 As Jeremy said, my name is Peter Salisbury, and I am a lapsed member of the British Computer Society, and the reason for that is that when I took up vickering belonging to the BCS was a little bit more expensive than I could afford, so this is a plea for a free membership, thank you very much, I'm gladly come back. This title is more or less the table of contents for the talk, so you'll notice me gradually plodding through those few words, and I've been told that if we all finish early we get more beer, so there'd be absolutely no reason for me to go on at any length. I want to start really by indulging in a bit of good old days stuff, there's a few grey hairs here, so you'll appreciate me remembering, and as an oldie I like playing that great game of my computer was bigger than yours, have you played that one? I remember my first computer when I was doing my computation degree before the days of computer science and everything, it was three floors of the maths and social science building in Manchester University, three floors. On the other hand, we had this minute feat of microminiaturisation in the department at UMIST, which was a PDP-8, I don't remember those, it was about a 7 foot 6 tall, but it weighed less than a ton, imagine that for a computer, and had this enormous disk drive about the size of a tumble dryer. The disk drive you switched on when you came into the department because the disk drive took 15 minutes to get up to speed before you could manually load the read-write heads into it, but it was worth the wait because on that disk drive you could store 8,000 words of information. Now these are 12 bit words, so that's 8 kilobytes of information, phenomenal feat really, wasn't it? A lot of the fun I think for me was that these beasts were enormous, bit like the sort of train driver aspect of life, isn't it, where this enormous thing did exactly what you told it to. In those days, because they were so huge and so precious and so protected, you could only gain access to the computers through a priesthood of the operators. I guess you probably don't even have operators anymore, I don't know, but there they were, ranks and ranks and they took the whole of one of those three floors. And I learnt quite quickly that of all the people in the university, the people you needed to be on good terms with were the operators. I remember really clearly one of my colleagues on the course who was always very brusque with them and said, I want this back as quick as possible. One of the operators handing him back his project, which must have been a thousand punch cards or whatever, and he hadn't sequenced them. Say, I'm so sorry, we dropped the cards and they're in a bit of a random order now, so you keep on the right side of those. And the way it worked was that you would take in your stack of cards, wait a couple of hours and go back and they would hand you some of that Z-fold green and white paper, heady days, isn't it? And on there would be the output from your programme, whatever that might be. But it was a two-hour turnaround, so I remember thinking once, you know, we had a fairly simple assignment, it was a small recursive programme, something like a bubble sort or whatever. And I thought, this time I'm going to get it right first time. You know, I'm going to write this, won't have any syntax errors, no runtime error, it's just going to be right first time and I just go through this loop once. So I gave it in, you know, that much code and came back a couple of hours later and was expecting a single sheet with the listing of the code and the answer, you know, the sorted numbers. And instead I was given a half box of paper, half a box and at the bottom of all this stuff it said, run time limit exceeded listing run time error. So I'd forgotten that at the end of the recursion you have to tell it to stop. So it had used all its memory, zooming up the stack, run out of memory and then listed every single call going off the way down the stack, more or less infinite and run out of the print limit that we had, which was half the box. So that's what you get for thinking you can do something perfectly first time. Of course in those days because of the sheer size and cost of these things there was no question of owning a computer. Still in the days when they said it may be that these things take off to the extent where every single country in the world will have one, maybe. And even some big companies might have their own computer but that was it, you know, the likes of you and me would never own something like that. And time on a computer was essentially a gift from the university, you know, they didn't charge you for it, you had to queue for it but it was a gift. And you treated it like that, you treated it as something precious, something to be grateful for but you didn't even dream of owning it. And of course the point in there is that that's true of most of life, isn't it? That when we think about most things we don't, we can't own it or deserve it even. So if you think about the way that your friends treat you or the weather or your health or how much you enjoy the next film you watch. Or being in the right place at the right time, you know, those things far more important than things we can own but we can't own those things, can we? So it seems to me that well-being is much more at the gift end of the spectrum than it is at the ownership end. And yet everything in our culture and the air that we breathe tells us otherwise, doesn't it? That well-being, happiness and so on comes from owning and possessing. And there's something particularly powerful I think about the kind of possession you get by giving money for something. You know, when you pay for something and it's mine and I take it home and take the cellophane off the screen and all that stuff, you know, that sense of possession. And it came home to me, I was working in a project management company and this is a long time ago. So the product was a reel of magnetic tape with our programme on and they ran it on their main frame when they got it. And that reel of magnetic tape would cost them a quarter of a million dollars. So cost of goods sold, nought, money in, quarter of a million. But with the quarter of a million, they got a lifetime of free support and a lifetime of free updates. Free, you just paid a quarter of a million dollars, not that free is, it included in the price, put it that way. So the trouble was that we in the technical support department found that we kept getting people ringing up with problems that we'd already fixed. And we said, well, you know, we've sent you all the updates, why haven't you installed them? And it turned out it was because they were free. So they just put them in the bin because it's free, can't be worth anything in the bin, far too much effort to install them. So they're still ringing up about bugs we'd fixed. So we changed our policy and started charging for the updates and then installed every single one of them after that. It's crazy, isn't it? But that's the kind of relationship that we have with money and with ownership. There's something in us that's tempted to value only that which we own or we want to own. Valuing somebody else's stuff, that's quite a big thing, isn't it? And the open source model challenges that whole view of life, doesn't it? It's a completely different way of looking at the world. And it's both sorts of free that are talked about in the open source community, isn't it? There's free as in free beer and free as in freedom. And both of those things knock away at that sense of ownership through payment, which I would argue is quite a corrosive thing in itself. So how does it affect me as a vicar? Well, it probably affects me more because I'm a geek than it would if I wasn't, to be perfectly honest. But I do find that whole open source outlook liberating in many ways. If I take a couple of opportunities, I'm chair of governors at our local school. Excuse me. And well, I have two penheads. One of them is Comic Sans. I'm sorry if it's your favourite font. And when I said to the people at school, you know, just because it's an infant school doesn't mean we have to produce our prospectus for mums and dads in Comic Sans. You know, there are other fonts. And they said, well, well, there's only Arial. These are the two fonts in all the universe. So I was able to say, well, there are all these fonts and they're all open source free. You can just what we don't have to pay anyone. No, all free. And again in the governors, you know, we're told constantly that we have no money in education. And yet we spend thousands of pounds every term on licenses for software we don't need. You know, we have in an infant school, we really have no need of Microsoft Windows. And yet we're paying thousands of pounds every term in order to license it. So there are a couple of my pet heads, but much more positively. At home personally and in our church generally, we use open source for everything. I'm not sort of Richard Stallman kind of Debian open source where we're not prepared to play MP3s or use Adobe Reader or things like that. But open source and our computers run various flavours of, I was going to say Linux, but I know if Richard were here, he'd get very cross if I didn't say GNU Linux, so we'll try that one. Various kinds of Linux, my personal preference Exibon to other people like the comfort and support of Mint and that sort of thing. But the benefit it gives us is that we can use quieter and less energy hungry computers. You know, they don't need fans and stuff because they're not doing hard work. They're just running very simple programmes that do what we want and nothing more. So that's a huge benefit to us. Another benefit is that we can upcycle people's old laptops and we use those in our, we have an internet cafe on a Wednesday afternoon and Bill Gulland, one of our church wardens, he sits in front of a rack of old laptops that are now running Mint and if people get excited or interested, you can say, here it is, take it home with you, you know, which you can't do. If you're infusing over Photoshop with someone, you can't say take it home if it's the gimp away, they go with it. Huge benefits. And it also means that I can reassure our extraordinarily competent parish administrator Jill that she won't come in tomorrow and find everything's changed. You know, installing 39th update of 423 and suddenly it's all gone wrong. She can keep exactly what she has for as long as she wants until she reckons that the upgrade's worth the hassle. It's all under her control so another huge benefit to me. I want to talk about another benefit which is that I do a tiny, tiny bit of developing still because I can't quite kick the habit and developing in the open source world feels like standing on the shoulders of giants to use that well-known phrase because all the bits that got to where we are now are all there for us to use, aren't they? We can pick up something and say, this is just about where we want to go but a step further. And instead of building it from the ground up, you can go in with the APIs and the libraries all open source, pick them up, plug in what you need and you're there. The most recent example is that my mother-in-law is quite poorly, she's got a fair degree of dementia, loses track of the day, rings us up in the middle of the night, that sort of thing. So I thought what would be great is to have just a screen on the wall that says something like, it's Monday and it's too early to ring Peter, something like that. And I happened to have lying around a sort of no-name Chinese Android tablet and I thought well I could use that for it if I had the right app. So I looked through the play store and there was nothing there that was exactly right. So I thought well how hard can it be? Harder than you think, it turns out. But anyway, all the APIs are all there, all beautifully documented and the whole development environment is given to you for free and I've developed an app that simply says now it's Monday afternoon or something like that and at tea time it goes yellow so she knows she needs to go downstairs for the community tea and that sort of thing, very simple app. And you can have it because it's on the play store. So if you go to the play store and look for Day Clock by Peter the Vicar, you can glean this gem of information it is now Thursday evening. Which is useful to know sometimes isn't it? It's kind of stage of life thing isn't it? When I was younger I needed a second hand, now the minute hand is moderately useful but before long it's just the date you're looking at isn't it? So the thing that I've found developing that, A we're standing on the shoulders of giants, the giant Google, all this stuff, all I had to do as you can imagine was very simple stuff. But the whole app and the polish of it and the look of it just comes for free. It's in the play store and then it starts a conversation. It's just extraordinary. A wonderful conversation that you have with people who look through the app store, the same thing they wanted, something for their person with dementia and saying thank you to me for it. It's absolutely wonderful. And also saying do you know what would be really handy is? And so that goes in next and between us we develop something really special and wonderful. And there's even someone in Australia, a chap called Simon Ogden, who wrote to me and said I want to put your app onto no-name Chinese 7-inch tablets, put them in a wooden frame and sell them. How much do you want for your app? And I said, it says very clearly it's open source, it's entirely for you, it's absolutely free. But he decided, out of the goodness of his heart, to give me two Australian dollars, which is about a quid, every time he sells one. Isn't that amazing? Just generosity of his heart. And I think I must have made probably 20 pounds by now, something like that. So internet billionairehood is just around the corner, as long as there's this predicted explosion in dementia. But I think that's a really good example of the sort of, what's the word, the culture of open source. It's about gratitude and generosity, really, rather than about payment and ownership. So there's all good things about open source. Where does God come into it? So you see we're here now. Where does God come into it? Well God is, it's the old English word meaning good. And anyone except the very most hard and atheist has a kind of idea of good and not good to use new speak. Spirituality begins when we feel that goodness has some kind of objective reality. There really is a force, a person, whatever you want to call it, that is good. And the key question is not, is there a God? And that question, there's only one answer to it, which is the answer to almost every question. It depends what you mean by. You know, I've had people tell me that they're atheists who then say, I don't believe in God. I just believe that there's an all-pervading spirit that works for the good of everyone. And I said, I'm exactly the same kind of atheist. So the question is not, is there a God? But if there's a God, what sort of God is there? Much, much more interesting question, isn't it? And I want to read a quote to you from the very best theology book you could ever buy. So if you go from here and buy a book by Francis Buffard, unapologetic, I wrote it in 2012. And this is what he writes about the experience of meditative prayer. And now I've forgotten to breathe because the shining something, an infinitesimal distance away out of the universe, is breathing in me and through me. And though the experience is grand beyond my powers to convey, it's not impersonal. Someone, not something, is here. That's unapologetic Francis Buffard, brilliant, brilliant book. So the key question is what is God like? If you go along with that someone, not something, what's this someone like? And the Christian faith is based on what Jesus taught about that someone. And on a concept called grace. That's the kind of central plank of the Christian faith that distinguishes it really in our understanding of what God is like. And grace is loosely translated as undeserved generosity. So John sums it up in the Bible. This is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent Jesus to save us. So the generosity comes first and the response comes second. And that means that the godly way, as far as Christians are concerned, is that we give first with no expectation of reward and if something comes back, hallelujah. We had our annual church meeting last night. I make it fun by seeing if we can beat how quickly we got through it last year. So this year we managed 24 minutes, which wasn't quite a record, but it was pretty good. And then we go to the pub. And it's kind of always the same, which is I think we're probably running out of money this year because we don't charge for almost anything we do. We give loads of money away to charity and we don't have any government grants. We don't have multi-billionaire directors or anything like that. So we just survive on this whole cycle of generosity and gratitude. But the money never does run out for some reason. It's a really challenging way to live and it's at odds with everything around us, the attitude of entitlement and ownership and all that sort of thing. But it seems to me that it may be at odds with most of the world, but it's entirely in harmony with the spirit of the open source movement. That give first and if something comes back great is to me at least the heart of open source. So to sum up, ownership and gift, our desire to own and control things often gets in the way of truly appreciating things. Open source releases us from that attitude into one of gratitude and cooperation. And God, Jesus teaching about God reminds us that God gives freely even before we respond and asks us to do the same. Open source software for me for us in Lamington is one way that we try to do just that. It's gone again. It's gone again. Any questions?