FLOSS Weekly 700 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word.
Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

 Doc Searls (00:00:00):
This is FLOSS Weekly. I'm Doc Searls. This week Shawn Powers and I talk with Jonathan Corbit of LW n That's Linux Weekly news. He's been doing this since the nineties. It is a brilliant publication. He is deeply involved in everything having to do with Linux and the colonel especially, and what's going on with Sea versus Rust and Conservatism in this system, and how the whole Linux kernel community works. It's deep stuff. It could not be more important. And that is coming up next.

Announcer (00:00:41):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is, TWIT

 Doc Searls (00:00:44):
This is FLOSS Weekly episode 700. Recorded Wednesday, September 28th, 2022. THE LINUX KERNEL GETS RUSTY. This episode of FLOSS Weekly is brought to you by Kolide. That's Kolide with a K Kolide As an end point security solution built around honest security, you can meet your security goals without compromising your values. Visit Kolide.com/FLOSS to learn more and activate a free 14 day trial today. No credit card required. And by i r l at original podcast From Mozilla. IRL is a show for people who build AI and people who develop tech policies hosted by Bridget Todd, this season of IRL looks at AI in real life. Search for IRL in your podcast player. Hello again. Everybody, everywhere in the world. I amd, Doc Searls and this is FLOSS Weekly and I am joined this week with a very ENT looking and perhaps not sounding Shawn Powers. There he is. I sound you green.

 Doc Searls (00:01:52):
Yeah, so he's, he's making trouble lately by dying his hair green and wearing his green shirt, which I noted earlier to people Eve dropping on her back channel, uh, makes him look like a Celtics fan, which I am. Uh, but he is probably not. I don't think he gives a damn, really? Do you? I have a cat named Larry Bird. Oh really? Wow. I do. That's cool. I like that. See, you didn't expect that as he or she has he or she eaten birds? I used to have. Now Wild Cats would bring them home to me, you know, you know, they'd bring back a pre robin or something and lay it at my feet and look up and go around like, cuz I'm the alpha cat and, you know, would appreciate that. And why don't you eat this? I mean, <laugh>. Yeah, exactly.

 Doc Searls (00:02:41):
I'll take it. So, and it's interesting cuz I'm wearing a purple shirt and you're wearing a green one. There's just something to that, maybe to as a non theme. I just, But it's together and, and we are the jumper. Right? And it's almost looks like team. Yeah, maybe like team colors. So our, our guest today is, uh, is Jonathan Corbit. Who, who's who I've not known personally very well, but, but have known his work for a very long time. And with L WN Linux Weekly News, which is persistent and authoritative and complete as complete as can be. So have you, have you kept up with that? I mean, we're both with Linux Journal.

Shawn Powers (00:03:17):
Yeah, that's

 Doc Searls (00:03:18):
Actually funny up until, Go ahead, sorry.

Shawn Powers (00:03:21):
No, no. I mean, and I'll, I'll talk more when he's here too. But it's funny, my, my relationship with L WN is, uh, I'll wait until he, until he is on with this. But, um, I purposefully tried not to go there for all of my information because it felt like cheating. So

 Doc Searls (00:03:38):
<laugh> because, because Aly Journal. Yeah, I suppose I, I went there because I would cheat. That is a great way to cheat. But anyway, <laugh>, So, um, let, let's, let's get into This's probably the first concern himself. Refer to it that way. Uh, our, our guest, our guest today is, is, uh, is Jonathan Corbet. Um, he's, uh, the colonel documentation maintainer co-founder of L w n.net. Please go there. And the author of its Colonel Page, a member of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board, the lead author of Linux Device Driver, third Edition, lives in Boulder, Colorado. And there's so much more going on than that. Um, uh, Jonathan, welcome to the show. Um, there he is visibly Oh, and, and thank

Jonathan Corbet (00:04:24):
You. Pleasure to be here.

 Doc Searls (00:04:26):
Are are those books behind you mostly tech or are mostly Linux related, or are volumes of lwn or what?

Jonathan Corbet (00:04:35):
No, they're mostly science fiction, actually. And then you can find, see things like Edward Tufty up in the, sorry, wrong up in the corner over there. Um, the, the tech books are off to the side where you don't see 'em, but where I can reach them without getting outta my chair.

 Doc Searls (00:04:49):
Yeah, yeah. There's, um, you, you could always tell back when they still had people worked in offices and they had cubicles. You tell who the hackers were by all of their O'Reilly books on the shelf in their cubicle. You know, there was that. I don't think they tried to hide them, but arms, arms, arms length was, was how that went. Yeah. So, mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you wonder, do you rely on print that much or do you, do, would you rather go online for, for your wisdom on that stuff? That's just an off the wall question that one is prepared with, but it came to me.

Jonathan Corbet (00:05:25):
I, I still occasionally go to the print books usually for things like, if I have to figure out something with sql. I mean, you know, SQL is not my area and it hasn't changed much, so I'll go get mys SQL book for, for current stuff. You, you generally wanna go online anymore. And so I haven't bought a lot of books in recent times. I think a whole lot of other people haven't either.

 Doc Searls (00:05:49):
Yeah. Well, let's, you know, O'Reilly still seems to be alive and they have subscriptions going and let, let's go into that for a second because I think, I mean, something I've noticed lately is that everybody wants a pay wall. <laugh>, you know, every, you know, you go online and you, you click on the Atlantic, you click on New York Times, you click on on lots of, of, uh, of, of sources. And they, you know, they'll give you, give, either give you very little or they give you nothing and say, and they, and they tease you and go to a paywall. You've actually had a paywall publication for a very long time, so you're ahead of the game there and you've probably been ahead of it. Has that been the case from the start that, uh, LN has been subscription Only Don't think, it wasn't Tell Us

Jonathan Corbet (00:06:36):
Was Lwn was actually not meant to be the focus of what we were doing. Uh, me and, and my friend Liz Kuba, a long time compatriot, um, we wanted to start a consulting business around Linux, cuz it was about 19 96, 97 when we were thinking about this. And we thought this Linux thing might be going somewhere. So we were gonna make a consulting business with, and I guess mostly focused on system administration and such, but we didn't really have all that strong an idea of what we were gonna do. But we did know that we needed to draw attention. So l w n was our at attention getter. It was the way that we were gonna show the world just how current we are and how we, how much we knew about the, the Linux world. And since we were keeping up with Linux colonel mailing list, which was, you know, all of a hundred messages a day in those days, nobody else could possibly keep up with that.

Jonathan Corbet (00:07:33):
So we could share our work with the community and at the same time, draw attention without would surely lead to lots and lots of business. Um, it didn't, but, but it did definitely lead to a lot of attention to L W N. So we eventually pivoted over to that. We initially wanted to do it as an advertising supported thing, cuz that's what everybody was doing back in 1998 or so, when, when we were making these decisions. And then the.com thing hit and the sort of Linux wave at the very end of the.com boom hit us. And we got acquired briefly by a company that wanted to use us as sort of a piece of their Linux court portal. Because in those days everybody was gonna make their money by having the, the online portal for, for Linux and open source software. And of course that didn't last very long either.

Jonathan Corbet (00:08:27):
And in 2002, we were cast out on our own again. And we tried the ad supported thing again for Bit. And, um, trying to make a living as an ad supported website in 2002 really just didn't work very well for anybody who was doing it. So we initially decided to just throw in the towel and then our readers started throwing money at us and saying, you should really do this as a subscription oriented thing. So I went and hacked on the site code for a while, and it's actually almost exactly 20 years ago now that I think about, it was in September that we launched as a subscription supported site.

 Doc Searls (00:09:07):
I, I, I'm wondering, um, it's interesting to me that your, your, um, your readers led you to that. It, it's funny cuz I, I I would follow the L kml, the Linux curl mailing list a lot. I'm not a, the only code I know is Morris. So I, I didn't know a lot too much of what they were actually talking about in many cases. But I enjoyed watching, watching how it all moved. But what you had with l w and was like more than an accessory to that, it was like, it was amazing companion. Um, and, and I'm wondering if you thought of it that way, that that, that the two kind of went hand in hand.

Jonathan Corbet (00:09:49):
Well, we obviously tried to go along with what was going on in the community and to try to make that community activity more accessible to a wider range of people. Cuz even back at the beginning, the volume of the traffic was hard, even for people in the center of the community to follow much harder if you weren't really current with what was going on and what the people there were talking about. So we wanted to make it accessible to the, to the wider world. And I think we've, hopefully we've succeeded in doing that over, over the, the decades since then. But yeah, that was our goal.

Shawn Powers (00:10:27):
<laugh>, I do have a question. Uh, and specifically I would like to know all of your, uh, secrets. No, not, not really. Um, what I'm curious about is you manage to, to get all sorts of information, and I have a unique understanding of how difficult it is to come up with, uh, pertinent, uh, relative interesting, timely information on a regular basis. And so I'm a little bit curious how you go about procuring all of the information that goes into l w n uh, however, uh, before you answer Doc, do you wanna, do you wanna tell us about something

 Doc Searls (00:11:06):
Or do you wanna tease that? I was just trying to Yeah, what we, what we, just a little, um, detail in how we work here. We, you know, we have several ads during the show, and so <laugh>, we, we decide how do we wanna Shawn ruin it? What comes after the next ad or whatever. So just go

Shawn Powers (00:11:24):
Then let me, Okay. Pretend I didn't say anything. You can edit that out if you

 Doc Searls (00:11:26):
Wanna. It's after the, It's

Shawn Powers (00:11:27):
Fine. It's, So, Jonathan, how is it that you get the bulk of your information and the reason that I, I'm curious, uh, one, I'm not going to be stealing your thunder at this point. Back when I, when I wrote for Lennox Journal every month I had to come up with like half a dozen interesting stories. And that was a challenge. Um, you do more than that, <laugh>, it must be a challenge. I'm just curious how you manage to, uh, get so much, uh, information. Is it, is it all you, do you have a, a team of people that are nerdier than any of us that just, you know, scour the internet looking for, uh, information?

Jonathan Corbet (00:12:07):
Um, I mean, it's not just me. We're currently down at a relatively low level staff with exactly two people. Um, I'm very much looking to hire writers, by the way, should anybody wish to, to enter into this life of, of intriguing adventure in terms of gathering information, What we do for the most part is follow the public discussions. We don't, we really work from public sources almost exclusively. We don't have, you know, people sneaking us information from behind corporate firewalls or anything like that. We just don't operate that way. So my main way of operating, especially in the kernel community, is to subscribe to several dozen mailing lists, not just Len External. And I've developed ways of working through them very quickly to try to pick out the, the discussions that would make interesting topics. And usually with that, finding topics isn't that hard to do.

Jonathan Corbet (00:13:03):
It's more a matter of narrowing it down to the ones that can actually be dealt with in a timely sort of way. Um, we do also, you know, watch websites and all that and try to follow some discussions happening in, in, um, you know, in discourse servers and online forums and all that sort of thing. The movement of discussions to online forums is actually making our life a whole lot harder because they're much harder to follow than a mailing list is, especially if you spent decades developing a lot of tools to help you follow being list in a quick way. But, um, without N NTP and G News and a few things like that, it would be a whole lot harder.

 Doc Searls (00:13:47):
So, um, we have a, uh, I, you gave us a great tease right there with, um, with the, uh, intrigue and adventure line. So I have some questions about that. But first I have to let people know, this episode of Last Weekly is brought to you by Kolide, that's Kolided with the k it admins often feel like they have to choose between their commitment to cyber security and their duty to protect the employee's privacy. Naturally, you need to safeguard company data against hack and breaches, but you don't want to turn your workplace into 1984. Traditional MDMs give the IT team complete access and control over company devices. But since employees are inevitably going to use their work laptops for personal activities, these tools can saddle you with surveillance capabilities you never wanted, like access to photos and browser history. So before you know it, your end users are complaining about all the security agents slowing down their laptops.

 Doc Searls (00:14:44):
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 Doc Searls (00:16:04):
Okay. So, so Jonathan, you provided us with some really rich, um, and useful background material including a, uh, a slide deck you prepared, um, after an event, I think it was in Europe or something like that, whatever it was, you, you, you went into, it seemed to be like the biggest issue in there was rust and the use of rust for working on the kernel and where that's going. Uh, do you want to expand on that a little bit? Because the, the curls traditionally developed in sea, rust is coming in, there's a lot of rust developers out there. It's kind of the hot, the hot code base. The hot code right now. So what's going on with that? Especially the adventure and the intrigue? Yeah, I said especially the adventure and the intrigue, we want the juice

Jonathan Corbet (00:16:53):
Right come not necessarily a lot of intrigue there. You know, the colonel has, as you said, been written in the c programming language. There was a brief experiment with c plus plus way, way back in the early nineties that didn't work very well at all. It was averted after I think just one release, one development release. And it's all been seen assembly ever since then. In recent years, there has been a push to incorporate the rust programming language. Rust, of course, has its origins in, in Mozilla some 10 years, but more than 10 years ago at this point, they tried to design a programming language that would make it very difficult to write code with many types of common errors. C of course makes it very easy to create all kinds of memory safety and other sorts of errors. And we've been doing this sort of backyard action trying to fix these errors for decades in the kernel and in many other software projects as well.

Jonathan Corbet (00:17:53):
The program and language can help with that. It can make sure that you're not accessing memory in ways that that will create bugs and security bugs particular. So a few years ago, a few developers said that Rust ideal for, for use within the kernel, in fact, that the Rust developers wanted rust to be suitable for, for kernel type developments. Because I, in the sense that it should be suitable for low level development and in particular non imposed sorts of performance penalties that other sorts of languages that have managed run times to provide memory safety and such impose. So Russ should be suitable for that. These developers have been working in this direction for some time. They've managed to get a bit of of corporate support behind that and trying to show that you can in fact write colonel modules in the rust language. This effort has come to the to head over the last couple of years.

Jonathan Corbet (00:18:51):
We discussed it at the Kernels Maintainer Summit one year ago and pretty much concluded that Rust would be incorporated. It would be allowed into the ker as an experiment to see how it would go. But that didn't happen over the last year at the Colonel Maintainer Summit just two weeks ago, it was decided that would happen for the 6.1 Nel release, the merge window for 6.1 will be opening in actually just after just next week. And that NEL release can be expected to happen in December, probably about mid-December. So the initial incorporation of rust into the kernel would be a pretty minimal sort of thing. The, the infrastructure will be there, it will be something for people to play with. There will be no production code that, um, that people will be running written in rust at that point. But there are things that are coming, There's some very interesting things, including an NVMe driver that was written in Rust.

Jonathan Corbet (00:19:51):
The latest kernel already has a very well optimized well debugged and VME driver. And c the rust one was an exercise to see how well that would work in rust. And they've managed to get performances just slightly short of, of the kernel's C driver without really even trying all that hard. It was a really spectacular demonstration I think, of how well this can work. So going forward we will see what happens with it. There's seems to be a lot of interest from people who would not otherwise be Colonel developers on working on the Colonel now that Rust is there. I I hope it's gonna bring a lot of new faces into our community and I hope that over time it will show that we can write safer code in a safer language that we don't have to use c for that kind of programming. So that's, that's kind of where it stands. The experiments is really just beginning in the sense that once it gets into the main line, there's gonna be a lot more attention on it and we'll see a lot more people starting to play with it.

Shawn Powers (00:20:55):
So I'm curious, um, I'm, I'm kind of a big fan of Rust. I'm not a Rust developer, um, at all. But, uh, you know, we've, we've interviewed Rust developers here on the, on the show. And, uh, just in general, I'm curious, is there, uh, any pushback against the idea of introducing Rust into the actual Linux Journal? I mean, that seems like a kind of a huge deal. Uh, and I I I've been around communities long enough to know that, uh, communities don't always agree on everything. So is there pushback and if so, w do you think that's going to, uh, be an issue or will people just get on board or don't you really know

Jonathan Corbet (00:21:33):
This is the kernel community? We don't agree on anything <laugh>, but, um, there is a bit of pushback and you just put up a slide from my talk that there was a, a post from one longtime criminal developer who, who actually fuels outright insulted by the idea that we need something like rust to, to avoid creating bugs in the kernel. Most people I think, don't feel that way. I think that what I would describe is not necessarily push back so much as nervousness because people don't know how well it's going to work in the kernel. I mean, that part we'll see, but if rust is actually adopted for production kernel code, then we have an awful lot of maintainers with, with decades of sea experience, who are now gonna have to learn the rust programming language well enough to review code that is being submitted while enough defined bugs in it and to maintain it going forward.

Jonathan Corbet (00:22:30):
And that, that makes a lot of people nervous because that's, that's a lot of learning that's gonna have to be done. You don't really learn rusts over a weekend. It's, it takes some time to, to get a handle on it. In fact, I'm still working on it fairly hard. I'm kind of, you know, working my way through, through the book <laugh> and all that. Um, but you have to write a fair amount of code, I think, to, to get a handle on it. And then the interface of Rust to the kernel and the abstractions that are being built to do kernel type things in Rust are yet another thing that are gonna have to be learned. So there's, there's gonna be a lot of, of learning that goes on. And the, the people who are promoting rest in the kernel who are pushing it, are gonna have to do a lot of, of handholding and support work for quite a while. I think they, they understand this. I think they're ready for it. They're, they say that they're prepared to do this, but is it's going to be a, um, it's going be an interesting process to watch over the next year or two.

Shawn Powers (00:23:32):
<laugh> it, I mean, it makes perfect sense to me. And again, no, I mean, nobody has asked me and nobody should ask me because my opinion is, is, is worth very little. Uh, but, uh, my experience with Rust as somebody who has talked to a lot of developers, uh, about it is that it certainly seems to make a lot of sense and part of its difficulty is also part of its strength, right? It, it, it requires you to write really good code, uh, or just doesn't work right. And, um, uh, again, that, that's a strength. So I, I hope that, uh, that things move forward smoothly. But, um, you, you kind of echoed what my suspicions were, uh, in that there are a lot of people who would have to learn a lot in order to make any sort of significant transition, uh, especially in the, in in the main kernel itself. So I appreciate that and, and that's gonna be something that's, uh, interesting to watch. And where could we go to follow <laugh>, such a thing? Is there a website that we could possibly subscribe to with regular? I can imagine one. Yes,

Jonathan Corbet (00:24:42):
I can imagine one. We'll definitely be watching it. Um, to sort of finish that out, I, I described one of the challenges. There is another one, which is that certain things are just hard to do in Rust. Uh, one of the core data structures in the next kernel is that is a doubly link list. We use them everywhere. We have, um, thousands and thousands of these do link list. And for reasons I could get into implementing a doubly linked embedded list in the rust programing language is almost impossible. There was a separate

Shawn Powers (00:25:13):
Workshop Yeah, that, Yeah, sorry, separate. I was just agreeing with you as I mumbled along. Go ahead. <laugh>.

Jonathan Corbet (00:25:20):
There was a separate workshop that was held in, in northern Spain just before the, the Links plumbers conference and all that, that I was privileged enough to go to. And a big part of that workshop was trying to deal with the problem of not really even implementing this WLY link list structure, but just initializing it. How can you initialize it in a way that that fits into the rust programming language and allows developers to write idiomatic rust and that sort of thing. Cause you can always do it by just creating a big unsafe block, but that defeats the purpose of, of using rust in the first place. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So there are gonna be some interesting challenges there of where there are some things that Rust just doesn't support very well because it's a use of memory that that rust was, in a sense almost designed to prevent

Shawn Powers (00:26:08):
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.

Shawn Powers (00:26:15):
So do you find that your, um, your involvement with, uh, L W N and, you know, reporting so regularly on criminal information gives you sort of an inside track on what's going on? Or do you just get most of the information that you, that you garner from, you know, the, the lister, which is like drinking from a fire hose for the, the Colonel Listerv? Um, Or, or do you find yourself being one of those inside people that, that gets the, not the dirt gets the rust? No, that doesn't seem right either. <laugh>, is it just a scouring lists or, or do you have, uh, useful conversations with people who you may not otherwise have those conversations if you weren't so involved with the, with the criminal development community?

Jonathan Corbet (00:27:02):
Well, you know, my involvement with the Colonel development community encompasses both L W N and my actual work directly for the colonel. And, and both of those certainly bring me a wider awareness of things. I, on the L WN side, people will send us notes saying, Hey, have you seen this discussion over here? You might want to pay attention to what's going on there. And, and that does help us. Um,

Jonathan Corbet (00:27:28):
And you, our, our long involvement with the community does get me invited to events like the, the Con Host Rustin Linux Conference in Northern Spain or to the Colonel Maintainer Summit, things like that. That certainly increase my awareness of what's going on there. And I think also help, help the community as a whole, because I go there as a participant in the community, not as somebody who's just going there to report on things. So it's, it's a combination of both. I mean, it's mostly really just watching what's going on in the community, but, but it does bring opportunities to, to see what's happening in the community as well.

 Doc Searls (00:28:08):
I, I, I wanna probe a little further into the, um, the old versus new, the conservatism issue that you brought up, uh, that you brought up in, in your, in your slide deck there. Um, but first I have to let, uh, let everybody know that we have this thing called Club TWiT And Club TWiTis another great way to support the TWiTnetwork. As a member, you get access to add free versions of all the shows on twi, as well as other great benefits. There's a bonus TWiTplus feed, which includes footage and discussions that didn't make into final show edits. And as well as bonus shows we've started, such as the gizz Fizz Ask Me Anything is in fireside chats with some of your favorite TWiT guests and cohosts. Uh, as FLOSS Weekly listeners, you may be interested in checking out the Untitled Linux show.

 Doc Searls (00:28:56):
The show is available only to Club Twit members. Um, so join that. You can sign up to join Club Twit for just $7 a month. Head over to TWiT.tv/club twi and joined today. And we thank you for your support. So one of the most, um, interesting and entertaining things to me, uh, Jonathan, and, and following the Linux hurdle mailing list for so many years is Linus himself. Like something comes up and he just sort of smacks things down. And, um, and, and, um, and so you mentioned that conservatism was a bit of an issue and there's a, one of his posts, um, uh, he ends up trying to bring it up here with, uh, Yeah. Um, he says, You really need to understand that Russ and the colonel is dependent on kernel rules, and he's emphasizing that not on some other random rules that exist elsewhere. And I wonder to what extent those rules are, are programmatic as it were, or are they cultural, or are they both, And is Lynns himself like ju just being a good leader here, or the biggest stick in the but on the rests issue,

Jonathan Corbet (00:30:10):
No, I don't think he's a stick in the mud at all. I think he's been pretty supportive of the idea from the beginning, you know, cautious about it and not wanting to, to break things. The conversation that you're referring to in particular was a very technical one. And, uh, had to do with how you deal with failure. The, the normal application level, rust way to deal with failure is to panic and throw up your hands and say, This isn't working. Something has gone wrong. Let's just kill the program right there. And for a user space program, that may well be the best thing to do in the kernel space, you really cannot do that because if you do it, you kill the system completely. And that makes it really hard for users to even just say, recover any work that they had going on. And it makes it really hard to debug any problems that are, that are happening.

Jonathan Corbet (00:30:59):
So the discussion has gone back and forth a few times with the rust developers has been, What do you do when you can't allocate memory? What do you do when you detect a bug somewhere? And the, the normal rust way of throwing a panic is just not something that's accessible there, acceptable. There. You have to, you have to find a way to muddle along if at all possible, and keep the system running so that users can recover from whatever has gone wrong. So that was the, the topic of that particular discussion there. And, and I think Lins was, was entirely right on that point. I don't think that really, I don't think that particular discussion relates to conservatism at all. Um, I can certainly tell stories that do, if you want. Um, I mean, on the rough side, you can go back to the other quote that you put up before of saying, you know, essentially that C has been good enough, You know, it was good enough for my daddy is good enough for me, <laugh>, uh, I don't see why it shouldn't be good enough for, for developers in the future as well.

Jonathan Corbet (00:32:02):
That kind of conservatism a a totally different area, which is one closer to home for me. When I became the, the documentation maintainer for the colonel, the colonel's documentation director was really this totally disorganized mess of individual text files. It was, as a previous maintainer said, just a collection of things that random passes by kind of set down in random locations and left there it was difficult to use it best and full of old and obsolete stuff. One of the first things that we did was to adopt a, a system called Sphinx, which was designed for the documentation of code. It comes out of the Python community initially, and we wanted to use it to bring some structure to the lenux documentation tree to allow us to, you know, create nice HTML documents and all that stuff, which is really almost a secondary concern, but something we wanted to do.

Jonathan Corbet (00:32:56):
The main thing we wanted to do was sym some structure on our documentation, actually create something coherent as opposed to several thousand individual que text files that people threw into a directory somewhere. And I ran into incredible amounts of opposition on that. I still am. Sometimes there are people who just didn't like restructured texts because it imposes a little bit of structure on what is still really just an ask you text file containing your documentation. There are people who didn't want to reorganize our documentation directory to actually make it more friendly to our readers and try to bring subjects together. And to put structure on it. It's, it's a, you know, battle that I had to fight for several years, and I think I won it because I think the bulk of the community was really behind doing something better in that regard. I think we have a long way to go, but it's the kind of thing you run into when you, you try to, to bring change to a community that has done things the same way for, for more than 30 years now. I think it's just inherent to the territory, really.

 Doc Searls (00:34:01):
So, um, it's, it's interesting to me that I was around, I just wanna stay on line for a minute because, um, I actually got some hang time with him during the time that he was writing Get and Ditching Bit Keep, and that was, that was almost an example of where, um, he was not being the conservative. He was the opposite really. And, uh, and I suppose he was getting some pushback on that. And it's interesting to view what he leads on and what he doesn't. Um, I don't see him among, you know, the, the top list of contributors. You have this wonderful list of, of, uh, who's contributed what in the 5.19, uh, uh, Colonel, um, your, your stats are always amazing <laugh>, I just have to say that. Uh, um, but obviously you're still leading in, in some ways. Um, and I'm, and I'm wondering, you know, where, you know, I, I think you made a really good point in saying that this is really one little minor point here that's in a technical issue. So where is, what does Linda's leadership look like now? Um, uh, obviously he's still very involved. He still looks like the chief pah, at least is to an outsider like me, but I'm not inside. You are inside, you're documenting the whole thing.

Jonathan Corbet (00:35:18):
All right, let me answer this in a few ways, starting with this, with the get saying actually, because, um, you know, we adopted Bit Keep in about 2002 until then the, uh, Linux community was functioning without a source code management system for over 10 years. You know, if that doesn't really epitomize conservative and resistance to change, I don't know what does. I mean, that was kind of a, a very interesting situation in its own right. When we did finally changed that first by a bit keeper and then via get, we, we not only changed the way we work, we changed the whole world. And I, I, I take that as an example of what we could do in the future, For example, with adoption of Ross and other sorts of development tools, getting back to Lins in particular. He doesn't write a lot of code these days.

Jonathan Corbet (00:36:11):
That's, that's really not his role, right? His role is to decide what gets into the mainline kernel and to try to steer people. They're developing things in that direction. So you'll often see him most actively during the merge windows if you watch what he posts in the coming week or two. And you'll see somebody come to him and with the poll request saying, Here is some stuff that needs to go into the Scott one colonel. And he'll look at it, he'll say, No, I am sorry, this is not acceptable. You can't do it this way. It needs to be done some other way. Now, normally, hopefully this happens before he gets to the poll rec request point, and he will often participate in discussions to, to make that happen as well. But that's really his, his role is steering things at a high level and make sure that everybody is playing well together.

Jonathan Corbet (00:36:58):
They're pushing in something resembling the same direction, and then the work that they come up with by the time it gets to him is, is acceptable for, for pulling into the kernel to, to create a US stable production ready kernel at the end of it. So he doesn't author a lot of code, but if you look at merges into the ker, right, If you look at the merge commits, which I don't normally count, you will see that he is the creator of a vast number of them because he is the one who is taking the pieces and putting them together to create the whole that we all use as a Lenux colonel at the end.

Shawn Powers (00:37:33):
All right, So what I hear is that if I want to get all of the Colonel documentation switched from text based to emoji based in order to save bits, because you can just say so much more with an emoji. No, I'm just kidding. Um, <laugh>, actually, my question though, does lead right off of, um, of LE's uh, handling things. Not me personally, but, uh, I've seen discussions, uh, where people are concerned that, uh, the majority I believe of, uh, changes going into the kernel are done by, uh, people employed by a small number of companies. And that's both good and bad, right? I mean, people are getting paid. Yeah, I would to develop the Nel, but also there's a concern, okay, is, I mean, is there any, should we be worried about, about that? I mean, again, there are, there's clearly vested interest in the kernel being healthy, and so, you know, people getting paid to, uh, develop the ker is ideally what we want. Uh, but is there too much concentration of influence, uh, so to speak by companies?

Jonathan Corbet (00:38:41):
Well, as far as I can tell, something just over 90% of the people contributing to the ker are doing that as part of their job. All right? So, you know, kernel development is very much a paid sort of thing. There aren't that many volunteer developers anymore just because, well, there's a lot of reasons. But among other things, anybody who has any success as a volunteer developer tends not to stay that way very long, cuz people start throwing money at them. But if you look at a typical development cycle, the people who are working on the kernel are working for generally just over 200 and as many about, it's about 240 different companies. So it's not exactly a small number of companies that are developing the kernel or, or are paying the developers who work on the kernel. And generally the most influential companies will be behind at most maybe 10% of the commits that go into the kernel.

Jonathan Corbet (00:39:38):
Okay? So I really don't think that there's any one company that has undue influence over the Nel. There may be companies that can try to influence in any one particular direction, but in general, when even the biggest companies, the most productive companies try to influence the kernel in ways that are not healthy for the long term, you know, for the kernel over the long term, they get a lot of pushback and people call them out. Even people working for those companies will call them out for that. So I think the situation's pretty healthy that way,

Shawn Powers (00:40:17):
Honestly. And, and I appreciate that and, and it was the kind of thing I, I was hoping that's sort of the way that you would answer, uh, because I mean, the concern, it's not necessarily conspiracy theory, right? It's just, uh, there is a concern like, could somebody, uh, hire enough, uh, of the prominent criminal developers to buy influence in, uh, kernels such that it would benefit their company while, um, you know, hindering another. And it sounds like maybe the, the development team is still large enough that that's not necessarily the case and possibly even self-policing, you said, you know, the company would, uh, frown on its own developers for doing such a thing. So that's encouraging. I, I appreciate that and I I'm glad that, uh, we could hear it out loud.

Jonathan Corbet (00:41:02):
Yeah. To, to follow up on that. I mean, companies do definitely hire developers to influence how the kernel goes. I most often, they want the developers to make the nel work well on their hardware, for example. You know, it's a good sort of influence. Sometimes there are more subtle things and, you know, there are people involved going to be things that happen there. But there are, there are just over 2000 developers anymore that contribute to any given kernel development cycle and something over 4,000 4,500 who contribute over the course of the year. So you would have to hire a lot of developers to try to influence the, the kernel as a whole. Um, the, the, the piece of the puzzle that I didn't quite talk about before is maintainers, the people who decide which patches actually get into the ker. And there are fewer of those and those work for fewer companies.

Jonathan Corbet (00:41:52):
Um, the last time I looked, the patches getting into the mainline kernel are going through the hands and maintainers that are employed. I, if you look at about half of the, of the patches going into the kernel are going through maintainers employed by about half a dozen companies. So there is more concentration at that level and perhaps more potential for trouble there. I think that the real problem there is not that those companies are trying to hire maintainers to, to influence the colonel. I think the problem there is that companies really tend to be reluctant to pay people to work as maintainers. And that something that a lot of companies could do to help this situation is to, to make maintainer ship part of people's job and really pay them for that. Um, I think that's why we see concentration there is cuz a lot of companies just aren't willing to do that. They'll pay a developer to write a driver for their device and then it stops there. And, but that's really only a part of the problem. So we're, we're perennially short of maintainers and we could really use more resource there.

 Doc Searls (00:43:01):
Oh my gosh, you just opened, um, a rich vein of possible questions, <laugh> in the limited time we have left. So, um, we'll get to at least one of those after I let everybody know that this episode of Flo Weekly is brought to you by I r L, an original podcast from Mozilla. IRL is a show for people who build AI and people who develop tech policies. It's hosted by Bridget Todd and this season it looks at AI in real life. Who can AI help, Who can at harm? It features, uh, conversations with people who are working to build a more trustworthy ai. These are fascinating. In every case, there is an episode about how our world is mapped with ai. The data that's missing from these maps tells as much of a story as the maps themselves. You'll hear about the people who are working to fill in the gaps and take control of the data.

 Doc Searls (00:43:50):
There's another episode about gig workers who depend on apps for their livelihood. That one looks at how they're pushing back against algorithms that control how much they get paid and seeking new ways to gain power over data, create better working conditions for political junkies. There are episodes about the role that AI plays when it comes to the spread of misinformation and hate speech around elections. That's a huge concern for democracies around the world. Um, the latest episode is called the AI Medicine Cabinet. Um, uh, that, that I just listened to. Um, it goes from Maryland to Rwanda, uh, to other places looking at AI diagnostic systems, um, uh, work One, working on Mozilla's Privacy, Not included buyers guide that investigates privacy and security and mental health apps, uh, all kinds of stuff in there. Highly, highly recommend checking that out. Um, search for IRL in your podcast player will also include a link in the show notes by thanks to IRL for their support.

 Doc Searls (00:44:54):
So, so Jonathan, you, you touched on the human side of this thing and there's so many ways they could go. Um, one, one of them is, and, and it's one you just touched on now, um, there the level of appreciation for the foundational role that Linux and other open source code bases, but especially Linux, cuz Linux is in nearly everything. It's in the clock. I look at up here, it's in all kinds of stuff. Um, it has become the embedded operating system in all the televisions, um, that are, And yet it's interesting to me that there, that companies don't look deep enough to recognize how important this is. I, I, I would think that they, that companies would have lots and lots of gift subscriptions to, um, L w N as well to what do you thinks going on with companies that, that they don't get the importance that they have?

 Doc Searls (00:45:53):
I mean, I, I, Lenox journal ended in, at least for us, uh, Shawn and I, in 2019, it's still on the web, but as a functional magazine, uh, it ended then, um, and in part because of that <laugh>, you know, there was, there was a time I remember, you know, ibm for example. Uh, we became friends with Dan Fry there. He ran a division and he's the one who told me that I took him six years to find out that the, the colonel developers they hired on purpose, uh, Ted Show, for example, um, you know, we're telling them what to do rather than them telling the Colonel maintainers what to do and had worse stories about that. And, um, I, now that you know, I mean that, that, uh, uh, meta, which is Facebook is a big participant now, at least as a, as an employer. Um, and of course they have a vast, vast pile of Linux machines running, right? As does Google. These are, these are important to the world and, and stuff that they need has to show up in the kernel in some ways, and then everybody else else gets the benefit from it. But what do you think is, is there just cluelessness there? Is it too many layers of, of management? What's the deal?

Jonathan Corbet (00:47:08):
Well, again, with over 200 companies participate in every kernel development cycle, Uh, I, I don't think I would say that that companies are entirely unaware of, of the importance of it. You know, I mean, on the L w N side, we of course sell subscriptions to companies for the employees. And we have a pretty broad representation of, of companies including, you know, companies in areas like the finance sector that you wouldn't necessarily think are interested in it, but in fact are very interested in, in what's going on in the Linux Nel for, for very similar sorts of reasons. So the awareness is there a, um, but you know, the, the willingness to I, first of all, the understanding of how to engage with it and the willingness to engage with it, of course varies quite a bit. I think there are an awful lot of companies who think they can just grab the software, toss into something, make use of it, and solve their problem and move on to the next thing.

Jonathan Corbet (00:48:10):
And in fact, a lot of them can, and you know, it's not what we like to see. We would like to see better participation, but it is also, you know, assuming they follow the license, it's also entirely within their rights. It's what we said they could do with our code that we put it out there with, with the prize. They could indeed do exactly that, right? They don't have to. So all we can do is to encourage companies that, that depend on what we do to, to participate in it, to, to help, to, to steer it in the direction they wanna go. And companies tend to figure this out over time. They start by just sort of taking it, then they may start making demands of developers and that doesn't go very far. And then they slowly learn that if they work within the community, they can get things to go the way they want them to go, and they can get what they need from Linux in a much better sort of way.

Jonathan Corbet (00:49:03):
And there, there are people who will try to help them with that. One of the functions of the, of the Linux Foundation, sectoral advisory board is in fact to to work with companies that are trying to figure out how to work with the, with the development community and to, to talk to them and say, Hey, this is what you're doing right? This is what you're doing wrong. You should really doing be doing this some other way. Um, it's, it's something that we do kind of, you know, out of sight, but it is something that we do that I think has helped a lot of companies to become better members of the development community as a whole.

Shawn Powers (00:49:39):
So speaking of being better members, um, I, I'm not, I'm not a developer and, and I'm not involved with, especially with any large projects. And so, um, I'm really glad that you brought up the issue of there being fewer maintainers than is ideal and, and that the whole nuance between developers and maintainers and, and that sort of thing is, is really starting to, uh, uh, be above my head as far as, uh, comprehension goes. But what would be the, the motivation apart from goodwill for companies to have more interest in, uh, the maintaining part that, that might be lacking, uh, diversity of companies, diversity, you know, at, at all. Uh, is is there something that, uh, companies are, are missing? Uh, is it just the goodwill of, you know, the, the half dozen or so

Jonathan Corbet (00:50:26):
Companies involved that are doing it? Well, I mean, supporting maintainer ship, of course, uh, very much increases your influence over how things go. And that's, that's something that's best in keep in mind, but really supporting maintainer ship is valuable to ensure that the subsystems that you depend on go in a way that will be useful to you going forward. If you say, I don't know, you make web cameras just since I'm staring at one, and that comes to mind, then you might want to employ a developer to write a driver so that your webcams work well with Linux because you want your cameras installed in Android phones, whatever. And if Android, which runs Linux does not support your camera, it's not going to go there. So that's sort of a minimal level of participation, but you may find that your camera does interesting and strange things that are not well supported by, by the, the kernel's video subsystem overall.

Jonathan Corbet (00:51:34):
And in fact, this is, this is happening right now. There, there's trouble with some, some camera devices that are not very well supported by the media subsystem in Linux. And so we're starting to see closed source or out of tree drivers being used for that. And that's not good. If we had, instead people from the companies involved more active in the maintainer ship of that subsystem. They know where their product line is going. They know the kinds of things that the subsystem as a whole is going to have to support in the coming years. And they can work to push things in that direction so that when their device comes onto the market, Linux is ready for it. That's really hard to do if you're just trying to contribute drivers. You really have to be working up at higher levels, and you don't necessarily have to be a maintainer to do that, but helping the maintainers and working at at higher levels in the subsystem will really help your company in future years if you do that. So that, that's one reason for companies to participate more at that level.

 Doc Searls (00:52:36):
Cool. I appreciate that.

Jonathan Corbet (00:52:37):
Thank you.

 Doc Searls (00:52:40):
Um, we have a couple more, fairly limited time left here, but, um, I wanna ask about, um, diversity. Uh, there's, uh, we had that issue with Linux Journal, I mean, at Linux Journal's. Subscribership basically rounded to a hundred percent male, um, in its time. And, uh, and oddity about that is that her management was a hundred percent female. And actually at the point our ownership was as well, at least as I recall. And, um, uh, how, I mean, this isn't when, when you're looking at developers and maintainers, this is, you can't run an affirmative action program very easily, I don't think or something like that. I, I don't know. I don't know what the method would be. I it, because these things are aren't just social, they're, they're largely technical and they're, you know, what people get obsessed with when they're in high school or later.

 Doc Searls (00:53:36):
Um, a lot of it is just purely circumstantial. You're dealing with a very, very small population as well. I mean, these are not, you know, as part of the whole human population, these are, these are wizards, you know, they all went to their own Hogwarts as it were. And the LK Mel in way is, is, you know, something at a Hogwarts of a sort. And, and how you get in there is just by writing great code. That's something that Lins himself is set over and over again when he is been sort of busted on this issue. So, wondering what your thoughts are about that? How, how can you know what, what can be done and, and who does it <laugh>, if anything? I don't know. It's, it's really deeply weird that it's almost a hundred percent male, uh, on, on those list. Yeah, it's,

Jonathan Corbet (00:54:18):
It's, it's a really hard question. People have been doing things, you know, there have been mentorship programs, Outreachy and, um, the community bridge program within the Linnux Foundation and such that have tried to help in this regard. I don't know, it's hard to say how successful they have been. And a lot of the people go through those programs seem to disappear afterwards. Um, they may well be working as colonel people, but inside companies where you don't see them. Um, so that, that's one aspect of it. Another aspect I think is role models. And at times many of us have tried to draw attention to the role models that we have by, you know, drawing attention to some of the, you know, of the non basic white male nerdy kernel developers that we have. We did, at the Linux Plumber's conference a few years ago, we did a Nel developers' panel.

Jonathan Corbet (00:55:15):
Something we often do, you get a bunch of developers up there to talk about kernel issues. And without telling anybody without advertising and such, we had, we put it together as an all female panel just to put some people up there and say, you know, these people are out there, they're doing interesting stuff. They're thriving in this community. Um, you know, this is something that we would like more people to try to emulate. Um, we then got complaints about the diversity of the panel, um, <laugh>, that sort of thing. Um, there, the other aspect of this has been the whole idea that the, the development community is, is hostile to, to, you know, not just say female developers, but a whole lot of people who don't want to participate in what is seen as a very wild west sort of development environment. On the kernel mailing list.

Jonathan Corbet (00:56:08):
I think that, that people are still thinking about a 1990s version of the curl mailing list. It's, it's really not what it was back then, but it is still a place where you have to be willing to go out there, have your ideas challenged and be willing to, to defend them. And perhaps not everybody wants to have their ideas challenged in quite that way. I don't know that that's really, I mean, I don't wanna say that this is a, a gender linked sort of thing or, or any other sort of metric you wanna say, but there are people hold this up as, as an impediment to people joining our community. And we've tried to be better in that regard or continuing to do so. Um, but no doubt, have a ways to go yet.

Shawn Powers (00:56:50):
So I, I just gotta, gotta highlight again. You were called out for not having enough dudes on the panel

 Doc Searls (00:56:59):
<laugh> on the all female panel. Yes. Yeah,

Shawn Powers (00:57:02):
That's, that's, I mean, well

 Doc Searls (00:57:04):
It's people

Shawn Powers (00:57:05):
Smirked and left, but it's, it's a little frustrating that that would, that would be the case. So, uh, I think well great on you guys for doing that. I mean, that's, that's, uh, great on you guys. Listen to me. I mean, even it's, it's so ingrained, uh, in, in my psyche that it's, uh, it's mostly men. So, uh, kudos to the group four, arranging an all female panel. I think that's awesome. And it's unfortunate that it didn't go over well.

 Doc Searls (00:57:33):
Well, there,

Jonathan Corbet (00:57:33):
Well, I think you get complaints.

Shawn Powers (00:57:36):
Oh, okay. Squeaky wheels. So not, not the whole, you get

 Doc Searls (00:57:38):
Complaints anyway, I suppose, but anything, um, and there is diversity in terms of geographical distribution and, you know, cultures and things like that. There's, there's a fair amount of that. Um, but the <laugh>, the lack of women is kind, is kind of huge. I, I'm, I'm, You mentioned something that the, um, the Linux Foundation is doing, and the Linux Foundation is looming larger and larger in, in, um, in, in the Linux world. And in fact, in many other worlds, all sorts of adjacent, um, free and open software worlds, they, they have a really interesting way of moving into noticing a topic. And recently they expressed, they had a press release on the intent to, to form, to form a foundation. They, they, they spawn foundations like, like, uh, like Phish or something that, uh, that was on wallets. Wallets is coming up as something that, that Linux Foundation is gonna be interested in. And, but it's a new kind of organization. We don't, we've not seen, it's like before, I don't know to what extent Linux itself has had an influence on that, but you're involved with the lf and we've had many people with the LF on this, on this show. We had Brian Bellor on a couple of weeks ago. So, And what, what, what are your thoughts about that? And cuz you've been somewhat involved with it and with the role of the lf.

Jonathan Corbet (00:59:06):
Yeah, and I serve on their, their technical advisory board, which is really meant to represent the Colonel community's interest to the Linux Foundation. Um, so that's, that's my main involvement within these days. And I've spoken at a lot of their conferences. Um, you know, from the point of view of the Kernel community, I think the OVS involvement has been very positive in that they've given some developers like, like Lin Al as a place to, to live that's free of the influence of any given company, that sort of thing. They took over colonel.org after the security issues we have there and have managed to run that infrastructure for us very nicely. They've supported travel for a lot of developers to conferences, that sort of thing. So I think, and they've been running this mentorship program as well. So I think that their, I believe their participation has been positive.

Jonathan Corbet (00:59:58):
Um, the, the Linux Foundation makes a lot of people nervous. Um, it does seem to be intent on rapid growth, um, to perhaps a greater extent than I, than I would like, but, but it's just not my, my organization. That's, that's fine. They can run it the way they, like, There are people who would really like to see the LF do things that it was not made to do. Like, for example, promote gpl, license enforcement, things like that, that is really just not going, it's just something they're not going to do because that's not really at the top of the list for the people who are in the end supporting it, which are large companies working in the Linux area. Right. They're there to make kernel development work well and various other projects work well, and I think they help with that. They, they can never be the only organization that's, that's working in this area. Um, but I mean, again, I think they're, their involvement is positive. That's why I continue to, to be involved with them.

 Doc Searls (01:01:04):
So we're at the end of our hour here, um, maybe even a little past it as I look at my clock, old fashioned, one of the sweep second hand every time you see me looking up. That's what it is. <laugh>. Um, just a quick one, is there any questions we haven't asked that you'd like us to have asked? And then I have a final two brief ones.

Jonathan Corbet (01:01:26):
Um, I don't know, you could have asked me how can I apply to work as a writer for L WN <laugh>? Um, which case? I would say, um, look at the, the right for us link on the L WN front page and go there. I won't go for that other than say that I really am looking for people who would like to be a part of, of this exercise going forward. Um, if, if you feel that you can write the sort of stuff that we do, please contact me.

 Doc Searls (01:01:54):
That's great. I, we always close the plugs generally for, for our own stuff, but that's a great one. Thank you for that. The last two questions are, what are your favorite, um, uh, uh, text editor and scripting language? We asked everybody that

Jonathan Corbet (01:02:10):
My favorite, I mean, I do most of my work in eax, but, um, I'm also, I mean, I've used VI since about 1981 or so and know it very well and often use it in places where I don't wanna fire up Eax. So the way I put it is I tend to run vi when I'm running as route and eax when I'm doing everything else. Um,

 Doc Searls (01:02:31):
That's a first. That's good. <laugh> for bilingual that

Jonathan Corbet (01:02:35):
Way. Scripting language is, I mean, I, I I use Python pretty heavily for all that. The l w insight is written in Python and when I need something to, to bash something out, that's what I reach for.

Shawn Powers (01:02:47):
To bash something out, you use Python.

 Doc Searls (01:02:55):
That's great. Well, it has been great having you on the show, uh, Jonathan and, and, um, uh, we'll have to have you back when six oh comes out, I think, or maybe shortly after that to catch up, catch us up on, was it next week? Okay. Maybe well maybe have you back next week.

Shawn Powers (01:03:15):
He did say, didn't say how long. Yeah,

 Doc Searls (01:03:18):
<laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. Is it next week? Wow. For some reason I thought it was later, but then you would know <laugh>. I'm not, I

Shawn Powers (01:03:26):
Would, I appreciate the insight

Jonathan Corbet (01:03:27):
Happens that comes out on Sunday.

Shawn Powers (01:03:28):
Yeah. I appreciate the conversation because while, I mean Linux has the core of, of my career. Uh, the actual Nel development stuff is, uh, uh, something I'm, I'm not heavily involved in. So I appreciate the insights today.

Jonathan Corbet (01:03:43):
Well, it has been a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

 Doc Searls (01:03:47):
Yeah, thanks again. So Shawn <laugh>. Yeah,

Shawn Powers (01:03:54):
I mean, yeah, like I said, it was, it was really great to, um, uh, talk about the Linux Colonel with somebody who actually knows what's going on and what's going on currently. And, uh, has a grasp of, uh, that community, which, I mean, it, it's public, but it's not, uh, well known. I, I, I, I don't know what I'm, what I'm going for there. It's just, it's kind of mystic and it's not something that is easy to get involved with unless it's absolutely what you do for a living. And so having an insider's, uh, look on things, uh, is great. And I'll be honest, uh, I, I didn't talk too much about it, but, um, I, I had to try really hard not to just go to l w n to come up with ideas for Linux Journal when I was writing every month, um, because I, it just didn't feel right. So, <laugh>, I'm glad I didn't, I'm glad I did what I did, but, um, uh, I I'm also glad l w n is still there, so

 Doc Searls (01:04:52):
I always thought it was just fabulously informative and very straightforward, and I like the simple html in it, <laugh> and on the, on the website. Um, uh, so I, I've let everybody know that next week we have David p Reon. David, uh, Reed is one of the fathers of the internet. Uh, he's one of came of the Reed's Law about networks. Um, he was one of the primary authors, the three authors actually, of, uh, the end to end design in systems. Um, and end to end is actually what we have with the internet. So he's one of the architects of the internet. He is a very original thinker, very smart guy. Uh, and he is a good friend too. So he's coming up next week. So, um, so Sean, a plug before we go.

Shawn Powers (01:05:39):
Um, uh, just the same as always, you know, YouTube channel blog, Uh, yeah. Uh, Shawn Powers.com with a zero for the O Oh yeah, there's me. Uh, oh. Literally wearing that shirt. I wrote that this morning. So <laugh>.

 Doc Searls (01:05:50):
Okay. I

Shawn Powers (01:05:51):
Promise. I have other shirts. I it's literally from today, so, uh, yeah.

 Doc Searls (01:05:54):
Okay. So great. Um, thanks everybody. David Pere next week, come back for that. And until then, I'm Doc Cs is last weekly. See you later.

Speaker 5 (01:06:03):
The world is changing rapidly, so rapidly in fact that it's hard to keep up. That's why Micah, Sergeant and I, Jason Howell talk with the people Mac and breaking the tech news on Tech News Weekly every Thursday. They know these stories better than anyone, so why not get them to talk about it in their own words? Subscribe to Tech News Weekly, and you won't miss a beat every Thursday at TWiT tv.