you know, more than one program. It's an aggregation of a lot of pieces to, you know, to create an operating system that a lot of folks could use. And then later, someone other than me asserted this notion of Debian, the universal operating system. I picked up on that big time when I was writing my platform for my second attempt, the one that was successful at becoming DPL. And I'm tickled that even today that is a meme that still shows up frequently in people's conversations about Debian. The notion that we can be and should be whatever we collectively are willing to work on together. And it doesn't matter whether that's a great operating system for really huge computing infrastructure, which is part of what my employer is interested in these days, or whether it's the cool new thing for something deeply embedded, which lots of us have had the opportunity to play with various devices over the years. It really can, you know, the fact that we've supported as many processor architectures and as many native languages and as many other things as we do makes us somewhat unique in the free software world. And all of those things together, in my mind, make this a really unique, really special, really important community. And the things that we decide, the decisions we make, the technical choices that we deliver in the software that we package up and make available, end up having really widespread implications and ramifications through all of the free software world. Great. Thanks. Can I get the rest of the panel opportunity to add to that? And then we can take a round of questions and comments. There's also quite a significant social aspect to Debian, which we've passed on to a lot of the rest of the free software open source world. We have been famous at various points for having flamers on our mailing lists and having really deep disagreements, but we've also kept many hundreds and now into thousands of contributors working together on the things that matter. We've helped with guidance for younger projects, for other projects as well over this time. We've demonstrated how you can actually focus on just producing a really good, cool system that we then, not only are we packaging up pieces upstream, we're developing our own technical solutions and then we're giving it away. We're more than happy for hundreds and hundreds of other groups to just take the pieces of Debian that they like, embellish with their own changes and pass on themselves. You know, we're not jealous of what we do, we absolutely, we're over the moon that we can share it and they can continue sharing. It's really, really awesome to just be part of such a big community. So, I think in addition to these elements of a community and an actual software project and kind of a set of really important documents, I think that Fermi and Debian is evidence that, I don't have a short 50-way to say this, but it's evidence that something that a lot of people say could never have been done, got done and can continue to be done. And this is something that really I connect with strongly, both from the FSF and being a contributor to Debian, is that we're pushing the envelope in technical terms and having the same operating system run on so many different platforms and to serve so many different purposes that it can be the same operating system that powers the server and has a really flashy, nice desktop for a computer user that's using their computer just to get other things done besides write code. And also the commitment to doing all of that with just free software. You know, how many manufacturers are telling us, well, you can never have a laptop that doesn't require some proprietary software. You can never do these things with all free software. You can certainly never do these things without paying people to do them. You'll never get just volunteers and people doing this out of the goodness of their own heart. But, you know, they seem to be wrong. And it's a mix of people who are being paid to do it and people who are doing it just out of love and fun. And I think that demonstrating that all of those things are possible and can be successful is an amazing thing about what Debian is. It's not mine, but I've heard the Debian project described as a bit like making sausages. They're very, very tasty, but you don't want to look too closely as to exactly how they're made. So, yeah, but part of it, spicy sausages, yes. And part of it is, I think we have to remember, it's the Debian not as a product, as a just generating the operating system. It is as a project itself. So it's not just being able to put together this free operating system. It is the way that you have thousands of people who work online and work distributed in a way that hasn't, well, certainly when it first started was a very rare thing and everyone being able to put together. And similarly as part of our social contract is that we do this all in the open. And we don't hide our problems. So if there's bugs, they're all open. Anyone can see them. Anyone can see where the issues are. And certainly the reputation of some of our mailing lists, like Debian Develop being a rather conflicted place at times, is simply an example of, I think you have in other organizations as well where there's arguments. It's just we don't hide them. We are open and we allow all our users and the community to see and then be able to also get involved in that process as well. So that's one of the key things behind the project itself for me. I agree with everything they said. My perspective is that for a long time I've ended up working in open source as ecosystem. So it's not just like one specific project. But Debian is fascinating because it is a specific project with a specific culture and community, but it's also in a sense all of free software and open source because it is an intersection of a massive amount of code from a massive amount of diverse cultures and coding styles and languages and projects. And it serves an important function of making sure that all of that works together. You know, like just having a language that's free software. Okay, that's fine, but it's just a language floating around by itself. Actually turning it into an integrated system is a massively complex problem. I think probably before Debian folks would have mostly said, oh, you would need a big company managing that. That's just not possible. And I think it serves as an important example of how to make software usable and I don't necessarily mean usable in the sense of pretty design. That is important too. We need more of that. But that sometimes usability is about the plumbing part and it's not the fun part, it's not the shiny features part, but it's about really getting the plumbing right and keeping on maintaining it. Yeah, I was going to say, I've also heard Debian described as an instance proof of the validity of the free software collaborative development engineering model. And it's kind of interesting, there are a couple of other things, not just sort of foundational documents, but a couple other interesting things that Debian chose early on because of the intellect or insights of some of the early key folks in the project that have been observed and in some cases copied by others. Our preference-based voting system, for example, oh, how I wish the United States presidential elections used a preference-based voting system. You know, there's a lot of things the rest of the world could learn, I think, from some of the things we've done, because while we have occasionally had serious knock-down drag-outs about technical or in some cases even cultural questions within the project, we have the structural mechanism to deal with them. We can have nasty discussions. We can disagree with each other strongly on technical and other matters and at the end of the day we can put forward a set of alternatives and vote on them and almost everybody goes, yeah, okay. It may not be what I really wanted, but we sure know what the consensus of the project is now. Let's just carry on. And that's something I think the world at large, you know, other projects have looked at and there's lots of things like that I think others could learn from. So the thing that I'm wondering slightly off the topic here maybe, and then you take a round of questions and then you pick that up. One of the things that really attracted me to Debian when I first got involved and it's only ever got stronger is the idea that because we have such a large group of people working together with some agreed constraints in our foundational documents and some of the designs of the system we have, we can between us make what's quite clearly the best operating system on the planet, the most flexible, the most powerful in almost every respect. Yeah, we can all contribute. If there are bits and pieces that don't work the way you'd like them, you can help, you can fix things if there are bugs. Equally, there are these several thousand other people who you may not have met yet, but you can trust them to basically do the right thing. They're your friends, they're people who want to work with you. So it just extends your capabilities that much further, just because we can all share in all of our effort. Great, thanks. Any questions? Regarding how white Debian is spread, how many of the panelists, partners, spouses, parents and grandparents are using Debian today? And about why not? So when my then-girlfriend Jo and I first got together, she had a Windows laptop. This is not uncommon. She was coming around regularly, and my housemate Simon and I, he's also a DD. We were both hacking away on our laptops and running things. After a few weeks of coming around and whatever, she complained, so why don't your computers crash? What's wrong? What am I doing? And then after a few more weeks and we explained, oh no, you might struggle with this, we'll happily show you. She was a little bit taken aback by this totally different way of doing things. And then eventually we got her a new laptop, we installed Debian on it. She's been using it ever since. Absolutely hates anything else. It just works. She's now going through the non-uploading Debian... She's going through the process right now to become a non-uploading DD. She is one of us. She just hasn't filled in all the paperwork yet. So my wife and kids are all Debian users. I'm on the far side of country for my parents and due to weird twists in earlier parts of my life, they're Mac users. And every time they have a problem, I just apologize as I have no idea how to help. I could spend all afternoon telling the funny stories of how my wife and each of my kids ended up running Debian each for different reasons and with different motivations. It's suffice to say they all came to it in relatively natural ways and I don't think it would occur to any of them not to want to run something else right now. My son's about to head off to university for a mechanical engineering program and he knows that he has to have his laptop set up to dual-boot windows because the university uses a lot of mechanical CAD stuff that's made available to the students for free while they're students and it all runs on Windows. He knew he had to do that so we've helped get the machine set up for that. He was not going to school without a Debian instance also available on the machine because he needed a real computer too. It seems like people close to me and my family seem to be beset by the kinds of problems that are plaguing us as a broader movement which is very specific requirements for proprietary software for school programs, professional and so that's one place where I draw inspiration to try to work on fixing those things but I try to do helpful things like run services for friends and family using Debian Main normally so that they can not rely on Google as much and still have some of the same features that they would get from doing that so I try to help fill in host websites for people help them set up their WordPress installs so those places where free software is way ahead and then just try to keep a list of all these challenges we have to tackle all the educational online school programs that are starting to require proprietary software or at the very least proprietary plugins and browsers in order to work and then both then PAPASF and as a Debian contributor try to help get those problems solved So my partner, she works for the same organization as me Collabra, we do free software consultancy so everyone at work uses Debian every day on their desktops like your first question on your first date No, I think your first one is here is your laptop, it is running Debian congratulations but I think the interesting one is certainly a bit broader which is exactly where Debian is because it's in a lot of places that people don't expect either things that eventually come back to Debian so in Debian or derivatives I was giving a talk at Linnertstag in Graz and the guy who was organizing it said let's go to his lab and he does genetic sequencing for diagnosis of cancers and various other things and the actual sequencing machines are all actually running Debian or if you got a flight here from Europe then it's highly likely you touched a air traffic control was running a Debian based system It was very interesting actually years ago I got invited to do a customer visit to a major airline in Europe and our field sales guys were curious as to why I had been invited because they said they basically don't do any Linux, we think they've got two red hat machines running Oracle or something but everything else is something else and I wrote, yeah, it was all Debian and they weren't bothering the sales guys about it because at that point in the history the company didn't officially support that as an operating system on the servers, we all know it worked and we sold a hell of a lot of hardware to a lot of people that were running it but I got invited, I spent a very pleasant day wandering around and learning all the crazy things that people were doing and we're just expecting it to work and it was fun writing the trip report up from that trip through a teenage rebellion phase where he has rejected the Linux he was raised on and now has Windows sometimes you just have to give them room to grow up and discover it for themselves no, I mean most of my close friends both technical or non-technical use Debian or a derivative of Debian my family, my siblings and my mother are very Mac-oriented I've introduced into things but my dad was very into Linux so I don't know it seems to vary, it's a mixed bag but I do have the experience of very very non-technical folks who are completely comfortable on Debian or other Linux distributions I am the other half and I'm not using Debian yet but I do have an Ubuntu partition and I was hoping to install Debian yesterday but I got distracted by like Augusta you could probably find somebody to help you sometimes this is my laptop it's finally got the Debian sticker on so it should get it, yeah there's also Windows partition on there my work works in Microsoft office and we spend about half the day every day waiting for documents to stop hanging never mind that I tell them about things like latex so I think it's just a exposure thing and I want to agree with Peter that there's the user face but there's also word of mouth and the more technical stuff and I think it's superficial to just focus on and I think, I guess it was Neil was saying it's sort of interesting that Debian shows up in places you don't expect and a lot of folks don't know about, I've talked about this in talks at other Debcons before but some funny little stats a few years ago actually when Martin Mikkel was DPL HP at that time came up with an interesting product called Debian GNU Linux with HP telco extensions and it was sold in a bundle with an itanium based server and there were two really interesting stats to me about that product, number one is the number of systems of that that we sold to the three customers who bought them who happened to be OEMs for all of the telcos in the world bought more itanium processors than the at that time estimate of the size of the itanium market so that one product sold more than most people thought that whole market size was and the second interesting stat is I was told by someone definitively in the middle of that era that one third of all mobile phone calls in the world every day touched one of those systems somewhere during the call process and the interesting thing is those are all running on private networks they're not on the internet or somehow externally visible and the kernels that were built for them and all you know were required to have lots of nines of uptime reliability because they didn't want to reboot those machines for 10 years and that's an interesting set of requirements it's the reason that when we were first doing itanium enablement in Debian I knew every time we uploaded a kernel package to Debian that it had actually survived all of our torture testing in the lab and it was probably the most robust kernel builds that existed within the distro you know that's an interesting little fact of history and I have no idea how many of those I mean it hasn't been 10 years yet actually a bunch of those systems are still running but I don't even want to think it but you know they're all at remote cell site so it's probably the thing keeping the electronics warm on the top of the mountain in the winter I used to use an titanium server to dry my hair in the morning in the basement for that another story I just have such a Marilyn Monroe image right now except that it's a server and your head so when we were first doing it Linux enablement on them they sent me one of the prototype servers and the baseboard management processor firmware was very naive it ran the fans full speed all the time have a day in mind? Thursday? not Thursday I didn't say she had to schedule it while she was here or delegate someone amongst the thing that Debian should be what Debian is not currently and should be where are we going to right so I've got a reproducible answer from Andy do we have anyone backing that up I give one mildly controversial answer I guess official Debian Debian main is 100% free software Debian as a project still supports non free software as required for its users so I think when we think about what Debian could be it could be in the long term a way to make non free non issue that's one thing that'd be cool a question over here languishing on the dark mess over there I said it's dark over there nobody could see your hand thank you for being part of the panel I just had two quick questions the first is really what kind of phone do each of you run or use and leading up to the question of how can we get Debian into the sort of mobile space that we see so many devices on I mean that's the piece of free software that I don't have in my life is a great free software maybe you could combine some vision of how to actually get there if it's even at all so I'll answer the first one of those because that's quite easy I still have an Nokia and 900 running MIMO a Debian derivative it's the best phone I've ever had because it happens to be a little on based Debian computer that happens to know how to talk GSM and stuff I'll let somebody else answer the harder question well the easy question I'm carrying a company provided HTC One M8 that's running a build that I did myself of an older cyanogen mod with a number of interesting tweaks to change some of the security profile I was going to answer a red phone but okay I've got an Nokia X I think where's Graham or someone who's seen my phone before that's apparently a good phone for Debian it works I'm using a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 which runs Replicant which is the flavor of Android sponsored by the FSF which removes all the proprietary bits which means it's lacking some features like Wi-Fi and GPS and Bluetooth and it's 3D graphics acceleration but I can tell you it makes phone calls sends received text messages and fulfills my need as a phone every day just fine so we're of course trying to fix those remaining obstacles and get the missing features implemented but in the meantime I encourage people to give it a try the project is sponsored really is developed primarily just by two main people and he's got the system working on several phones so imagine if two more people join him and did the necessary kernel work on those phones that we might actually have more features and more supported devices besides helping that project I think another good way forward because I also miss the M900 so in the days when I was able to run a new Linux system on my phone is I think we need to think about portable devices that are approximately phone size but just have working Wi-Fi with free software and then promoting open Wi-Fi networks and mesh networking because no matter how free we get the user space on any mobile phone the proprietary GSM firmware is going to be an obstacle and attempts to replace it are going to run into big time patent trouble I think we need to push on all fronts we should make them cause the patent trouble we should also work on communications work arounds using what we have at our disposal yeah even without the patent issues the problem we have there is that the hardware manufacturers can produce new devices faster than we can keep up with them and so to be able to actually go buy a contemporary device you either have to just decide you're going to live without a bunch of functionality or you have to decide that it's okay to run software stack on it we obviously are all sort of picking different places on that continuum so I have a variety of devices again everywhere from the N900 to the N9 also have an iPhone interestingly we've been doing things like porting G-streamer to it so actually some of the stuff we do is replacing bits which are proprietary with free software and then the aim is to try and eventually lead towards the place that we will eventually as as John and I'm sure most people around this room is we will live in a world where there is all entirely free software and we won't have to rely on anything like that are we there yet? nowhere near if you speak to any of the open hardware guys Andy or BTO in particular the level you get it's not very far before you reach something proprietary in hardware so it's somewhere that I think we would all like eventually to get to, will we get there soon? who knows I'm rubbish at predicting the future in technology so embarrassing I have a Moto X with stock Android on it and I've drawn my pragmatic lines with the phone should work but I will put in a plug for where I volunteer at the Free Software Foundation is in the Respects Your Freedom program so what hardware we use every day does matter but advocacy can make a much bigger difference in what hardware is like in the future and really taking the steps to go and talk to Intel about how AMT is blocking having fully free laptops you can make a big difference over time I'll also say having worked on Ubuntu the first Ubuntu mobile and the beginnings of the Ubuntu phone it is not trivial to create interfaces that work well in mobile but it's entirely possible and I think Debian could attract a community of people who have the design skills and the technical expertise to do it we don't really have it right now but I think we could that's a great closing point does anyone want to add another closing statement before we end in a minute I'll just reiterate what I said yesterday the benefit of those who aren't in the room for the new people session please if you have other questions particularly if you're new to the community or your student or whatever don't be at all afraid to come and poke any of us anytime you see us during the week and ask a question or see if we're available to have a conversation because a large part of the reason many of us come here is precisely that to have the opportunity to meet new people talk to new folks about what we've been excited about for so long and help ensure that this community grows and flourishes in the future yes exactly I learned so much at DebCon it's awesome well thank you very much for being on this panel and personally as a newbie thank you very much for all the support and advice it's amazing thanks for helping us be here