 So next up we have Neil, our previous DPL. The DPL is a very opaque role to some people because the problem is you can only know what it is to be a DPL if you were actually a DPL. So what Neil is going to do this morning is share some experiences that he had while being DPL and what that all entailed. So please thank Neil for taking the time to prepare that. Can anyone hear? There we go. So thanks very much, Annie. It's good to see so many people here after a, apparently less microphone now, after a rather good evening in the pub with lots of food and lots of good beer. So that's good to see. So I wanted to give an overview as to what happened over the last year and the sort of things that a DPL has to deal with. Now it should be worth bearing in mind that every DPL term is different. You all have different challenges to deal with and different sort of things you need to do. Now I knew that when I took over, that it'd be a lot of work and lots of talking to people. But not quite how I imagined. There's a lot more of talking to other people. So generally to the bits of media but also lots of other groups, lots of other people within the free software community. So I wake up and I found I was elected to the post of DPL. My first thoughts would break the code of conduct. So I'm not going to say what exactly those were. But it was quite exciting. So that was certainly an interesting time. Now the main things you sort of get in the first sort of, well, before you officially take office, there's lots of media requests. So I think I had IT wire, I had Linux.com, I had a MyLinuxDesktop.org or something like that and various different things who all want varying levels of interviews with you, talking about what your plans are. And it's a really good opportunity to promote Debian and the sort of things that we're able to do. Additionally, you get a lot of spam. Now I had some of this from being a media over there. Current DPL is nodding furiously. I had a bit of experience of this with being on the press at contact and a couple of others. But you not only get all the spam from your leader at mail which is a fairly well distributed email at the moment but you also get all the press at spam and all the auditor spam as well. And donations and trademarks and the rest. You get spam, you get a lot of spam and if anyone really, really wants to train their spam filtering software with some really good data run for DPL, it's an excellent, excellent plan. So you have to wait through all of that. There's also an archive of the previous DPL mails which is really useful so you can run through that and find out even more spam which is great. So that was kind of the first day we was waiting through that. Day one, I have a lot of days to go through so I'm hoping everyone is feeling sitting very comfortably at the moment. So day one, no, let's sort of speed up a little bit. So month one. Within a month, I personally released Jesse. I'm claiming that, I'm claiming that. No one is going to take that away from me. It's all my work. But hey, we released Jesse. Now that was an absolutely fantastic experience to have. Loads of fantastic press, loads of coverage from everywhere. I appeared in a video conference call to Debian India. They had a huge cake. Unfortunately, they didn't think they could ship any to me and it would still be in an edible state but that was a great fun thing to do. More interviews again. Lots of this sort of happens. And yeah, so there's certainly quite a bit of a press around there. Then you have sort of three kind of issues which should come over from Lucas's term. Sort of legal issues which you have to deal with. Once around the PHP license. Essentially the PHP license says it only applies to PHP and derived works now. If you create a program using this license there's then confusion because the license can't actually apply to the software that you've written. Be all or an end all of that is essentially we are going to publish a statement on the Debian website somewhere saying we're going to ignore that bit because it doesn't make any sense. That serves as a useful legal stop all to say well it's absolutely ridiculous. We can't do anything about it so things are fine. So hopefully that will move forward soon. LibDVDCSS is a more interesting one. We got very close to being able to accept this. Certainly in the form that we'd worked out and then Japan came along and it appears that in Japanese copyright law. So it's Japanese copyright law around DMCA is fantastic. So they've taken DMCA and then added bits on to make it even more complicated even if it wasn't before. So this was there's some language in there around machines which well apparatus which facilitate the making of apparatus which facilitate copyright infringement. So this is to stop people making machines which clone cards for cable TV or something. Now that then becomes a problem for Debian because Debian is that mechanism which then distributes LibDVDCSS which then can be used to potentially view movies which you have legally bought on whatever computer equipment we have legally bought and obviously this is a terrible thing and we should block this apparently. But that's where we are so that is as yet unresolved and I really don't want to advocate going down the path of creating a non-Japan.debian.org because non-US.debian.org was so easy to deal with. And then ZFS, I'll get on to more of that in a minute. So spending money was also a useful thing. When I came into term I said we need to spend some money so lots of requests came in. So I approved all those and pretty much without I think without exception. I think I'll mention more money in a minute. And the other one which probably people don't know is around DD certificates. I don't know if Mehdi's had any of these yet but yeah. So as a, without wanting to add too much more to Mehdi's workload, as a Debian developer you can email the DPL and they will sign you a special certificate to say you're a Debian developer. This can take some time just with the volume that certainly I got. Each one individually doesn't take too long but just the processing of those when you have various other bits to deal with is interesting. It'd be great to automate that some way. So that was kind of month one. Month two until the end of my term. I'm working out how hard to rant about this. I'll be good. I'll give a bit of background as to where we are with this and how this came about. So four days in to my term I receive an email from John Sullivan saying ha. So I've read that Debian are interested in have worked out a way of distributing ZFS. And there's major concerns with this. To the state that depending on exactly how we do it this could create major problems for Debian and could essentially send huge ripples through the community. There is no doubt I think that the license that ZFS is distributed under CDDL is a free license but in my mind and quite a few others these licenses are not compatible with the GPL. So there's a lot of back and forth lots of twos and pros. Essentially we'd received some legal advice from the Software Freedom Law Center. I think Luke has originally sent in the request around what can we do with this? Does this compatible? How does this work? What do the licenses say? And we got back quite a lot of texts. I'm not entirely sure it was the exact question we asked because for those who have dealt with lawyers I'm sure you may recognize some of this but we asked about how is these license compatible? Can we distribute it? And the answers we got back I will summarize as saying you're not going to get sued. Which isn't exactly what I wanted to know but fine. So not only if we did get sued then it's unlikely that there'd be any damages because Debian doesn't have any money. I'll get onto that in a moment as to exactly how much money Debian does have. But it's unlikely that anyone would want to sue Debian it would be bad publicity, et cetera. But that wasn't the question that I wanted to know. I wanted to know how compatible these licenses were. So we received that advice. I then had lots of meetings with John from Free Software Foundation, Bradley from Conservancy and FTP Masters and the maintainers and everything. And eventually we get to this truth shall we say where we work out we shall distribute it using DKMS in the Contrib repository. Now Contrib is an interesting place for those who don't know what Contrib is. We have three main suites in Debian. One of those is main. Main consists of programs that you're fully free and can be distributed and essentially uphold our Debian Free Software guidelines. Non-free is for things we're allowed to distribute but don't meet those guidelines. In between there you have some a bit of a gray area things that are free but depend on non-free stuff or somehow the licensing doesn't meet a self-inclusive main an example of this. So this doesn't just have to be licensing either. This is also around functionality because remember many years ago early in the Debian days we had SCUM VM which is free but only existed to run what at the time was non-free games. Then beyond a steel sky came along as free game and excellent it could go into main. So the point of Contrib is not just a licensing thing it's around usefulness itself. We talked to, I talked to FTP masters, big thanks to Noodles as well who helped with some of this as a, I'm not gonna call him a lawyer in training but he has been doing a law degree recently so make of that what you will. And essentially we worked out the point that there is a promise we make to our users when they use main. You can take main. You can apply DFSG to that. You can modify it and as long as you essentially send the source on, et cetera, you're gonna be okay. And you can send this to your friends. It is entirely unclear. That's probably the political way of putting it but it is very unclear as to what happens if you take ZFS on Linux, combine it with a Linux kernel and then distribute it to your friends because it has a binary format. So no one entirely knows exactly what that means. So we would be breaking that promise to our users hence this is why it's going to end up in Contrib. So excellent. So we have a wonderful position that works. Conservancy are okay with it. Free Software Foundation are okay with it. FTP Masters are okay with it and the maintainer's okay with it. Fantastic. It goes into new and then Ubuntu publish a statement. Ubuntu publish a statement saying they're shipping the binary on advice from a senior free software lawyer. This starts to make me quite annoyed. For those who don't understand Britishness quite annoyed is well, well, go look it up. Yeah, it put me off my tee. I was mildly miffed because we'd worked really hard to reach this point where I mean the original positions I think of Free Software Foundation and shout at me, John if I'm wrong is don't chip this at all. And the important point is here is not around CDDL being a free license or even being a proprietary license. If we allow a GPL incompatible license to be linked like this in the Linux kernel and distributed as binary that is exactly the same legal preset as binary non-free modules as proprietary modules. What we're talking about here isn't around is it a free license or not? It's an incompatible license. If we allow an incompatible license no matter how wonderful we may or may not find the CDDL that is our defense to stop binary proprietary modules being loaded with the kernel and distributed with the kernel. It's the thing that we use to stop essentially proprietary software appearing and not being able to be used on our devices. So going back there was this wonderful announcement. I was then asked by SFLC if they could publish the advice that they had sent Debian saying we won't be sued. I thought this was quite odd. So I asked why and a lot of the commentary was around. Well, if we publish this then Oracle won't sue Debian. I can't see Oracle suing Debian to be honest at all ever but so that was quite odd and I thought but why would you do this? This goes against the position that your client the Debian project has taken which is no it's not just about the legality it's about the morality of combining these two things and Debian has always been keen to remain a free software distribution and keep it that way. So then an opinion piece comes out from the SFLC which looks very similar to the advice would receive to accept with Debian's name filed off. This saga is continuing. It hasn't finished yet. It will continue for a long time. I just hope that us as Debian recognize our role within the wider community and work not just as Debian, not just as Debian versus Fedora, not just as SPI versus SFLC versus Conservancy or Free Software Foundation. This is an issue which is important to all of us who care about software freedom and the ability to use our devices together. Enough of a rant about CFS. Delegations, I could be wrong. I believe I'm probably the first DPL who ended with fewer delegates than they started with. So press publicity bits got combined into one. This is now just the fantastic I have to say publicity team. I don't know if anyone's dealt with them recently but they're incredibly active and the amount of stuff we're getting now is absolutely wonderful. Yeah, thank you very much. Especially if you're listening to the stream at home. I think Laura is probably there. Hello. Auditor got changed into the treasurer delegation. This was a slight confusion with the role. They started getting emails saying can you please audit our programs and make sure they're secure or something. For people who are handling monetary books this was a little bit confusing for them so just to highlight the sort of differences here this is now the treasurer. Front desk got de-delegated. I spoke to Dam I think at a mini dev company in Cambridge. They wanted me to update the delegation because they were changing people or moving people around. I asked what they wanted actually delegating and then we realized there wasn't anything to delegate. It was just running a process and looking at applications and not making any decisions. Then dev conf chairs. Now this one was fairly contentious and I'm particularly sad that I wasn't able to help deal with this during my term. Essentially it's a the role of dev conf chairs is a very difficult job and so is organizing all of dev conf. How do you ensure that there is accountability to the project for what you're spending project money on but at the same time allow the local organizers of the event to actually get on and run it and create a great event that we've all come to expect. Sorry Mehdi a fun one for you dealing with dev conf chairs. So I've handed it over to him so we'll see where it comes from there. Easy subject apparently, excellent. Then in my final bits of the mail I delegated for four hours the Debian trolling team. This was given to Paul Tag and it had one power only which was to declare what color t-shirt the DPL show wear. Now I was clever enough to time limit it because over those four hours, well there was a few changes of shirts shall we say and you can probably see sort of the lateness of the hour throughout the evening at first all happy, excellent, great. Then getting very tired and by the end of it what the hell I'm running out of t-shirts. Oh punch someone, well possibly Paul Tag. Money, in my platform I said we have too much money and we should spend it. Now every request that came in I replied and said spend the money already. People said can I have 2,000 euros for a sprint? I said let's go up to 2,500 euros because I don't want people coming back again and saying oh we went over the budget by 100 euros or so. Did a lot of work with Debian system administrators as well to get things like new disks, improve hardware, things like this. So this is just the money at SPI in the various earmarks that we have and so very prized to say that with this great amount of spending that I authorised and told everyone to do we ended up with more money than we started with the game. Oh dear. April doesn't have a 31st date. So Margot was saying Margot spotted the deliberate mistake I put in my slides to make sure everyone was awake. End of April, which I don't call it the week. It's a special day. It's a very special day in this case but so anyway we ended up with once again more money than we started the year with. So I'd certainly encourage people to... Donate more. Donating more is good. Fundraising went through the SPI account. So a lot of that money is already earmarked for Debcon, right? Yes, but it was also earmarked for the previous Debcon. Okay. So it's... Overture also gets more money during that year. Is there another problem with your dates since each one year off? Both? Because you started in 2015? No? That was my term. No? That's mad. 14, 15. 15, 15, 16. No, that works, yeah, OK. But the numbers are right anyway, so. It was very late last night and very early this morning, hence the coffee. But yeah, so we still have quite a lot of money. We should probably spend some of that. That'd be a good idea. Yes? Stand up. Stand up. So Deb Conf in Hawaii? Deb Conf Hawaii, apparently. That certainly helps. Yeah, so anyone who's interested, the thing was the presentations for Deb Conf 18 are on Friday. If you want to propose Deb Conf Hawaii, that would be fantastic. Especially as it's summer back at home and winter now in Cape Town, although it's been reasonable, a little bit cold and raining a lot, so a lot like a British summer anyway. So I feel quite at home. Other bits which I wanted to do, bike sheds, the new name for PPAs as FTP masters decided to call them. I think it came from original joke, which I made in one of my talks. And they kindly decided that apparently my humor is so bad that it can be termed into a code name for something we do technically. As I understand it, the bits that are left here is stuff to do with want to build and how that integrates. And hopefully, at some point, maybe by 2020, we will get bike sheds. I'd encourage anyone who is particularly interested in this go talk to Andreas Barth, Abba. He's not here. Excellent. So I can volunteer him to be the point person here. Go talk to him. Try and work out what if you want this. Yes. Mehdi. Does it work? Yeah. I suggest anyone interested to go talk to Aurelien Gernot, who is the maintainer of the want to build and the built-in network today. Excellent. Aurelien Gernot, Aurel 32. Good. That's the next stage for that. I think that did work quite well is outreach. So certainly with the outreach team, I think I said Devin will guarantee a minimum of four slots per session. And so that's gone really well. It's something that I was keen of and trying to increase the amount of outreach we do and making sure that we can do that. Excellent. I do have some time for questions as well. So there's lots of people to thank, particularly like to thank at this point, Lucas. I know that when I think Steve took over his DPL, it's like, ah, your DPL. Congratulations. See you. But I got a fantastic handover from Lucas. Lots of detail about and introductions to various people as well, which was really, really handy. A huge thanks to everyone who's helped me during my term. A particular thanks to these three organizations, Free Software Foundation and the Free Software Conservancy, Software Freedom Conservancy, even. Trying to, who were able to support my role, not only with just questions and interacting with the rest of the community, but a good amount of moral support as well. These people know what it is to be the figurehead for a large and public organization. So particularly John, Karen, and Bradley from the Free Software Foundation and Conservancy particularly, like to thank them particularly much on this speech. Yeah, thank you. And you know I said Debian has money. Well, these sort of people are ones who also help uphold software freedom within the things. And quite frankly, they also need money to do it. So go join these people if you haven't already. Conservancy, for example, this week, if you join this week, then there is a generous donor who's going to match your funds. So I encourage everyone here to sign up for them. Also, if you're at a conference and Conservancy are there, they throw an awesome cocktail party as well for people with some rather low budget. But you will get the exact director of the Conservancy, cooking you chili. Also like to thank my employer, Collabra, who were absolutely fantastic during the year. They're actually, I think for the first year this time, a gold sponsor of DevConf, which was really handy. So unfortunately, due to South Africa customs, we didn't have our usual bump at the jobs fair and stuff like that, which has now arrived. So thanks very much for the auditing for like driving down to the depot and picking it up and the rest of it. So there's loads of stickers and things like that. And is there anyone from the org team in the audience? Cover your ears. Because we've also got these flyers. And on the back of the flyers, they get made into paper aeroplanes. Absolutely fantastic. It says AirDebcom, apparently. So yeah. Everyone has permission to have a flyer. Everyone has permission for a flyer and then to turn it into paper aeroplanes. So that's fantastic. So I'll shove those out and think. Yeah, the responsible person says that we can all make paper aeroplanes. So that's great. So yeah. I guess that's it for me. We have time for questions, I believe. I'm not seeing a yellow or red sign. Oh, 10 minutes. Excellent. So one at the back. Thanks for the summary. While seeing these FSF software conservancy logos over there, did you make any progress with the, well, interpretation or stubbornness? Sorry. Did you make any progress about the, well, interpretation of the GFDL? That seems to be some kind of stubbornness on the, well, maybe FSF side, maybe on the Debian side. But it's not in the interest of, I think, our users not to ship documentation, to ship free documentation just because licenses say, well, there are invariant sections about back and front cover texts. And maybe we can keep this up going again while all involved people are here at Debian. Yeah, so the, yeah, thanks very much. So this is one of the, I mean, the FSF and Debian have some, let's just say, actually minor disagreements about what we think is free and what we're trying to produce. I think this is, oddly, the one area where Debian is trying to be more free than the free software foundation in this particular case. Now, the wonderful thing about this talk is that we have people here who can answer that. So, John. You know, personally, I want to see everybody on the, like Debian and FSF on the same page, particularly about definitions of what constitutes free and not free software documentation material. I think that we've had a good several years in a row, actually, of just good conversations and figuring out how to move forward. So that's obviously one of the more complicated things that we're trying to do. So I think that's one of the things so that's obviously one of the more complicated areas that's been an issue for quite a while. But, you know, we're interested in talking about it. I've gotten very good responsiveness out of Lucas and Neil and Zach and had a chance to meet Medi here too. So I think that we'll continue to have very frank conversations about everything and hopefully make some progress. Great. Ah. So it seems that you spend a fair amount of time working on the FS. I was wondering if you... One idea I've had for a long time is that we might be useful to have some kind of Debian legal advisory team, people who are from inside Debian and that could collect the advice from all organizations that provide advice to Debian and just build up the various proposals and dig this up to let the DPL decide. I don't think it makes sense to delegate or to decide on this. Yeah. So one thing that I think would be particularly interesting is increasing Debian's options for who we can get legal advice from. Certainly as, in my term, we had a new pro bono legal advice around trademarks, which is Marie who's been helping us with trademarks. There's various options I think we have because I think the traditional saying is if you put three lawyers in a room you'll get seven different opinions. So certainly that's certainly useful and that kind of interestingly touches on a question that I think the project needs to think about which is what does the project want from the DPL? The DPL is an interesting position where it's not entirely clear what's expected there. I mean, is this an administrator who checks all the finances and improves things like that? Or is it a spokesperson who goes and does a lot of press events and turns up who to events? Talks to various different organizations or is it a mediator who goes and deals with conflict within teams? Sometimes even within packages I've received some of those which is tricky. I'm not convinced that this is a role that one person can take on especially if they're not working full-time on the job and be able to achieve everything that they want to. I don't have the answer to this but it's certainly something that people should think about when it comes to the DPL role and what's expected of them. I think we have time for one, maybe two short questions. If anyone else has any of those? We've got five minutes. Oh, yes. So what was the most rewarding single interaction you had with somebody during your term and what was the least? What was the most and the least rewarding interactions I had? Probably I think the most rewarding I mentioned already which was that video call with Debian India they actually had I think eight or nine release parties all at the same time all which were equally packed so being able to appear and represent the project over there was by a eventually once we tried seven different video streaming systems and ended up with I think I used a G streamer pipeline over a socket to a web thing but eventually we got there that was absolutely fantastic and seeing this massive cake which they baked for the Debian release. The, not necessarily the worst but the most annoying I think interaction was from a least rewarding least rewarding is a member someone who used to interact with the project quite a bit and doesn't have access to the BTS or various list servers for the moment emailed me and said what's happening to the team survey for the ITS? So that is a bit of a what eventually I managed to script that this is actually talking about the bug tracking system but the team survey is something that was about 10 years ago when Steve did it someone believes that it's entirely dysfunctional and the BTS is a team all rubbish and aren't doing any jobs and are annoyed at being banned still so I received a number of emails from this person I wrote back I was going to write back eventually I decided that this is not going to stop anything so I ignored it very very quick what's the most bizarre interaction you have had? What's the most bizarre interaction I've had? The most bizarre interaction I had was before I took office I walked into my local running club which meets in a pub obviously because we're British and turned up and then six or seven people I know said hey congratulations let me buy you a pint for being DPL which was great but it sort of emphasised to me actually what a big deal Debian is and how much it actually has influenced beyond just the free software people we know people rely on it they really use it and they love what we do and wanted to carry on doing that and I am out of time now so I'll just say thank you very much for a fantastic year it's been a hell of an experience please if you think about running do so you won't regret it