Entrevista con Jon Maddog Hall, parte 1

Duracin: 1.05.00

-So, we can start maybe explaining what Linux and free software is.

-What is free software? Well, ok, so the people really hear a couple of different terms, theyre
going to to hear the term open source, and there will be times they hear the term free software
; we start with open source first. When you buy a product from Microsoft, or some other
company, or a ?, or something like that, your only to buy there is that, you want a new machine.
You cant really change the software at all, you cant see how it works, so youre stuck with that
software the way it comes from manufacture. And if theres a problem, which is thought be used
for moving ahead with the solving resolution, with solving your problem, then, you have to wait
for the manufacture to give you that solution. Sometimes the manufacture goes out of business,
which is a stuck, and sometimes, even if the manufacture stays in business, they lose interest in
that particular piece of software, and they decide you have to upgrade to another version that,
maybe, you dont care about; you dont care about the features. Your old one is good enough, its
doing what its supposed to, and you dont want to upgrade. And the issue with staying with that, I
mean, you could just keep using it forever, but the issue with that is, number one, in a world of the
Internet, you have people breaking into systems, and every once in a while we find a bug that,
even in old software, that allows people to break into the system, and so without the company
behind you, making its own fixes, youre vulnerable. The second thing is, you want to be given a
piece of hardware, and you want the old software to work on it. Well, it doesnt. You know, it
takes the manufacture to make the software want on the new version of the hardware. Or, if its a
new operating system, lets say you buy a new computer for your lab, or your office, and that has
a new version of an operating system, and your old software wont let it do its version, or vice
versa. So, in all these things youre at the mercy of the manufacture; the software doesnt belong
to you, even though you bought it, you have a license that says youre allowed to use it for a
certain period of time on a certain piece of hardware and thats it. And youre not even allowed to,
when you take your old laptop, or desktop, and you get a new one, you take the old one and give
it to somebody else. Even though you paid for that software, they are not allowed to give that to
them; youre supposed to scrub all the software off of it and buy a new copy of that for those
people, and a lot of times that is very expensive. So, all of these things are what happens to
proprietary ? . So, along comes this concept of open source, when we say, Were going to make
this source code available to you so you can change it if you need to; you may still pay for the
software, you know, were going to do that, and you can maybe make changes and everything to
it, stuff like that, and its great. Now, some pieces of software, like the Berkley Distribution of the
University of California, Berkley, they were an open source, but there was nothing in the license
that prevented somebody from taking the source code, making a binary out of it, and giving it to
somebody else. And so, Richard Stallman, who started the Free Software Foundation, said, Now,
this is wrong. If you got the software for free, you should, you know, no matter what you do to it,
(Minute 04.05)

you should give the next person the same rights that you had. Just because you add something to
it, piled it and put it out there you dont have the right to take that other persons freedom. And
he came up with these rules, in the license of the GPL, the four famous rules, that says, You can
use the software for your purpose, that you should be able to have access to the source code for
it, you should be able to change the software for anything you need to, you should be able to
redistribute those changes to anybody who needs them; and about the only thing you are not
allowed to do is restrict somebody elses freedoms. Those are the four freedoms that he talks
about, and thats free software. Now, nothing in that has said anything about what you can charge
for the software or not. As a matter of fact, we should encourage these people to charge for the
software, encourage these people to charge for their time. Its just that when you follow the
mathematics and the logistics of free software it means that youre going to have a limited
amount of money that you can make off of each copy, that basically, what you are charging for is a
service of changing the software, the service of distributing it. And if your charges get to high, well,
somebody else can do that for a lower price. So ? for software, has a very little price.

-So, youre talking about that theres another business model behind free software?

-Oh, there are many business models, yes.

-Which are the most important ones, in your opinion?

-Well, the biggest service model is the one of charging for services on top of the software. So, I had
a friend of mine who took a proprietary piece of software, the company that had it was charging a
couple thousand dollars per license, and they were selling maybe three or four copies per quarter;
maybe per month, I dont really know how it was. But it was such a small amount, and my friend
took over the company and he said, You know, Im thinking about just making this software
completely free, completely open; just give it away. Because he noticed that sixty percent of the
people who bought the software, bought some educations courses, bought some services, update
services, because the software was very big, very developed ?, and people want to know how to
use it, so they bought the services. So, what would happen if I made it free? So, he made it free
and all of a sudden two thousand people a month would download his software from the net, and
sixty percent of them bought services, so he made more money than ever. This is the value model;
you can look at it as the cellphone model. To give away as many cellphones as you can, while the
make of your real money is the selling of the applications that go on top; or the Google model,
versus the Apple model of were going to go and keep it to ourselves, and both of them are
viable business models, but the Android is considered to be more of an open market place. Theres
another market, which is give away a certain portion of the software, and you allow, you build up
a community around it, things like that, and then you have other parts on top that you sell, and
you sell them to the big companies that are using your software. And I had a friend of mine who
did that; he would have a big piece of software that used to run different operating systems, he
had about five engineers working for him; these engineers were spending all their time on putting
the software in different systems, not creating new features the costumers wanted. So he opened
(Minute 08.18)

up the entire thing but he kept some pieces, proprietary. And he would watch as people ? the
software down of the server, and if they were moms and pops in small shops that couldnt afford
his software anyway, hell just say, Hey, enjoy, and have a good time. But if they were large
companies, he just called them up and said, I see you are using my software, would you like to
have these other parts? And what he did was, he lowered his supply process, he increased his
volume, he lowered his costs for sales, from 36% to 5%, it was a purely business decision. He had
no desire in his heart to have the glories of the source code available to everybody, it was a
business decision and he made more money than ever. So, people have to understand what this
business models are, and theres many of them, I just talked about a few. And these bases are the
things that are particularly viable today; the way you say volume in the world of computing
means something different today. Volume in 1969 was while programming was if you sold ten
computers a year you were doing great. What volume today, of a computer that is, you know, in
the lot bases its a commodity item, people think of it as a commodity item, is the way to go. And
what you can do to get that high volume its a lot of times, give away your software, and then
make your money in other places.

-And, what are the ethical or philosophical principles behind that purpose?

-Ok, well, the second question here means whether, if you talked to Richard Stallman of the ethics
about this, of the fact that sharing his good, giving his good why would you be holding on to this
stuff; intellectual, theres no such thing as intellectual property, and particularly in the case of
software, we give away a piece of software, its not like youve given it away, its just a copy , you
still have the original software, right, theres no lost to it; thats his philosophy. My philosophy
tends to be slightly different, I go along with a lot of what you said, but I do believe theres such a
thing as intellectual property; I believe that an author should have the right to say to what
happens to a thing that comes from their mind. What? If youre basing what youve done on
something that someone has done before, somebody elses license to ? with a GPL, then you need
to follow that license. Its your right not to accept that code, not to clothe your thing upon that ,
but when you look at society today, so much of what we have is based on what we learned before,
on what people brought before us. And, I take a look at what the Internet is doing today, and I
look at where computers where in 1969, when I started, and, in 1969, you needed two and a half
billion dollars to do much of anything with a computer. Typically there where large companies that
had them, typically had a Masters or PhD scientist even to touch it, ok, you know, and typically
they were from Western European nations, or the United States. And, if you werent from these
places and you didnt speak to one of the five major languages of the industry, yeah, tough luck.
Well, the world is different now; and the world is a place where we can buy a 35 dollar computer
called the Raspberry Pi, and we do that, all of a sudden you have high school kids in places like
Mexico, or Brazil, or India, or some other place, coming up with ideas that they can then
implement. And these computers are powerful enough to do anything that any reasonable
computer can do in the world. And all of a sudden we dont just have 50 great minds of computer
science thinking about this, we have thousands of hundreds of thousands of minds helping us. This
(Minute 12.46)

is one of the things that attracts me to free software or open source, because in a proprietary
company, you will hide these people behind closed doors, youll never see their names on the
software. But with free software, you can look at the mailing list, you can see the people who are
making the contribution, you can, you know

-Email them, or

-Email them, and they rise to the surface like cream rising on milk, and then you can skip them off.
So when Mark Shuttleworth wanted to start Ubuntu, he took the entire mailing list of the Debian
project, took a laptop with him, went to Antarctica and spend nine months down there, finding
out who had the good ideas, who ?, and he came back and said I want you, and you, and you,
and you to come work with me on Ubuntu. No HR person had to come and ask for an interview,
anyone like that, he knew who he was.

-He went there to look for talent?

-Thats right, and Im not so ? to think that the Albert Einstein of computer science is going to
come from the United States. They may come from Cambridge, England, or they may come from
Brazil, they may come from an as unlikely place as Helsinki, Finland, ok, but they may come and I
want to find them, I want to see them. I met a young boy at a campus party in Spain; he was 15
years old when I met him. He had put down his own Linux distribution at the age of 12 and a half,
he started his own company by the time he was fifteen and he had his father working for him, his
father had 30 years in the computer field working for IBM. His father left that, to come work for
his son, doing this Linux stuff. And today, hes finally graduated from high school, hes going to
university, hes doing fine, and hes a really nice guy, you know, really wonderful personality, not ?
at all, very humble; really a good kid, and Ill find him over time.

-Which other experience have you looked, or to your travelling all around the world, that showed
you that free software can empower this kind of people? I look at it with hope, because it really
gives power and possibilities to many, many people.

-So, Ill now start on a different tactic, and Ill talk about the fact that I come from a very strange
country, ok, I come from the United States. And we dont think anything at all about taking
Microsoft software, put it in our tanks, and our planes, and our ships, and our missiles, and things
like that, because after all the ? is a loyal U.S citizen. However, before the NSA,-you didnt think
twice of either-, and the other thing is that if you are from China, and you are Chinese, you know,?
, you may think twice about putting this software into your systems without at least looking at it,
and figuring out, its the same thing ?, is going to allow someone to just turn out your software
while your missiles are trying to get off the ground. Besides all of that, you want to be able to have
products which you tailored for your community. So, few years ago, - Ive got to get the name of
them right, its a tribe of Africa, its not the Zulus, one of the tribes of Africa wanted to have a
Word processer that would work in their language. Now, the Word processer could process their
(Minute 17.08)

language, but all the props came out in English, and Swahili, the Swahili. And, the Swahili people
wanted the props to be in Swahili, and they went to a certain company that had a very well-known
Office system, and they asked them, Could you please support Swahili? And the company said,
Well, no, its a too small market, which is not in our best business interest. So, the Swahili people
came to the Open Office people and said, Could we do this? and the Office people said, Well,
heres the source code, go do it, and the Swahili people sat down and within a couple of months
translated al the strings and had a Word processer that operated in Swahili; which isnt as easy as
it sounds, because the word download doesnt exist in Swahili language; well, it does exist, but
download means to take a package of the back of a truck and put it on the ground. So, every
time they came to the word download they had to put this long string of stuff explaining what
download really meant.

-So, they had to invent a new concept, or a new way to explain it

-Right, twenty years ago, when you went to Japan, and you were reading in the newspaper the tax
section, you would see a whole bunch of Kanji characters and in the middle you would see the
English characters rambling; and a bunch more, and CPU, and a bunch more. Takes time, for
languages to change some things sometimes; but the Swahili people now have another Word
processer that operates in their language. I was at a UN event in Ethiopia, when some people from
a very large company in the United States, announced that, next year, their operating system was
going to support Amharic, which is the native language of Ethiopia, the ancient language, the
language that Jesus probably wrote in, ok, and, I ? my Ubuntu system, brought down the language,
and there it was! Already supported along with other two hundred languages I had on my system.
So, in this event, the capabilities were no longer in a situation where the computers were used by
people who use one of the five major languages of the world, who do business in a particular way,
and they have to change their business to fit the way software works; with free software you
change the software to fit the way your business works, and that saves you a lot of money and
time. Now, how much does it take when you start up a businessLets say you want to start a
business, you need ten computers, you need ten operating systems, you need ten Office packages;
you need all this sort of things, a factor graphics editing software, you need a video editing
softwareThis is pretty expensive, especially for a small company who doesnt have much money.
Well, you could pirate some of this stuff, but thats illegal, right? And you might get caught by the
BSA sooner or later.

-And if youre starting a new company you dont want legal trouble, right?

-Exactly. But lets talk about another type of legal issue. I ? an operating system, and I want to
add software to go in the ? system, who are manufacturing this things and I need software to go
in there, and, I can call a particular company and negotiate with that to see how much its going to
cost, how I can have for a copy, and six months later Im still with my lawyer paying them, and I
dont have money to pay lawyers anyway, or I can use free software as long as I obey several little
things said in the license, you know, be nice to people, share your softwareI can just start, I dont
(Minute 21.24)

need any lawyers, I dont need to negotiate with anybody, I can just do it. So, many years ago I
went to Israel. Israel, as you know, is a very dynamic, technological country; particularly for how
small they are. And I went to Tel Aviv, and I was looking around and said, Where are all your Linux
companies? they said, Were waiting for the letter of authorization I said, What? The letter
of authorization; you know, if we were doing something with Microsoft, well write to Microsoft all
about ourselves and everything and after a while they would send this letter of authorization to
say that we are the representatives of Microsoft in Israel. Ok, good news. The bad news for you,
as if we start with the bad news first, youre not going to get that letter, theres nobody who can
give it to you, not even Linux Toolbars. The good news is, theres nobody who can give it to you, ?,
so, just go ahead and use it. Thats the good news. So, I left there, I went to India, I went to Delhi,
I get there and of course theres all these Indian people, ? and technology, and stuff like this, and I
say, Where are your free software companies? Were waiting for the letter of
authorizationSo, I said, You know, guys, just do it, and then itll take off. The kid, twelve and a
half years old, nobody told him about how difficult it was to make his own distribution; I met him
when he was fifteen, his father comes over to me and says, He works really hard at this, I say,
This is how I now he does, I know he does. But nobody told him he couldnt do it, nobody told
him it was too hard, nobody knows when ? with the Internet.

-Yeah, it has become part of our culture, in some ways, you can do it.

-And, the nice part of all this is, I come to countries, like Mexico, and I say You can stop this drain
of both money and brains in town, from Mexico, going to the United States. So, even though, you
know, I dont know what the piracy rate is for software is in Mexico; I know in Brazil is 84%, in
Vietnam is 96%. And people say to me, Theyre really bad, theyre stealing over software. I say,
the average Vietnamese makes four U.S dollars a day, Microsoft Office costs 400 dollars. That
means theyll have to work for hundred days without any food, housing or clothing to be able to
afford to buy the shiny, plastic disc. And they know the shiny, plastic disc doesnt cost 400 dollars
because they can buy it from the guy on the street for five . So, at the same time we tell them
You have to be on the Internet to do business, you have to. They can pull an old computer out of
the garbage and fix it up, but they cant afford the 400 dollars for Microsoft Office or the 200
dollars for the Microsoft operating system. And so, if I was on their boat, Ill put a black patch over
my eye and go, ar, ar, ar, ok. But here, I can say to them No, its legal, you know, heres the
software, heres the source code, use it, please, go ahead.

-What do you think about the fact that some governments, I think, third world countries
governments, havent embraced the open source and free software as a public policy? They have
been really shy, except Brazil and some other few countries.

-Ok, so I will differ about this, which is probably more than my large company in Washington, but
Ill say, it does take time and money to convert from using these proprietary products to using free
software; I mean, the town of Munich, Germany, recently took ten years just to switch over from
using proprietary software to all-free software. Now, Im of the opinion that it could happen a
(Minute 26.16)

little bit faster, but they took their time and they did it well, and now theyre completely
proprietary-software free. And, it does take time and money; some of these countries say, Well,
weve got all the software licenses we need, theyre all working really well and we are not going to
change just for the sake of change. Other countries, quite frankly, have opened up, and I think
theres enough documentation of this, to say that maybe some money crosses the palms of
various politicians, or theres family, as some politician works for a back large company in
Washington and therefore, there is, in a sense not to switch over to free software. But I think,
whats happening now is that people are beginning to understand that software is no longer the
luxury that used to be. We cant run companies and countries on adding machines, hand
calculators, books of tables; without software the planes stop flying and things like that. And
people are starting to think, Well, what happens if economic situations happen? What happens
if you know, I put it in a marge situation, What happens if we go to war, what happens if there
was a terrorist attack in Washington and the entire Microsoft office was destroyed? How do you
recover that? If youre looking at the far future, how you recover that? And then the NSA, would
do its good by saying, Oh, yeah, we capture the boxes coming from Taiwan and going to some
other country, we put it in the box, the ? , stuff like that, and it comes there. Now, some
companies or some countries may not have the facilities to be able to completely save themselves
from that. But a country the size of Brazil, a country the size of Mexico, could actually think of
themselves, We could build this things inside of our own country. We could give the design of the
chip for ? , or you have Intel right over here, or we can work with Intel, to make sure the
microcode in our chip is not bad. Or, we can use CoreBOOT which is an open bios, we can use
Linux as an open operating system, or compilers. We can check every single piece. Plus the fact
that we have to recognize that this operating system is developed around the world, by people of
all source of different political philosophies, and stuff like that. And if somebody was to put
something in there, somebody might notice it, and thats a problem. So, its less likely that
somebody would get trapped in a piece of open code than it would be in a piece of closed code.

-How would you encourage Mexican politicians to open their minds to these advantages? I mean,
we could

-Well, the first thing is, you really have to start with the universities, and this is about other big
point that Ive been going with universities is saying, Well, if you use close-source products to
teach your students, then the students see how to use close-source products to solve their
problems. But they cant see how the close-source products work; they cant look inside of them,
they cant figure out how this piece of software is actually doing what it does. With open-source,
you can do both: you can show them how to use the source code how to use the source-code to
solve their problem-, and how does this thing actually do that. This is particularly true in computer
science, you know, if you use cisco networking components, you can show the students how to set
up a network, show them how to take care of the ? ; you can show them how the tools actually
work. And, not only that, but in computer science is nice to teach students how to collaborate on
real projects. Now, when I was learning operating systems, I had to type my
(Minute 31.19)

operating system in on punch cards, and on an emulator ? frame. An somehow, I thought that my
little emulated operating system was not ever going to be useful to anybody so I didnt spend all
that much time working on it. But today you can actually have students work on a real life
operating system as used by millions of people around the world; you can show them how to go
in, test the operating system, fix a bug, how it works; its not just Linux, its also BSD, the Muck, the
Bird; its this one called Free Ghost, which is a free, open version of ? , completely binary
compatible to run Amastose(?). All language, every computer language in the world has an open-
source version of it; in fact, most of the started as open-source projects and still continuing with it,
and the only implementation, the only full-implementation that ever existed and still exists is from
the Gentoo system; you have data bases, you have , you have 430 thousand software projects,
that students can look at and say, Oh, yeah, I want to know how the video edit works, I want to
know how to ? , and use it, and look at it.

-This has been discussed in our university, and there was a discussion before, about very
specialized software for architects, or for designers, or for video editors and things like that. The
main argument is that those software made by ? , are more powerful than the open source
software. Is that true? Our should students use InDesign and Photoshop because thats the
industry-based software? Is it better than the other stuff?

-What would happen if Adobe ran out of business? Then, all of a sudden theres no Adobe
software. Do your students now go back to university and have to have their degree taken back,
because they cannot longer use Adobe software? I dont believe that you should be teaching
students how to use the package. I believe you should be teaching students design with Adobe as
an example, and Inscape as an example. You should be teaching them how to run their business
with the Office package, with Microsoft as an example, and Libre Office as an example. And then
the students could go in and figure out, which is what they should be doing, which is the best
solution for their particular needs. A few years ago comes this company called Nortel, maybe you
remember that, and at one time they were the second largest telephone company on the face of
the earth, and there was Nortel certification. You got your certification to Nortel, ok, and people
had always Nortel certifications, thousands of thousands of Nortel certifications, and then in a
period of about two years, Nortel went completely bankrupt and disappeared, and all the Nortel
certifications worth nothing. So, when you want to train people, my education of 1969 is in such a
low level that today, or three-five years later, its still just as good. Yes, Ive learned things along
the way, Ive read books and stuff, but if understood what those things that said before I had that
education. If you only teach people a black box then, when something else comes along, its a
different box, theyre completely lost. You need to teach them at a low level. And Im going to be
giving a talk tomorrow at five o clock, about performance. A lot of things in that talk that Im
going to say, that the people who only know the language ?, its going to go completely over their
(Minute 35.52)

heads. Because Im going to be talking about registers, Im going to be talking about cash, talking
about how a machine actually works; not what they expect, that the programmers will probably
program in (?) language in ten years. But because I know how the machine works, in my mind is
this logical thing for me to go to my (?)language. And Im forcing the machine to do more than
what it should have to do. And because I know it, I can tell the compiler, generate the machine
language, and I can look at it; and I bow it, you know, I can code this one way, and generate these
instructions, I put it a slightly different way and I generate other instructions; its going to be
faster.

-I wanted to talk to you about some obstacles for the free-software movement; Im an Ubuntu
user since like five or six years, and when I encourage my family or friends to use it, they say, Its
too hard, I have to learn something, the drivers dont work, and that kind of stuff. What is your
reaction to this?

-As I was trying to get people to use free-software I ran into all those kinds of questions. In fact,
after a while, I realized I kept getting the same ten questions, over and over again, still in different
ways; they werent questions, they were objections: I cant use it because So I gave this talk,
Then ten reasons why I cant use Linux and the ten reasons why these ten reasons are crap. And,
the good news is, the reasons are still there, but theyre even more crap than they were ten years
ago: Its too hard to use, its too hard to install. I mean, my God, I take my DVD, I put it on there
and I go tap, tap, tap, tap, fifteen times, and the most of the times it installs. It actually installs
even faster and better on the server. It would install even better if we did the proper things like
videa or ETI,? , it would install in a lot more things, if various companies, if we did had a massive
amount of that stuff. Now, as changing all this, are things like Android, so Android uses the Linux
kernel, and the device drivers, a lot of desktop device drivers, are being written for Android to go
once to things like tablets, just to fight back. So, more and more hardware menders are now,
cuding out device drivers and some of them are actually playing them as source-codes. And I dont
really care, theyre selling their hardware, what do I care. And, you know, consumer pressure will
eventually bring the outliers in.

-For example, in desktop software, because the Mac has become like the standard, you know, this
Steve Jobs idea that ? should be easy and treaty, and I think they do a great job. I hate Mac

-And I wont greed, I wont greed on that; Apple does a great job on doing that. But you have to
look at the Apple model. The Apple model is that we own everything, from the ground up; we own
the hardware, we own the operating system, and into large extend we own the applications, we
specify exactly how they have to be since theyre the first of all. That is a business style guide, that
they invented years ago, Macintosh go; in fact that was the big difference between the LISA and
the Macintosh. The LISA was, heres the application store. The Mac, at the style guide, says, You
put your application on here but it wont be an Apple application until you follow the style guide,
and everybody complained and moaned, and stuff, until finally the first Mac application came out.
(Minute 40.35)

And people looked at it and said, Well, ok, so what, and the second Mac application came out
and it looked like it was written by the person who wrote the first one, even though they were two
different companies, and all of a sudden people wentSo, yes, it isnt that its easy to use, it is
consistent, ok, so you learn the first one then you learn everything else. Linux is not consistent; we
have Canol, we have EDP, we have GDP plus, we have UT .People wrote Witcher system, even
though this is thank God falling away, they wrote their own Witcher system, their own scrawl bars,
their own button boxes, and they all work slightly different. So, that lack of consistency, and, the
style guide also says things like, How can you change files ? and stuff like that, so everything
works exactly the same, thats the good news. Whats the bad news? Well, if I want to get this
piece of device three years supported, Ive to get Apple to support it for me, because theres just
no way that the ? . And there are some things theyre not going to support. And, when they decide
that this piece of hardware was no longer interesting, they drop support for it. I think were
starting to see the first of the iPhones, Mac isnt being supportive anymore. And thats fine

-The AC connectors, if you buy the new model you have to buy a new port; its absurd.

-Well, thats yet another thing about Apple which is, you knowAll right, everybody else was
supporting USB, Apple just fought that, fought that, Firewire was the way to go. Now this goes
back to the Munichs works; ? versus news, ? ; Apple may be bright, Firewire may be superior to
USB but it lost, face it. If youre going to have Firewire also put USB, because your costumers
would love you dearly but no, they refuse to do it, ok. Micro, USB is the power connector of the
world, face it, Apple.

-So you are forced to, for example, to use an rejecter, you can use a special How do you explain
that even when these things happen people continue to use and buy the product?

-Well, because theyre good, Ill admit that, theyre good, they do a very good job, but theres a
couple of things about it. You say people continue to buy it if you have the money, ok, theyre very
expensive. And, you know, you take a look at the iPhone Im just peeking something designed by
Apple-, but take a look at the rich market place at Android; all the different hardware sets, all the
different manufacturers competing with each other to drive down the price. And you have small
Android devices, you have larger Android devices, you have Samsung, Galaxy, gigantic. Then you
have the smaller ones, that are less expensive, but as fast, and when the companys lost interest in
this, you have a whole bunch of groups that say, Hey, we have an image that we can plug in
there, and they start using the software the company has, and you can use ours, and you
continue to use the device until the last person drops dead. So this are the issues, I mean, Apple
wont even let you change a battery, neither would Google. If you have a Google ? it wont let you
change the battery. You know something? Samsung will let you change the battery; isnt that
wonderful? And I will remind you that Steve Jobs declared that no one would ever use a seven
inch tablet, that the ten inch tablet was the smallest that anyone would ever have, and now Apple
is coming out with a seven inch tablet because Google is cleaning their clock with the seven inch
tablet.
(Minute 45.31)

-I often like to talk about the influence of the free software movement in other fields, other
cultural fields and, I see open design,? , open music, Wiki literature, Wikipedia; how do you see
the influence you have in all those other fields?

-Well, I mean, its kind of been a surprise, we always continue to be surprised in different ways;
Wikipedia was probably the biggest surprise we had. All these people that had all these paper
encyclopedias that cost you 400, or 500, or a thousand dollars to have, and then you would buy it
every year, right? And so there was that, and all of a sudden comes this guy, Wikipedia, and
generates this thing what people contribute to it; or Open Street Maps, where people contribute
to it. First it was your maps, your paper maps, your guides, and all of a sudden there was Google
Maps! Thats just really cool, and the whole industry just like, disappeared. And then somebody
says, You know, Google Maps is good as it is, buts its not really all open and free, so we start
Open Street Maps, people go around and you say How good is that going to be? well, it is good,
it is very good. And, these are things that are always surprising. Now, the concept of open
hardware was also an interesting thing, because all we all once say is, the difference of
software/hardware is while you give away a piece of software but you still have a copy, but
obviously if I give this away no longer have this, right? And this requires real material to go into
building, a real facility to build them in, and these facilities are really expensive so, how do you
make that money back? And it just so happens that a friend of mine, from Lincoln Massachusetts
had this idea for something, and he said, You know, Im going to create this little chip that is going
to have sixteen cores to it, so its probably going to be as powerful as most server systems today,
and, oh, by the way, I can take that up to be four thousand ninety-six core if I get the correct
fabrication plan, pay them enough money to shrink that thing down so I can get four thousand
ninety-six cores in something this size, still using less than five watts of power. So, he did the
design using open-source software tools, which were free to him, ? , and he got the design done
but then he realized that, You know, I have to sell people on this, I need to show them how good
this works. So what I need is a developers board that I can put my chip on there, and show people
how great this is. How do you do that? Designing a board for your design, with six layers and stuff
like that, so, he started a project, and he presold a whole bunch of these boards with a sixteen
core CPU, and using a standard CPU that has two burn cores, and a field programmable ATR, its a
digital signal process on chips, and he had people help him design this by making the whole design
of the board completely open. So, if you go to his website today, you can get a complete design
from a certain core, you get a complete listing of all the parts that , you can get your own surface,
and then you factor this. And all he asks is buy the chip from him, thats what hes selling. And
today as a sixteen core CPU and a sixteen core CP

-Whats the name of the site?

-So you go to parallela.org, just like this one. This is actually working viral, a version of this, but its
easy to see outside the plastic.
(Minute 50.17)

-I saw it before we were doing are talk, I saw the stuff theyre doing, and its amazing.

-Well, this entire board, which has its little expanders on the bottom so you can expand it, this
entire board costs 95 dollars. Now, I look at the Raspberry Pi, I love the raspberry pie; people I was
friends with, a couple of people, started a project, and I was ? , but the Raspberry Pi is a great little
computer for high school students; it shows them how to program and stuff. Maybe for first year
college students to show them how to build electric circuits with ? . But this is what a senior
university student should be having; be able to program the FPGA, be able to program ?, be able
to program the parallel ?. To know the fact that you need to treat this two chips differently,
because this is very fast and you have to take time to load it up, ? .This, you got two cores that
access main memory over time. So, this has a whole round of different types of things, that the
students should be exposed to, ? . So you mention the ?? . ? created a chip with a whole operating
system on it, ok, you only low down a single process, a single process once in a year. So, youve got
to have a box every year to ? into that. But this on the other hand, is a four-core ? processer, with
a gigabyte of memory on it, but it shares with a ? processor and another board in there, and you
can actually run the Linux from the motherboard and then just move your program into the ? . And
the ? can run things on real time because theres not operating system on it, and then it can give
the data stuff to the Linux system, translate it into a peace of GIP or anything else.

-Thats amazing. For example, the same idea of ?, I think we owe you that.

-Oh, you say me

-No, not you, the community. The whole thing about thinking projects, community-based projects,
and the power of what a connected network can do

-You know, many years ago, NASA had a very famous problem that they handed out to people;
What would happen if a team of people were on a spaceship and they crashed down to the
Moon, and you only have so much that you can carry, you have all these things gathered around,
different objects, and you can only carry so much, and you have to walk from where you are to the
base, which is so many miles away. What do you take with you, what is the priority of the things
you take with you? And there were things like a gun, things like water, air, food, and, you know,
and they would take the smartest people and say, Make the list, and they would make their list,
and they would say, Ok, now all you people get into groups, two, three people, get into groups,
and you have to make a list again, but you have to come to consensus of what goes on the list.
And they would do that, they would make their list, and ? . And then they would compare the list
against with what NASA considered to be ? , and without fail, without fail, even the smartest
person was worse than the whole team. And thats what you have to get through collaboration;
that your giving up, that ability comes up with very good solutions, that Albert Einstein of
computer sciences is not ? . Thats really exciting; fair frankly Im coming to the end of my
programming career, you know, Ive been doing this for 45 years, I still will for five years or so and,
(Minute 55.02)

I wont be able to have too much of a concentration power in me for programming. But, the fact
that I see kids like these that have access to the code they need, to be able to do what they want,
and to be able to change that code to meet their needs, thats very exciting. Lawrence Lessig, in
his creative comments, solved a problem that most of people didnt understand. He said, Hey,
theres this photograph; I would love to use this photograph but its a lot of effort to find the
person who has it. And even if you do find him and communicate with them, if youre not offering
an amount of money, he sees really no sense on letting you use it, unless he says, Well, ok, you
put my name on it so I go famous and maybe some other people will buy some other stuff from
me. But most of the time, the people say, No, they wouldnt care if you did. So, if you say, as
you make the photograph, these are the conditions that you can use it for free, just go ahead, then
all of a sudden things become a lot easier. But this all thing of ?, and say, Hey, if its for a project,
go ahead, but if youre going to be selling it, I want to have a piece of action. You can change it,
you can make it a different product. No, no, no, I dont like that, I dont want to make it a different
product; you can use it without having to say where it came from. No, no, no, I want to have
attribution. And just with this ?, there are different things, and you can still, because youre the
copyright owner, you can still license about some other way to some other person, its ok. And to
put all that stuff together ? .

-I think thats amazing. I see like a battle between the closed models, you know, not just in
software, Amazon is a bunker, and the videogame industry, but I see like a battle between the East
Coast models and the more collaborative models.

-The videogame industry is actually opening up; theyre having different models also. What theyre
doing is, theyre giving away the ? software, going to ? machine, and then back on the server,
which you have to connect to, they have all the data and stuff like that to make up a story. Now,
again, you have to say, What is the benefit of the ? to the costumer of all of this? So, you know,
having the source code for the client means that I can fix little problems in my particular machine.
If its not working very well, I can fix the code to make it work. So, thats the value to them, and no
matter how old my machine is, as long as its a group of people that may have a board for my
machine, Ill find the support to do that. But if they made that the binary only model then Im
stuck, I cant get it to work; the server may be there or may not be there; theres nothing I can do
about that. But thats their problem and not mine. And they know what machine their server is
into the operating system and stuff is running on, and everything like that.

-Well Jon, to close the interview I would like to ask you, what do you tell people who think free-
software is a big ? ? That, normal people, that

-I hate to tell you this, but normal people are already using free software; if using Firefox or
Chrome using free software. If using a cisco router, like Linksys or ? or something like that youre
using free software. If using most of the intelligent TV sets coming out from Samsung and stuff like
that, youre using free software. If youre using the POS post office of all, youre using free
software. If youre using something from eBay, or even having Amazons code itself that goes on
(Minute 59.45)

top, maybe proprietary, what you see underneath is Linux, so youre already using free software. If
youre using the Internet at all, all the BNS surfers or programs are running of a program called
Mind, which was written by a friend of mine named Paul Something, which is free software. So,
Im sorry, youre already using free software. In fact, if youre using IOS or XOS, this is all based on
free PSD, youre using free software. Mister Jobs may have put some candy pudding on the top of
it, and they may have done a lot of work on ?, but theyre still using free software. Next was also
free software, so, you know, sorry. If youre trying to tell meIve this friend of mine who was
analyst but he did this technical announce, he analyzed technical systems, and when I first started
working with Linux I said, Hey man, what do you think about Linux?, he goes, Its a toy. Now,
to be fair, Linux was single-threaded, only 32 ?, had no low base file systems, and no threading
colonel, whereas the Unix system had all of these things. So, about six months later, or maybe it
was a year, I said to him, What do you think about Linux now?, and he said, Its eating-
interesting. Another year goes by, and I ask him, What do you think of Linux now?, and he says,
Im recommending it to my clients for all except for meshing critical types of apple juices. And
finally, we had this enterprise conference down in Washington D.C, whit all these IDG things, right,
and I purposely invited this guy ? . And after we all finished with evaluation of operating systems
with enterprises situations and that stuff, I said, Jonathan, Illuminati was his company, it is his
company, and I went through this whole thing and said, Jonathan, what do you think of Linux
now? He looks to me and says, I would recommend Linux for anything; I said, Thank you,
Jonathan, thats what I thought you would say. And that, by the way, was over ten years ago, so, I
think that somebody is saying to the ? , are ready to go away. When I gave my father and mother
their first computer, the way that they ran it, was they had a notebook and they wrote down step
by step what clicks they were going to do; if anything changed they were lost, and this is how a lot
of people did it. And, when Microsoft e-facto standard on a desktop, they could do that without
writing down the answers anymore. People are now used to the fact that theyre using Android
driving it from an IOS system, using web browsers, sometimes its called Firefox, sometimes its
called Internet Explorer, and these things are all different. So without learning it step by step
anymore, theyre learning the concepts behind it, this is scrawl bar; and I dont know if its
actually out there, but Im going to bet it is. And I know also that when my parents were retired,
they went to a retirement home, and the retirement home had a computer, and when they first
moved in everything was Windows. But by the time my parents died there were already people
there doing Linux, and some of the older people would tell the ones who were not using Linux,
Why are you still using that Windows crap?! They werent afraid to try new things, and that is
why free software bonds the very old and the very young, because both of those groups are not
afraid of trying new things, are not afraid to fail. They fail, they pick themselves back up and I think
that is going to help a lot.

-Thank you, Jon.