FLOSS Weekly 735, 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, Aaron Newcomb and I talk with Ahed Soba about Linux and open source and all kinds of stuff in develop, in the developing world. It is so interesting. There's so much stuff going on out there. We don't see in the corporate environments we work in or in all the usual environments that most of us that are watching this show are listening to this show. Think about it's really good stuff. Lot of insights, lot of new learnings, and that's coming up next podcasts you love

Speaker 2 (00:00:34):
From people you trust.

Speaker 3 (00:00:36):
This is TWiT.

Doc Searls (00:00:40):
This is Floss Weekly, episode 735, recorded Wednesday, June 7th, 2023, floss Without Borders. This episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by Collide. That's collide with a k Collide is a device trust solution that ensures that if a device isn't secure, it can't access your apps, it's zero trust For Okta, visit collide.com/floss and book a demo today. Good morning, good evening. Good whenever it is, wherever you are. I am Doc Searls. This is Floss Weekly, and at the moment, anyway, I am co-host list. And so but one may drop in in the meantime, I'm just gonna go straight into the show because we're a tiny bit of a late start. Our, our guest this week is Ahmed Sobeh, which on his LinkedIn <laugh>, that's on his LinkedIn, I think, but on, on his on his Twitter is amez Zakaria. So let's just start there because we were starting to talk about it before the show. What's, oh, and you're, you're, you're in Moonen. In DSLand, is that, that's right, too. So that's true. Try to get strictly

Ahmed Sobeh (00:01:53):
Yeah, that is true. Thank you very much for having me. For starters. So yeah, the name thing, it's a bit different how it works in the Middle East. So you keep carrying the names of all the parents in your family. So if your name is, for example, Michael, and your dad's called Eric, so your name would be Michael Eric, and then the last name, that's how it works. And then if you have a kid named Tom, so he's gonna be Tom, Michael, Eric, and then, and so on until the generations go on afterwards. So my actual name is much, much longer than this. So I picked Zak Zakaria as one of the, well, my grandfather's name basically as the name that I go by. But when they moved to Germany, they said, we have to have the last name on your passport, which is the last grandparents.

Doc Searls (00:02:39):
Oh, wow. Yeah.

Ahmed Sobeh (00:02:41):
And then I had to change my identity basically as a person everywhere except Twitter, because I forgot to do that. <Laugh>.

Doc Searls (00:02:47):
It's, it's good. It's interesting. On the one hand you have like a menu of choices because you have all these ancestors, and on the other you have the bureaucracy of Germany that says, let's see, which one is closest to the end of the alphabet one. <Laugh>. We use that one. That's exactly it. Yeah, it's I was mentioned before the show that my mother was Swedish and, and half my ancestors therefore are Swedish, and it's Sweden. Like in some countries, your name, like if, if you're, you know, if you're if your name is Anders and your son is there for Anderson, and apparently in Sweden, they cut that off. They said, we're gonna freeze everything and everybody's last name. It'll be whatever it was. And it turned out like a third of the country where Anderson's. So and they kind of got stuck with that. That may be off. Maybe some Swedish listeners or viewers can jump in and correct me on that, but it's na names, names are wild. So so, so tell me a little bit, you're, you're, you're, you're an open source guy, your job is around open source. What, what, and, and you're with and I, I have so many times Ivan, open Ivan. So tell us about Ivan and, and connect those dots for us.

Ahmed Sobeh (00:03:57):
Yes. Well, I work in open source, which is something I'm extremely grateful for because I mean, it's not every day that you get to work and something that you're actually passionate about and believe in. My open source journey isn't that extensive or long. I started in 2020, I worked at Mo, the Firefox Company. From there I gained a different perspective on software, because before that I was working in back in my home country in Egypt. Then open source isn't really a big thing back in Egypt. It's mostly proprietary software with yeah, trying to commercialize as much products as possible. So open source, working in open source wasn't really something that I interacted with a lot. I've heard of it and kind of understood what it's about, but not really that much into it. But after I worked at Mozilla, I kind of gained a different perspective on things, understanding what open source is, because working on Firefox is an open source project.

(00:04:52):
It is owned by the company, but still you welcome contributions from anyone in the community. And the community around Firefox is huge and amazing, actually full of great people and great contributors. After that, I, after Mozilla, I worked at s a p or with Rust, also an open source language, which I basically picked up at Mozilla and got a bit deeper into open source and understanding what open source is. So when I moved to Ivan afterwards and got the chance to be working in an open source program office, that was just an amazing opportunity because, so Ivan offers managed services for the open source databases and the open source program office. The main and the only duty of the open source program office is contributing upstream to the projects that we offer managed services for. So the company offers managed services for, for example, Postgres, Kafka, Flink, open Search, all of these open source projects.

(00:05:46):
We, in our open source program office, we hire people just to work on contributions and upstream contributions to these projects, which is in its own thing because you just get hired, get paid to work on open source project. For me as an engineering manager, it's much more challenging than other engineering manager jobs or engineer manager positions because you are working with a team that's working on a project that is not owned by the company or owned by the team. But it's, it's a good challenge in itself because you interact with the community, understand how the community works. Each project has its own way of working, has its own kind of community. We interact and work with very different diverse types of people, different cultures, different backgrounds. So it's amazing all around. And our open source pro program office is very special in that way, in that people are just focusing on helping, maintaining these projects and sustaining them, making sure they're well maintained, making sure that they have contributions going all along. We have several maintainers, or depends on the project. Sometimes they call them maintainers, committers, depends on how they call each project. But we have several of those people on our team, which is a great thing to see that we hire people. I mean, sometimes we're hire maintainers, but at other times we hire people and work with them and build their own open source career, open source path and open source journey towards being committers on these projects, which is always very nice to see. And, and it's amazing, amazing thing for the community itself.

Doc Searls (00:07:16):
It's I'm curious, did, did Ivan itself grow out of a, say a particular open source community and you work in a cloud databases, like said, come out of Postgres or one of the other database communities and say, Hey, let's start a company that's all about this. Our,

Ahmed Sobeh (00:07:34):
Yeah, our founders are long-term contributors to Postgres. So you can say that it grew from here. This is where everything started, and the whole roots of the company and open source given from that start or how the company started. So from that point on, it was all about of, of course, maintaining the product and maintaining the growth of the company with trying to well contribute to opensource as much as possible. So yeah.

Doc Searls (00:07:58):
That's that's great. So just tell us a little bit about what, what Ivan does, even even Ivan both work. Yeah. <laugh>, that's when you're working in multiple languages, you cut a lot of slacks to people, it's like close enough. Yeah, yeah. True. so a big setting up cloud database is simple. And you've, you've list a whole lot of companies, Comcast, Toyota, uk, government, Atlassian these are big clusters, these are big customers. And so I'm wondering, you know, so, so what is it, you know, why would I want Ivan rather than some other thing? Just to get a little plug to the company?

Ahmed Sobeh (00:08:37):
Yeah. Well, if you want to set up, for example, let's take one example. Set up your own Kafka cluster and you want an wanna deal with all the hassle of doing that and maintaining that, making sure that it works in the right way. Just go to Ivan choose Kafka as a product, talk with one of our representatives for a few minutes, or without even, you can just deploy your owns service on your own platform in 10 minutes. And then if everything will be set up, we also have your bring your own cloud initiative where you don't even need to migrate from your current cloud provider. You can stay with all the existing setup, and we just do everything for you. So I think to answer the question, why would I choose Ivan cuz of the ease and the absolute simplicity of just starting up things without caring about all the, the hassle that you have to go through. I think also you, with Ivan, I mean, it depends on how much you care about open source, but with Ivan, you just know that working with Ivan or having something with Ivan, you're giving back to the community and you, you're also giving back to these open source projects, even if it's behind the scenes, but you're still part of it.

Doc Searls (00:09:43):
That, that's great. I know I, I'm projecting on, and I'm reading the literature here and I'm thinking, I'm, I'm just wondering, would individuals be possible customers for Absolutely.

Ahmed Sobeh (00:09:55):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Doesn't a company, yeah, we, we, I mean, developers are, I mean, our most important customers, if I can say this, so it doesn't have to be a company at all, just individual people working.

Doc Searls (00:10:07):
So I'm wondering if, if like I look at Comcast, Toyota, Atlassian are there, I mean, are there, when those companies use Ivan, are they also like looking for individuals working for them that would want to do their own clouds as well? I'm just, I'm just wondering how, how the, the whole thing grows by budding kind of

Ahmed Sobeh (00:10:32):
Yeah, I mean it it starts differently with different companies, but as you exactly mentioned, in some cases, just one person who finds the idea appealing and finds the ease of the setup and the ease of the usage with Ivan, very appealing. And then things escalate from there. This person recommends it to his team or, or their team, and then think goes forward from there. Entire team is using Ivan next. They talk to other people and other teams. And then we have someone from the company contacting us saying, our people really like this product. Let's have a deals truck. So it, it's not always a corporate deal between two CSU people talking to each other. It's just sometimes start starts from a developer who just likes a product and then things go from there. So yeah, it's, we also have three tier options on on our project. So even some people can just try the project and see how much they like it or how easy it is, and then they can go from there. So yeah, it's all about the developers.

Doc Searls (00:11:27):
So it, it, it's interesting to sort of contrast the way that works for you with Ivan versus the w sort of what you're up against in, I'm thinking of your, your presentation that I enjoyed talking about governments that, you know, governments are the biggest customers in developing countries where they're often, you know, they're, they buy expensive services for big companies, they're almost always proprietary and, and generally they're, you know, there's, there's one hand, you know, washing the other and they get locked in that way. And this is almost the opposite of that culture. And I'm wondering, is what you are doing with Ivan and generally in your work kind of subversive that way, where you're, you're dealing with developing countries, showing them a completely different way to work that ends up being more productive?

Ahmed Sobeh (00:12:25):
Yeah, I mean it's yeah. I mean, open source and ative software in developing countries is very difficult topic to tackle. Since, because I grew up in a developing country and was raised and learned everything I know basically about software there, it's a very different mindset and the trust in an product that says it manages an open source service and open source project, the fact that it relies on an open source project in the well, yeah, under the hood, basically that kind of makes the project or the product or the project lose some of its trustworthiness. Unfortunately, that's something that's set in the culture, set in the mindset that open source projects are not safe to use. They're not very secure, depends on the scale of course, and depends on the type of people we're talking about or type of product they're working on.

(00:13:15):
But unfortunately, that, as you mentioned, government institutes, they don't really trust open source projects because there's the mindset of this is not maintained by someone who's paid to do this, then I can't really trust it. I can't really trust something that people fix or update or evolve even more in their free time. And that causes a really big problem in these regions because people get stuck with a specific type of software that is usually forced upon them. And any, any attempt to change or yeah, move the, the, the stable waters usually gets blocked, I would say, because yeah, we don't need the hassle of working at open source project because we don't really know what might happen tomorrow. What if they change the license, what, what would we do then? Ideas that go from there or go in this direction that we can't really trust the project.

(00:14:07):
So it's, yeah, it's, it's a very delicate and difficult topic and I don't foresee it changing in developing countries easily. I think as you mentioned, how these governments get into deals with big tech companies from the US and from Europe, it's very difficult to break this cycle because I think I mentioned this also my presentation, if someone gets elected or appointed in the right position, and this person, they have the knowledge and the understanding that, yeah, let's go open source because open source is, would save us money the first of all, as a developing country, and money is the most important resource for a country in that position. We would be able to self-learn about this. It's not something that's provided as a black box and we just use, and that's it. We would how the pro, how the product works and we, part of the whole journey of the product.

(00:14:55):
There are so many benefits that would benefit a country in that position, but that usually gets shut down because of the reasons I mentioned. And as you also mentioned, there is the ugly face of, yeah, we get paid to keep things as they are because there are other people benefiting from this. So things, yeah, the status quo doesn't really change. So it's gonna be, yeah, it's, it's difficult challenge to change the situation, but I'm hoping that as time progresses and I, I can see open source growing everywhere in the developing world, especially Africa. There was open source, I think what's what's called open source Africa. There was this open source summit in Nigeria last year that had 800 plus attendees, which is amazing to see. It's not something that you see it used to see before. So I think, or I believe that in a few years we might see things starting to change, at least not changing completely, but it's starting to change.

Aaron Newcomb (00:15:48):
And that's really interesting cuz it's a little bit different than I would've expected. I would've expected that open source just would be everywhere because it's because of the free nature of it, right? Yeah. And that ev everybody would be using it as much as possible. So, so that's really kind of eye-opening for me. How do you define a developing country? Is it different than what the standard definition might be? Is it different when we're talking about open source?

Ahmed Sobeh (00:16:12):
Yeah, I I touched on this also in my presentation, that the term developing country, since it was first coined, it has changed a lot and went through different phases. And the world has changed a lot since this actually happened, since this term was first coined, I think it's 1960 by Walt Whitman. It's, it's used to divide the world into two types of countries. There's developing countries and there's countries that already developed and they develop, the countries are developed, they satisfy specific financial or economic threshold. And if they pass that threshold in terms of GTB and other GDP and other stuff, they considered developed. And other countries are on their way of being, developing and working towards being a developed country. Now, it's changed a lot. I would say there are three different categories that we divide developing countries. There are countries that are actually developing.

(00:17:00):
So countries that are on their way to being a fully developed country, they're working towards it. They have their projects in place. They have the privilege of a free government that will help 'em get there. And let's say in 5, 10, 15 years, they would be actually an actual developed country. There are countries that are trying to develop, so countries that are missing some parts of the ingredient, countries that are maybe don't have a free government, don't have enough financial power, but they're still trying, they're still attempts every now and then to become an actually developed country. And then at the end, there is this type of countries that are stagnant. And I also touch on this on, in my p in my presentation, that the Arabic language is very accurate in describing these countries. It's called [inaudible], which means countries that have been left behind. And this is exactly what happened in these countries. The world

Speaker 6 (00:17:49):
Has

Ahmed Sobeh (00:17:52):
In terms of not just technology, culture and everything else. The world has advanced and developed new ideas and new ways of living and working and using software. And these countries have to be left behind. And the digital gap between the rest of the world and these countries is huge. And with this division, you better understand why this situation is what it is now. Because if you look at, because I, I will own the example you mentioned, that if software is free, then it makes sense that it would be used in countries that don't have enough money. But that's not the only angle people look at. If I have a small business in a developing country, if I have a supermarket and I have a database system that I paid 50, a hundred Euros for in in the currency of the, the country, it's not cheap, but it's not expensive and it works for me.

(00:18:41):
And then someone comes along that says, Hey, I have an open source project that you can use and it would completely replace what you're using and you wouldn't pay anything for it. 90%, nine out of 10 times the person would say, no, sorry, I have something that works for me. Because they one, do not trust the competence of people in their own country, in their own society when it comes to tech. So they know that maybe the person who developed this didn't do the best job possible, didn't really do it up to the standards of the pro product they're currently using. That's one thing. And number two, they lack the trust in the institutions that would carry on the job of doing what they should do if something goes wrong. So if I take the software and it doesn't work, or if it's messed up or something, there should be someone I should go to in the, I know the company or where the person came from, I be say, sorry, this doesn't work.

(00:19:34):
Please help me out. Please carry out the appropriate legal actions. They don't really trust the system that would fix their problems for them. So that comes, yeah, that comes with a cost in itself that yes, I will pay money for a piece of software that I don't know how it works. So I don't really care how it works, basically, I just pay money and it does its job. But in exchange for that, I get I get the ease of mind. I know who I'm gonna talk to. If it doesn't work, I know who to go to to get the next version, and that's it. Don't have to do much work on my own. So yeah, it's, it's surprising that open source is not much more much more common in these countries, but unfortunately it's not.

Aaron Newcomb (00:20:14):
And so, and so this is really kind of filling that gap it sounds like, in a lot of ways that you just mentioned, right? Because you're able to help them deploy. Cuz there's also, and and I'm just guessing I don't, you know, I know that people in these countries are really smart, so, so don't take my comments wrong, right? But even in developed countries in, in the US and Europe, in Asia, there is a big knowledge gap. People are struggling to find people that are experts in these areas in cloud native, right? And I'm just looking through your, through your website now, a lot of this looks like you know, it really has to do with cloud native Kubernetes all the cloud providers, you know, all of those things, right? And, and, and that's a really hard thing to learn unless you, you know, go to school for a long time and have actually a lot of work experience. So are you helping to solve for the knowledge gap as well?

Ahmed Sobeh (00:21:07):
Yeah, I mean I personally try to participate as, as many initiatives as possible that would help with the knowledge gap. Not, not at Ivan. At Ivan, we have our own community meetups everywhere. Unfortunately not much in the developing part of the world. That's something we look to as the next phase in the company's growth. Currently, we have all these meetups in all the developed parts of the world. And as you mentioned that there's already also a knowledge gap in these areas. But we have lots of meetups for different projects and different topics where people get together. They have some presentations and it's free to attend. People just show up and listen to others talk about the topic they're interested in. I'll learn a lot. But also these kind of initiatives are quite difficult in the less developed areas of the world.

(00:21:54):
Mm-Hmm. I also touched on that in my presentation because there is I I can mention also my presentation three pillars that are challenges to open source. There is a slightly in culture, there is the aspect of freedom, and there's the aspect of being able to change and being able to accept new ideas. The aspect of freedom is usually kind of a problem in these areas where it's not easy to set up a new community or start a new initiative or start a new meetup or start a new organization because of prosecution reasons, because of government bureaucracy. Even if sub prosecution, just government bureaucracy and jumping through hoops, you have to get many approvals to do these kind of things. So that, that's not a challenge that people face in these areas. That of course, the age of covid helped a lot with that because lots of this can be done virtual now and just have a Zoom meeting where people can show up and attend and that works. But if you wanna do something in person, then you have to go through lots of hoops and jump, jump through lots of hoops and go through lots of bureaucracy steps to get any of this done, which makes it really difficult in these areas. And set. That's something also that's gonna take quite some time to change.

Doc Searls (00:23:06):
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(00:25:17):
Okay. So amed in, in in your your talk, you, you gave gave the case of somebody an open source person, somebody working on open source's, maybe job title has open source in it, who's still saying, he says, well, somebody stole my work and they're using it somewhere else. How is this Okay. And and I'm wondering how much of this is due to just an inadequate understanding of what open source is and how it works and how it promulgates to the world, and how much this is just human nature. You know, a we're all born with opposable thumbs. You know, if a three-year-old is holding something that they made, they're gonna say it's mine. You can't have it, right? Because you think there's only one of it. And having only one of it is a good thing. And I'm also remembering back in the eighties and even if the early nineties when I first heard about free software, I'm not a developer myself, so I didn't know much about it, but trying to get my head around a G P L what Stahlman was talking about, what free really meant, free isn't freedom.

(00:26:17):
Rather than, you know, free isn't beer, it's kinda hard to get one's head around. So I'm wondering if in the developing world, what, how much does this is just human nature and how much of this is peculiar to those circumstances? Yeah,

Ahmed Sobeh (00:26:31):
That's quite interesting how you touched on the human nature part because I completely agree on with it. I think lots of the time these kind of behaviors would be attributed to the upbringing and the environment and the culture where the person grew up and the person knew about software. But there is also a human nature side to it because it's not just people from development countries who make that inaccurate associa association. So the example I provided is someone who was born and raised in my own country, and they work at one of the biggest tech companies in the world working one of the biggest open source projects in the world. I think they were not very aware that it's considered open source. It can be called open source because there are lots that can be said about that particular project from both sides, but is, but it is open source.

(00:27:18):
The core of it is basically open source. And along came this other company that created another project based on that open source project, and now it's changing the face of the internet or how we interact with the internet every day. And their opinion was that their own work was stolen. And as you say, I would attribute this to both at the same time, human nature, but not, I mean, the human nature side of it would not be enough for the person to claim, oh, I was stolen, or my work was stolen for me. Because I think the extent of how, how we, I mean, that gets you to label something as being stolen is 100% attributed to how you first interacted with software. And that's what happened to me personally. I, I grew up with knowing that software has to be either bought or cracked.

(00:28:08):
Unfortunately, that's how lots of kids in the early two thousands in my own age bracket and in my old country would get access to software that they cannot afford. You want a game that is quite expensive. You can't ask your parents to buy you a game that expensive for a PC game. You just go online, find somewhere to crack it. And that's unfortunately wasn't, I think, I think even in the developer of the world wasn't really prosecutable until like recently like 10, 15, 20 years ago before that it was totally fine. That's something that used to happen. And that's it. So this perception of software, when the person has a journey of 10, 12 years working a software engineer with this mindset, and then they get faced with the idea, oh, you're working in a project that's, any person at any point in time can take and go start their own product.

(00:28:58):
That's the reaction that you would expect at, at that point in time. That, yeah, my work was stolen, I worked on this for me and for my own company and for my own benefit. So I think the very basic, very first interactions with, with software in these regions, if open source is part of these interactions, is open source part, part of these first learnings about software that would change how people perceive software in these regions. Because they do. By the way, we, I did use a couple of open source projects in my university time, but it was for learning purposes to improve my skills to use the projects for my own benefit. I remember in my first job, in my first year, actually my first job the product we're working on was using an open project. And the only angle I could see that it could benefit from using this project is if I find a bug again, just fix it locally and move on with my life, I don't have to wait for the next release or I would have to call customer service or do any of these things that people do.

(00:29:55):
I just, just fix it locally and then build a project again and use it. That's, that was my perception at the time. The angle of giving back to the community or helping others or sharing this project among, amongst different companies or products that did cross my mind at the time. So as time progressed and I worked in open source and worked at a couple of companies that are actually concerned with open source, that changes with time. So it's not something that's set in stone. Yes, there is the human nature element, yes, there is this selfishness that, that humans have. But I believe that growing up on a, growing up learning about software in the context of open source, as open source as part of the image, I think that would affect how people would perceive open source in these countries. Once they get to interact with it. It wouldn't be as defensive or as hostile as someone stole my work. That's what I think.

Aaron Newcomb (00:30:47):
So it's pretty funny that you just said that because you kind of answered the question to a degree that came from the chat room, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. It's, it's super related to that. It's almost the same thing, but let me ask it anyway. This comes from Gumby. Gumby says, given that universities and individuals who are self-taught likely have self-selected to open source, he says a hundred percent floss, right, but open source or a hundred percent floss, how does that play into the challenges of adopting floss at the bigger employers? And I mean, one of the things I'm, I'm gonna guess from your, from what you just said is, is that, you know, other folks have had the privilege, so to speak, of growing up having this in schools in their experience, you know, as a good thing in their lives as they develop educationally where that might not be the case for developing countries. Is that accurate?

Ahmed Sobeh (00:31:37):
That is very true. I, I remember the the labs that we had, for example, university Linux was not part of the conversation. These labs when I went to university. Maybe it has changed now and I hope, and I think it might have changed a little bit in some of the labs at least, but it wasn't, UX was not part of the conversation. Linux was something that you would install your own machine and try to be cool with. I use open source software, I'm a really cool person. But wasn't something that people or professors or TAs at university actually spoke to you about or recommended or just put as part of the picture? I think it all, it's all a human behavior of seeing something for the first time being hit with a specific idea for the first time after you've already built the specific perception of the bigger picture.

(00:32:20):
So I understood software as something that I make for a company that gets to sell and then 10 years later someone comes and says, there is this other version, by the way, where you just work with people randomly on the internet and no one pays you anything that's gonna, that that's not gonna be something that the person absorbs easily. So yeah, I think integrating open source into very basic foundations of open source learnings that changes all that a lot. And as I mentioned when I was talking about the previous point, the people in these countries, they know about open source projects, but as I just said, they use it for their own benefit. So people pick up open source projects or co contribute to open source projects to improve their skills. So someone says, I want to learn some Java. They look for an open source Java project and they try to contribute to it until they reach a specific level or until they're prepared enough for an interview at an actual company.

(00:33:11):
And they're like, yeah, that sounds good. Thank you very much. This is my last interaction with open source later. That's, that's how it happens. So there's also this perception that it's cool that there's a project that I can work on, but I don't really care about where it goes, what it does, who does it benefit, what kind of community interacts with, with, I just care about what I can get out of this. And this is also very understandable if you look at the environment and the setup that these people or people from these regions work in, or yeah, learn in basically people sometimes need to pick up 1, 2, 3 jobs. And it makes sense that once I get that second job, I'm gonna drop open source contributions all, all together. Because it doesn't make any sense if you, you're thinking about your family or the income for your family, a pay job in software, second pay job in software and the freelancing job in software makes a lot more sense than just contribu open source project. So this, all of this together paints the picture of this is just another thing that we can use to advance as engineers, which is good in its own sense. It's building good engineers, but it's not really the essence of open source collaboration and people working together and working towards building a community of people working on the same project. It doesn't really happen when the perception is is like this basically.

Aaron Newcomb (00:34:31):
Yeah. You mentioned in your presentation something about InnerSource mm-hmm. <Affirmative> as a, as opposed to, or as an, as a, as a separate topic, I guess from open source. What do you mean by InnerSource?

Ahmed Sobeh (00:34:43):
So InnerSource is exactly what opensource is, but inside the company, so always trying to have projects that are shared and worked collaboratively on between departments and between teams. I would, I, in my opinion, and that's what I mentioned in the presentation, it's a very good stepping stone for companies in these regions when it comes to open source. Introducing the idea of let's have a project that every single department can contribute to, every single team can contribute to. It's not it's not a, what, how can I say it? It's not a, an a product that is owned by any of these teams. Cause as, you know, the agile naming goes, there's a product owner for a team that owns the product or owns how this project works. Let's have projects that are not like, that doesn't have a product owner, doesn't have a tech lead working on it, doesn't have a set of engineers with some QA people working towards some backlog of tasks.

(00:35:38):
Let's have something that's a bit more open exactly like any open source projects. But for the company where you have a some features that everyone would like to see. You have forums where people can interact on inside the company. These forums can just have, can just be GitLab issues or GitHub issues or something that people just discuss what they, where they want to go with the project, where they wanna take the project in. And it becomes a shared responsibility within the company that everyone at the company wants to see the advancement of this project and wants to see this project succeed. I think doing this builds this perception or builds this culture of collaboration within companies, within smaller organizations, even governmental organizations, if they do adapt this adopt this in their software institutions, this will build this collaboration mentality within each company.

(00:36:29):
Also build expertise when it comes to open source. So if I do this for a couple of years and then I see or try to interact with a open source project, it's not gonna be this shocking experience where I'm like, I'm so lost. What, what, what can I do? Where can I start? Where can I pick up an issue or who can I talk to? Who owns this? Who is the leader here? You kind of prepare your mindset and prepare your culture to embracing open source projects, embracing the culture of open source projects. So when you move on to open source, it's not as a shocking experience as it was. It would be first if you just moved from close source to completely open source. So I think InnerSource would be one of the solutions that I would think would help as a stepping stone moving the companies and the organizations in these countries to the next step.

Aaron Newcomb (00:37:15):
Yeah, it's interesting. It sounds almost like an extended hackathon or something like that where you're, you know, you're just getting together as a group and saying, let's all try to get this thing done. And, and then, and then having that concept get embedded inside the culture of the organization, or at least freeing them to understand what the value of this could be, can kind of push them along. I'm, I'm a little curious that the you know, let me back up a little bit. So, so the large companies that, that I work with on a daily basis they see open source as almost a competitive advantage these days, right? So, so big, I mean, any, and it's not just tech companies either, right? These are big financial institutions in insurance companies, you know, companies that you would think would be adverse to open source.

(00:38:02):
That's all changed now, right? 15 years ago it was the opposite, right? Nobody wanted to run open source. Now all of a sudden, open source is an asset, and especially with cloud technologies, open source is seen as the, as the first way to go, right? And, and the only, and the only time you, you, you, you veer away from that is if there's, you know, for some reason there's a security thing or something that you have to choose a proprietary solution because you know, the security director's telling you have to. Anyway, all that to say is that there is this culture of open source first that has developed in so many organizations in the developed world. And I'm a little bit surprised, tell me if I'm wrong, that the desire to be like, name your favorite company, you know, that that has a good reputation, wouldn't also influence that to say, look, well those big companies that we admire, that we wanna, we wanna be like they're focusing on opensource as the way to get to where they want to wanna be. We should also look at opensource. Do you find any of that? You know, we want to be like that other company and adopt opensource. That was a long question. Sorry about that. I I had to set it up a little bit, but <laugh> No,

Ahmed Sobeh (00:39:09):
No, no worries. I mean, it does exist but on a much smaller scale than it is in the developed world. So there are some companies that are trying to adopt open source projects that work with open source projects, but I think the biggest challenge or the biggest blocker that some other companies face is the competency. That level. So not having or, well, not just competency at also there is the amount of people that they have available to them on the market so that are skilled enough to do these kind of things. So in bigger companies, they have the time and they have the resources, and they have the funds to hire people that either already know. For example, let's say a company is trying to use Kafka or Flink. They can either hire people specifically or Kafka, Flink experts and then they can go from there.

(00:39:53):
Or they can hire people who they can afford to let them have enough time to learn about Flink, learn about Kafka, and then take, take their journey from there on, and then be the Kafka Flink experts on the company. This luxury or this freedom or this disability is not as prevalent in smaller companies as it is in bigger companies. And things in the developed world are a bit different, where bigger companies are much, much bigger than they actually are in the develop, in the developing part of the world. So they say Company X, that is in the us In the US it has 10,000 engineers working at it in the us the same company at site in a developing country would have like 400, 5, 500 people. So it's also different level of different scale. So even if the initiative is there, the ability and the resources, I'm not to want to focus on funds or financial resources, but resources in general are much, much less in these areas, which makes it difficult.

(00:40:54):
Even if you have the initiative, even if you have the idea to do this, you cannot afford to have someone come on and then begin to understand these kind of things. And if you wanna hire someone who already knows how to work with open source and has open source experience, the pool becomes much, much smaller. And there are much fewer people that you can pick from. And these people would naturally pick the highest companies like company, excellent, company y, company Z, who just hire the top talents in the country. So I would agree that the initiative might be there in some cases, but resources make it much easier to sustain that kind of interest, at least.

Doc Searls (00:41:28):
I, I'm wondering, I, I noticed, I mean you've worked for, you know, in addition to Ivan Mozilla, which is a very pure open source company also a nonprofit, which is another special breed. But you also work for S A P, which is you know, a gigantic company. And, and I'm wondering whether I mean we've had people on from IBM and I've known a lot of people say from IBM who told me, and also Microsoft, cuz we had people from there as well who said there was enormous internal resistance at first. And then all of a sudden we had to go into compliance with our own engineers because that's, that's what happened. It wasn't just a strategic decision was made, now we're no, no, we're gonna care about open source. It was like Microsoft had to do Bing and they could do Bing with Linux, sorry, they weren't gonna do it with, with whatever their, their own web server was at, at the time. And I'm wondering, having bid at s a p are, are you seeing, and especially in, in in the developing world where these big companies do sell to the big governments, especially some of that cultural change happening, is there, or am I just projecting that, just assuming nature will take its course?

Ahmed Sobeh (00:42:43):
It does, yeah. There is actually that that change is already there. From my experience at s SAP p it was there, we, my team actually had a one day per month to just work on open source projects, completely drop the product and just work on open source project. And that was something surprising to me to be honest. Mm-Hmm. That ha we usually view these big, big, very big tech companies as companies are completely focused on products that can be sold. But as you exactly mentioned, it's not always a strategic decision. We as a team who works for a product, we can, we kind of force the hands of the company to go in that direction. If I'm, for example, I was at S A p I was building a solution that was using Rust. And if you're working with an open source project and you use other open source dependencies, you already occupy lots of your time working on open source.

(00:43:34):
You for these dependencies, lots of them you might need to add small feature or fix a bug and then contributed back upstream. You already doing lots of open source work by nature because even if you're just building a product for your company that gets sold and it's not open source, but you're doing a lot of open source work by nature and that in its own self forces the direction eventually if the person who's responsible for product management and product planning realizes that the people or the engineers in his team or their team is with time consuming a lot of time working in open source projects, it's a very natural and logical direction to just use this as an opportunity to drive towards open source because it's happening anyway, so might as well, I don't wanna be cynical and say get credit for it, but might as well get credit for it, might as well contribute to open source officially and brand your team and brand your company as a company that contributes to open source.

(00:44:30):
So it's exactly as you mentioned, the nature of the tech industry in general and tech projects are available to everyone now with some of the strongest of them being open source. That kind of forces everyone's hands in going to that direction. And that would take me into the next point that I always like to mention, it's not just using these projects. It's very important for these companies to also care about the sustainability and existence of these projects. Just using these projects, should it be enough and just funding these projects with money is not just, not just enough. And this is something that I'm quite proud of that we do at Ivan, that we donate our most critical resource, which is time, people's time. We donate it to open source, we let people actively work on open source for, for a job. It's something that they get paid for.

(00:45:21):
And even, even if you are on the marketing team at Ivan, sorry for the company pitch, but even if you're on the market team arriving and you contribute to a, an an open source project, we have a program where you can go and submit you say, I worked on this open source project during my free time and you get paid for it. So that's, that's how you can drive people towards it, make people feel like they're appreciated and they're well not compensated just money-wise, but compensated in general with appreciation also money-wise for the contributions open source. And that's something that is still being built up in lots, lots of companies, but it's definitely the right way to go.

Aaron Newcomb (00:46:00):
Yeah, it really comes down to the culture of the company and embedding that in the culture. And I love that idea of, you know, somehow recognizing the fact that somebody, you know, contributed to an open source project from a, from a corporate view as well, like the, the corporations actually recognizing them. Have you, what kind of support have you gotten in this, in this effort? Not you specifically, but the, how much support has the effort gotten from, you know, the Linux foundation's <laugh>, and there's the Linux Foundation, but you know what I'm saying, like the, the or the, or the large corporations. So like, you know, o open source initiative or or the large organizations, you know, like, like, like I I can imagine like a Red Hat for example, right? Yeah. this is hugely important for them as a, as a company. So have you gotten any support from those folks or do you see support coming from those organizations or companies to try to help out in the developing countries?

Ahmed Sobeh (00:47:04):
Yeah. I, I personally have not had any collaborations in that area yet. All my efforts and all my attempts are with people directly in my own communities and in my own circles and groups. And that's what I always try to do. But it's always, I mean, opensource already struggles enough in the developing world, and I think that takes all the attention towards the developing world, which is fair and unfair at the same time, and at least it makes sense that closing a smaller gap would take your attention much more than closing a much bigger gap. So yeah, I mean, not much initiatives that I've seen in that direction or that I've interacted with people who drive in that direction yet. But yeah, I'm hoping in the future this would would actually change.

Doc Searls (00:47:49):
I wanna get to more questions, but first I have to let everybody know that Club Twit is a cool thing. Club Twit is another great way to support our network. As a member, you'll get access to ad-free versions of all the shows on twit, as well as other great benefits. There's a bonus TWIT plus feed, which includes footage and discussions that didn't make the final show edit, as well as bonus shows who started, such as Hands-on Mac, hands-on Windows, ask me anythings and fireside shots for some of your favorite twit guests and co-hosts as Floss Weekly listeners, you may be interested in, you should be interested, not just me, you should be interested in checking out another Club Twit exclusive show. It's the Untitled Linux Show hosted by our own Jonathan Bennett. So sign up to join Club Twit for just $7 a month. Head over to twit.tv/club twit and join today. We thank you for your support.

(00:48:50):
So this goes back to something you were discussing earlier, but I just wanna get a, a little bit more of a, a sense of it. How much are people learning open source from each other or in more formal ways? And I, I asked that because like, I, at when I was at Linux Journal, which I was for 24 years I would often talk to like colonel developers and ask them, you know, I'd ask a room full of these people, you know, where'd you learn what to see? Or whatever else you're using. And none of them said school <laugh>, you know, they, they, they all said ourselves or each other, but we have community too. And that, which is another topic cuz that varies from code-based to code-based situation situation. So I'm wondering how much self-teaching is going on versus community teaching and how does that feed into community, which it's a word we throw around around a lot, but it means different things to different cultures.

Ahmed Sobeh (00:49:48):
That is true. I mean, I would say almost, almost all of open source knowledge would be self-taught, would be self learned in in these regions. As I mentioned, I, all my experiences with open source was at my first job at, I mean, back before I moved out of my country working with the libraries that I realized, oh, I can just fix this and then move on with my life using the local version. So that was the only exposure I got to open source. But the thing is,

(00:50:19):
If there was an existing community that was strong enough to help people learn about open source, have people understand open source things been much different, there would would be a very different ability to learn about open source. And there are lots of challenges that come with building communities in these regions when it comes to open source. The biggest, and also I touched on that in my presentation, the biggest issue would be first access. It's, that's also, I mean because these are the projects that I have daily interaction with. So Fling, Kafka, open open search, all of these big big projects, they would, wouldn't be working or wouldn't be compiling a building with a weak machine or below average machine. So you have to have first access to funds and have to have access to equipment, which is a problem in these regions. The average university student, the average one does not have access to good equipment or stock equipment, does not have access to high speed internet.

(00:51:16):
I remember vividly from my time in a university, there were people who would be working on a project and they would say, I'm really sorry. I can contribute, I can now I can also contribute on Wednesdays and Thursdays because that's when I go to this place that has good internet. So they're studying computer science, but they don't have stable internet. This has changed a lot now and improved a lot, I would say, but still exists. These cases are still part of the society of how society behaves. So access to equipment that the internet indication of self-learning becomes very difficult in that setup. As I just mentioned, if you can't compile a project, how are you supposed to learn about it becomes very, very, very difficult. There's also the issue of localization where I understand that internet is the sorry, English is the language of the internet and the language of the world.

(00:52:02):
Let's say that to be frank language, a language of the entire planet, but not, there are lots of very good talents and very good software engineers in Africa, in parts of Asia and south America. They don't speak fluent English and going to learn about a project and be self-taught about a project through documentation that's purely written in English. It's very difficult for them. It becomes very difficult for for them to start and they wouldn't have an entry point into the projects that's how I try to say that. Usually the entry point is I open a page and it tells me, one, what does a project do? What language is it's written in? How can I contribute where to go to contribute? Here are a, here are a list of first starters issues or beginner's issues. If I can't grasp all of that in a language that I can understand, then it becomes very difficult to go into the project and I would first need to improve my language and then, and then come back and it just discourses people from contributing at all.

(00:52:58):
And in all of this setup where, so with the lack of equipment access inter internet access very easy to educate and self-learn, basically very privileged few become the ones who are able to do this or shall learn about open source and contribute to open source to people like me who ha had the privilege of a working compiling able machine that can compile open source projects. People who had stable internet at their homes becomes like, this becomes a few privileged people who or can contribute to Pittsburgh projects. And how can you build the community in these circumstances? It's just gonna be privileged people who can contribute to the project only in their free time and they don't have free time. They, you can continue this country attract or maintain other volunteers basically because their lives or their situations or their access is different from yours.

(00:53:52):
And then the project will either die at some point in time or just be archived as lots of open source projects are archived on the internet. So the issue of access makes it very difficult. Even if you have the intention, even if you have the understanding, even if you have the need to learn about, about an open source project, lots of these access issues will just discourage potential contributors or potential people who can contribute to open source projects. And that in itself is, it's more of a foundational issue. It's not something that you can change in the culture on people's mindsets or how they think it's depends, it's different in each country and each country they have their own journey towards improving access for the citizens, but yet it's quite important to, yeah, to make this a bit easier for people to be able to, to read open source at the end.

Aaron Newcomb (00:54:42):
So we've got a couple of related questions. I wanna get to the one from the chat first. Cuz we always try to do that. So Gumby asks in the chat, and it's a little bit of a longer story, but I'm gonna summarize it here hopefully. So he was saying in the nineties, he was in Sri Lanka working with, you know, there was a lot of open source folks and, and hobbyists and people, but they were all sprinkled throughout the country and they didn't know each other. They didn't have a way to connect with each other, right. So even if they wanted to, or even if they had access to technology, you know, back then, and of course technology's changed, but they, they, you know, they just didn't have that connection. So he asked, what would you, what would promote the ability of these folks to find and support each other?

Ahmed Sobeh (00:55:24):
I think with social media being, being part of the world and how the world functions right now, that's something that would help a lot in these cases. Back in my Time's, forums were the only way of communication. People go forums and ask each other's questions. It was simpler times, it was easier times, and it was better times in my opinion. But still, social media makes this a lot easier. You have people meeting together in a Facebook group and trying to collaborate on something, work on something that's a much, much easier way than trying to meet up, which is quite difficult in these regions as for different means of access when it comes to, or organizing actual meetups and booking places and all these things that require resources. So I think initiatives that are on social media are, have been very effective recently, especially in Egypt. For example, in my country, lots of open source initiatives have picked up a lot on social media, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or any kind of masteron or any kind of social media outlet. So I think if I want to be I wanna be precise of a specific solution specific way, social media would be a very good direction to go. When it comes to trying to help this with, with this,

Aaron Newcomb (00:56:33):
Are there successes that you're seeing? So are there countries or continents that are starting to contribute more either to GitHub or other places where you see that there is success?

Ahmed Sobeh (00:56:47):
Yeah, I think I, I'm quite concerned with Africa because it's my own own continent. I, I have seen Nigeria and Kenya, for example, a huge uprising when it comes to open source contributions. There are huge improvement in numbers when it comes to open source contributions. I just mentioned the open source summit or open source conference that was in Nigeria last year, 20 22, 800 plus. I think these is a number that you don't see in lots of developed regions of the world when it comes to open source conferences. To be honest, it's a quite well significant number. But the one chart that you can see on the screen is the one that's a bit unfortunate that all the African contributions amount to less than 2.5% of the world contributions to open source. That's what, what needs more work. That what, that's what needs more improvement given the fact that, by the way, most of the big tech companies, they outsource their work to exactly these regions because they, of course for lower pay and lower wages, but they know about the existence of talents in these regions.

(00:57:49):
So we already know that they're very good engineers, very good capable software engineers in these regions. So just giving them me the means to contribute to open source, which would help a lot, as you can see in this list of top top 10 countries that pe that countries or more advanced countries outsource software development too, only three of them would be considered almost fully developed or actually fully developed. The rest are all just countries that are trying to develop, whether it's each Brazil, Taiwan, Romania, Ukraine, the Philippines, India, all of them countries that are trying to develop. But still there is this recognition that there are very capable engineers, very capable software engineers in these regions. And I think that's a very strong foundation, I would say very strong foundation to build on and have open source contributors in this regions. I, and it's been, it's been improving as Isaiah just mentioned, because it's some something that really made me feel like it's going in the right direction. The Nigerian conference is something that's worth admiring.

Doc Searls (00:58:47):
So we're down to the last couple minutes of the show. And I'd just like to end, end with a, a quick question about what can only come from developing countries. You know, there's a and I'm just wondering if, is there an answer to that? Of course, we imagining things that may not exist right now, but I'm thinking as a class, if you could say briefly what you think can only come from the developing world.

Ahmed Sobeh (00:59:14):
Completely new ways to look at projects and solutions and things. That's something that I think has been dominated by specific point of view. In most projects, you have people who are from the same regions, or as I say, the developed world in the us Europe and some parts of Asia. These are the people who have been consistently contributing to open source over the past 20, 30 years. But there's a completely new way of looking at things that people living in developing countries can provide. We have different perspective coming, different perspectives coming from different backgrounds growing up in different conditions and situations. We would offer new solutions to long lasting problems that have been there in the open source community for long times. And I think that's direction where most parts of the world are going at the moment. So trying to open up for different perspectives and different points of view from different people coming from different backgrounds.

(01:00:14):
So it only makes sense that open source would also open its arms to people coming from developing countries because as I just said, w the amount of talent that I've seen in my own country, just to be completely accurate and talk about something that I've seen with my own eyes. People have very clever ways of approaching solutions. I'm not saying that other ways, not clever, but their clever way, giving their conditions, working around the hassles that they have to reach the, the well the level of knowledge that they have is something that is very impressive and could only benefit opensource projects and opensource communities. Having these people as additions to their already existing, very, very knowledgeable communities, adding people to them from that status would be very good.

Doc Searls (01:00:58):
Yeah, I, I've noticed that generally the, the harder life is for people, the more resourceful it is. They, they are. It's, I mean, people can be extraordinarily resourceful when you're privileged. A lot is already taken care of for you and you, you know, how things are gonna, the car's gonna run, you know, the roads will be paved, you know, things like that. But I've always been impressed by that. So we're out of time. So we always end with two questions. One is oh, they're just, what are your, what are your favorite text editor and scripting language?

Ahmed Sobeh (01:01:34):
Can you say that again? Sorry.

Doc Searls (01:01:35):
Oh yeah. The yes, this of all our guests. Your favorite text editor and scripting language. Ah, yeah.

Ahmed Sobeh (01:01:41):
Scripting language. I would say Python is my favorite scripting language. Yeah. And I've recently, I used to be a vin person, <laugh>, but I used to, I used to be a VIN person, but I grew to like Sea Lion very recently.

Doc Searls (01:01:54):
Hmm. That's

Ahmed Sobeh (01:01:56):
Cool. I mean, yeah, not very proud of that as an open source person, but yeah.

Doc Searls (01:02:01):
Well that's great <laugh>. It has a sound effects. Well thank you so much. A this has been a great show very informative and, and, and fun as well. And we'll have to have you back and talk about everything that's changed, you know, in a year or two years or whatever it's gonna be. Cuz I'm sure they'll have a lot to talk about again. So thanks for coming on. It's been great. Thank you very much for having me. It's been a great pleasure. Have you play music next time too? <Laugh> I'll prepare something <laugh>. That's great. Thanks. Thank you very much. So, so Aaron that was, that, that was a, a great show.

Aaron Newcomb (01:02:43):
Yeah, I think so too. Very eye-opening. It's something that we all need to be conscious of. We live in our little bubbles still. You would think that in this day and age, you know we would know more about that or I would know more about this stuff. I'm really talking about myself here. So it really is eye-opening to hear some of the challenges in other parts of the world that could inhibit open source, but also some of the encouraging trends that are happening as well. And some of the things that that we all need to keep in mind as we're looking to grow the open source community. So I found it, I found it super, super interesting to, to listen to and hear what's going on. So yeah, glad we had this show for sure.

Doc Searls (01:03:22):
Yes. Sa same here. I mean, I'm remembering back in the early days of, of Linux Journal, I mean it was such an uphill thing and probably we were going through the same thing back then as, as we are now in other parts of the, in other parts of the world where it seems like, oh my gosh, so many things are sacked against us. You know, especially the, you know, where the large companies or the governments who whatever are buying old stuff, you know, buying old stuff that somebody greases somebody's fault to buy. And then, you know, it turns out, you know, a bunch of geeks are doing a better job and you have to use their stuff and it's just, I'm, I'm just really encouraged by it. So yeah. Yep.

Aaron Newcomb (01:04:02):
Same.

Doc Searls (01:04:03):
So so give us your plugs cuz you're working on some new stuff.

Aaron Newcomb (01:04:09):
I'm working on some new stuff. Yeah. it's exhausting. <Laugh> there's always too much to do, but yeah. So the, obviously the YouTube channel is, is doing great and growing. In fact, I've got a video coming out

Doc Searls (01:04:21):
Is Retro Hack, right?

Aaron Newcomb (01:04:22):
Yeah. Retro Hack check on YouTube. I've got a video coming out at 11. So, so right after this you can tune in. No, don't, don't turn away. Don't keep, keep watching Twit. Just kidding. <Laugh>. no, but you can watch it any time of course on YouTube. And it's actually where I do this new a kind of a run long-running type of show called E-Waste Wednesday, because Wednesday is literally the day that I go to e-waste and see what I can pick up. And so what I started doing was bringing this stuff back and talking about what it is, seeing if it works. You know, sometimes I do some, some quick repairs, sometimes I get sucked in and do a long repair. But yeah, so I've got a, another video on that coming up. At 11:00 AM this morning I'm gonna be looking at a Packard Bell monitor from the early nineties an Atari 2,600 that popped up at

Doc Searls (01:05:09):
Us. Oh, I had, I had one of those. There it is. Wow.

Aaron Newcomb (01:05:11):
Yep. And then I'm also gonna be looking at a wise terminal from the early nineties as well. I think 19 three. So anybody that worked on terminals will, will probably get nostalgic over this one. It's a great terminal. And I was able to hook up a raspberry pie to it and access the internet with the links browser text brow text-based browser.

Doc Searls (01:05:29):
Oh wow. The original, the original browser links. Wow. Yeah.

Aaron Newcomb (01:05:33):
Yeah. It was, it was a super fun thing to put together. So I think people will enjoy it.

Doc Searls (01:05:38):
I I like it on, on the video of seeing your, your joystick. That was the Atari 2,600 joystick where you had to hold the base down. It wasn't heavy. Yes. You had to hold that thing down and press the red button while you're, and it was bad. Yeah.

Aaron Newcomb (01:05:53):
And it was, it didn't move that much, you know, that was the thing, right?

Doc Searls (01:05:55):
Yeah, it was pretty tight.

Aaron Newcomb (01:05:57):
It was very tight and you know, very crude actually. But it worked and it was cheap and that's what it was all about back in the day, is making things for you know, to get those margins up and they were

Doc Searls (01:06:07):
Very killed. A lot of invading space things. <Laugh>

Aaron Newcomb (01:06:13):
Means Me Too.

Doc Searls (01:06:14):
Wore out the red button. Well this is great. And, and next week a little plug tour. Next week we're gonna have David Sire on Dave Sire. Created a company called Linux Care back in like the nineties. The whole idea was to have, get a bunch of geeks together to fix things. Did a bunch of other things after that. He's been an old friend. We ended up talking for two and a half hours, but I just, just called him out of the blue and said, you gotta come on the show. We can't like talk about this stuff and not have you on the show. So he's coming in next week. So that's what's coming up then. And so great having Armon again, and we'll see you next week.

Jonathan Bennett (01:06:54):
Hey, we should talk Linux. It's the operating system that runs the internet, bunch of game consoles, cell phones, and maybe even the machine on your desk. Then you already knew all that. What you may not know is that Twit now is a show dedicated to it, the Untitled Linux Show. Whether you're a Lennox Pro, a burgeoning ciit man, or just curious what the big deal is, you should join us on the Club Twit Discord every Saturday afternoon for news analysis and tips to sharpen your Lennox skills. And then make sure you subscribe to the Club Twit exclusive Untitled Linux Show. Wait, you're not a Club Twit member yet. We'll go to twit.tv/club twit and sign up. Hope to see you there.