Starting a business in Singapore is an exciting adventure. With your ideas polished and your plans ready, you’re eager to enter this bustling market. However, before you proceed, there’s a crucial step: securing approval for your company name from the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA). This seemingly straightforward task can quickly become a major hurdle, delaying your launch and dampening your enthusiasm. Worse, even an approved name might still lead to issues if it conflicts with existing trademarks—a costly mistake that many entrepreneurs overlook.

With the right approach and support from corporate secretarial services, you can navigate this process smoothly. Let’s explore how to secure your company name and start your business journey on the right foot.

The Importance of Name Approval

Your company name is more than just a label; it’s the foundation of your brand. In Singapore, it also serves as a critical legal checkpoint. A rejection from ACRA or a subsequent trademark dispute can halt your incorporation, disrupt your marketing efforts, and even necessitate a costly rebrand. In 2023, ACRA rejected over 15% of name applications, often due to issues of similarity or non-compliance. For busy entrepreneurs, a company secretary can be invaluable, turning a potential obstacle into a smooth process.

Understanding ACRA’s Requirements

ACRA plays the role of gatekeeper to ensure Singapore’s business registry remains clear and fair. When you submit your name through BizFile+, they assess it against several key criteria:

• No Duplicates: Your name cannot match an existing company, LLP, or reserved name.
• Decency First: Names that are offensive or suggest illegal activities are prohibited.
• Restricted Terms: Words like “Bank” or “University” require licenses or justification.
• Similarity Trap: Names that are too similar to others, whether in spelling, sound, or meaning, will be flagged. For instance, “PeakPulse Pte Ltd” versus “PeakPulse LLP.”

A quick search on BizFile+ can help, but be cautious: a “no match” result doesn’t guarantee approval. Similarity is subjective, and this is where many run into trouble.

The Trademark Challenge: ACRA Isn’t the Final Arbiter

Here’s a crucial point to remember: ACRA’s approval doesn’t shield you from trademark disputes. The Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) governs trademarks, and a registered mark can challenge your name even after you’ve launched. Imagine “SkyBloom Events Pte Ltd” gets ACRA’s approval, but “SkyBloom” is trademarked for event planning. This scenario can lead to legal notices, rebranding expenses, and a public relations nightmare.

In 2024, IPOS recorded over 1,200 trademark oppositions, with many new businesses blindsided by this oversight. Checking for existing trademarks early can help you avoid such pitfalls.

Common Reasons for Name Rejections and How to Overcome Them

Rejections can be frustrating, especially with a S$15 fee and a 14-day wait to resubmit. Here are common pitfalls and how to avoid them:

• Too Similar: Names like “BrightStar” versus “BriteStar” that are close enough to cause confusion will be rejected. Solution: Choose a unique name. Combine words or create new terms, and test their pronunciation.
• Too Bland: Names like “Singapore Trading Pte Ltd” are generic and often overlap with existing names. Solution: Add a creative twist, such as “SingaTech Trading.”
• Overreach: Names like “Global Holdings” for a small startup may be questioned by ACRA. Solution: Ensure your name reflects your current scale.

A bit of creativity and research can significantly improve your chances of approval.

Steps to Secure Name Approval

Ready to get it right? Follow this plan:

• Brainstorm Options: Come up with 3–5 unique names you love.
• Conduct Thorough Checks:
• Search ACRA’s BizFile+ for matches.
• Check IPOS for trademarks in your industry.
• Perform a Google search for unofficial uses and secure a domain.
• Stand Out: Coined words, like “Nexlify,” often clear hurdles more easily.
• Keep It Simple: Ensure your name is pronounceable and memorable.

For instance, a startup swapped “CoreFit Gym” for “CoreVibe Fitness” after spotting a conflict, securing approval on the first try.

The Importance of Trademark Checks

Before submitting your name, thoroughly search IPOS’s Digital Hub for registered marks, variations, and similar-sounding names in your field. A broad web search and domain check (e.g., .sg or .com availability) provide additional security. One founder avoided a costly rebrand by discovering “PulseWave” was already trademarked before registering “PulseWave Tech Pte Ltd.”

The Advantage of Corporate Secretarial Services

In Singapore, every company must appoint a company secretary within six months—it’s a legal requirement. However, savvy entrepreneurs engage them sooner. Here’s why they’re invaluable:

• Expert Insight: They identify potential ACRA issues based on experience.
• Comprehensive Checks: They thoroughly examine ACRA and IPOS, highlighting risks.
• Accurate Filing: They ensure submissions are correct, avoiding delays.

A 2023 study found that firms with secretarial support were 40% less likely to encounter setup issues. At a cost of S$200–S$500, it’s a modest investment for significant peace of mind.

The Cost of Mistakes

Errors can be costly. Each ACRA rejection incurs additional fees and waiting time. Trademark disputes can lead to thousands in legal expenses and a forced rebrand post-launch. One tech firm lost S$10,000 renaming “CodeZap” when “CodeZapp” contested their name. Prevention is always more cost-effective.

Final Steps: Launch with Confidence

Secure your name by following these essentials:

• Conduct thorough checks with ACRA and IPOS.
• Create a name that is unique yet clear.
• Rely on corporate secretarial services Singapore for their expertise.

Singapore’s market rewards those who are well-prepared. By getting this right, you’re not just approved—you’re laying the foundation for a lasting brand.

Conclusion: Your Name, Your Future

Choosing a company name in Singapore is more than a procedural task; it’s a strategic decision. With diligence and the right support, such as corporate secretarial services, you can navigate ACRA’s requirements and avoid trademark pitfalls. Why risk delays when you can launch with confidence? Your business deserves a name that’s poised to succeed.

Understanding Company Secretarial Services: What They Include and How They Benefit Your Business - Entrust Public Accounting

Being in business in Singapore is associated with numerous roles, including legal and regulatory requirements of which companies must comply to remain legal.

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Sommaire

• 1 Interview with Florent Cayré – Commown
• 2 Presentation of Florent
• 3 Commown’s business model
• 4 Activities around smartphones
• 5 Hardware and spare parts
• 6 Free software
• 7 The duration of the support
• 8 Open Hardware
• 9 Software tools
• 10 Commown’s next challenges
• 11 The cooperative model of a SCIC
• 12 Conclusion
• 13 License

Interview with Florent Cayré – Commown

Walid : Dear listeners, good evening, it’s June 21st, the day of the Fête de la Musique, and it is with great pleasure that I welcome Florent Cayré.Florent is one of the founders of a cooperative, a SCIC (cooperative society of collective interest) called Commown.I must say that I am one of the members, even if I am rather a sleeper person.A few years ago, I met Commown, I thought the concept was great and so I became a member.And it’s also, we’re going to talk about it, thanks to Commown too that I discovered /e/OS which is an OS that we’ll talk about later, which is a degoogled OS.I really wanted to talk to one of the founders of the cooperative.Florent, listen, welcome to Projets Libres.I hope you’re doing well and thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.

Florent : thank you.It’s great to have the floor.

Presentation of Florent

Walid : Look, I tried to look on the Internet for interviews, I haven’t found many of you.Can you start by introducing yourself a little bit for our listeners?

Florent : Yes, indeed, I don’t do a lot of interviews, I’m not very visible in the media, but I still try to be present enough at a certain number of round tables.I’m Florent Cayré, I’m an engineer by training, an aeronautical engineer at the base, not even a computer scientist, but I took the tangent of computer science and especially free computing, having a computer under Debian since 1994.I’m a bit in the old idiot gang.And as a result, I quickly did computer science in my profession, since in aeronautics, I started by doing a lot of numerical simulations in fluid mechanics, which is my scientific specialty at the beginning.And then, quite quickly, I didn’t like this environment so much, especially in terms of atmosphere.It’s still a very vertical management style.These are former military companies.Moreover, we were also working on military projects.And so, I was passionate about aeronautics, little by little, the passion diminished.The IT sector remained.And I joined a small group of classmates who wanted to set up a company.I said to myself: Come on, let’s go.I am going into this with no entrepreneurial spirit.

Both my parents are civil servants.It’s not a family culture at all, so it was quite complicated at the beginning.On the other hand, I found a little more meaning in it.I started using a lot of free software and then contributing to it.And little by little, I used some pretty innovative technologies that were being developed at the time by Logilab, which I ended up joining after using the cubicweb framework a lot, a lot for my projects in my previous company.

Here, at Logilab, I worked a lot on the scientific computing part to try to put Web technologies in the management of scientific data, so to manage clean scientific data to make beautiful calculation chains, an issue that I had addressed very well in the field of aeronautics.Little by little, I started to contribute a lot to free software, to not really be able to do without it.I have participated in great projects at Logilab, especially in the field of energy production.I ended up leaving, especially for Strasbourg, leaving Paris and leaving for Strasbourg.And then, I started looking for a project that was really very aligned with my values.

So, I wanted free software, I wanted cooperation too, because one of the great frustrations I had working at Logilab was that we had so much work that it was quite difficult to collaborate with other companies.So, I tried to work with a nice company from a friend who did numerical simulation in fluid mechanics.And it was very complicated because we couldn’t find ways to cooperate and interests in cooperation strong enough for the relationship to last a long time, and it was a great frustration.I started looking for a project that combined free software, cooperation and ecology.And in fact, while wandering through Linux user groups, I met Élie.We sat next to the order, we said: What do you do for a living?What do you do?We told our stories a little bit and we realised that Élie, who was carrying out an associative project at the time, which was that of Commown, was looking for partners to move to SCIC.One of the roles he missed was a technical role and a lot on the free software aspects.

I really fell in love with the project.The next day, I was a volunteer for the association and then, a few months later, after completing the team, we started in SCIC at the beginning of January 2000.

Walid : What does free software really represent?What makes you can’t do without it?

Florent : For me, it’s simply knowledge.That is to say, I can’t imagine keeping mathematical theorems secret.For me, software is the same.It is pure knowledge.It is a commons that is a public good, which is a good of general interest.I don’t want it to be privatized at all.And then, it seems totally counterintuitive to me to use something that you don’t know what it’s doing.So, proprietary software is exactly that.You install something on your computer that is not even really your computer anymore when you install non-free software on it, since you don’t know what it does.I am willing to give my trust to things, but that I can open the hood is strictly necessary to give my trust.This is what free software allows.In addition, it has an enormous emancipatory role, especially in third world countries, developing countries.Today, without free software, I think they would have zero computer skills.Today, I think it gives a chance to people who had none.

Commown’s business model

Walid : You mentioned the name Commown.I also introduced it at the very beginning by introducing you.Could you start by explaining to us what the Commown project is?I’m going to call it a project at first.What was your initial idea?Is the original idea still the same as it is now, or has it evolved over time?When did you set it up?

Florent : We set it up in 2018, the SCIC, in the form of a company, but in reality, it’s a project that Élie had already launched a year and a half before, in the form of an association.His initial idea really stayed at the heart of Commown.Obviously, it has matured a little bit and everything, fortunately, but in reality, everything was already extremely detailed, extremely well thought out.The project is essentially articulated around three really main pillars.The first is an economic model.In reality, that is to say that the economic model was chosen not at all by chance, based on the observation that the obsolescence of electronic equipment, which is really a disaster, because producing electronic equipment causes a lot of both human and ecological damage, and therefore having obsolescence on these products, is really a phenomenal waste of resources, mainly natural resources.You have to know what a mine is to get an idea of what it’s like to put a phone in the trash, it’s really catastrophic.So, the starting point is: we have to fight against obsolescence to produce much less of these devices, to stop throwing them out the window.And so, for that, we have to go back to the root of the problem.

The root of the problem is that the people who produce equipment today, they sell it.And since they sell them, they have an interest in selling more.And to sell more, there have to be some that go in the trash somewhere.

And so, when you’re a big player, in particular, you have no choice but to have obsolescence strategies to survive.And so, obsolescence strategies are extremely varied and extremely clever because in any case, the survival of these major players depends on it.It is not only technical planned obsolescence that regularly makes the headlines thanks to the association Halte à l’obsolescence programmee (HOP), which has really kicked the anthill.But there are plenty of other mechanisms, including advertising, marketing, which doesn’t stop all day long from you slip in your ear that after all, you really have a device.You absolutely have to change if you want to look cool.So advertising is really the biggest obsolescence mechanism that can exist.And the second one, really very closely, is the software.And in particular, the software is non-free.Software is really the thing that allows… Even free software, in fact, even if it hurts me to say this, is really the thing that makes devices obsolete because of a lack of updates, essentially, security updates, since security updates are expensive.And the players have no interest in it, once again, in particular Qualcomm, Mediatek manufacturers, chip manufacturers have no interest at all in keeping the software in place for too long because at that point, their chips, they can’t replace them, they can’t sell new chips.Commown starts from this observation and says: We have to stop selling.When we said that, we didn’t say anything.A whole bunch of things still need to be built.In fact, in reality, it has already been 30 or 40 years since people have made this observation, including Rank Xerox for example, which started selling not photocopiers, but photocopies.And so, the solution to that is to sell the use of a device instead of selling a device, which forces the supplier to repair his device instead of selling a new one, because in reality, he no longer has an economic interest in putting a new device on the market.

It’s better to repair the device because it costs less, since what we sell is the use.In fact, it’s a kind of rental.

So be careful, there are some rental players who really don’t do the job.We are transforming the model so that the ecological interest and the economic interest coincide.The ecological interest is to make the device last and it’s exactly the same for the economic interest.The longer it lasts, the more we will have made the investment in expenses profitable.

Walid : So, it’s a rental without an option to buy.

Florent : That’s it.That’s the second thing, which is quite important, is that indeed, from the moment we give a purchase option, we fall back into the mechanisms of obsolescence, we just delayed them, that’s all, but we haven’t defeated the evil at the root.We even find completely hallucinating rental offers today, like, I think it’s Samsung that does that.It is written on our website somewhere.We give you a new phone every four months.We are almost the exact opposite of the objective, while the economic model is still officially rental.In reality, obviously, there is a lot of resale behind all this.So, it just becomes a purely financial game.From the moment you buy and sell, the rental stage is almost financing.In reality, and so we are turning into a bank, which is obviously not at all our business.We do a lot of services to make the devices last as long as possible by advising people, by repairing the devices, by making sure to protect them, by updating them, to upgrade them if they need to be upgraded, by increasing the RAM, this kind of thing, increasing storage space, helping people transfer their data, not lose it, etc.That’s what makes the devices last, to keep the devices in the hands of their users.

Walid : I’ll make a first digression before forgetting, because when I hear you talk, I feel like I’m at work.We work in household appliances and we work on reconditioning.Not too long ago, the government came up with something called the reparation bonus.I just wanted to know, because it’s one of my current topics, if it was something you get the repair bonus from or not.Are you entitled to it or not?What do you think?Basically, the idea is that the government applies a bonus.That is to say, basically, when you have your appliance repaired, if it is broken and if it meets a certain number of criteria, the person who repairs it and who is approved will apply a discount and then will contact an eco-organization to recover the bonus for himself.

Florent : ok.Clearly, we don’t benefit from it and we can’t benefit from it.The cooperative remains the owner of the devices it purchases.I say the cooperative and not the employees or not the co-founders.There are now about 600 shareholders in the cooperative, which owns the entire fleet.So, clearly, we cannot benefit from this kind of mechanism.What do I really think about it?I’m quite skeptical about this because I think that it will essentially produce a windfall effect and that repairers will just increase their prices by the amount of the subsidy.But it’s the experience that makes me talk, mainly because I saw exactly the same thing when I was a student and they said: Look, we’re going to increase the APL.Rents have increased by exactly the same amount as APLs almost instantaneously.So, in reality, it’s a bit of a disguised subsidy to a certain industry.After all, it’s not the industry that I dislike the most.Repair, I find it an extremely healthy activity.I would be very happy if a large number of repairers were created.I prefer that we subsidize this kind of thing rather than polluting industries like Total, in, I don’t know, me, for example, by not charging the price of aircraft fuel at their fair price.

Walid : We agree.I close this parenthesis to come back to Commown.I got to know Commown in 2019 and at the time, from memory, you were very focused on smartphones, on phones.And then afterwards, you diversified too.But at the time, it was very focused on smartphones and Fairphones, in particular.That’s also how it caught my attention a bit.Is it still one of the main activities, the smartphone part of your business?

Activities around smartphones

Florent : Yes, it’s still a main activity.It remains the main activity.Indeed, today, we have diversified a little in many directions.In particular, we make other electronic devices, computers in particular, laptops as well as desktop computers.And also, now, we’re working a lot on the audio.But there are plenty of historical reasons for starting with Fairphone.One of the reasons is that Élie has one of the very first Fairphone 2, really “One of the first“, it’s written on it, on his phone.He quickly realized that it was still an ultra-innovative phone and as a result, that there are still a number of disadvantages due to this youthful design, and in particular a lot of small false contacts, a lot of subtleties that make it a difficult device in reality for the general public.He said to himself: This is precisely the right device to show the added value of a service like Commown’s.Because it’s not easy to keep a Fairphone 2 for long.You have to have the spare parts, you have to know all the little defects it has, you have to be able to know the device well.And as a result, Commown could gain this expertise and we gained this expertise quite quickly.

We helped a lot of people to keep Fairphones 2 for a long time.And then, obviously, the other really good reason is the basic one, which is that Fairphone is the far, very innovative and virtuous player in the manufacture of electronic equipment.They have a very important transparency.If you read the reports they make, they are extremely detailed, extremely precise.They are working hard to convince the rest of the industry that we need to be cleaner, that we need to do better in all areas: design, manufacturing, transport, even packaging.He was a natural actor.We don’t want to distribute devices that are made in deplorable conditions by kids and possibly with a lot of deaths in the mines.Obviously, Fairphone was the first manufacturer we wanted to work with.Since then, it’s not easy to choose new manufacturers because up front, in Fairphone, they are all much worse.But we still try to find criteria that allow us to open up to other people.And in particular, we try to find players who have a reasonable size that allows us to have an influence on them and to tell them: Look, we have to increase the warranty periods, we have to improve this design point, we have to allow free software to be installed on it.

This kind of criteria.We have a whole bunch of internal criteria to choose equipment that remains for us the best or with the best players on the market.This openness is still very controlled, this openness in terms of products.In terms of the market, we have also opened up to companies since then, which we didn’t do at the very beginning.We only did individuals.Now, we do business, we have a lot of corporate customers, it now represents more than half of our turnover.And then, we also have local authority customers.And then, we are trying to develop this market.It’s much more difficult, much longer, but we think it’s interesting.

Walid : Before we go into more detail, because there is a subject that really interested me very much, it was how to manage a fleet of aircraft and how to make it last the longest.But first, I’d like you to give us a little more detail about the economic model.

Florent : The business model, it’s quite clear, we start by buying devices.We are the ones who make the investment.We borrow money, essentially.We also get help from a whole bunch of members like you, for example, who help us finance our devices.How do they help us?By lending us money, by taking part of the capital, which allows us to come in and say to the banks: Look, we have a lot of capital, you can lend us a lot of money and for cheap.Overall, we are fairly well followed by the banks, not too much by venture capitalists, except for individuals.The first difficulty is finding money.Once we have found money, we buy these devices, we rent them with service, paying close attention to many things, including that they are up to date if possible, before sending them.We update them, we install a screen protector on them.We try to make sure that the device arrives in good conditions and if it is ever a little roughed up, that it is still alive for as long as possible and as little damaged as possible by its user.

For example, screen protectors are things that are often damaged.We change them for free, it’s included in the service because we have an economic interest in it.

In reality, once again, we also have good will, but we also have an economic interest that coincides.Which means that it’s sustainable, even if the co-founders end up leaving the project one day, for example going to retirement, even if it’s a very long time away.But if one day all this happens, in reality, the economic interest will remain there and as a result, the project will be sustainable.That’s one of the important things.This economic model, for us, is extremely stable.One of the subtleties we’ve brought relatively recently to all of this… No, I am not finished on the customers.Rents, as it is in our interest for the customer to keep his phone as long as possible, we make decreasing rents.That is to say, the longer the customer keeps the device, the less he will pay.This is logical, on the one hand, with regard to the accounting depreciation of the devices, but it is also logical that it is in his interest to keep it a little longer.If the rent has dropped considerably, which is the case with us, I will give figures afterwards, obviously, the customer will find it difficult to say: Hey, I’m going to take a brand new phone and pay four times more than before.

To give you an example, today, if you go to our website, you’re going to look at the Fairphone 4.You have a minimum one-year commitment.The monthly payments are €29.60 and after five years, you drop to €11 per month.The economic model encourages people to keep the aircraft and each time, we add discounts if there has been no breakage, for example, if there has been no theft, that kind of thing.That is to say, if, roughly speaking, you take care of your device, the price decreases a little more.This is the economic model.Afterwards, we added a little subtlety, but which, for us, carries a lot of meaning.

Today, we have an agreement with Fairphone, which we talked about on our blog by the way, which consists of donating part of the rent to Fairphone.

Why is this a bit structural and it is really, for us, the ultimate model?In reality, Fairphone themselves, they have a contradiction since they are selling.They don’t stop working for the durability of their devices by making modular, repairable devices, they do an extraordinary job.

In reality, one day, if they really have the success they deserve and it is happening, they will face the same difficulty as the others, that is to say that their business model of sales will contradict their objective of making the devices last.As a result, we’ve been aware of this from the beginning too, but they too have a great maturity with regard to these subjects.We have teased them, not to say harassed them for a long time to set up this kind of economic model where in reality, they have an interest in the device lasting a long time, including financial, since we pay them part of the rent, so they will earn with us, with Commown, they will earn more money than if they had sold their device to an individual or a company thanks to the pension rents that are paid to them.The final objective, our absolute dream, would be that in reality, the money earned by manufacturers could be used to do R&D to further improve their devices.So that they don’t make money through sales, but they make money through sustainability, over time, have an extremely stable source of income through rental.

And in that case, he could focus on one business and do it well, which is designing phones and the software that goes with them and maintaining it, because it’s a phenomenal cost center today, when in reality, it should be more of a gain and not a burden.In our model, making the devices last is a gain.We are trying to transfer some of that to the manufacturers.And we set this up with other people like why! open computing, for example, which provides us with a good part of our Linux laptops.We have the same kind of mechanism in place and they have exactly the same awareness of all this as Fairphone.They have also understood the interest of this model in the long term.

Walid : It’s interesting because having also spoken at one point with the people about Fairphone, the software, it requires an incredible number of engineers and they follow the versions of Android.This is something that is extremely complex.It’s always chasing behind.At one point, they had made their own version of Android.I think that afterwards, afterwards, they abandoned it, in the end, because I suppose that they must not necessarily have been strong enough to be able to maintain it, which was already de-googled at the time.

Florent : Open OS, Fairphone Open OS, yes, absolutely.

Hardware and spare parts

Walid : At the time, I had a Fairphone 2 with it, it was pretty cool.You started with telephones, then you made computers.Now, you’re typically on headphones, that kind of thing, that’s pretty cool because when you have a headset, I don’t know, a Bluetooth headset, for example, and you have to disassemble it, often, you break it.And then, it’s not something that is put forward at all by manufacturers, repairability.There, it’s also, I suppose, a permanent work of sourcing new equipment that you’ll be able to put in, since in any case, there is one time or another, we arrive, no matter how much we do planned non-obsolescence, there is a time or another, it’s just like, I don’t know, me, a Fairphone 2, there are no more parts.There, I guess you live with your pieces.

Florent : That’s really interesting that you address this issue of spare parts.In reality, we still have plenty of Fairphone 2 pieces.Why do we still have plenty of them?Because we still have plenty of phones.Unlike the manufacturers, quite simply, Fairphone themselves, they no longer have parts of Fairphone 2.They have less than us.They could ask us for it.We’d keep them to ourselves, by the way.We jealously guard them because that’s what allows us to fulfill the promise we make to our customers to make the devices last as long as possible.One of the things we do and why we limit our diversification in terms of the number of models is that it is in our interest to have the most uniform fleet possible so that we can take spare parts from our own fleet for as long as possible.

Our own fleet becomes a reservoir of spare parts.

When you can no longer buy spare parts from outside, from the manufacturer in particular, you dismantle devices.There are always devices that have a given fault, but the vast majority of components remain perfectly operational.We can disassemble them and reassemble them on other phones that are broken, broken, etc.And we extend the life of old devices in this way.

Walid : On this purely hardware part, do you do any repairs?I don’t know, welds, stuff like that, etc.Or do you just have a set of parts and then there’s one that doesn’t work, we change the camera module, and then we put another one in its place?

Florent : That’s a great question.Because we’re in the middle of working on this subject.I don’t know how you do it, because it’s really extremely topical for us.In 15 days, I’m even going to a congress in Grenoble called Sustainable ICT, which talks about sustainability in electronics.We will meet a great electronics teacher from Grenoble, Vincent Grennerat, with whom we will discuss the possibility of increasing our skills on repairs that are a little low-level, I want to say.Today, our skills are extremely limited in this area.There are not yet any big names in electronics in the team who would be able to develop repairs, debug difficult problems, etc.Honestly, it’s still a bit early for us.We don’t have a sufficient volume of devices with breakdowns of this type to justify a full-time job in this field, clearly not.But suddenly, we start by cooperating with other people whose job it is.So, from time to time, we subcontract a repair.Clearly, in the long term, we want to increase our skills because it will be part of the basic job.

We also wait until we have the financial strength to be able to pay someone to do this more or less full-time with us.But clearly, we have that in mind.Today, we only know how to do repairs, extremely simple welds.And even then, it disrupts operations a lot today, so we tend to subcontract them to people we know well and who we know will do a great job for us, such as the Déclic Eco Teaching association.In short, we are trying to find a situation that is stable enough to both repair our devices and increase our skills at the same time.

Free software

Walid: I still have tons of questions about the hardware part, but since I’m doing a podcast about free software, we’re going to come back to the soft part a bit.Here, what’s really interesting is that we end up with Android phones, Linux computers.Now, we understand where this influence comes from.I would like you to tell us about your meeting with, I don’t know if we say /e/OS.

Florent : /e/OS, yes absolutely.

Walid : just for listeners who don’t know, /e/OS, it’s an OS based on Android Open Source Project, on which all the Google layers have been removed and which was built by someone quite famous called Gaël Duval, who is someone who set up Mandrakesoft at the time, so Linux distribution, that we knew when we were young, and who did a lot of other things.I tried it for the first time in 2019 on a 2015 Moto G and my phone was given a new lease of life, I hallucinated.It also explains how you can make a phone last long enough by the fact that by changing OS, the phone regains decent performance.

Florent : Yes, absolutely.There are many things in what you have just said.Indeed, we started by making Fairphone OpenOS.This was before the Foundation existed.Today, if you want to find them on the internet, it’s better to type Murena, which is the company’s trade name./e/OS, it’s impossible to find on search engines.So, type Murena like a moray eel, but with an A at the end.Today, we are partners, which means that we have even set up a collective together.We co-founded a collective called FairTech, both with Fairphone, TeleCoop which is a very interesting and very important player for us too, the e foundation and Commown.Then, we also have other cooperative telephone operators in other countries, WEtell for example in Germany.It is indeed a partnership that is really interesting for us.How did we meet?Simply when we saw what it was like to maintain Fairphone Open OS.It was a purely OSP-based OSP, so very basic, with very few advanced features.The GPS didn’t work well.There were a lot of difficulties in using Fairphone Open OS pure.

On the Commown side, we had built an image with extremely weak technical resources, knowing that we have no or very few skills in mobile software development in-house.We had made an image by installing a whole bunch of software that we wanted to see on phones to make them more practical.We had installed microG.

Walid : Wait, microG, can you explain what microG is?Because it’s a bit of the centerpiece.

Florent : It’s definitely the centerpiece, you’re right. microG is basically a software that will emulate Google’s APIs, that is to say Google’s services, which will emulate Google’s services in such a way that even the applications that are installed on the phone do not realize it, do not realize the difference.That is to say, they think they are using a Google service like: Locate me or there are many other things in microG, but I’ll stop there and then, I’m not necessarily very competent to go into detail.And as a result, microG hides the fact that Google is not there from applications.This means that a certain number of applications that, before installing microG, crashed instantly because they used a Google service that they couldn’t find, thanks to microG, they already don’t crash.Or even, they perform in a strictly similar way and with the same kind of performance as with Google’s services.And so that’s the centerpiece because it allows you to install perfectly standard apps on a phone without Google.So, /e/OS also started from there: Lineage plus microG, plus a large amount of work, gives /e/OS.

We realized that it wasn’t easy to distribute Fairphone Open OS to our customers, but it was a phenomenal success.We didn’t expect that at all.It must be said that we had good press coverage, we had a great article in the DNA (Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace), with even an insert on the front page of DNA, the emblematic newspaper of the Grand Est region.It was a great advertisement for us and at one point we had a third of our orders that were under Fairphone Open.

Walid : I never would have thought.I thought it was going to be a geek thing.

Florent : Yes, at the beginning, we said to ourselves: Come on, let’s give it a shot.Anyway, we’re free software players, we want to do it, let’s go for it.And we were very surprised by the success.And not only us, that is to say that these are stats that we sent to Fairphone, they were amazed.And so, we hope that thanks to this, that it’s a little bit thanks to us, that they then set up a partnership with /e/OS.We must not delude ourselves, we had a rather weak influence on this.I think the main influence is Agnès Crepet, who is a great French developer who joined Fairphone, who probably already knew about Gaël Duval or at least, it must have made the first contacts a little easier.In any case, they have set up a partnership today with /e/OS and /e/OS was almost released on Fairphone 4 from the beginning, after two months, something like that.We can see that they have been working for a long time, that this partnership, it works like hell.Within FairTEC, there are meetings almost every week.It’s really great.Now, we decided to let go of our incompetence on Fairphone Open OS, in favor of the great competence of the Murena team, which is really, in addition, a completely hallucinating strike force compared to what we would have been able to develop.
And then, top skills in the field of mobile computing development.

Walid : What is your strategy in relation to this?The idea is to have a part of your fleet… They’re mostly Fairphones, I guess?

Florent : Yes.

Walid : you’re going to get There’s a part of your fleet that’s in stock Android, well in Android, Fairphone, and then a part that’s with e.How will it go for you?

Florent : The way it works today and for a long time now, and it works very well, is that we receive all the phones with the manufacturer’s OS, obviously.Often, anyway, we are forced to update them because after a while, we, as we buy them in large quantities, inevitably, the OS, it has already received two or three updates before we put them on the market, sometimes.Anyway, we’re going to flash phones.We offer our customers the opportunity to say: I don’t want Fairphone OS, I don’t want you to update Fairphone OS.Yes, I want /e/OS.We charge €25, which is not very expensive, for people who have not yet ordered their phone.We install /e/OS and send them the direct phone.

Then there are also people who say to themselves: I want to switch to /e/OS and I already have a Fairphone from you, but it has been under Fairphone OS.Can you help me switch to /e/OS?Here, we offer another service that may seem completely crazy to some, but it’s: We take a phone, we install /e/OS on it, a phone identical to theirs, we send them and we get theirs back.We give them 15 days in their hands so that they can play with both, transfer a little bit of data and all that, and presto, they get their hands on /e/OS and then they send us the phone back to us under Fairphone OS and it’s settled.We have no problem with that.In any case, our customers can install the software they want on Commown’s hardware.It’s the same on computers, if they want to install something other than Ubuntu, they have every right to do so.After that, it can cause some problems for the support.In practice, this is not a problem.We just ask people to tell us: If you have installed a different OS than the basic one, tell us.That way, at least, we won’t waste too much time explaining something that doesn’t belong on your OS.And then, if the OS you have installed, we really don’t know it, you will have a lower quality service, that is to say that we will be able to help you less on the use.

But on the other hand, we obviously keep all the services related to the equipment, changing the battery, when they are worn, etc.Support for breakdowns, breakages, etc.It works very well.We are happy to promote free software.For us, this is our DNA.And in reality, today, for example, Fairphone 2, we did a new operation not too long ago when we called FrankenPhone to revive phones that died for everyone, or almost, but not for us.So, we took Fairphones 2 that were still under Fairphone OS, so Googled and all that.We fired Google because it didn’t work anymore and it had become really too heavy for a Fairphone 2.By installing /e/OS on it, the device came back to life.This is exactly the experience you described earlier.It’s so much lighter than a basic Android, that it works much better on less powerful devices.So, it extends the life of the devices in a way…

Walid : Actually, what’s interesting about your model is that if you go to the Murena website and look, I chose my phone because I wanted to put /e/OS on it.I took a phone that was supported, I bought it refurbished and I put the thing myself in like a big one.But you, as, let’s say, the manager of a fairly large fleet, you can in advance, basically, know and potentially have a little weight to have the support of a certain number of equipment that you would have.And the other question is, because I didn’t dig into it, is what is the policy of /e/OS?I think I’ll try to invite Gaël Duval one day to talk more about it…

Florent : yes, that would be great.

The duration of the support

Walid : What is the policy in terms of support duration?Because for you, it’s still the sinews of war.If you have Fairphones that are already five years old or I don’t know how many and you want to make it last another two, three years, but the OS itself, it can no longer be updated, it’s the OS that becomes limiting, it’s no longer the hardware that becomes limiting.

Florent : That’s exactly it.Today, for us, the problem is the software.That’s why Fairphone’s efforts to maintain… Now, they still stopped supporting the Fairphone 2, but after a considerable number of years.I mean, they’re the only ones by far to have made all these efforts.

Walid : Because there are no more parts…

Florent : There are no more parts, but above all, what is the financial interest?As you said, it’s a huge cost to port new versions of Android to old devices because in reality, there is no cooperation from other players.Fairphone had to fend for itself.It’s a tiny box compared to Qualcomm.Still, they are the ones who did all the work of reverse engineering some of Qualcomm’s stuff to be able to port it to their Android 11 device, I think, to Fairphone 2.They have made an effort that is absolutely delusional compared to the rest of the industry.Eventually, you could invite Agnès Crepet, who has a lot to say about this and who is really great.We benefit from their efforts.That’s why we don’t want to buy phones from just anyone, because people who make efforts like that, they have to buy the equipment.They are rare.In reality, we can’t do much about it.That is to say that we do not have the possibility to develop an OS today.Then, in reality, there are people who do it very well and who do it much better than we would.

We are a cooperative, let’s cooperate.We cooperate with the best players in the sector.Today, it’s Fairphone and Murena, clearly.

We also have a lot of discussions with other manufacturers.We now know that Crosscall is still… Which is another type of device that we provide, which has other characteristics than the Fairphone.In particular, it focuses its durability a lot on robustness.They are also very interested in trying to provide software support in the long term.We don’t yet have the significant benefits of what Fairphone is doing, but we can see that there is interest.In France, in addition, there is the repairability index and the durability index which still put a lot of pressure on manufacturers.It helps us.So I say “It helps us”, in reality, we don’t look at it in a passive way.We are very active in the working group on the repairability index then and the sustainability index today, because for us, that’s the key in reality.We fought to get the free software community and even some government departments that were completely neglected in this matter to intervene so that free software would be included in the rating of the sustainability index, that is to say that manufacturers, ideally, have obligations, but also an interest, an incentive to allow the clean installation of free software on their hardware to be able to make it last a long time.

We have Adrien who works extremely intensely in these working groups, always in cooperation with the major players in free software and the great experts in free software who help us to provide and build arguments, etc.

Open Hardware

Walid : Two questions.There’s one that’s on the hardware side, one that’s on the software side.On the hardware side, to my knowledge, there is not really any open hardware, open hardware things that would really hold up for everyday phones on a daily basis.As for computers, the problems are a little different since a computer, apart from the transition from 32 to 64 bits which means that there are OSes that no longer run.For the rest, I have computers that are 10 years old, they are still running.You can always change the hard drive or the RAM, it goes well.As for phones, it’s still very different.The first question was: Are you looking at open hardware?Have you spotted any things that, potentially, could be interesting tomorrow?And the second one, on the software side, is: Are there free tools, free services that you lack to better manage all this fleet of hardware that you have?

Florent : On the first point, open hardware.We are deeply convinced, of course, as free software professionals, that we need open hardware in many areas and that in reality, it is one of the key solutions to fight against the big boom that will come to us with the climate crisis, which may prevent us from manufacturing new equipment, or at least centrally.There are a lot of issues around open hardware and the climate crisis.We try to promote everything we can in this area, but in reality, there are enough initiatives.As far as I know, there is almost none.Fairphone had still released a number of very interesting things, especially about the Fairphone 2 at one time.Today, I believe that they no longer do it, essentially, in my opinion, more because of lack of time than anything else.It’s a bit of a shame.Maybe we’ll talk to them about it soon since it’s the 10th anniversary of Fairphone.They invited us, so we’re going to prepare a whole bunch of small meetings and try to give them feedback.As soon as we can, we give feedback.

On these aspects, on the telephony side, there is not much going on.On the computer side, we participated a little bit, even a lot, at one point, in the Cairn Devices adventure. Cairn Devices, which is also a Strasbourg company, is really our neighbours, who have the ambition to manufacture a very modular laptop, components that are extremely easy to change, etc.They have a lot of difficulty starting this kind of activity, which is really very difficult and very capital-intensive.It’s very difficult in France to set up this kind of company.Today, they have, in quotes, fallen back for the moment on the development of an open hardware keyboard.This project is still really interesting.Here, we put a little effort into it.We hope that the keyboard will be released soon.I think that here, we are really close because they managed to get it produced.There are initiatives, we follow them and we try to support them with our means.Obviously, we are Commown, we are not a multinational.If, technically, we are a multinational, we also provide our services in Belgium and Germany, but we are still only based in France, we are not a multinational and we have no financial means.

But in reality, we manage to set up projects to get subsidies together.We did that with Cairn Devices.We managed to recover a subsidy of €30,000 for them and for us, to try to move their project forward and ours at the same time.So we help each other and we hope that it will give results.Today, there is a framework at the computer level that has killed the game a bit, that is to say that for us, their product, it is absolutely extraordinary and unique in the world for the moment.We would like them to go much further.And here, I think that on the other hand, we will have an extremely limited influence on them because it’s still a very, very… set up by former Facebook employees.In short, it’s not at all the same world as ours, clearly.For the moment, they are not yet selling to companies.We have been in discussions with them for some time.We’re going to try to buy their equipment to test it on a fairly large fleet to see if it holds up in the long term, but in any case, the concept is great.

There is quite a bit of open hardware in there.They published a number of their works, including the chassis.You can easily build a chassis, they have worked in this field and it’s cool.Now, it’s not just open hardware that matters.To make the devices last, there is nothing better than being able to repair them and have a good repair doc, diagrams, boardviews, etc.Today, there are very few manufacturers that provide quality equipment to help repairers work.Let’s start at the beginning.It would already be nice if all manufacturers did that.

Software tools

Walid : The second question was about software.Are you missing any … Hardware, you just explained a little, but on the software part, are you missing any services?Do they have free software to really plug holes in your offer or in general, to offer a rental service?Are there things that are really missing?

Florent : Full.We even started from scratch.That is to say, today, we, as we are very culturally focused on free software and not only culturally, we have good reasons, which I tried to explode, to be.Unfortunately, we have plenty of customers who have to go and find where they are, and in particular, precisely, companies.Our offers for companies include Linux.Of course, we would be very happy to provide a lot of Linux to companies, but in reality, today, most of these companies take Windows machines.So we provide them with Windows machines.One of the things we want to do is really transition counseling in a really qualitative way.Today, we don’t have the means to do that.That is to say, we would like to be able to say to all these people: What do you use as software on Windows?That, this and that.We have free replacements.We already know how to do that.And we’ll help you set them up at home.That, on the other hand, we do less.We would like to set up partnerships, but due to lack of time, we never succeeded.But we would like to have players who help us take our business customers by hand and try to get them to use more and more free software without necessarily making them switch to Linux all at once.

But software by software, little by little, make them uninstall all non-open source software from their Windows.And then, one day, take the plunge.Because once you only use free software, changing your OS is super easy.There are even only benefits to doing it since it’s much better done.Honestly, under Linux, all objectivity of course.We miss it a lot, but it’s not quite software, it’s more about competence, advice, a service offer that should be put in place.Then, the next step, even if technically, we want it to be before and I am the first, we would like to set up outsourcing, as we say, under Linux, that is to say to be able to provide really high-level services to our customers under Linux.Typically, software cable distribution, software remote configuration, the implementation of their entire information system.What I imagine today is to use technologies that are really made for that, to configure machines.It can be very sober, it can be script that we execute remotely via SSH bridges, via appointment servers… anyway, we can do some nice things.

Walid : In 2023, you have conf management tools that allow you to do that.But managing a Linux Desktop, compared to managing a Linux server, having seen my colleagues, a very long time ago, manage the Linux Desktop of the National Assembly, that’s a job.

Florent : Yes, absolutely.It’s a job, but it’s the one you actually want to do.That is to say, today, our support is what it does in practice, but it does so with technical means that are limited.We do small remote control takeovers, etc.We still have skills in this area, but in reality, it’s good for small companies or for individuals, but we’re starting to have customers who are a little bigger or who have needs, who need it to work at the top during desktops on Linux and we want to provide them with better quality service.Yes, clearly, there is Ansible, Salt, etc., a whole technical stack that I use every day anyway since I also have my computers in-house to manage.We still have almost thirty employees today.We can no longer manage this with bits of string and we have never done it anyway.Obviously, we still have a certain technicality.Except that you have to build a whole team to be able to do that.Today, we don’t have the financial means to recruit.

But we recruited young people when they were still really young.We tried to take some good players in the making and they were good.We soon have people who are going to be computer engineers, who are going to have master’s degrees in computer science and all that and who have a lot of experience in how support works at Commown and as a result, could set up this kind of high-level service or in any case, acquire the skills that are necessary to do so.So that’s all clearly the direction we’re going, but we’re going slowly, unfortunately.Or fortunately, because it may be the best way to do it.In any case, we are resolutely going for it.

Commown’s next challenges

Walid : That’s good because it introduces my next question, which is: What are the next challenges that await Commown?

Florent : That’s an interest at the moment too.The next challenges are basically to become extremely efficient at refurbishing our own devices and renting them out, especially computers.Laptop relocation is really complicated because a laptop that had a first life, it really has to be in very good condition to be able to rerent it like that without doing anything on it.That happens, but it’s mobile devices and as a result, it falls, it takes hits, etc.That’s why we’re trying to favor desktop computers, by the way, because they’re really, really, really durable.Laptops are much less durable.So, we recover laptops that are sometimes in a very bad state.We haven’t put in place all the architecture we need today to manage them effectively, i.e. our online store, it doesn’t easily allow us to set up refurbished computers with different grades, to manage the stock of refurbished computers, even if today, we know how to manage new stocks, but not too much refurbished stocks on the online store.We still have a whole set of tools, a whole database that is well done.

We know all our devices, we know where they go, we manage them perfectly in our ERP, open source by the way, Odoo, but we underexploit this stock management for the implementation of refurbished computers on the online store.One of the big challenges that we face is this whole IT and logistics chain of efficient and rapid management to put on the market as quickly as possible – so that they can be used again and not sleep in a closet for too long – devices, refurbished computers, and in particular mobile phones on which, Frankly, economically, sometimes it’s complicated to find your way around.Changing a chassis, for example, takes far too long to be economically profitable.So, it is better to rent the computer really cheap if it is in very bad condition.All this remains to be refined a little, let’s say.Obviously, we have a whole bunch of ideas, we already have practice because in reality, with phones, we’ve been doing this for a long time.But in reality, the telephone is easier.They come back to us in less bad condition or in any case, we have an ease to change the equivalent of the chassis, changing the shell of a phone is generally easy and fast, while changing the chassis of a computer is very expensive and very inefficient and very heavy.We are less advanced on computers than on phones.

Walid : Yes, I feel like I’m at work and hearing my colleagues talk about the reconditioning cycles of large household appliances.I totally understand.Before I conclude, I wanted to address one last question.This is the software where you were in-house.You use a software that I like called Odoo and in which you can manage all the refurbishing part with the beautiful repair module, which I had already done elsewhere too.What do you use just like that, as a range of in-house software, a little iconic, but a little representative?

Florent : Not much, because today, Odoo does a lot of things.That’s a lot of things in our house.You should know that we have developed many, many, many Odoo custom modules.A little too much by the way, because unfortunately, it’s often easy at the beginning, when you don’t know the thousands of modules that exist in the Odoo open source community.That said, our activity is still quite atypical and as a result, we still have trouble finding general, generic modules that correspond to our needs.We really do a lot of things in Odoo today, both support, the online store, accounting, invoicing, everything, just about everything, project management, well… We really use a lot of things from Odoo.

Walid : You don’t use the production modules to generate manufacturing hours, repair hours, stuff like that?

Florent : I did a big experiment on the Fairphone 2 with it, which lasted a long time.I had set up all the modules above that are related to this to assemble the Fairphone 2 at home, to have traceability at the part level.I didn’t tell everything because it would be endless, but when we received the Fairphone 2, when we started Commown, the Fairphone 2, we dismantled them all one by one.All the serial numbers of all the modules of the phones were recorded.We had a complete database of all the modules of each phone.

Walid : Can’t you get that through software?

Florent : Even Fairphone doesn’t actually have it.We were able to track down the modules by module and say: I dismantled this module from this phone, I reassembled it in another to repair it.Or: I disassembled this module from the phone, I sent it to a customer who sent me back the equivalent module that was broken and that I send back to the manufacturer under warranty.We were able to manage all that.In reality, today, we don’t need all that anymore.It was an extraordinary piece of machinery.It was very beautiful technically, but we had a lot of data to recover which, initially, was managed with spreadsheets and the recovery of this data was hell on earth for a long time.It was at a time when our business was exploding.I was the only computer scientist and I exploded in flight on that project because it was too ambitious to do right away.So, maybe we’ll do it again one day, it’s not certain.Today, we no longer trace at the module level and as a result, we no longer need assembly modules, manufacturing modules and recipes, BOMs, the famous manufacturing BOMs to trace at the module level, so we no longer use them.

The cooperative model of a SCIC

Walid : We’re going to stop this subject because I think we can talk about it for hours.We are coming to the end of this interview.I wanted to give you an open platform.If you have a message to convey before we separate, what would it be?

Florent : That’s interesting because there’s a hole in the racket, because I’m a little too talkative.One of the subjects of Commown that we haven’t talked about at all is the fact that we have a SCIC.This is the governance of a SCIC.In reality, when I started with the three pillars at the beginning of the interview, I only gave one.There were two more left.It was the choice of equipment, ethical, all that, building to last, eco-designed, etc.We talked about it afterwards.The third point was: We are a SCIC.And “We are a SCIC” is no small thing.

Walid : wait, SCIC, is it a common company of collective interest?

Florent : It’s a cooperative society.

Walid : cooperative, sorry.Cooperative.

Florent : I’m just going to talk about this model which, for me, is an extraordinary model and a model for the future, especially in terms of dealing with the crises that are coming our way.First, it is a cooperative.What does that mean?This means that it is not capital that governs.And that’s really important.

That is to say, it is a model that is not a capitalist model.So it’s not one euro equals one vote, it’s one person equals one vote.

Whether a person has the means to put €5,000 on the table and the means to put €100, he or she has the same value in terms of governance for us.So, that’s really important.That is to say, it is not money that governs.It’s really important from many points of view.One of which is the stability of the company, because if someone comes up with a million euros, they can’t say: It’s okay, I’m buying all your shares, go and show yourself.In any case, he will be able to buy all our shares.It will be with pleasure that we sell him, but he will have a voice like everyone else.On the other hand, we will welcome his capital with open arms because it will allow us to buy equipment.And that’s always welcome.On the other hand, what goes with the “Get out of the way and I’ll change your project” is not possible.So, a SCIC, you can’t change your project just like that.And so we have statutes in which a lot of things are set in stone, including the fact that our objective is to make the equipment last.And so, we won’t be able to change that, even with all the money in the world.

The second point is that it is a cooperative, but of collective interest.Here, we touch on a very interesting point, that is to say that a classic cooperative is that, roughly speaking, the employees who can become cooperators, more or less, it’s not quite accurate, but really not far off, and therefore only the employees participate in the governance.In a SCIC, this is not the case at all, since employees are a component like any other.We have many other colleges and in particular in a SCIC, it is legally mandatory to make it possible, even easy, for users of the service to take part.So, customers must be able to become shareholders and as a result, gain power.That’s really important.

This means that users can run the company and get it where they want it to go.And so, the company, it necessarily puts itself at the service of users and not, as we see with a lot of large companies in particular, I mention the GAFAM because that’s what annoys us the most as free software players.Basically, they are not doing their users a favor, they are doing themselves a favor to them above all.And so, even if it means stealing data from their users without telling them, etc.Obviously, we can’t do that, and in a structural way.That is to say that it is not just our good will, it is legal, we cannot do otherwise.And that’s really important for us too, for the stability of the project.That is to say, the day we leave, we have an accident, a thing, something, it’s not a big deal.It’s not a big deal, thank you, for us, but not for the company.So, the company will not change, it will remain stable.This SCIC model, which must record potentially divergent interests, is really interesting because it forces us to build an economic model that satisfies everyone in reality, and not the one who has the power at the time.

We, within SCIC Commown, have customers, it’s mandatory, employees and project leaders.We are in the same school, we have the same weight.We, the co-founders, have the same weight as an employee who would be in the same college as us.We have producers, hardware manufacturers, so why! Open Computing, for example, is part of the SCIC and has a say in governance.You can see that just by mentioning these three, they potentially have divergent interests.Employees will say: We would like to have a higher salary.Users will say: You’re nice, but if you have a higher salary, prices will go up.We want prices to go down, on the contrary.And the producers, they’re going to say: Yes, but you’re nice, if you put pressure on us to buy cheaper computers, how do we live?Same thing, I forgot about the financiers.And the financiers, it’s the same, they have a really important role.Since we have to start by buying devices, they too have an interest in being in the SCIC and we have a certain number of investors in the SCIC who allow us to have money.

This model of a cooperative society of collective interest is a model that is a non-capitalist model whose effectiveness we want to demonstrate.I think we’re getting there today because we have members who are all happy, there are a lot of them.Overall, the model is acclaimed by all members at the same time.We would like to increase the visibility of this model and encourage the participation of our members.We are working it, hoping to show that we have made a lot of progress in this area for the next AGM and that we are going to give even more power to people from outside the company to have expertise, to have divergent interests and to innovate in terms of model.

Conclusion

Walid : That’s a good conclusion.This is a praise for the SCIC. We haven’t talked about the Licoornes , which is a grouping of the different SCIC, but we can talk about it in another show at another time because it’s a really fascinating subject. And also the same, we haven’t talked about Telecoop, but we could talk about it again too.

Florent : That’s a lot of people to invite, it’s going to be great. You’ll be able to have a lot of great shows with Licoornes.

Walid : I’m going to do a second podcast which will be called SCIC Project or Licoornes Projects, we’ll have to do that. Florent, thank you very much for taking your time to talk with us.

Florent : thank you.

Walid : I fell in love with Commown the first time I saw Adrien talk. We talked after the presentation I had seen and I thought it was great. I really wanted to introduce this model because I think it’s very interesting. And then your approach to free software, your approach to fighting planned obsolescence by free software as well. In any case, I’m super happy to have been able to discuss this subject with you. I’m going to thank you once again and I’m going to say for our listeners that I hope they also enjoyed this exchange and that if so, that they don’t hesitate to share this episode with others on social networks, to give us comments also on streaming platforms since the podcast is available on all good streaming platforms. We have other episodes coming to talk about other jobs and other projects too and that it’s going to be very nice. Florent, listen, thank you very much and see you soon, I hope.

Florent : a big thank you to you. Keep up your show, it’s great. I listened to a few of them, so it’s really nice. Good job. Good luck to you to continue. Merci.Au pleasure.

Walid : See you soon!

This episode was recorded on June 21, 2023.

Transcription by Raphaël Semeteys.

License

This podcast is published under the double license Art Libre 1.3 or later – CC BY-SA 2.0 or later.

podcast.projets-libres.org/@pr…

Sommaire

• 1 Interview with the Castopod team
• 2 Castopod’s Sources of Income
• 3 Castopod’s Pricing
• 4 Castopod’s Governance
• 5 The community of Castopod
• 6 What is Fediverse?
• 7 Castopod’s Challenges
• 8 Castopod for a podcast user
• 9 Castopod for a Content Creator
• 10 Castopod for a content creator who is just starting out
• 11 Conclusion
• 12 The ActivityPub Integration
• 13 The adoption of ActivityPub + Castopod Index
• 14 Evolutions of ActivityPub for the podcast
• 15 Open Podcast Prefix Project (OP3)
• 16 Audience measurement in the podcast
• 17 To go further around Castopod
• 18 License

Interview with the Castopod team

Walid : Welcome to this second episode dedicated to Castopod. I strongly advise you to listen to the first episode before listening to this one. I am very happy to meet Yassine Doghri and Benjamin Bellamy to continue the discussion.
Long discussion that will end after the end credits with a little technical extra. It’s a novelty that we wanted to test. There you have it, happy listening!

Castopod’s Sources of Income

Let’s go back a little bit to a topic that we touched on at the very beginning. I’d like to understand how you finance all the developments around Castopod? What are all the sources of income you have that allow you both to work on Castopod?

Benjamin : We don’t work at the same level on Castopod. Yassine said he is an architect and the main contributor. Personally, I now rarely intervene on the code. So it’s going to be more about governance, about funding. Today, we have several sources of income: we mentioned NLNet, which supported us at the beginning and still supports us today. In particular, we have a plug-in engine development project that is supported by NLNet.

We also have donors on Open Collective: we have an Open Collective page that is very, very little used because in fact we don’t put it forward very much, we talk about it very little. If you hadn’t asked me about funding, I probably would have forgotten to mention it. In any case, you can go to OpenCollective.com to make donations if you want to make a contribution but you don’t know how.
And then we have a SaaS hosting offer, which is ultra classic. We said earlier that we were inspired by WordPress, we were also inspired by WordPress. That is to say, we have castepod.org where you can download the solution and self-host, and castepod.com where in a few clicks and 30 seconds, you can have your own instance on your own domain name, which is installed and working. And you don’t have to worry about backups, updates, etc. We’ll take care of everything for you.
And then there are also the Ad Aures activities, which can be either consultancy activities, advertising activities, or service activities. We haven’t talked much about it, but we’re working quite a bit on automatic transcription, which allows us to do indexing. We have other projects that we may not talk about today because otherwise we’re going to do a 5-hour episode. And so, in fact, we have quite multiple sources of income today.

Castopod’s Pricing

Walid : There’s one thing that I find quite interesting, and that’s the pricing of your SaaS offers, because in fact, whatever the plan, we have the same features. And I think that’s great because the platform I was on, for example, was one less feature. Want to add a Mastodon button? You need the top plane, you want to have this stat? you need the higher plane, etc. And actually, it’s super frustrating, especially when you want to do a podcast, like me, and you don’t want to make a living out of it. I thought it was good for you to say a few words about it, because I thought it was really, at least for me, it’s great.

Benjamin : yes, that was a really strong choice that we made from the beginning. I didn’t want us to have three offers with three different levels of features. I didn’t want us to have a Castopod Community and a Castopod Enterprise. I didn’t want us to do fake open source. It’s really real open source and real free software. If you download the Castopod version on castopod.org, or if you pay for hosting on castopod.com, it’s the same software. What will change afterwards can be ancillary services, it can be, for example, a level of CDN, it can be a storage space but we try to make offers where everyone has the same features. We don’t want you to feel constrained or annoyed. And then you’re really going to pay for what it costs. That is to say, if you have a podcast with a one-hour episode per week, disk space is almost nothing. It’s really cheap. And so our basic offer, which is less than 10 euros per month including VAT, it will be enough. If you’re an associative radio station that has 24 hours of live broadcasts, podcasted, every day, it’s going to start to do and inevitably, at the end, it’s going to require disk space that has absolutely nothing to do with it, which will cost more. And obviously, there is no question of us charging less than what it costs in hosting fees and in particular in hard drive fees.

So our offers behind them are calibrated in relation to what a technical infrastructure costs, but not in relation to what we estimate you have in your pockets or in relation to features to frustrate you, to tell you no but if you want a little more you will have to pay a little more. That’s really the idea: so the offer is unlimited in number of podcasts, because for us whether I have a ten-episode podcast or ten one-episode podcasts it’s exactly the same thing: it doesn’t take up more space, it doesn’t cost more. So there’s no reason to charge you ten times more when you have the same amount of data, the same amount of time. Today, if you go on castopod.com, if you have a podcast, if you have 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, it’s going to cost you the same. So the idea is really to pay in relation to what it costs in the end. Which is a bit confusing because especially on the French market, which is a market that is still growing, which is quite different from the American market which is a little more stable: we have a lot of unlimited offers per podcast, that is to say you can put as many episodes as you want, of the duration you want. We don’t have that, because there’s a limit to storage space, because someone has to pay for storage space when they arrive. So we’re a little bit against the trend of French-speaking offers and a little more in line with what is done on the other side of the Atlantic, where the big hosts in the United States are more in a logic of saying that you will pay by the hour or by the minute. We’re not there yet, we don’t charge by the hour or by the minute, first of all because depending on the quality, it’s not the same at all and we don’t want to hurt someone who encodes their podcast with a high compression rate. Maybe it’s going to evolve, maybe we’re going to do things differently. In any case, the idea will always be the same, it’s not to pay in relation to a tax, in relation to what we think you have in your pockets or in relation to features, it’s in relation to what it costs. There can be no surprises actually.

Walid : I think it’s really interesting because it puts everyone on the same pedestal. The one who knows he’s going to make a life out of it and the one who knows he wants to do it on the side and who, like me, it costs him money to do this and it doesn’t make him any. That’s really good and for me the example is really statistics. I was so frustrated that I didn’t have stats that I had to pay more.

Benjamin : That’s something else again, which is to say that we believe that as a content creator, your data belongs to you, your audience belongs to you and certainly not to us and certainly not to anyone else. That’s why we encourage all our customers to come with their own domain name, because if tomorrow you want to leave and you have nothing to ask us for, you leave with your complete database. That is to say that you don’t just leave with your mp3 files and your metadata, you also leave with your user data, you can leave with the login, the password, with the listening data, the analytics and you can download castopod.org, download the platform, you self-host or go to another host that offers the Castopod solution. I think today there are about 5 of them in Europe. And you go back up your database and you’re iso-functional, but really iso-functional. You have all the features, you have your user accounts, you have the interactions with your users.
We’ve talked about ActivityPub, but so all the people who have liked, who have commented, you get 100% of your users’ comments and interactions, 100% of your analytics data, not just a CSV export where you get your data. Your data is yours. If you want them, they give them to you and you do what you want with them. The reversibility on Castopod, because it’s also an open source software, it’s really total.
It’s not a sales pitch, it’s a technical reality. Reversibility is total.

ActivityPub (source: wikipedia)

Castopod’s Governance

Walid : Next point, I would like to talk about the governance of the Castopod project.

So what I’d like to understand is how is the project organized? What tools do you use to develop the tool and to interact with your community? We’ll talk about the community right after, but first, what is the mode of governance? How do you operate?

Benjamin : Then I can answer. As with any open source project, we have a Git repository.
Finally, for many open source projects, at least, we have a Git repository. We have our own GitLab that we self-host and we have a mirror on GitHub for visibility, for stars. By the way, don’t hesitate to go to github.com to give us lots of stars! There you go. We welcome contributions at many levels, whether it’s tickets on GitLab for bugs or new features. We define priorities thanks to this, the tickets, that is to say that depending on what comes back, if we have specific requests for one feature or another, we will move it up in our priorities. Then we discuss among ourselves what we should do and what we need to do for the next few months, etc. That’s about it. Contributions help us to prioritize the…

Walid : You forgot the Discord channel.

Yassine : Yes, that’s right. We also have a Discord channel, and a Discord server for instant chat. I’m hanging around a lot to help users either install Castapod if there’s a little problem or if they want to give feedback to clarify some things about Castopod. And we have quite a few other users who help us manage that part as well. What you need to know is that Discord is used quite a bit among podcasters.

Benjamin : Personally, I’m not there much, I’m way too old for Discord and I’m not a big fan of the platform. But in fact we have to be where our users are, there is no secret and so the Discord channel is very very active.

The community of Castopod

Walid : We’ve just explained a little bit about how you interact with your community, what I’d like to know is what do you know about your community? Do you know most of where people come from? Do they self-host or do they take SaaS? Do you know a little bit about what features they prefer, etc. What do you actually know about your community?

Benjamin : What’s very interesting is that potentially, we might not know anything about our community. As we said, Castopod is open source, but there is no telemetry, there is no tracker. And we can install Castopod without telling us. And it happens very often.

We know that there are people who use Castopod that we don’t know and probably never will. In addition, you can have private podcasts with Castopod, you can have Castopod on an intranet.

Benjamin Bellamy

Finally, it’s true that we don’t know all our users. Now there are ways to find out. Of course, we want to know, because it makes us happy. It’s nice to know that people are using it because if no one is using it or if we don’t know that people are using it, there is a point where we might stop. And then, there are ways to find out: we’ve already talked about it, there’s Podcast Index that we’ve mentioned. And in Podcast Index, there’s a column that’s Generator, which says which platform generated the famous RSS feed.

And so today, we’re going to look into it and then we see that regularly there are new podcasts on Castopod, mostly in the United States, but there are some everywhere actually. There are some all over the world, first of all because Castopod is translated into about twenty languages, and we develop in English, we translate into French: so what the only two languages we produce, all the others are produced by the community. So from the moment Castopod is translated into a language, it’s because someone needed it, and there are really plenty of them, there’s Breton. Brittany is strong, we have a lot of contributions, including in the source code by the way, that come from Brittany. There’s Galician, there’s Serbian today. That’s a friend I worked with, who is very active, who was in charge of doing the Serbian translation. So today the Serbian translation is more accomplished than the French translation.
There’s Chinese too. We know, we have elements like we have in any open source project. We’re kind of looking at what’s coming out.

Very recently, we launched a platform called Castopod Index on index.castopod.org. It is in response to a request we had been making for a while. I must have seen a message on Mastodon that I never found, from someone who said “but I’m on Mastodon, it’s great. I’d like to follow Castopod’s podcasts on Mastodon, but where do I find them?” And so the idea was to say, we’re going to make, at least, the list of Mastodon nicknames, well ActivityPub, of all Castopod podcasts, and so that gave rise to this index.castopod.org site, which lists podcasts under Castopod that I’ll be able to follow from my account on the Fediverse, so in particular Mastodon. And I’ll be able to reshare, comment, like episodes. And by making this site, we learned things, we discovered
Things: We discovered podcasts that weren’t on our radar. We were very happy to discover some things, less happy about others. There are some that surprised us. At the same time, this is also the strength of open source software, which is that anyone can make it their own.

Today, we are very happy, we have a community that is quite loyal, that is quite active, that we would like to see grow, of course. We wish there were many more. In any case, today, we’re quite happy.

And so, there are podcasts that we host ourselves, there are self-hosted podcasts, there are podcasts that are hosted by third parties. There’s a little bit of everything. I’d be hard-pressed to give figures and stats, because today we haven’t studied in depth and once again there are things we can’t know. In any case, today it is mostly people who are self-hosted.

Benjamin Bellamy

What is Fediverse?

Walid : Very interesting, we’re going to get into it, because you started talking about Mastodon, on one of the parts that I really wanted to be on Castopod, it’s all the integration with the Fediverse. And the first question I’d like to ask you is how do you define Fediverse?

Benjamin : Fediverse, it may seem super complicated, in fact it’s super simple. The Fediverse is a set of social networks that are connected to each other. To take an analogy, it’s as if tomorrow on Twitter, you could see posts that come from Instagram, you could like them, you could reshare them, you could reply by staying on your Twitter account and that these shares, likes, comments were visible from Instagram. But you could also see posts that come from SoundCloud, that come from YouTube, that come from any social network, and that you could interact with people who are on another social network in a completely transparent way.
In fact, behind the Fediverse and ActivityPub, which is the emblematic protocol of the Fediverse, we hide the most important notion in our eyes, which is interoperability. That is to say, they are social networks that are interoperable with each other, that are connected to each other, and this is what makes it possible for you to move from one platform to another by being able to exchange, interact with people who are not on the same platform as you.

And you’re not a prisoner of a platform, which means that what’s in a Fediverse platform can get out of it and other things that are outside can go in. Concretely, here I took an analogy with social networks which have the particularity of being closed silos, so nothing goes in, nothing goes out. On the Fediverse, we will have several social networks, the best known, the one that has had the most success until today is Mastodon. Mastodon is a micro blogging platform, where messages are limited to 400 characters, but it’s not the only one, there are many others. For example, there is PixelFed, which is an Instagram like that allows you to share photos. And so if I share my photo on PixelFed, someone on Mastodon will be able to see it, will be able to subscribe to my account, will be able to like it, comment on it, share it. And I, from my PixelFed account on my PixelFed site, I’m going to see these interactions and I’m going to be able to respond to them. So in fact, the interaction is total: there’s PixelFed for photos, there’s PeerTube which was developed by Framasoft.

Walid : We talk about it at length in the episode with them, we spent an hour and a half talking, including the Fediverse integration part. Which finally, like you, dates back to the beginning of the creation of PeerTube.

Benjamin : Yes, it was even a prerequisite for us. From the beginning, we wanted to do a podcast about the Fediverse.

Walid : That brings me to the next question, I’ll cut you off here, what is Castopod’s place in the Fediverse?

Benjamin : Actually, for us, the Fediverse is really super important because once again we think that value is created by content creators, and that this value has two forms. It has the content and the audience.

And so, you have to be in total control of your content. And for that, an open source platform allows you to self-host and guarantee that my content is at home. In any case, I can retrieve all my content, do what I want with it, I remain in control of it, regardless of the host I choose, I remain in control of my content. And in terms of the audience, I need to be able to interact with my audience without an intermediary, whether that intermediary is technical or legal. That is to say, I do not have an intermediary who will technically be able to cut off the communication between my audience and me, and who is not an intermediary who is obliged to do so by law. Today, the problem with closed silos is that these platforms have all the technical power and since they are required by law to act and censor comments that would contravene the law, well they do so preventively and automatically because they are closed silos, they are huge. Sometimes there are platforms that have billions of users, so we can imagine that on a platform with billions of users, every post can’t be moderated by a human being, it’s not possible. Inevitably, these are algorithms, and inevitably they give rise to abuses.

The advantage of a decentralized, federated system, like the Fediverse, is that I can have several instances, that is to say that I don’t have a Mastodon server, it was said that there is Mastodon, PixelFed, Peertube, Funkwhale, Plume, Castopod, there are plenty…

Benjamin Bellamy

But that for each of these social networks, I have several instances that will have a geographical presence, that will perhaps have a theme, a language, and where I will be able to operate as a moderator as an administrator of this platform. So either I’m my own administrator because I’m self-hosting, and that’s a choice that many people make, or I go to Framapiaf, for example. You were talking about Framasoft, Framasoft has a Mastodon instance called Framapiaf, and if I’m going to register on this platform, I have to follow the terms and conditions of use that are submitted to me. But I’m not on Facebook, I’m not on Twitter. The number of users is much more limited. There is a change of scale that is extremely important because it is what means that on these networks, today, I do not have automatic moderation a priori. I don’t have an auto-strike because I did something that looks weird when in fact it wasn’t at all. So it’s much smaller, but because these networks are federated, they’re all connected to each other, just because they’re smaller doesn’t mean my audience is necessarily going to be smaller too. Because I still have access to a global audience, and it’s even bigger since it crosses social networks that have nothing to do with it.

Walid : Can you give me a concrete example between me, a podcaster, with my Castopod platform and interactions that can happen with people who are on other platforms, Mastodon or others for example. Do you have any examples, Yassine? You have concrete examples to share so that people actually don’t have to be obvious; you install Castopod, you look at the tab, you look at the Fediverse part and there “wait how does it work, where do I enter my account and everything?”.
To understand that, in fact, that your Castopod has its own native integration and that it has its own account, and what I’m going to be able to do with it, it’s not necessarily obvious. So how do you share this with a user who doesn’t know Castopod and who potentially doesn’t know the Fediverse very well? What could you give as an example?

Yassine : So initially we integrated Castopod into the Fediverse in order to have an implementation that was as transparent as possible. That is, the podcaster doesn’t have to know the Fediverse, know how it works, for it to have its episode that shows up on Mastodon and for it to have dialogues and interactions. So when a podcaster is going to create an episode and publish it, we offer them to write the whole thing, whether it’s on Mastodon or on another micro-blogging network on the Fediverse. And so, when his first episode is going to be published, he’s going to have all his followers who are going to get a notification with a post about Mastodon for example, the episode that can be played directly there with a built-in player and they’ll be able to either like or retweet or share directly from their Mastodon.
The podcast is really the actor, to be more technical, he is a Fediverse actor and therefore he can interact with other actors in the Fediverse whether it’s on Mastodon.

Walid : What draws the problem is that I have a WordPress with an ActivityPub integration, he has his own account. I have a Castopod with the ActivityPub integration, it has its account. I have a Peertube, it has its own account. I may have my own Mastodon account that has its own account. And in fact, you easily end up with 3, 4 accounts and it’s not necessarily very, very obvious. I’ve tried a lot of things to see how to do it and in the end, things are not that obvious in terms of strategy, what do you want to do behind it?

Benjamin : I totally disagree with what you just said.

Walid : Aah, it’s fun, go for it!

Benjamin : It’s not that things aren’t obvious, it’s that things aren’t usual. Today, you’re used to having a Twitter account, a Facebook account, a Tiktok account and you’re used to posting the same content on several different platforms. Here, the big difference is that your three accounts, so your ActivityPub account on WordPress, your ActivityPub account on Mastodon, your ActivityPub account on Castopod, they are all connected to each other and potentially a single user who would be on Mastodon for example can follow all three from the same place and he will see the content of these three platforms arrive in the same place. And that’s not usual, we’re not used to that. We’ve become accustomed to having content compartmentalized in silos and closed ecosystems.

And then, all of a sudden, everything is connected. So actually, it’s a matter of habit. That is, how do I want to communicate? What I think is that you don’t communicate in the same way on a podcast platform as you do on a micro-blogging platform as you do on a blog platform. And the contents are not the same. Except that we got into the habit of copying and pasting between platforms because these platforms were closed and didn’t communicate with each other. And today, on the Fediverse, this is no longer the case. So you just have to think a little bit about an editorial strategy and say, well, I want to do a podcast, it’s audio and it’s an hour long, and it’s going to go on Castopod. And then behind it, I have an article that’s going to be 200 lines long. That, clearly, is WordPress. And then, I’m going to tell you something that happened to me this weekend. That’s 250 characters. That’s Mastodon.

But actually, I’m going to have different contents. And if tomorrow you go to the Capitole du Libre, or to Pas Sage en Seine, and you take pictures, you’re going to put your photos on PixelFed. The nature of the contents, the form of the messages on the Fediverse, it is free. That is to say, it can be an image, it can be a text of less than 400 characters, it can be a text of more than 400 characters, it can be whatever we want, and it can be a video, but all of these platforms can, in one way or another, be able to visualize these messages. So they’re going to visualize it more or less well, that’s for sure, because the interface of each one means that they’re going to display more or less well a photo, a short text, a long text, a podcast, etc.
It’s really a way, an editorial strategy and actually, what you can do more, but you can’t do less. It’s on closed platforms that you’re forced to copy and paste. Now, you need to ask the question maybe a little differently.

Yassine : Sorry, maybe I have something to add. I’d like to clarify that ActivityPub is not the Fediverse and the Fediverse is not ActivityPub. As a result, we have to distinguish between the decentralized social network that is the Fediverse, and ActivityPub, which is one of the protocols that is used, the main one that is used, to be able to communicate between the different servers.
Today we are only at the beginning, ActivityPub dates back to 2018. Before, there were other protocols to do the same thing, but they were not necessarily suitable. ActivityPub is not necessarily adapted today, maybe there will be evolutions, it’s a bit of a cacophony anyway. There’s a lot going on, it’s all new. And so…

Benjamin : It’s not a cacophony, it’s an effervescence.

Yassine : And so, there is not necessarily governance. Everyone does things on their own.
And everyone follows up with each of their solutions, etc. So we’re finally coming together thanks to ActivityPub today. But we could imagine tomorrow that it’s a new protocol that allows us to integrate the same accounts, we might have a single account and that we can interact with it everywhere, I don’t know, we can, well, it’s that at the beginning, there are problems.

Benjamin : I think that, it’s true, the biggest problem with Fediverse, it’s not that technically it’s complicated, it’s not that we’re only at the beginning and that a lot of things can happen, it’s that functionally people have trouble understanding how it works. That when you tell someone you’re going to the Fediverse, you don’t really know where the entry point is.
Closed silos have the huge advantage that it’s simple, you’re taken by the hand. You’re a child, you don’t have any questions to ask yourself, you do this, you do that, you tick, you accept the terms and conditions of use and that’s it.
That’s not what Fediverse is about, you’re an adult, you can choose who you’re going to hang out with, what you’re allowed to say. The real problem is more about the content than the container, I want to say. After that, it’s true that it’s the beginning, well it’s the beginning, it’s been there for quite a few years but there are still a lot of things to do and discover. And then there are things that are not practical, for example the identity management on the Fediverse, I personally find that it is not great. So that’s also why we encourage podcasters to have their own domain name, because that way they are masters of their identity. If tomorrow I go to a Mastodon instance and then I decide to change it, I can move but my identity will also change on closed silos, obviously we don’t ask ourselves the question because if I leave, I disappear. So now, at least, I can continue to exist, but under a new identity. There are networks today like Nostr that allow you to change your access provider to the social network while maintaining your identity, this is done in a rather clever way. Okay, but you have to know. So, there’s a lot to do, but that’s what’s great. It’s that it can only get better today.

Castopod’s Challenges

Walid : We’re going to close the chapter on Fediverse, because we can talk about it for a long time. The last point before the conclusion is the future, and what I call challenges.
The future and challenges of Castopod.
Could you explain a little bit about what you’re working on, or what are the big things that’s coming up, or what you know you need to work on?

Benjamin : First of all, Castopod’s challenges are trivial, but Castopod is an open source platform, anyone can take it, appropriate it, modify it, we’ve already talked about it, but if no one takes it, if no one appropriates it, if no one modifies it, we will have lost. For us, the real challenge with Castopod is that it has a minimum of success, and that people make it their own, and that people install it and come to us. But in any case, if the product is not used, it is useless. Initially, we needed it for ourselves, but we would never have done it if it hadn’t been for this external demand and this need. And so, we’re super happy that people are using it and we’re super happy with the progress today, but we can’t let it stop. And for us, the challenge is that there are more and more people using the platform and that there are more and more interactions. And that, then, maybe not all of them, but that the features we use are used. Honestly, I’m super happy when you say that you use the people feature that allows you to say who the speakers are on the podcast, because, well, it appears in other apps. We have no illusions that features like this, which we have put into developing, to be used, we know that they will not all be used to the same degree. And for that, we need feedback from users, to know what you like, what you don’t like, what you want us to change. And then, if you want to do merge requests, go ahead. If you want to translate into new languages, go for it. For us, that’s really the challenge, it’s that people take ownership of it, use it, modify it, criticize it, encourage it.

We really need that because otherwise everything we do is useless. Then, on the things to come, we briefly talked about plugins. Today we are in the process of setting up a system of plugins because:

1. We can’t develop everything and so there are features that we won’t be able to do because our time is limited and therefore we can’t do everything
2. There are some things that we don’t necessarily want to do, we’re not going to hide it, and in particular there are publishers of services related to the podcast who have told us “hey, we’d like to interface, do this, do that”. We say “yes great but it’s not up to us to do it, it’s not up to us to promote one solution more than another”.
   And so we expect a lot from that because we think that there can’t be a living ecosystem if everyone can’t come and participate easily. We can’t say we’re promoting interoperability if we don’t promote it on our own platform. And the plugin architecture is one of them: one last time we invent nothing, it’s also what made the success of WordPress and then behind us we also expect a lot on monetization since we have a monetization solution on Castopod, more precisely at Ad Aures which is activatable on Castopod and on which we have quite a bit
   because we think it’s pretty cool.

Walid : Yassine, do you want to add things about future challenges or new features coming up and all that kind of stuff?

Yassine : Just a little thing to clarify, since we talked about Fediverse and the integration with Castopod, there are still some features today that are missing between Castopod and the Fediverse, namely hashtags, pinging a particular person in the Fediversees. And as a result, there is a bit of code refactoring to be done on the implementation side. It’s been a long time since I implemented it in 2021 and so I’ve learned a lot since then, I know that there is a little rework to be done to make everything work for the best. So that’s also planned in the next few months.

Castopod for a podcast user

Walid : In closing, I’d like to ask you three questions. The first is what would you say to a podcast listener to introduce Castopod?

Benjamin : In a few sentences. The first thing is nothing, since the podcast listener, he’s not on Castopod, he’s on his listening app. So, having said that, I’m still going to force myself to give a real answer.

A podcast listener who, for example, would have accessibility problems and who would like to be able to access a podcast with transcription and who would like to consume a podcast that does not offer a transcript because it is hosted on a platform that does not allow you to insert transcription, well in this case I would say to him, “ask your favorite podcaster to go to a platform that is compatible with podcast 2.0 and that in particular allows you to put transcription” and obviously I would tend to recommend Castopod but I’m not sure I’m completely objective about the choice, I must admit it. In any case, as an auditor, there is a real challenge in demanding platforms that are open, free and that provide real functionalities. Again, as a listener, I don’t see the point of going to an Apple Podcast where I have exactly the same features that I had in 2000, 2005, it dates back to 2005. So if I don’t have more features than that, I just have to change the creamery and ask my podcaster to say no but go look elsewhere.

Castopod for a Content Creator

Walid : yes, by the way, I changed creameries myself because the platform I was on explained to me that the Fediverse didn’t care. So there you have it.
The second question is “what would you say to a content creator who uses another podcast platform to showcase Castopod?”

Benjamin : So the first thing is, is the platform you use podcast 2.0? So it’s not just Castopod because it’s important to say, podcast 2.0 can’t work if Castopod is the only platform to offer these features. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but it’s in our interest that our competitors offer features as well as ours, at least in part. If you’re the only one offering transcription, listening platforms won’t have an interest in integrating it, and as a result, it won’t work. So it’s in our interest that as many platforms as possible offer the maximum number of podcast 2.0 features, and that our competitors offer things comparable to us, at least almost as nice. So for that, there is a site that exists, that references them all, which is called NewPodcastApps.com, in a single word, and which references all the listening and publishing platforms and podcast indexes that are compatible with podcast 2.0. So there’s a filter that’s quite big because there are a lot of features: you can choose those that are for hosting, those for listening, those that are open source, those that offer transcription, geolocation, in short, there’s everything. And so, we’re going to be able to search, if I’m a podcaster, which platform is best for me. And then you’ll see that most likely, it’s Castopod. But in any case, make up your mind.
What also brings me back to the previous question is that I could have said, as a listener, go to NewPodcastApps.com and then look for apps, listening apps and then if you’re looking for geolocation, speaker management, transcription, chaptering, you check and then you look at what is there as a listening app and it’s going to allow you to choose the one that suits you best. Is it on iOS, Android, Mac, PC, Linux or whatever. And it’s really a site to keep in bookmark. There’s everything and that’s what will make things evolve and make the podcast grow with all of us.

Castopod for a content creator who is just starting out

Walid : Last question, what would you say to a content creator who is starting out to present Castopod, like I did when I started for example?

Benjamin : Basically not very different from what we said before.

Once again, I’m going to repeat myself, but I say what will make your value is your data and your audience, well choose a platform that guarantees that no one will be able to take it away from you, no one, it seems really important to me, on a closed ecosystem or on a closed platform: if you are dereferenced well you have lost everyone. Your stars on Apple podcast, they can disappear, your likes on Castopod, they can’t disappear. No one, technically, can remove them. That’s not possible. They’re on your platform, it’s your social network. What is important is that Castopod has its own social network. It’s not the only one, all the platforms of the Fediverse, this is the case. Castopod has its own social network that is connected to others, so you’re not limited to that. So we can’t censor you. You can self-censor, for x or y reason, but we can’t censor you. It’s technically not possible. And I think it’s fundamental to understand that because there are so many creators who have been struck on closed platforms and who have been… So either you can just be demonetized, well there are different sizes of stick, or you disappear completely, but it’s someone who made the decision for you.

It’s not you who took your risk to measure, who said no, but I’m keeping it, I’m taking the risk. On these platforms, Castopod is part of it, well it’s you who decides, and it’s you who assumes your risk, and it’s you who decides, do I keep it, do I delete it. You’re still responsible, according to the law, that’s valid on all platforms, but it’s you who makes the decision, no one else.

Conclusion

Walid : Ok, that’s a good last word, I’m going to do a little op-ed myself, for once. I migrated to Castopod in December and I’m very happy about it because I’ve already gained all the integration with Fédiverse, which is very nice, especially when you do a podcast that talks about free software and open standards and the audience is largely there. I found it really interesting. I didn’t lose much to be completely honest. There’s some stuff that was maybe a little bit better on some of the
other platforms. I’m thinking typically of chapter editing, for example, as we’ve already talked about.
There are some things that can be improved a little bit and everything, but I haven’t lost any functionality. So that’s really, really cool. I’ve switched to an open source platform that I find more interesting.
I’m not going to hide it, what’s very cool for me is that you’re French and we can talk and you can explain to me a little bit about your philosophy, what you want to do etc. I think it’s interesting when you’re a content creator to be able to understand what the people who make this platform want to do. And what they want to go towards, what they don’t want to do, etc. It’s really nice.
I’m very happy to have migrated to the Castopod. I really wanted to do this episode with you because I wanted you to be able to share a little bit of the discussions we had off-air at the different shows. Thank you, thank you for making this platform as a user, as a content creator, it’s really very nice.

See you soon, dear listeners. That’s the longest episode, I think, we’ve ever done! And then if you’re interested, we’re going to pass on a bonus, we’re going to test something that’s Benjamin’s idea: talk about other subjects, a little more technical, etc.

So thank you both, thank you Yassine, thank you Benjamin for your time.

Yassine : Thank you.
Benjamin : Thank you and thank you for being here because if you weren’t here, it wasn’t going to happen.

[Générique de fin]

The ActivityPub Integration

Walid : A little bonus, a little extra that is linked to conversations I had with Benjamin or with Yassine about our different meetings.
I’d like to talk a little bit about the ActivityPub integration and I’d like to know a little bit about how it went technically. Were you familiar with ActivityPub when you decided to implement it? Yassine, what can you tell us about it?

Yassine : Well, it’s not easy, at least it wasn’t easy when I started implementing. I didn’t know anything about the Activity Pub, it was in 2021, I think. So, I had to learn everything. Knowing that the resources, in terms of dev, concerning the Fediverse are not numerous. I had relied on a few articles from Mastodon, how they had done it and especially the aspect of ActivityPub which is long, a lot of texts, not many images, not easy to understand a priori and suddenly it’s several back and forth. At some point I had to start writing code, I had installed a Mastodon server, I had asked Benjamin to have one to do direct tests with it.

So it’s back and forth between code, tests, with what we had for the dev, reading and re-reading the aspect of ActivityPub until we understood, sometimes not understood and came back to it to understand. So it took a few months anyway. What was complicated was the fact that there were no resources, no real tools to test the implementations, at least today that’s what is missing. I think there were some initiatives for, FediDB I think at the time who wanted to make a kind of mock server to be able to test locally but they pivoted to something else.

The adoption of ActivityPub + Castopod Index

So, if there’s one thing to know about ActivtyPub it’s that it’s not easy to implement. Today, as Mastodon is the reference in terms of Fediverse – it is the software that is most used today in Fediverse – we tend to test with a Mastodon implementation and there are advantages and disadvantages. And then, after those months of implementation, we released a first Alpha 42 version, I remember at that time in April 2021. And then with user feedback, we can fix bugs left and right. It’s really implemented in a practical way and not so much making diagrams before etc.

Walid : How long did it take you to get a stable version with the ActivityPub integration? Castopod Complete is the first version of Castopod. I mean the feature, so you think of it as really stable and mature, the ActivityPub feature.

Benjamin : from the Alpha 42.
Yassine: Yes, and then there were still a few small bugs left and right, but we fixed them as we went along, and the most complicated thing was to release the 42 because we had to understand how it all worked.

Walid : Was the adoption of this part of ActivityPub fast? Did it become a popular feature right away or not?

Benjamin : That’s hard to measure, we see it a little bit today with index.castapod.org, just by looking at how many subscribers each Castapod podcast has.
Well, honestly, I thought it would be more. We’ve got Nick who’s over a thousand. I think it’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest.

Walid : Yes, Nick from The Linux Experiment channel, which I actually interviewed.

Benjamin : 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, so it’s something to put into perspective, but it’s already not bad. This was also one of the objectives of the Castopod index, it was to try to facilitate interactions towards the Fediverse by grouping all the Castopod podcasts in one place and to allow you to find and follow them because otherwise it’s not necessarily intuitive and obvious. So we hope that it will continue to grow, and that there will be more and more of it, and that it will be used more and more.

Evolutions of ActivityPub for the podcast

Walid : On the Fediverse part, yes, we already talked about it in the episode, so I don’t necessarily need to go back on it more.
I had indeed spotted the hashtag problem, that it would be cool to have hashtags.

Benjamin : On the Fediverse, maybe I can introduce a subject, I don’t know if you’re either interested, at least I’m not the one who will talk about it. Today, what Castopod publishes, we basically modeled ourselves on what Mastodon expects because that’s where the users are. But what will have to be done one day is for Castopod to publish its own posts with its own format and for there to be podcast players, real podcast listening apps, which rather than subscribing to an RSS feed subscribe to an ActivityPub feed. The thing is that today we feel that the pump is not primed enough to make it worth getting into it. But that’s one of the things that is… In fact, there are people who are waiting, I think we will do this, but there are too few of them today for them to…

Yassine : We can do that today and have an adapter already for Mastodon so they can play podcast episodes. It’s just that I had defined a spec at the time
It was in 2022 I think, or the end of 2021 I don’t know.

PodcastActivityStream in the idea is to extend ActivityPub and include podcasts and podcast episodes.
I think in the rework that I was talking about in the main episode, maybe I’ll integrate that directly and see with Mastodon how to make a Merge Request or something at Mastodon.

Yassine Doghri

Youngest child : it’s an aspect that is ultra technical and that is ultra important because in the long run, so it’s the idea we had at the beginning, which was very naïve, but which for me is still valid: it’s that, in the long term, the podcast must remain decentralized, but not necessarily on RSS. And that I think ActivityPub might be an alternative to RSS. Because with ActivityPub, there are a lot more features.
RSS is very limited, and with ActivityPub, you can do many, many more things. And so we said “we’re going to do both”. And then, maybe one day, ActivityPub, JSON-LD, all of that, will supplant RSS for podcasting and there will be podcast listening apps that will end up talking only about ActivityPub. It’s science fiction today, very clearly. In any case, we’re still on that path to create a PodcastActivityStream for which Yassine wrote the spec.
So the spec is public, it exists today, it’s just implemented by no one including us. We don’t implement it.

Yassine : If we implement it, but not as it should be. It’s just a small detail but I had a discussion with someone, we were talking about it by email and he explained to me that it was possible today and that we could just make a fairly fast adapter, well easy on Mastodon to be able to play episodes actually.

Walid : There’s also a whole aspect of potentially convincing other hosts, other streaming platforms to do the same in the end, so that it really makes sense.

Benjamin : Yes, of course. But it’s a bit of a demonstration by example. The whole problem of Podcast 2.0 is demonstration by example. That’s the specialty, let there be one or two who do it, let us solve the chicken-and-egg problem and then the others follow because they say “Oh yes, but in fact it works, people use it, my competitor does it, I have to do it too.” This is proof by example and by success.

Open Podcast Prefix Project (OP3)

Walid : I’d like to talk about another topic that’s super important to me because I use it and I think it’s really, really cool, it’s OP3, op3.dev. I would love to hear about it. For me, it translates on my podcast as “I can give public statistics to my community”, so I think that’s very, very cool. So I’d like us to say a few words about it so that you can introduce what OP3 is, how do you work with the people who do OP3? How did you integrate that? And what’s in it for podcasters and for people who listen to podcasts?

OP3 (source github)

Benjamin : OP3 stands for Open Podcast Prefix Project, so literally the Open Podcast Prefix Project. So what is it? It is an audience measurement tool that works by prefixes. What for? Because, in fact, the URLs of MP3 files are prefixed by the audience measurement server. And so it allows you to measure a number of downloads for each of the episodes. There are plenty of systems like that, they’ve been around for a long time. The most well-known, at one time I think there was Chartable, which was the best known, which was therefore a kind of Google Analytics of the podcast, which was bought by Spotify. So as a result, it cools a lot of people, rightly, because it allows Spotify to have a lot of information about competitors. And so, Castopod has its own prefix system and its own analytics system. That is to say, with Castopod, we have built-in audience measurements that are therefore found in the podcaster’s database. And OP3 has a double particularity, which is that it is, well, even triple, it’s open source, it’s open data and it’s free. Most podcast prefix systems claim to be free in the sense that it’s free to set up. I’ll be able to consult some data for free and then if I want to be able to consult all my data, i.e. for example audience measurements that are more than a month old, I’ll have to pay. It’s ultra classic, but basically it’s free. But if you want to have access to your data that you entrusted to me, you’re going to have to pay. I’m not a fan of this type of business model personally. I don’t think that’s very cool. After all, why not, you’ve been warned.
OP3 is really different because I’m going to be able to see all of my data, but more importantly, everyone is going to be able to see all of my data. That’s why it’s open data, it’s that it’s not possible, it’s not possible, it’s deliberate, it’s not a defect or a bug or something that has a feature that isn’t there yet. It is not possible on OP3 to have private data.

I can’t use this platform to check my audience stats and no one else can see them, which is the case all the time normally. And so, everyone can find out how much of an episode had a given audience on a given day, from which browser, etc. The challenge of OP3 is to have a platform that is truly open and that can provide information to an entire ecosystem. The fact that it’s free is also very important because there are audience measurement platforms that give data that is at least partial, public, and for example rankings and things like that. But if it’s paid, we already know that all the people who are in the ranking have paid. And that it’s not because I’m not there that I don’t have an audience, it’s just because I didn’t pay. So the fact that it’s free, it also guarantees a certain transparency. And then, in my opinion, at least a certain quality of information.
So today OP3 is still small because it’s a project that is very recent, there are more than a thousand podcasts today, the growth is quite linear. The idea is that there should be as many podcasts as possible so that we can start to get information about the audiences, etc. So from a technical point of view, it’s not very complicated to integrate. In the case of Castopod, we integrated it a while ago. And for the podcaster, it’s just a checkbox actually. It’s a button to activate: do I want to be on OP3 or not? I choose. By default, this is not enabled. I have to make the choice to activate it. And if I activate it, well, actually, I’ll have stats in two places, I’ll have them on Castopod and on OP3. And on OP3, everyone will be able to consult them. This also means that OP3 plays the role of a trusted third party. It is not a third-party certifier, especially even though the measurement methods comply with the IAB v2 standard. This doesn’t mean that the platform is IAB v2 certified, if only because it’s quite expensive, but in any case it allows me to make comparisons and get a lot of information.
And for the record, that’s what we use to make the top 50 on index.castopod.org, that is to say that we look for audience measurement information, OP3, for these podcasts. So since the Castopod index, as its name suggests, only concerns podcasts hosted on Castopod, there is nothing else, but we could make a ranking with podcasts other than those hosted by Castopod, as long as they are used OP3.

Walid : Finally when I tick the box to say I want the integration with OP3, I don’t have a link on my podcast site, something that points me to the stats, I’m not sure.

Yassine : That’s something we just added. So, it will be for the next release.

Walid : Great! because I was like, ‘Okay, through Castopod Index, I can go and see, find the stats of the podcasters’. So I thought that was very cool.

Benjamin : Actually, the URL is not secret. It is completely public.

What OP3 uses is the GUID, since you have to know that a podcast can change host, it can move, it can change its name, its RSS feed can change its URL, and suddenly there’s a silly thing that we didn’t have before podcast 2.0, it was a unique identifier per podcast, which allows us to say “well there you go, here I have two RSS feeds, but in fact it’s the same”, because I changed hosts, because sometimes I can also have a duplicate, because I can have two domain names that point to the same server and suddenly potentially I will have two URLs that point to the same physical file.
And so Podcast 2.0, among the features, added this: the GUID which is a unique identifier per podcast that allows you to know that now in fact it’s twice the same and OP3 uses that.
So basically, we just have to go to op3.dev/p/guid and we access the data like that. What also allows me to clarify one thing is that OP3 will look for the podcast info in the PodcastIndex database. Since when OP3 measures an episode, it will count when downloading an mp3 file, but it only has the url of the mp3 file, we don’t provide it with any other information about the name of the podcast etc. And so in order to be able to display the title of the episode or information like that, it actually links through PodcastIndex, which means, and it’s important to know this and we probably don’t say it enough, that a podcast that isn’t referenced from a PodcastIndex can’t use OP3. And that happens.
And in fact, John Spurlock, who is the developer, the person who maintains OP3, contacted us saying “but I don’t understand, we have podcasts that are hosted by Castopod, that use OP3, but we don’t know what to do with them because they are not referenced on PodcastIndex. Why?” Because Castopod doesn’t force podcasts to be listed on PodcastIndex.

Audience measurement in the podcast

Walid : And you couldn’t put a box to tick off like that?

Benjamin : So we can do a lot of things, it’s just that we didn’t. And then the only person who complained so far was John Spurlock who said “but how come I have podcasts that come to see me and that I can’t actually find? I don’t even know the title, the name, I don’t have any info on it.”

So for those who are interested in all these issues of audience measurement, because audience measurement in podcasts is not simple, it’s complicated. We’re talking about audience measurement, but in fact we should talk about download measurement because that’s a point that’s really great in podcasting, is that I can listen to a podcast that is already cookie-free, we already mentioned it earlier, but I can listen to a podcast without creating an account. That is, I can download Antennapod, I don’t get asked, I go to F-Droid, download Antennapod and subscribe to a podcast. I subscribe to a podcast, but at no point did I give any information about myself.

I didn’t give an email address, I didn’t create an account, I didn’t give a username, I didn’t give a password, absolutely nothing. No one knows who I am. And that’s what I also find incredible today in the internet of 2024, is that there’s still an ecosystem where I can subscribe to content, listen to it every day, every week and no one knows who I am. And I didn’t create an account.

Benjamin Bellamy

The downside is that when I want to measure an audience, it’s much less easy because differentiating between two downloads and knowing if it’s the same person or not, it’s almost… So for sure it’s impossible, then I can have ideas and then above all what matters is to be able to compare compared to the previous month: “I have 30% more or less downloads”, but… So it’s not a big deal in the end.

For all these issues, there is a very nice article that will be published in the magazine podcast number 3. I say it’s a very nice article because I’m the one who wrote it and also gives an interview with John Spurlock, the developer of OP3, who did me the honor of answering all the questions I had about his platform. For all those who are interested, I encourage you to go and read Podcast Magazine issue 3.

Walid : Thank you for listening to this little extra, we had a few more things to discuss.
Don’t hesitate to tell me if you liked it, let us make these little extras a little more technical. If that’s the case, we can try it on other episodes. I would like to thank Yassine and Benjamin for taking part in the game and spending more than 2 hours and 20 minutes recording with me.

Keep following them, there are a lot of conferences around Castopod, there are a lot of things, talk about it around you. See you soon and thank you for listening to these episodes to the end.

This episode was recorded on January 23, 2024.

To go further around Castopod

• Understanding OP3 with John Spurlock
• Exploring Castopod Index
• Castopod SaaS Offer

License

This podcast is published under the double license Art Libre 1.3 or later – CC BY-SA 2.0 or later.

podcast.projets-libres.org/@pr…

Sommaire

• 1 Interview with Agnès Crepet – Fairphone
• 2 Agnes’ journey
• 3 The arrival at Fairphone, the beginnings of Fairphone
• 4 Fairphone’s mission
• 5 Agnes’ team and its missions
• 6 Make your own version of Android with long-term support
• 7 Provide long-term support without losing functionality
• 8 Lessons learned from the Fairphone 2
• 9 Feedback on Fairphone Open OS
• 10 Relationships with free communities (LineageOS, etc.)
• 11 Collaboration with /e/OS (Murena)
• 12 Relations with the Commown Co-op and Aircraft Leasing
• 13 The Fair TEC Collective
• 14 Hardware longevity at Fairphone
• 15 Op-Ed
• 16 Conclusion
• 17 License

Interview with Agnès Crepet – Fairphone

Walid : Welcome to Projet Libre and it’s with pleasure that today I welcome Agnès Crépet in episode number 4. Florent Cayré, who is one of the founders of the Commown cooperative, strongly encouraged me to contact Agnès because he had told me that she would have exciting things to tell me. She was kind enough to agree to speak in Projets Libres!.

Agnes works at Fairphone, she is the Head of IT and Software Longevity. With her, we’re going to talk about what it means to maintain an operating system and applications over time, and also with relationships with other players in the ecosystem. And if you want to know more about her career then I will put in description the link to the excellent episode of the APRIL podcast, Libre à vous number 180 in which Agnès describes very well her entire career.
Agnes, thank you so much for being with us, I hope you’re doing well today. You told me you were hot.

Agnès : Exactly. In my coworking space, it’s extremely hot.

Agnes’ journey

Walid : But listen, that’s not going to stop us from talking. Could you start by telling us a bit about your background and how you came to work at Fairphone?

Agnes : Yes, of course. My quick journey: as you said, in Libre à vous I go into a bit of detail about my journey. So I’m not going to do it to you now, but I mainly worked in France until I was 40 years old. I did a fairly traditional study in computer science, starting by doing fairly corporate jobs and then little by little by moving away from corporate formulas, so by launching my own company with friends called Ninja Squad and everything.
But hey, let’s say staying in the French ecosystem, and in 2018 I joined Fairphone, which is in the Netherlands, so it gave me the opportunity to see what it was like from the inside to work for a company that makes a digital, ethical product, let’s say. We’re going to talk about that a lot today, I guess.

And it also gave me the opportunity to have an experience with very different cultures. Getting out of my French-French ecosystem a little bit, so it was also nice. And so I’m still working for this company, 5 years later, in full remote (Editor’s note: complete teleworking), well almost full remote, that is to say that I still go there one week a month to drink coffee with my colleagues, just to keep in touch. I find that sometimes full remote is a bit of a challenge.
So there you have it, my career briefly, and alongside my jobs, since the beginning, so about twenty years, since I started working, and even before, I have always been part of activist, political collectives, around a certain form of digital technology that is more inclusive, freer, more diverse. So I’m part of the founding team of MiXiT, which has a conference in Lyon, which works for more diversity and ethics in tech. I am part of the Duchess France collective, which is a collective that works for more visibility of women tech in tech.

And I also co-founded in Saint-Etienne, the city where I live, a web media, let’s say, called number zero and which is part of the wave of Indie-Media. I also talk about it in Libre à vous, so I’m not going to talk too much about it today. But basically, it’s the whole wave of alternative media that appeared in the late ’90s, early 2000s, which was a form of activism to find an alternative to the mass media. There you go. And it was all online. So, that’s also what made me want to study computer science. So that’s a little bit of my activism outside of my job. But it’s true that since I’ve been working at Fairphone, I’ve kind of aligned the planets on this thing.

The arrival at Fairphone, the beginnings of Fairphone

Walid : For me, the first time I discovered Fairphone was at a conference at FOSDEM in 2016. So how did you end up at Fairphone?

Agnes : I came in as a person who is completely unknown to Fairphone. So I applied for an ad online because I felt like I had a profile that matched the job, and not a recruiter who contacted me and said “we have a great job for you”. First of all, because we don’t have the money to have recruiters, in any case we do it very rarely, punctually, and also because it’s not necessarily in our philosophy. We also want anyone to be able to apply.
So I arrived just because I wanted to have an experience outside France, that’s for sure. And I’ve been wanting to work for a product, ethical, responsible digital company for a long time. So there you have it, there aren’t that many in Europe. So I’ve been following him for a long time, since the awareness campaign he and she did around conflict minerals in 2010-2011. I had followed this project, I had seen the Fairphone 1 and the Fairphone 2 come out.

I arrived 5 years after the beginning of the story, after the beginning of the company, because the company is in 2013: I arrived in 2018. We’ve just celebrated our 10th anniversary, so you see, I’ve arrived at the second half of Fairphone’s life, which is certainly not the most complicated, let’s say. I’m not saying it’s easy to work at Fairphone today, because nothing can be taken for granted. It’s always very complicated, every month you have new problems that come in, you have to solve them, and then you don’t have a financial base that allows you to take risks, even if you take a lot of them.

But that’s nothing compared to the people who did the first 5 years, I think. All humility because these people, they were working on a project that was nascent, or on the first products that were complicated. Fairphone 1 and Fairphone 2 were products whose quality was not exceptional, because we were learning. So so, a lot, a lot of stress, I think, for this team of people over the first 5 years.
I didn’t really know it, I did see some aspects of it when I arrived in 2018 on the first, first 1 or 2 years. And it stabilized a little bit when we released the Fairphone 3. It’s still a much better quality product, which shows that, after a while, we were still able to make very decent phones. I’m a bit ourselves, but we don’t really hide it from each other and it’s important not to hide it too. From where we are, from where we started.

Fairphone is also a success by users, users who supported this crazy project to make an ethical phone by having technical problems on the first opuses. That is to say, in fact there are people who used the Fairphone 2 with big problems but who were happy to use it because they were participating in a different project. So that’s something to emphasize, the importance of the community on this kind of project.

Walid : Had you already worked with equipment or was it something new for you?

Agnes : No, no, it was completely new and I didn’t know anything about Android when I arrived. So if you want, I still had some steps to climb. I was a back-end developer, I was doing back-end. So I came a little bit from afar, after that I had done a little bit of project management, things like that, team, more than project by the way.
Yes, I was still on a very different technical stack. I had done a little bit of Linux at the very beginning of my career, C development, so that helped. Because today, it’s true that it’s still…

We do that, part of my team does that. But it’s true that it was still a great challenge when I arrived. I had very little electronics skills, so there you have it. Everything about Qualcomm processors, etc., I had to learn a lot of tricks. It’s better now, but I have to admit that the first few months have been very busy.

Fairphone’s mission

Walid : If I go back to Fairphone, the company in general, can you just describe what is the goal you are trying to achieve?

Agnès : The company’s mission is to change the electronics industry to make it more responsible, to make sure that we no longer hide our faces to the abuses committed in the construction of telephones, social or environmental abuses. And to make sure that we change the industry to be better, and that people are paid more in the supply chain and that the phone lasts longer to avoid too much e-waste. I’m keeping it short, but it’s still the main focus of Fairphone and in that sense it’s true that it’s a rather unique project because our KPIs, for example, performance indicators, are not only based on financial profitability, but also on all the areas of impact that I mentioned a little.
So, are there a lot of people who benefit from our social programs in terms of salary? Are there any fair materials included in the phone? Do we recycle as we claim to do? We have a lot of performance indicators that exist and that allow us to follow the success criteria we set for ourselves. Of course, these success criteria are not only financial.

But finance is also important because you’re not an NGO. We are a company, even if we are a social enterprise: it is a status somewhat similar to the SCOP in France. The Netherlands calls it Social Enterprise, but it’s similar to SCOP. We’re in the Netherlands, so they’re capitalists, they’re absolute liberals, so it’s still less classy than SCOPs, I’d say. But still, it looks a bit like it, with the fact that it doesn’t only include the financial profitability of the company. It is important that we aim for financial profitability because if we want to influence the electronics industry, we have to show that this project is viable. We need to show Samsung and others that if you make phones by paying living wages, decent incomes to the people who assemble the phone, it’s possible. You’re going to get there, you’re not going to put your box at risk. So all of that is important to us as well.

Agnes’ team and its missions

Walid : If I take your team now, how many people are you? What is the scope of your different missions?

Agnes : My team, you’re just talking about my team.

Walid : yes, your team.

Agnes : So I have about fifteen engineers, well, people in my team. I have two-thirds of them on the non-exotic, let’s say pure IT: Dev, Backend, Kotlin, Spring or things much less exotic than implementing an ERP. When I arrived in the company, if you will, there wasn’t all the IT stack that you find in classic boxes. So there was no finance software, no helpdesk, nothing to manage inventory and all that. So we had to put solutions in place, which don’t excite me that much,
But what you have to do to scale: ERP and company. We changed webshops last week.
Finally there you have it, we’re cleaning up the IT technical stack.
I also have developers who work on everything that is very specific data collection to do analytics on the KPIs that we claim to be tracking. So typically, we swallow all the data that comes from factories, that comes from repair centers to do analytics on what is breaking the most, where we need to improve, what we call field failure rates, failure rates in the field.

So when your phone is shipped, it’s hardware, so it’s complicated. You can’t do an update easily, well, a software update, you can’t solve everything, especially the hardware. And so we track all the errors, hardware and software, thanks to the fact that the phone can go back to a repair center. So we’re following all of that. And all these are technical solutions to be put in place. I have people who do that in my house.

And I’ve got a third of the team that’s really working on everything that’s software longevity of the phone, how to combat Android phone obsolescence. So here, it’s really more embedded development people. I have a full-time person on the Linux kernel, there you go, things like that that require skills that are quite specific, a bit niche. Because if I’m talking about the Linux kernel, for example, today there’s no one who does a lot of Linux kernel upgrades on an Android phone stack.

The industry is made in the Android stack. Basically, you ship your phone with one version of Android, you do, go, at worst, one or two versions, one or two upgrades, and that’s it. You don’t even have to touch your core. But if we want to do 5, 6, 7, 8 years of software support, at some point we have to update the Linux kernel or find similar solutions. All of this requires some pretty specific skills, mainlining, upstream Linux, kernel, things like that.

And so, I’ve got a full-time person on that in that little third. I was talking to you, a third, that is to say five people: we are not a team of 100 engineers. Fairphone has 140 or 150 people today, so I manage the 10% in charge of the technical software stack.

Make your own version of Android with long-term support

Walid : If I take the Android part, how do you go about making your own version of Android for Fairphone? What does it mean, roughly, schematically, the different stages?

Agnes : We try to stay as close as possible to vanilla Android, so to stock Android, i.e. the normal Android delivered by Google. But of course it’s not possible, well, let’s say it’s not possible. Of course, there are differences between what Google delivers and what you’re going to get on your phone. You have differences that are related to the hardware, in fact, the components that you have chosen as a phone manufacturer. And then you have differences that are more about the high stack, which will, for example, affect apps or things like that, in terms of what your network operators ask of you: Orange, Vodafone, Dutch Telecom and company. Fairphone customization is about things that are not necessarily seen by the end-user user, unless the operator wants to deliver particular apps. But if you ever squeeze this exception on operators, what we do is always as close as possible to what Android is, to what the Android version that we implement is.

Walid : So we’re talking about the AOSP (Android Open Source Project)?

Agnes : Yes. So, we’re going to say in Android, if I ever go back to the basics a little bit, you’ve got multiple layers. You have the Linux kernel: Android runs on a Linux kernel. You have what’s called the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), so that’s really all that sticks to your hardware, I’ll come back to that. Everything Android Runtime, native libraries, graphics, etc.

You’ve got the Android Framework and you’ve got the apps. And in all these layers, you have closed source and open source.

In everything I’ve just said, there’s a part called AOSP, which is called the Android Open Source Project, and it basically touches on the open source core of Android.

Walid : But what does that mean? Does that mean there’s a lot of closed source?

Agnes : Typically, the whole HAL part, the HAL implementation, it’s not open source. You have the interface which is open source but the implementation is not, that’s what will allow you to adapt, to run your Android on particular processors that are the ones you have chosen in relation to the design of your phone. And so here, we’re talking about proprietary code, we’re talking about what’s going to run on the second processors, the modem part, etc.

And typically, we’re potentially talking about Qualcomm code for us, since we have a Qualcomm processor. But we can also talk about other types of firmware, everything that is camera firmware, fingerprint sensor, well, that’s it. In your podcast notes, I’d put you An article that has been written by academics recently, which I like, which explains how complicated it is to actually maintain a product that runs on a processor, especially when it’s mobility, because you have a lot of firmware that you don’t necessarily control. Android is controllable because the core is open source, what you call AOSP, okay? But there are many other bits of code that are very complicated to master and that are at the origin of some obsolescence.

Typically, we just rollout Android 13 on Fairphone 3. Fairphone 3 was released in 2019 with Android 9. So you see it’s cool, we’ve done a lot of upgrades. And you see, a less cool thing is that the fingerprint sensor, we had a drop (Editor’s note: abandonment) of the manufacturer’s support, so no more firmware. And that’s typically, we’re stuck. We have Android 13 books, we have Android, Google, etc.
But this fingerprint sensor no longer has a firmware update. So that means that everything that’s Android checks that. In Android, you have a spec that says, well, your sensor, if it meets these requirements, it has an OK security level, a low security level, a strong security level, etc. And before, we had the level strong, and we had to move to the level below. Because we hadn’t been able to update the firmware of this… I’m being a bit long, but you’ll understand that this answers your question.

We had to go to the next level because we didn’t have the firmware update for this Fingerprint Sensor. We still have Android certification, but it means that concretely, for the end user, she will have to in fact, typically, no longer use the fingerprint sensor to make this transaction in the bank and use a PIN, password or whatever you want.

Typically, the fact of potentially losing control of certain firmware, even if you make a phone that lasts over time, software that lasts over time, even if you control your chip, I’ll talk at length about the chip later if you want, your processor sorry. There are bits of code that are complicated to keep under control and typically that kind of stuff.

Long-term software on a phone potentially means compromises for the end user, for the end consumer. It’s not necessarily easy to explain commercially or in terms of marketing to a customer that in fact he gains long-term support but he loses features that he had at the beginning. Potentially it can lose features exactly. You see, we have an audience that is aware of that, we come from the Fairphone 2, earlier I was telling you about the Fairphone 2 which was an average quality phone, a lot of hardware issues where people still supported us. It’s true that on the Fairphone 3 we broadened our user base a bit and suddenly people were a little more demanding, and that became even more true on the Fairphone 4.
Well yes it’s super annoying. There you connect to the Fairphone forum, you look at the Android 13 upgrade we did last week, you have a lot of people screaming about these kinds of fingerprints. We weren’t very good at communication before the upgrade, release notes, etc. We wallowed on something for a few days, we were able to say the thing a little late, we’re not perfect.
But yes, but it’s downright complicated. Obviously, we want to improve, and typically, what I want to do is the fingerprint sensor of our latest phone. We absolutely have to convince them to sign for 8 years. Even if they’re not used to it, even if they don’t know how to do it, we don’t care, we have to keep in touch with them as long as possible. All the explanation that Fairphone is used to doing about fair materials, so the metals that we include in our supply chain that are conflict free, that respect working conditions, that don’t have children, all that. We know it’s a long day and that out of 50 metals, at the moment, we’re only at 15.

Somewhere, on the body, the technical stack of our phone, we’re at the same point. That is to say, we are trying, in quotation marks, to make our way to have something more ethical, more responsible to make long-term work, but it’s a path. You can’t win on every aspect. I’m very happy with what we’re doing today with Qualcomm for example, it’s much better than a few years ago. I really hope that we will continue to have a strong partnership so that we can really have modem support, Qualcomm support until the end. But in other aspects, it’s not easy, the fingerprint sensor is a real failure on the Fairphone 3.

Provide long-term support without losing functionality

Walid : This team, which is not a very big team, from what I understand, maybe half-heartedly, a good part of your time you spend working on existing equipment to make it last as long as possible. That must keep you busy a lot of the time, right? On the really Android part, I’m talking.

Agnes : On the Android side, new products, recent products are managed by what we call an ODM. So the ODM is actually your factory. It’s the box that assembles the phones. So that’s basically the ones who do both the hardware and the software. ODM stands for Original Design Manufacturer: the assembly plant in China. And so the ODM often does the first Android upgrade and then we take over in-house (Editor’s note: internally) whatever, we in-source the developments with the team I’m talking about, that I manage. And by definition, obviously we’re more focused on products that have already been released, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t work on products that are going to be released. Typically the fingerprint sensor, if I ever look back a little on why we are where we are today, it’s typically that at the time we weren’t us in my team enough… Me, come on, I assume, I take ownership (Editor’s note: I take responsibility) on the mistake there. Maybe I wasn’t vigilant enough at the time when we designed the Fairphone 3 to secure the agreement with the manufacturer of the fingerprint sensor, to make sure that they would commit to us over 7 or 8 years. At the time, because I could do it… Anyway, the phone came out in 2019, I arrived at the end of 2018, so we must have missed it there.
But basically, my team is also included in the early stages of designing the phones to come to ensure just that kind of stuff. All the software architecture of Android, here I made you the layers quickly there, it’s really essential that we audit the code in fact, that it comes out of the ODM, to avoid making sure that the code is rotten, because we’re the ones who will do the maintenance behind it.

So we do audits, we tell them it’s not okay, we have to do it like that. All the changes to Android that Google has been pushing for some time are pretty good, rather designed for longevity, Treble, GSI, all that we can talk about if you want. Well, all this stuff, the factories in China, I’m not going to be racist or discriminatory, but not all of them are very strict, we don’t work with the biggest factories. When we talk to them about the new features of Android to ensure longevity, so GSI, Treble, sometimes they know, sometimes they don’t, so we have to be vigilant about it to make sure that if in three years we have to do a kernel upgrade, we have to do a new update in a year outside of ourselves, It is possible and we don’t have to spend too much time doing it. We also need to optimize the dev time that will be needed to make these future upgrades.

So we’re more and more involved, my team, on future products, but it’s true that a big part of our daily life is to make the products that have already been released last. We just finished support for the Fairphone 2 last March. We’d been working on it for 7 years and 3 months. So, the Fairphone 2, for us, even last year, was the bulk of our daily lives. A phone that was already, at the time, last year, 6 years old. So, a lot of money, a lot of time, for zero return on investment, since somewhere, the phone was already sold, it wasn’t even sold anymore. So these are things that are actually complicated to master within a company like Fairphone, which is not very big. It’s always hard to estimate how much long-term software support will cost.

Lessons learned from the Fairphone 2

Walid : We were talking about the Fairphone 2, what is your feedback both in terms of hardware and software? What are the great things you learned with the Fairphone 2 that allowed you to make the Fairphone 3 and after the Fairphone 4?

Agnes : In terms of hardware, we learned a lot about modularity. At Fairphone, we do what we call a life cycle analysis, so what the phone will cost from an environmental point of view, over all the stages of the phone’s life, its production, its use and its end of life. And in fact, on the Fairphone 2, compared to the Fairphone 3 and the Fairphone 4, we were much worse on the Fairphone 2 in terms of the additional environmental cost related to modularity.

That is to say, we did modularity on the Fairphone 2, but that somehow, what it cost on the whole production, there is 80% of the environmental cost of the phones that are related to the production of the phone, and in fact, the fact of making a modular design, it can cost you more in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and so on when you design this kind of phone: on the Fairphone 4, if I say no, the extra cost of making a modular design is 1%, on the Fairphone 3 it was 3%, on the Fairphone 2 it should be 12%, 12-13%. So we got better at that, since we didn’t want to shoot ourselves in the foot, we didn’t want to say “that’s cool, we’re making a modular phone, but look, it’s 12% more expensive in terms of environmental cost”. Because you see, the cost of having special components etc, an assembly of special components can actually have an impact on the footprint, the CO2, all that. We improved a lot on that, it was a big focus point we had.

On the part, well a little less important, but still, the way of assembling, on the modularity still, the way of assembling the components. On Fairphone 2, you had a screen clip there, we said to ourselves “oh that’s so cool, we’re not going to put two screws, we’re going to make a screen clip and suddenly it’s so good, people will find it very accessible because as soon as you take a turn of the screw, it’s already a little bit already, You’re losing people.” Cool. On the other hand, the fact of making these clips, and of course the time, there was a bit of play that was created and suddenly your screen tended to detach from the rest of the phone. So it’s not great. Because you had some pretty significant defections on that.
Big mistake on the bottom module, the bottom module, which really has an incredible failure rate that cost us a lot of money, because the phone was under warranty, even being under warranty there were a lot of defects. So materially speaking, we changed completely between the Fairphone 2 and the Fairphone 3. On the Fairphone 2 we didn’t have any operator validation, I didn’t have time to tell you about it, but beyond the Google Android approval, when you make an Android phone, with each software release, you also need an approval from the operators, Orange, SFR, whatever you want. We didn’t really have those approvals on the Fairphone 2 because we didn’t have a deal with the operators except for the Fairphone 3 with Orange.
On the Fairphone 3, we really on-boarded a lot of operators because we told ourselves that if we weren’t with the operators, it’s complicated for people to know us.
Not that people buy from operators all the time, but in any case you had to be tidy up with them. To be tidy up with them, you have to do some technical tests as a patient. You have drop test operators, so you see your phone that falls and doesn’t break, it can be 1 meter, with operators it goes up to 1.30 meters.

So for us, the Fairphone 3 which has been stored (editor’s note: put in the range) by many operators, it was a big tech job in terms of hardware to have something robust despite being modular. I’m not telling you a challenge… And on the Fairphone 4, we improved a lot on the waterproof side, dust resistance, a lot of aspects where we needed to get better.

So the Fairphone 4 is a very, very good phone in terms of hardware. The camera too, lots of camera improvements. The camera on the Fairphone 2, well, the camera on the Fairphone 3, so so. And the camera on the Fairphone 4, it’s cool. Of course it could be even better. I think those are the next products we’re going to release. The camera is a big big subject. Me, I have friends around me who bought a Fairphone, numbers above the Fairphone 2, I’m not going to name which one, because I don’t know, I don’t remember, who sent the phone back because the camera (it was people crazy about iPhones who tripped, on the ethical model of the Fairphone) but the camera was a sticking point. So the Fairphone 4 has a very good camera, but it’s true that to compare to Apple, it’s always complicated.

On the other hand, today we can be similar to good Samsungs. So it’s already not bad, but we still need to improve on it. So there you have it, hardware for sure.

Walid : And in terms of software, what did we learn with the Fairphone 2?

Agnes : We’ve learned a lot about software obsolescence. Everything I’ve described to you, you see, I’ve told you about all the crap we have on the fingerprint sensor of the Fairphone 3, so we’re still learning. On the Fairphone 2 we had quite strong software problems, which also had an impact on the consumer.

But we did a cool thing on the Fairphone 2, we did Fairphone Open OS, I think that’s part of your questions, but we’ll talk about it a little bit more. But that was cool, we learned a lot about the Fairphone 2. What we didn’t have on the Fairphone 1 but which already existed. The whole open source stack, how to open source Android properly. We’ve learned a lot about that.

Feedback on Fairphone Open OS

Walid : That was one of my questions actually. The Fairphone Open OS, why did you do it? Why did you stop it? What did you actually learn from this experiment, from this version of Android?

Agnes : So why did we do it? Because anyway, first of all, it’s in line with our ethics. If you can’t open it, you can’t control it. That was the quote that was always quoted from one of the founders of Fairphone, who always cited the example of why he decided to get into Fairphone, to launch the Fairphone project. He kept citing the example of his son who had a broken console. He couldn’t open that fucking console because everything was proprietary and all that. And the person says, “yes, I didn’t want that actually. I wanted to try to work on a different product that is open, that you can fix yourself, that you can change the screen if you break it yourself, etc. At a lower cost. Well, somewhere you can apply it to software, this stuff. If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.

So here, opening up the software stack so that people can take ownership of the software, ethically speaking, politically speaking, is essential for us. It still is, even if my dad isn’t going to build the Android software himself, with all due respect to him. I know that my aunt Ginette, who lives in Haute-Loire, who is 83 years old, I don’t think she does, but it doesn’t matter, ethically speaking, it’s important.

And then, the interest we saw in making an open source version: you also had the privacy side, less tracking, we’ll talk about /e/, because obviously it helped /e/, Lineage, PostMarketOS, CalixOS. There are other communities that were able to help us in fact afterwards. And the fact that we made our own OS at some point, it also allowed us to talk to these communities in a more serious way. And the third aspect is the longevity aspect. That is, planting seeds, opening up your code, and having people who care about what you’re doing, the LineageOS community that continues to keep the phone going. Even if you don’t do it anymore, like the Fairphone 2: we stopped Android 10, Android 11 is available on Lineage. This is very positive from a longevity point of view. That is to say, in fact, you give communities to build their own OS and then you can have a decent solution for users who want to continue using their device, even when you drop the software.

And, just as coolly, you can also cherry-pick parts of code that the community has made in your Android stock.

Walid : Ah, that’s what I’m interested in too.

Agnès : In the Android you’re making, you know. And that’s what we did, on the Fairphone 2, that’s what we did.

Relationships with free communities (LineageOS, etc.)

Walid : Earlier, you said that you have firmware, you have parts that are provided by manufacturers that are not free. But if you’re doing your own 100% open source implementation of Android, do you have to replace that?

Agnes : yes, you have a lot of open source drivers. If I’m talking about graphics drivers and all that, obviously, you have things that exist. So we took a lot of inspiration from Lineage, from those famous open source versions of Android. Lineage is a fork of Android, based on Android. So for us, it’s the opposite of Ubuntu Touch or PostMarketOS which are no longer based on Android, where it’s a little further away, let’s say.

The technical stack, LineageOS, is really based on Android, so for us it was still “convenient” to be able to draw inspiration from what they did. There are some parts that won’t be solvent by the open source community. So anything that’s pure close source, especially around the modem or things like that, there’s stuff that’s not solvent.

So typically, what communities do like that, they get binaries (Editor’s note: binaries) of these bits of code, firmware that revolves around the modem and they don’t touch the thing. But they’re not too bothered in time because they don’t have an Android certificate to pass. You see? In fact, every time we ship a release in the field, Google certifies our Android. So you have 500,000 tests to take or even more now. This is called CTS. So it’s up to Google’s approval. And among those tests, you have the security tests that are actually going to check whether it’s secure or not, which is what you’ve done.

And obviously, you have more and more tests that will look at what happens on the close source components (editor’s note: the proprietary components) that belong to the chipset. So for us, Qualcomm. And basically, if something is missing, the test is red and you don’t have the certificate… I’m caricaturing, but that’s kind of it, even if you can ask for exceptional processes. LineageOS, they don’t have that thing. They’re not going to get their Android certified by Google.

It’s a bit… It’s the antithesis of what they want to do. So if you want, they’re a little bit freer to do… And it’s the same for /e/, they’re a little bit freer to do whatever they want. And we, on Fairphone OS, were the same thing. We didn’t have that thing. We did both. We didn’t just do Fairphone OS at the time of Fairphone 2, we always made a stock Fairphone OS, so an OS certified by Google. The fact that we had Fairphone Open next door still allowed us to have a little bit of freedom. And the things that we took from the Lineage OS community, basically you had certain drivers, but also the kernel, this famous kernel that I was talking about earlier, there are things that are done at the community level that we also relied on. And also small fixed issues (Editor’s note: fixed problems). There are patches that we used Lineage for everything that is fixed Issue, User Facing Issues, issues that were a bit annoying for the user. We got those patches.
That’s the magic of open source. There are elements that we were able to rely on to make the last upgrades in time of the Fairphone 2, the 9 and the 10.

Walid : And the Fairphone OpenOS, how long did you develop it?
Agnes: Until the end of Fairphone 2.

Walid : Oh okay!

Agnès : We’ve never done it for the Fairphone 3 or the Fairphone 4. So the open source stack of Fairphone 2 was available, but then on the Fairphone 3, we decided to do another strategy because the thing is that we keep the open source, the fact of open sourcing, etc. We continue to do that.
We can be a bit long on the latest products by the way, but in general we try to publish as much as we can. But on the other hand, in terms of the availability of a real OS for end users, Fairphone Open wasn’t crazy either. You didn’t have a lot of default apps that allow the person who installs the OS to have an app ready right away, etc.

It can be useful for people who are a bit far from the technical side. We didn’t have that in Fairphone Open. So, after thinking about it, and then it takes time to make your own OS. So, on second thought, I told you, we had five people, at the time, I must have even had one less. We chose instead to facilitate the work of open source communities, perhaps as close as possible to them, let’s say, so that they can launch their own OS and that there are real alternatives available for people who want to switch from a stock Android to an alternative Android.

We’re even going to put an option on our website, our online webshop there, where you’ll be able to choose between /e/OS and the stock Android. So you can even, you can even buy a Fairphone 4 with /e/OS directly flashed on it. You can already do this at their place, if you go to their Murena webshop, you can already buy a pre-flashed Fairphone 4. But always to go in the direction of making it easier for end users to adhere to this kind of /e/OS alternative that may, at first glance, put some people off, because it seems difficult.
Flashing is always a complicated thing for people. It’s always hard to say “what the fuck am I supposed to do here? I have to unlock my bootloader, then I have to install this, oh my god, that’s it, I’ll keep”.
But I think I can understand, I don’t blame anybody for that. So having something ready, a pre-flashed phone, it can remove barriers for a lot of people to take the step of using these OS.

Collaboration with /e/OS (Murena)

Walid : so if we go back to /e/OS, what we didn’t say is that /e/OS is a version of Android that was created by Gaël Duval, so who is a Frenchman who is known to have done a long time ago MandrakeSoft, thus one of the first Linux distributions to be user-friendly. How did you meet, I was going to say, and how did you start working with them on this OS, which is therefore more focused on privacy?

Agnes : Gaël, I met him at a conference in Belgium in 2019, 2020, I don’t know anymore. He had already tried to meet in contact with people from Fairphone, well anyway. And so we said to ourselves, let’s try to make a partnership a little stronger to have this alternative. Since they are based on LineageOS, it also made sense to be able to go a little further in this perspective. And after that, we just continued the partnership. So we started in 2020, we’re in 2023, we just launched Fairphone 4 in the US with /e/. That’s it, let’s continue that.
Personally, I’d also like to try to work on everything Linux-based OS, to get out of the Android stack. I really like an OS called PostMarketOS, which is Linux-based but not feature complete.

You flash PostMarketOS on your Fairphone, the camera doesn’t work, there are things to do. But, for the future, I’m also a big believer in Linux Based OS. We also have a link with Ubuntu Touch, which has come back to life thanks to UBports, it’s a German foundation. We’re also in contact with them, to try to see what we can do on the pure Linux stack.

Walid : What’s the first feedback on Fairphone + /e/?

Agnes : At Commown, you received Florent not long ago, at Commown it’s 25% of their lease. All the phones they rent, you have 25% of people choosing /e/OS. And we, at the moment, /e/ – Murena, that’s the name of their brand behind it, Murena is a partner who buys us phones in the end and flashes the thing, their OS. Right now, it’s not on our webshop yet, so right now they’re buying 4 phones, they’re flashing 4 phones, they’re putting them up for sale on their website.

And so they buy us phones. Contractually, they buy phones every month. In terms of sell-in, sell-out, it is our number 5 partner in Europe. So I don’t know if you see, they’re the 5th European partner we have. So that’s huge. They sold about the same number of phones that Orange bought from us last year. I wouldn’t have thought. To give a comparison, so Orange 500 stores in France, which also certainly make efforts to highlight Fairphone and, well, drown in the middle of many other devices, what, you know.
I can’t tell you the number of phones by heart, but I remember that comparison. /e/ has sold so much in Europe, eh, we’re touting in Europe and… So we’ll see about the US, we just launched in the US on July 5th, so it’s a bit too recent to say where we’re at. Basically, /e/ – Murena sold as many Fairphone 3 and Fairphone 4 in 2022 as Orange. That’s pretty impressive.

Walid: That’s crazy! Having used /e/ – Murena for more than 6 months, my feedback is that you have a little bit of the best of both worlds. You don’t have the whole Google stack. And so actually, I’m using it for example on an old phone from 2015 that came back to life thanks to this. It’s still pretty cool and at the same time on my everyday phone using MicroG and app stores, you can have all the apps from the Android Store more than F-Droid well, you have everything, in fact, it’s really usable every day, which is what I find really nice.

Agnes : Of course, for the ease of use, it’s still nice, that’s for sure, there’s no picture.

Relations with the Commown Co-op and Aircraft Leasing

Walid : There are two subjects I wanted to address, the first is a little sentence that Florent Cayré said to me when we talked a little bit about Comtown’s business model and that I wanted to ask you. He told us “in fact, what interests us is also to encourage players like Fairphone to work on the subject of renting and so for that we regularly give them money for the use of the phones”. In fact, in the end, the more phones there are in circulation at home, the more interesting it is for you in the long run.

Agnes : yes, definitely. After that, I don’t know the approval in detail. I don’t take care of the commercial part. My sales colleague is managing this with Commown. So surely, if Florent says it, it’s probably going to be true. But you see, I wasn’t even aware of it. But beyond the financial aspect, what I find great about what we’re doing with Commown is the European lobbying around… Because for me, they’re at the top, for me, people like Common, they’re people who are the pioneers of responsible electronics, who are very radical in a good way, and who are going to push users to really change their behavior. Fairphone as well, obviously, since we want to try to make sure that people understand how phones are made, how problematic it is and why it’s important that they keep their phone and not buy one every year, that’s for sure. So we’re in the same logic, but they’re still, let’s say, experimenting with even more complicated things that I find even more interesting for the circular economy.

For me, the ultimate solution, the one that makes the most sense from a circular economy point of view, since they’re the ones who take on the issue of repair, end of life, all that, you know, which really facilitates the fact that the person can keep their phone for a long time. So that’s really cool what they do and that’s what I’m interested in working with people like Commown. We have exactly the same goal, that’s why we set up Fair TEC, this collective around the…

Walid : We can talk about it, huh. That was my next question. Perfect transition.

The Fair TEC Collective

Agnes : So Fair TEC is a collective that we set up with Common, but also with MVNOs, alternative operators such as Telecoop in France, YourCoopMobile in the UK, WEtell in Germany, etc. and /e/ – Murena, the OS I just told you about.

The objective of doing TEC was to make people aware of a more responsible digital technology, more responsible mobile solutions, and that somehow, the perfect offer from this point of view would be to have responsible hardware like a Fairphone with an alternative OS like /e/, potentially that you rent via Commown and with a SIM card from an operator like Telecoop that doesn’t push you to consume data. The objective of this collective was to show, to raise awareness among the general public on the ecological, social and privacy impacts of digital technology, so we raise awareness and show that there are solutions.

We show that through what we do, and potentially also what others are doing, that there are possible solutions. When we speak at conferences with people like Adrien from Commown, for example, we obviously don’t stop to talk about our own solutions. I often talk about other solutions, the Framework laptops, that’s everything that goes in the direction of the sustainability of solutions, technical products, responsible electronics. So it’s really nice to be able to work with people like that. So this partnership is only meant to last.
With Adrien Montagut, the other co-founder of Commown, we were also very involved in the definition of the future sustainability index at the French level. So there you have it, all this lobbying is essential. It’s thanks to partners like this that we can do it.

Hardware longevity at Fairphone

Walid : You, in your title, there is the notion of longevity but software, I wanted to know if you had colleagues who had the same title but for material longevity?

Agnes : They don’t have the title there, but they have that angle. One thing we want to do at Fairphone is anyway to have more people on longevity in general because there’s the hardware part, for the software we’re going to say it’s covered, but there’s the hardware part, there’s also the support part somewhere: how do you go about it, To make sure that the person if they keep their phone for 7-8 years, they have everything that goes around it in terms of service, that they can be accompanied on the optimization of the use of their phone, to make sure that they use their battery well, so we want to optimize all of that.
There are areas that were not yet covered much at Fairphone and that we will cover more and more. We have also launched our rental offer in the Netherlands, Fairphone Easy. So it’s also part of supporting users on keeping their phones. All these are things that little by little, we run a little more.

And there are people who take care of that. They don’t have the title Longevity in their role, but it’s part of their responsibility.

Walid : So I don’t know all of everyone’s jobs, but this is the first time I’ve seen a title in IT with “Longevity” written in the title of the person.

Agnes : I admit that I was the one who pushed him. When I saw what I was doing at Fairfun, etc., I didn’t want to be Head of Software, etc., I said we have to put this in, obviously it wasn’t a problem at Fairphone, but strategically speaking, I think it was essential to put it, because it arouses a lot of curiosity, by the way. Every time, I have the question, when I am interviewed by journalists, every time I have the question, but what does it mean?
At first, I wanted to shoot it more on the fight against obsolescence, and actually, it’s a bit negative. Turning it on longevity, I thought it was nicer.

Op-Ed

Walid : We’re coming to the end of the interview. I would like to give you an op-ed. Do you have a particular message for those who either want to work on these subjects or who are going to use phones?

Agnes : Okay, thank you. That’s the trick question.

Walid : yes, that’s the trick question.

Agnes : yes, so what I would tend to say is that you see if I go a little bit off the Fairphone spectrum, somewhere what we’re trying to do, when I talk in some conferences about this, I try to say that we have to be able to make people aware of adopting more responsible consumption patterns. All right? And what does that mean, more ethics and more responsible aspects in the digital sphere? For me, it goes through several angles. So that’s the beginning of my op-ed.
The first angle is to achieve more sobriety, so make sure that you discipline yourself on the fact that you don’t buy electronic products, and I’m not just talking about smartphones, but all the hype about IoT, etc. You see the stuff even about connected agriculture, stuff like that, like it’s great, I have a greenhouse at home, on my balcony it’s all connected, I see in real time if I’m running out of nutrients, etc. In fact, you can also just have a greenhouse, without putting electronics in it or sensors or whatever. So for me, the sobriety of uses, it goes through an awareness of what it can cost and suddenly it goes through the fact of reasoning about our own delusions that we may have. Especially tech people, geeks who like to geek everywhere and having a connected greenhouse is so good. Well yes at the same time it’s so good, it shows a model that asks questions, let’s say, that’s what I mean.

So sobriety. For me, sobriety of use, sobriety of consumption, buying less, buying better, it’s important. Then, there is a second lack that seems important to me, which is everything that is repairable and maintenance. So if you ever want to be more sober, then you have to make your devices last, so obviously you have to be careful what you buy, but once you’ve bought, you have to get started. That is to say, basically, it never makes you dream of repairing something at the beginning, maybe, or it makes some people dream, that’s cool, but there are plenty of them, it freaks them out a little, that’s it. Or if you have the impression, among listeners, that you are pretty good at tech, well try to promote it to your circle of friends, family.

There’s always the joke of “oh Sunday I’m going to eat at my aunt Ginette’s, she’s still asking me to fix her computer, it sucks”, well yes but at the same time, it’s cool to fix the computer the next Sunday. There’s a social role in that, and then, your Aunt Ginette, you can tell her to maybe go to the local Repair Café, try to promote these mutual aid approaches, which actually exist, somewhere to the general public, it’s still to be developed, but here’s the thing, if you have the impression, listeners, that you have knowledge in this area, go and give them to others, that’s it, and beyond your aunt Ginette, maybe go to local Repair Centers or if they don’t exist, set them up. Because I think we need to enter the era of maintenance.

Secondly, repairability and maintenance, I think it also pushes us technicians to enter that era, to enjoy doing this and to see how we can help less technical people repair and maintain their devices. And also, when I was in engineering school and all that, or when I left engineering school, there was always this thing of “oh thing, I’m going to do high-tech stuff, technological novelties, I’m going to a conference there, I’ve got a new framework coming out, it’s so good”

What if the best thing was to work on application maintenance? My second job was in what was called an IT services company at the time, now an IT services company, and in fact the punishment was to do application maintenance. It’s like “oh fuck, I got the shitty plan, I’m going to do a 3-month mission in Dijon, application maintenance, well Dijon ok, why not, I don’t know, I don’t know Dijon, I don’t know, I can’t judge the city, but, yes at home it can be boring, but doing application maintenance was the highlight of the thing, It’s like really.
Well yes, but at the same time we could try to reverse the trend, and show that it can be cool to do application maintenance, if the goal is to make the product behind the software on which you are going to do this maintenance last, so we have to get into this lot of maintenance. Why would it be the most dreamy thing to do is to move towards new techno? There you go.

And finally, the third angle, for more ethics in tech and all that, is techno-discernment. So you see the example of the connected greenhouse, it’s a bit like sobriety, but when I told you, yes, you can have friends who have a blast on their connected greenhouse, on their balcony and all that. But more generally speaking, I think that when you have a technician’s position, in what a priori the audience you have today on your podcast, we have to show techno-discernment. I’m not telling you that we should throw away tech, but that techno-solutionism is not the miracle solution to all problems. There are societal and ecological problems that are not going to be solved by tech. And I think that as a technician, you have to take ownership of that angle and defend that approach. You have to get out of the game when you don’t have a role to play.

The fact that we don’t care, we take electric cars and suddenly it will solve all the environmental problems because there are no carbon emissions, it’s bullshit. Electric cars, even if I know people who have them around me, the cost of producing electric cars, if you take a big electric car, it’s problematic, the cost of batteries is problematic, the environmental price of batteries is obviously societal. So I’m not saying we don’t need a car anymore, but why not?

But if I ever give you an example that is a little less contentious or more complicated to explain than electric cars, I’m going to talk to you about national education. A year ago, I was asked to do a keynote for national education on ethical tech and all that. And these were people who were, I don’t know any terms in national education, but let’s say digital trainers, digital representatives in academies, in short. And so pretty tech-savvy people, okay? And it was quite an interesting conference, it was put together by one of the co-founders of Framasoft. So the angle was how to use free software, how to use free software in national education. So great, I sign, of course I’m going, I’m doing my keynote, all that, too well. But somehow, if you take a step back and you don’t see only the angle of free software when you’re a librist and all that. Somewhere, as a technician, as a librarian, whatever you want, the idea might also be to say that maybe we need to rethink the head in education. I’m repeating myself a bit, I often say it in conferences, but the fact of putting tablets in excess in all schools, tablets that… We’re not talking about the maintenance of these fucking tablets, they sometimes stay in cupboards because the teachers aren’t trained. And as a result, it’s a huge cost. A tablet is expensive. You put 25 in a school of 200 students, that’s a budget after all, even if it doesn’t seem like much. It’s still a budget. The environmental cost, the budgetary cost of these tablets is still real.

Well, instead of doing all that, you put more teachers in and paid them better. Well, you see, I’m caricaturing a bit, but I mean, it’s a real question actually, and that we, as technicians, get asked a lot about it. What do you think about that? At times, in fact, we shouldn’t be afraid to say that it’s only good for these problems, maybe it won’t be up to us to solve them.

You see, it’s not going to be up to us to solve societal problems, some societal problems. Putting tablets and ultra-connected stuff in hospitals is not going to solve the problem of hospitals. The problem with hospitals is a lack of staff. That’s the problem. So for me it’s political.

The head is political. If it is not yet, it needs to be politicized a little better. A little more techno-discernment would do good. Nice last word Walid? Are you okay with that?

Conclusion

Walid : yes, nice last word, I would say that I totally agree with what you just said. Thank you very much Agnès for taking the time to talk with me about these topics.

It’s exciting, especially for someone like me who likes Fairphone and follows a little bit of what you’re doing. I had a lot of questions that I really wanted to ask and I got some pretty interesting answers, I’m thinking about the market share of /e/ for example. So it’s not that I’m blown away, but I thought it was a geek thing. So thank you very much for the time you took and the answers you provided. For the listeners of Projet Libre, don’t hesitate, of course, to talk about it around you, to rotate this episode, I think even more this episode is the end that seems to me to be quite meditative. Tell us about it, leave us some comments, and then see you soon for other exciting episodes, still very different. So there you have it, thank you very much. Agnès, listen, we look forward to meeting you in real life soon at an event or somewhere.

Agnès : I’ll be at the Capitole du Libre. Since we’re talking to librists, in mid-November, something like that, I’m going to do one or two talks there.

Walid : Well, maybe we’ll meet there.

I wish you a good evening, thank you very much.

This episode is recorded on July 19, 2023.

License

This podcast is published under the double license Art Libre 1.3 or later – CC BY-SA 2.0 or later.

podcast.projets-libres.org/@pr…

Sommaire

• 1 Interview with Fabrice Flore-Thébault
• 2 Fabrice’s career
• 3 What is a Technical Writer?
• 4 Upstream and downstream concepts
• 5 Documentation Formats and Tools
• 6 Who writes the doc and with what constraints?
• 7 “Productization” of free software
• 8 Document no-code
• 9 Impact of Artificial Intelligence
• 10 Op-Ed
• 11 Learn more
• 12 License

Interview with Fabrice Flore-Thébault

Walid : For this new episode, we’re going to talk about a topic that isn’t discussed as frequently as you might think in literature and in podcasts, we’re going to talk about documentation. To do this, I invited us to talk to a friend who works as a Technical Writer at Red Hat and who will explain to us a little bit, tell us about the documentation of his job, a little bit of his past and what it means to write professional documentation for projects and in particular in a company like Red Hat. Afterwards, we can take a little bit of that and generalize, look at what it means to write documentation now. So Fabrice, listen, thank you very much first of all and I hope you’re doing well.

Fabrice : yes, it’s going well. Thank you for having me. It’s very nice to hear you and see you when we’ve not been in the same city for a long time now.

Walid : We met when we were both living in Brussels. We had to go to a trade fair in Paris to realize that we lived two streets apart in Brussels, which was quite funny. First question, could you introduce yourself, Fabrice, and tell us a little about your background?

Fabrice’s career

Fabrice : My name is Fabrice. I’m a Frenchman exiled in Belgium who works for an American company, who has a Belgian daughter and a half-British and half-German wife. I am a European citizen of the world. We’ll say that first. I think that’s the most interesting thing.

I was studying history when I heard about free software and Linux and Wikipedia. And I think it all started at that time, at a time when I said to myself that yes, at university, we are told that knowledge is a common good, but we do a lot of things to put barriers in all this. I don’t know. I slipped into it at that moment. That’s how it happened. How does someone who hadn’t used a computer in their entire life start spending nights trying to install Linux. It took me a month to find the halt command to turn off the computer. So, I started with stuff, like starting a computer, it took half an hour because the little Linux, it had to recheck its disks because I hadn’t shut it down properly. So, I didn’t start with the best cards in my hand, but I learned and I hung in there.

And that’s it, by dint of learning, it ended up becoming a job too. And then, I’ve seen the IT professions evolve very, very strongly since then… I started in 2007, 2008, something like that. My first job was IT Support. Do you remember? IT Crowd ?

Walid : Yes.

Fabrice : That’s pretty much the same. In the job description, you have to know how to lift 15 kilos, because it was at the time of cathode ray screens and large designer screens, they weighed 15 kilos. It was a job that wasn’t just behind a laptop, behind a computer all day, but there was a lot of contact with people, there were things that were physical. Lifting a 4U server… Well the first time, you don’t remove the discs and you hurt yourself. And then, the second time, you remove the discs. Now that everything is in the Cloud, lifting servers, I haven’t done that for at least 10 years. And so, my first job, system administrator, has, I think, pretty much disappeared from the planet, because we’ve automated a lot of things. There are many things that are not done at all the same.

There are many things that used to take time and are now immediate. And I think so, every five years or so, my job has completely changed because what we used to do, we don’t do anymore or we do differently. So there you have it, for 10 years, I was on call. I woke up at 4 a.m. on my wedding day to wake up a stuck waiter, a waiter we had forgotten, who had been there for more than 10 years. Stuff like that. And now, I’m writing docs, so…

Walid : So, you start by doing support. At some point, you start to do adminsys. That’s when I met you, you started working on automation, configuration management, etc. And then, do you have the opportunity to branch out to join Red Hat actually?

Fabrice : Yes, but life is not linear. Let’s say, when I was a sysadmin, I found myself in front of things where it was a bit of a journey, if you will. It’s a bit like installing a computer, installing computers for the devs, it was a little bit of a journey, do this, do that, click click click click click click… The problem is that the first time, I like it. The second time, I don’t like it as much. The third time, it bores me. And the tenth time, I make mistakes because I’m not there at all when I do the thing. So, so I very quickly tried to see how repetitive things, I could avoid doing them. And this was at the time, really at the very beginning of configuration management. It was a very new field. It was super interesting that moment. Because we already had to convince people that it was possible, that we could automate and that just the idea wasn’t completely crazy. Now, when you’re in a world where if you don’t have Kubernetes on your resume, you’re going nowhere. It’s funny because Kubernetes is really just something that automates everything.

Or if you haven’t automated it, it doesn’t work. So, we have a paradigm shift that is huge. I’ve gone from managing people’s workstations and servers that are installed by hand to now, writing documentation for a tool that manages Kubernetes on laptops. So in the end, I write what remains to be documented when you find yourself managing a huge fully automated thing.

For a while, I automated server installations, configurations, etc. And then, the moment comes when Kubernetes arrives and you manage a Kubernetes, you no longer manage it with the same tools, so no longer with an Ansible. So, it’s a moment of questioning. And I wondered at that point whether I would rather stay in operations and manage Kubernetes clusters or explain to people how to do it. That’s when I switched to the doc side, knowing that what helped me a lot was that during all those years. From time to time, on free projects, I helped with doc.

And why did I help to do doc? Because I didn’t know how to write code and I wanted to give back to the community tools that had been useful to me. It’s just a matter of, I don’t know, karma, putting the ball back in the center.

Thanks to this project, I did the things that were taking me a long time, I did it in no time. Thanks to automation projects, it’s true, I was able to do in one half what I’m going to do in a full-time job afterwards. And so, part of the half-time that is freed up, I’m still going to use it a little bit to give something back to the project because I think it’s done. I didn’t mind taking it in my employer’s tone, since before, the job, he asked for a full-time job and that in the end, that part of this time that I spend in my own way by contributing to the community, it seemed normal to me. So, I learned about projects, about GLPI, about Rudder. GLPI is a computer asset management tool that I think your listeners have heard of or will hear who will talk to me.

Walid : Yes, certainly will hear about it.

Fabrice : And Rudder, which is also an automation tool, I think you’ve received them or you’re going to receive them too.

Walid : I hope so. Later too.

Fabrice : For Rudder, it’s my first real job as a Technical Writer for a summer, between two jobs. All of this allowed me to prove to my current employer, Red Hat, that I could be a good writer. And then I got into it and it wasn’t at all as I thought.

What is a Technical Writer?

Walid : What is a Technical Writer? What is meant by Technical Writer?

Fabrice : It took me three or four years to ask myself the question, to ask myself the question again and again each time and to try to understand, because it’s not at all what I thought. For me, computer science is first and foremost Unix tools, manpages, online commands and then documentation on a website with a wiki. It’s basically the reference material, actually. That’s what I used the most. In fact, reference documentation is documentation that is written by developers, that is very, very close to code. The Technical Writers, they’re not really going to touch that one. The developers, they’re going to do it well and we trust them. In any case, at Red Hat, this part is done by the developers and the Technical Writers, in fact, they don’t touch it. At Red Hat, the Technical Writers, they come there to produce documentation for users, which is an artifact of marketing and where stories are told. We want to tell stories, in the end. But it’s not as simple as that. That is to say, we have had manuals, user guides, so there is a whole tradition of manuals that comes from IBM in particular with manuals that are thousands of pages long where everything is described.

So, there is this tradition that is there. Let’s say, there are traditions brought by people who work, I think it’s a bit like everywhere.

Basically, there are two families of Technical Writers.

There is a family that, one would say, is the old-fashioned family. It’s kind of the one I’m part of. It’s a family that is very technical, who are people who know how to write code or not, but in any case who know how to read it, who know how to test complicated things… There is a great affinity for code. In general, these are people who have gone through support before. That’s kind of what I did. The course is you learn the technical subject, you learn how to answer user questions and then afterwards, you learn to formalize all that.

And the other family is people who don’t come from the technical world at all. It’s people, they can write docs for… Their field is language, it’s communication. They can write doc for a nuclear power plant. They can write docs on toothpaste tubes, on tractors, cannons.

Actually, it’s funny because they’re people, they can really change industries pretty easily. These are people who will develop techniques to interview people, to succeed in explaining things that they themselves don’t understand. It’s a bit like … much closer to what interpreters do, who do translation. That is to say, when you do translation, you are not necessarily… and you master the language, you don’t necessarily master all the technical side, all the technique of what you’re dealing with.

There are these two profiles, so a more editorial profile, more from the world of publishing, and a more technical profile. I can’t say for the entire IT industry. I know say a little bit about Red Hat.

And so, as a result, it doesn’t pose the same constraints when you want to document software, because you’re going to have either people who are very autonomous in writing, or people to whom you have to explain a lot of things. Because people whose strong point is language, they will interview people and ask: so, how do you do it, etc.

So the draft is largely done by the developers and then, if the Technical Writer is going to change everything.

Walid : There’s one thing you seem to be a little bit silent about, it’s that you’re not just technical, it’s that you come from… Well before, you went to university, you studied where you had to write in really good French or English, in short, I don’t know. That is to say, having worked with you, I am not capable. First of all, I had more trouble putting myself in the user’s shoes than you and two, I’m not able to write… It was more complicated for me, for example, to write in French, good French like you, and to popularize and tell what you call the beautiful story, which was my second question: what is a beautiful story?

Fabrice : Yes, I also did, it’s true, I studied History, but Literature at the same time. The technical doc is a very poor literary genre in fact. We try to transform natural language, in my case, it’s more English, we try to channel a natural language that is Rabelaisian. Each person has his or her own language tics. An American, a Canadian, an Englishman, a Briton, etc. It’s their native language, English, but they’re not going to speak the same. A technical writer, he makes that disappear, he will erase all that. The goal is that the documentation can be read by just about anyone in the world, especially people whose mother tongue is not English at all. We have the poorest possible vocabulary, we have the poorest possible sentence structures and also, we try to keep a content structure that is always as predictable as possible, as simple as possible, as sausage as possible. In fact, we try to talk to the eye and directly to the brain even before people read the words. That is to say, here, I’m just looking at the same time, I’m looking at the file that you prepared, that’s exactly it, it’s checklists.

At Red Hat, for example, we have three types of content and no more. We have a procedure that is the type of content that we use as much as possible, whose structure is defined and from which we do not deviate. And a procedure is: there’s an intro of one or two sentences that basically explains to people why they want to read this procedure. Why do it? That’s why. Then there’s a little subtitle that says: prerequisites. And we list a bullet point list of all the prerequisites before, all the things you have to have done before. Then a procedure which is a numbered list of all the steps to do to do something. And then another checklist and then a bullet list of additional resources that we can check out next. There you go. And so, suddenly, it’s the same all the time. It’s the same all the time. So, a user, he knows that he is already going to have this information. So, there’s this thing. It’s horribly poor, but we’re not here to create. It’s exactly the opposite of literary creation, for example.

So, we have a type that is like that, a type of content that is reference documentation, but that, I don’t know, on a project, there will be reference documentation and 25 procedures and concepts that are the same, which are a chapter. We explain the three concepts on the project and that’s it. There are just the concepts and references that are a little freer in form, but that’s the bulk of the thing. When you take a procedure that is written by…, a draft, which is written by a developer, for example, there is a good chance that there is not a single line left of what was there at the beginning. Because we put it all in a logical order so that information doesn’t arrive along the way. So that’s very important. The prerequisites, we balance them into prerequisites. The sentences are simplified. It’s subject, verb, complement, period. The goal is to use as few words as possible to tell something that everyone will understand without a shadow of a doubt, without in a place where two people will interpret it in a different way.

It’s funny to be able to say to yourself: I’m going to remove 500 words from this text or stuff like that, or how to reduce the number of steps in the procedure from 15 to 7. That’s it, when you use little tricks.

Upstream and downstream concepts

Walid : Could you explain, for listeners who don’t know, what is upstream, which is a word that we hear a lot in free software, and downstream, which is a word that I had heard quite little, except potentially at Red Hat. Can you explain these two words in a simple way, so that then, behind and after, we can start talking about collaboration?

Fabrice : Okay, that’s a rather peculiar way, it’s Red Hat’s business model . The way Red Hat works is to work with projects that are upstream, that is to say projects that are open source projects and that we will find, I think, on GitHub, essentially, GitLab, very little. It’s funny because for us, GitLab is more about downstream repositories, so repositories for products that are in the VPN and therefore to which people outside the company don’t have access. So, we’re going to, from an upstream project, we’re going to make a downstream product. And the downstream, it’s just created from upstream.

It’s just the metaphor of the source. Open source, a source comes from the source. So upstream, it comes from when it’s a stream. And downstream, if you go down and you’ll find the river again.

Walid : On the projects you work on, you always have an upstream which is the open source project and a downstream which is the Red Hat commercial product.

Fabrice : exception: the project where for the moment, we don’t have a downstream. Generally speaking, yes, Red Hat participates in projects and then they will build a product where the added value of Red Hat is the security audit, it is to make the mess run in the context of a large company, that is to say to integrate with backups, to integrate with centralized authentications, to integrate with really all the mess that there is in a large company to run something. It’s not enough to make an application that makes little Mickeys. To access the little Mickeys, you need to be able to authenticate yourself with the SSO of the box. And then, the little Mickeys, we have to be able to “backup” them with the backup tool of the company. The project, on the other hand, focuses on functionality. I show little Mickeys. The “productization” part takes care of everything else. So everything related to security, management of security patches, etc. All the delivery to the customer is also packaged and easier to install. It has an impact on the projects every time. It’s that a project that goes its own way just to make features, when it has to be “productized”, transformed into a product, it slows down the development a lot because you have to check that this and that, it’s compatible.

I’m working on a project right now called Podman Desktop. We’re trying to go very, very fast and we don’t have any product. It’s entirely communal. It’s quite rare, but not completely rare at Red Hat, because if you think about it, Ansible is the automation tool that killed all other automation tools. Red Hat took a long time to figure out how to turn this into a product.

Walid : Can you name one or two references upstream versus downstream in the context of Red Hat?

Fabrice : The Fedora Linux distribution is the upstream of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. For people who are in the Linux world, this is perhaps the most obvious. It has become even more complex since CentOS… CentOS was a downstream of Red Hat: they took the Red Hat distribution and repackaged it freely. That is to say, it was upstream, downstream and it went back to upstream. Red Hat has turned that the same way as the rest. That is to say, now, CentOS is more of an upstream than a downstream.

Kubernetes is the upstream for OpenShift. What does Red Hat do? On top of that, Kubernetes is added to everything that is security and everything that is necessary to make Kubernetes work in the business world. Which means that in general, a container that will run on Docker, on Podman, on a container engine, which will then run on Kubernetes, will wallow on OpenShift. The security requirements for running things on OpenShift raise the bar pretty high.

Documentation Formats and Tools

Walid : When you’re a Technical Writer, how do you fit into projects? What is your relationship with developers, marketing people? What is your relationship with the communities?

Fabrice : It depends a lot on how you organize the flow of documentation. That is, do we put a team of upstream writers and a team of downstream writers ? And then, in fact, the soup is not passed around. This is a bit like what happens between Fedora and RHEL. It’s very much the case to have things where the passage of the two is not done. Or you choose to do the documentation in the upstream project, so it’s visible from GitHub. You go to GitHub, you see the documentation on GitHub, you have the complete documentation. That’s Ansible, AWX. There are a lot of projects like that. But it’s not the rule at Red Hat, it’s more complicated technically. You need to have the pipeline that allows you to transform your upstream documentation with the name of the project, for example, into a documentation in downstream where it’s no longer the name of the project, it’s the name of the product. You have to have solid stuff to do that. We do good things, there are projects that do good things. We’re lucky, it’s a great project called Antora. Antora which is a content management and documentation tool made in AsciiDoc.

There’s AsciiDoc, the language, which is a markup language comparable to Markdown or reStructuredText, just the spec of the language. Then we have Asciidoctor, the implementation in several languages of something that has been transformed, this markup, into something else: HTML, PDF, epub, slides. And then, Antora, which is a project that makes it possible to make a real doc site. That is to say, to make a real doc site with a navigation. So, it’s going to manage navigation, it’s going to manage links, it’s going to manage versions, it’s going to manage the fact that we’re going to look for bits of docs in code where the content is written in different places, but we want to publish them all in the same place. It’s a magnificent tool. For me, it’s very comparable to Ansible to making playbooks because you put together stuff that comes from everywhere. We manage to have fairly complex pipelines that do great things. That is to say, in five minutes the content is “merged” on the upstream project, it is published directly on the upstream documentation, let’s say, every night or even at the time of the how, the content arrives in the product. You can be a tech writer and do automation.

Walid : Not too long ago, you gave a conference at FOSDEM on the subject. I’ll put the link in any case in the comments. If I understand correctly, you take your knowledge of configuration management and automation and you applied it to the doc.

Fabrice : For the moment, I help my colleagues a lot. There are people who want to do the same, in any case. This is an example, it is not the only project where this happens. What may have been different on my projects is that it was the Technical Writer who did the job and it was not the devs. There are expansions for Antora that arrived a year ago. We started using them when they weren’t out of the oven. We used really new things. Dan Allen, Antora’s guru, also works for companies that have big docs and big needs. He managed to do something pretty great, which is that he has a job as a software developer, documentation, he does everything. He developed the specs, he developed the basic interpreter, he developed all the tools around it. It’s just impressive to see him working, to see him also manage the community because he is very present to respond to the community of users. This guy is a beast, it’s incredible. And when you compare it to the mess that it’s on the Markdown side, there’s no comparison.

The Markdown naked with nothing else, we don’t do much. All the people who use Markdown, they add extensions per folder, this, that. There are endless Markdown flavors . For the moment, it’s refocusing on something called MDX (Extended Markdown), which, basically, we’re trying to take what we’ve been doing for a long time and put it in Markdown. My current project is Markdown and I’m not a big fan, but the developers love it.

Who writes the doc and with what constraints?

Walid : There, your background in automation has a direct influence on your ability to automate the document. That’s quite interesting, but for those who want to know more, I think the FODSEM conference explains it very well. There is one thing, when we were preparing, that interested me a lot, and that was the evolution of documentation. What you were telling me when we started was that the documentation, at the very beginning of free projects, was done by the developers, because the developers, basically, were people who came out of big universities, etc. They had the level.

Fabrice : And their users too. It’s always worth drawing parallels with other inventions like that. For example, reading. We take reading back to the Middle Ages. Reading in the Middle Ages, there are very few people who know how to read, there are very few people who know how to write. Everything that is written is basically written for people who have the same level of education as the person who writes. It gives complex things. We don’t have Scrooge Magazine, we don’t have that kind of stuff. It’s something that we’re going to find in iconography, that we’re going to find in painting, in other things, but that we’re not going to find in writing. IT is the same. We started to have people who were all with huge universities, who have a university career of at least 10 years before taking care of computer science. So, they are people, they have vocabulary, they have a very strong ability to enunciate and to state complex things. But they also speak to people who have vocabulary and who have the ability to understand things, complex things.

We want any software to be usable by someone who took their first English course the previous month and has a vocabulary of 150 words.

The same goes for developers. A developer now is someone who has done much more specialized studies than a developer of the seventies. A developer of the seventies, he read Kant. There’s no problem with that, I think. A developer of the 2020s, there are some who can, but there are some who can’t. It’s not saying something mean to say that, but it’s just that we’re not at the same level of education. We are not at all in the same literary genre, let’s say. So, there is that. And then, there is also the fact that we have moved from documentation that is essentially reference documentation, that is to say: “But what does it do? How can I do that? And I’m going to read something, I’m going to look at all the options, etc., and I’m going to find mine,” to something where it’s more marketing that’s there. That is to say, I think that the doc, now, is a marketing tool where someone who doesn’t know the product has to see stories, has to see how to use the product, why do it. We tell stories and the stories will bring features to the application.

What we are trying not to do at all is to have a copy of the application. We’re not describing the application. We are there to get people to use the tool. We are not describing the tool, we are explaining why to use it, how to use it and what to strive for.

Walid : If we go back to the beginning of free software, the developers were able to write the manpages, which is generally still the case, and they were able to write all the doc which was technical in addition, and they were the ones who did everything. But now, basically, the developer, he always writes the reference doc, which can be a manpage or something else. And besides that, there is a whole population of other people who will do the additional docs. You, the Technical Writer, will write the use cases, the story, etc. And then, there is, also because of the evolution of the Internet and the evolution of uses, you also have a whole set of other resources that you have at your disposal, that you didn’t necessarily have at your disposal on the side, which will also allow you to learn and on which you, I think, don’t work too much. I’m thinking, for example, of tutorials and videos. Me, for example, in no-code, a lot of LinkedIn posts, Twitch live, etc. So, it’s still different populations that don’t necessarily coexist with what you do.

Fabrice : I also wanted to talk about a tradition among Technical Writers, which is the manual of style, the style guide. It’s something that’s super important. So the Chicago Manual of Style, it’s from the ’20s, I think, something like that. There was a style manual which is a kind of Bible that explains how you write documentation. It doesn’t matter why. It’s how you write factual content that describes something, etc. It defines how you use commas. This explains why we shouldn’t use the passive voice because the passive voice has introduced uncertainty, etc. This is the basic pact of the Technical Writer. This is the Technical Writer’s Bible. This is what makes it difficult for Technical Writers who do docs to switch to another medium, to make videos or slides or to give courses, etc. It’s because of this manual of style which is something that is very formative.

When I started at Red Hat, I felt like my role was really language policing. I was expecting to have a role as an explorer and creator, but no, most of the work is boring. It’s just: “No, you have a passive voice, you have to remove”, “No, don’t do commas like that”, “No, in the titles, we don’t put capitals or stuff like that”. I don’t know much about publishing, literary publishing. well publishing, people who make books, but I think there are also layers like that of jobs between the publisher who changes the structure of an entire book and the proofreader who will find the typos and missing commas and stuff like that. And so, I think that in the work of Technical Writer, we have a single title, but there are all these roles that are also found. We are in the world of publishing, but structured a little differently. Publishing books, the job of making books and making guides and writing, it’s not the same job as the job of doing radio, recording blogs or making films. Basically, it’s not the same job at all. It doesn’t require mastery of the same thing. It doesn’t require mastery of written and oral language, it’s not the same codes.

I know that this exercise, for example, of participating in a blog, for me, is an entirely different thing from my daily life.

Walid : Basically, I’m drawing a parallel with… A few years ago, we set up a company with other people, we made roller skates, everything related to communication and marketing, all that was integrated. That is to say that you couldn’t communicate on one medium if you didn’t communicate on another and understand what you were going to release, when and how you were going to talk about your product on this medium versus that media, it wasn’t the same thing, etc. So my question was also to know: do you have a role in all this? And potentially, there may be other people in marketing who have a different role and know were you, you in contact and there was some coordination?

Fabrice : let’s say, there are docs, it would be nice if they were ready for releases, for example, stuff like that. We are like encyclopaedists in front of journalists. The content we offer is much closer to encyclopedia content and much less close to journalist or blogger content. The blogger, he’s in the event. He’s in the “I’m delivering something here and now”. Here and now: message. Whereas when you do doc, you try to do something that will survive time. That is, I’m going to try a blog, I’m going to put a screenshot with today’s version and now I’m going to make a video with what’s in the app today and now. You don’t do that in docs because you’re going to do the exact opposite. You’re going to do as few screenshots as possible, because it’s too much maintenance and it’s too much of a waste of time. If there is the product version in it, you have to update with each version. And so, the screenshots, if there is a revamp of the user interface, it’s all over again. So, we have objectives that are very, very, very different.

Now, I recently made a blog post for the project. It came out a bit like a doc that is put in a blog. I’m not very proud of myself, but I realized that it was a very different exercise. It was very difficult for me to go from the very cold doc to something a little more convivial. And since I’m used to writing docs, we remove the words, which is very skeletal. It was to put a little bit of a link back in there. That was the challenge of the thing. I’m not too sure if I’ve arrived, but here it is.

“Productization” of free software

Walid : How many Technical Writers are there at Red Hat, for example?

Fabrice : I think there were more than a hundred. I don’t know if it’s just a prediction or in general. It’s not huge either. We’re at a ratio of 1 to 15 developers roughly, I’d say, something like that, 1 to 10, 1 to 15. Now, I’m on a project where there are less than 15 developers and I’m a writer in it, it’s quite exceptional. The project I was in before, for the moment, there are three. There were three of us at a time when there were 40 developers.

Walid : What is the impact of putting Technical Writers on the project? Does it speed up the project? Does this slow down the project?

Fabrice : In general, we use Technical Writers when we do “productization”, i.e. when we brake. “Productization” slows down the project, inevitably. That’s where we’re going to put QAs, so people who do quality, testing. We’re going to put testers, we’re going to put in doc. I’m not saying that it’s the writers who slow down the project, but the writers, in general, are very much linked to “productized” stuff that goes slowly. For me, who came more from a world of service companies where we deliver quickly and we will do a review and then another review. For me, it can take time because we’re going to have a review where it’s the developers who will say: yes, technically, it works. Then afterwards, we’ll have a review where other writers will say: yes but you didn’t follow the guide style. So yes, it’s longer, but it’s not necessarily the case. I’m trying to keep up with a purely community project, there are half a dozen of them and the stuff goes by super fast. So if I take a screenshot on Monday, Friday, it’s more like that.

And people think it’s easy and fast to write docs. And this is not the case. It’s not easy and it doesn’t go fast.

That is to say, when you write a procedure, first, you have to find the logical flow and get to do the thing that is in it. That already takes a while. Then, you have to check that there is no one who will misunderstand the thing and who will do something else. There is all that. There is something to be made conform to the language afterwards, but it is not the most complex. We have tools now for that. We have like code linters, but linters for the doc, so who say: no passive voice you don’t have the right. This kind of thing, you have to test, then afterwards, you have to validate. And then, when it’s something that goes from upstream to downstream, you also have to make sure that it goes downstream. In particular, that we don’t introduce examples that we absolutely can’t put downstream or stuff like that.

Walid : Two questions on that. What tools do you use? And the second is: you said earlier that you were able to test. You say that writing docs takes time. Does it also take time because you’re going to install the tool and you’re going to test it functionally?

Fabrice : Testing the thing is almost what takes the most time. I try not to waste developers’ time. So, I try to figure things out on my own, and I tend to fart stuff a lot as well. What’s also slow is that the people who write the docs are the first users for the developers. Developers, they’re focused on a feature and just the feature they’re doing. But they are not users of the finished product, very few. A while ago, I had discussed with people who make a fork of PostgreSQL, so database software. And I was talking to them as a former database operator, like the things you have to think about when you make databases. So someone, a developer who has been writing code to make the database for 20 years, 25 years. And at one point, the conversation was cut short because he told me: No, but I’ve never been the operator of a large database server. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

So, writers are the first users. In general, when we use, it’s to document a feature that is new. Usually, we document a feature that’s a little bit not very mature, so we see the things that hurt. We do: yes, but look in such and such a case it doesn’t work, etc. There is also a whole part. In any case, that’s how I do my job. There’s a whole part that is to report information about things that aren’t right. After that, do I open tickets on GitHub or do I send stuff to instant messaging? What is going best? It depends on the relationship with the team, with the developers, etc. I am in favour of the Agile Manifesto, early 2000 version: “Individuals and Interactions before Processes and Tools“. So, work is first and foremost about people, it’s first and foremost about interactions. Then, we put processes and tools in place, but it’s not the processes and tools that are important. I think that’s really important for someone who does automation, also to know that it’s not the tools that are important, it’s the people.

Walid : Precisely, you’re talking about tools. What tools do you use? Now, you’re talking about GitHub.

Fabrice : The important thing is that it’s documentation for software. Documentation is for software. We try to make it as close as possible to the developers’ code. Afterwards, there are debates, there are people who say: we need a separate repository , etc. But anyway, it’s going to be… If developers write code, it’s in Git repositories , the documentation will be in Git repositories too. There is no discussion about that. So, putting in the same repository or a repository next to it, in the end, it’s not a big variation. But it’s in a Git repository . There are quite a few different markup languages that one can choose from. So, starting from the older ones, but staying in the open source world, there’s LaTeX, but I don’t think many people are going to write LaTeX now. LaTeX was rather dethroned by XML in the 2000s. And for the documentation, we have something called DocBook, which is XML to make doc. At one point, the developers at Red Hat, they still said, at a certain point: no, DocBook, it stinks, we don’t want to contribute. We have to find something else so that we can contribute to the document.

So, we said: okay, we’re going to do something else. And that’s how AsciiDoc came about. You could do Markdown, reStrcturedText or AsciiDoc. At that time, AsciiDoc had a converter that could translate from AsciiDoc to DocBook. The whole Red Hat build chain was based on the DocBook. So, for now, we’re still in that legacy, since we have AsciiDoc that’s been transformed into a DocBook and that goes into the old pipeline that was really created by Red Hat. The libXML was created by Daniel Veillard who is now… I work with him, I’m too proud.

Walid : Apart from the language used to make the documentary, what tools do you collaborate with?

Fabrice : First of all, Git, GitHub, GitLab. At Red Hat, the projects are on GitHub and the products are on GitLab. We have two different Git platforms. Github, there are all tools for use that are on actions, pages, etc. This is used quite extensively. GitLab too, everything that is automation, containers, and GitHub and GitLab know how to use containers, go “pull” a container and do stuff in the container that is “pulled”. That’s a technology that we use a little bit all the time. As a result, people each use their favorite IDE, their favorite editor, if you will. Visual Studio Code is very present. In fact, we used Atom a lot and then Atom was abandoned by Microsoft in favor of VS Code. A large minority who are on the IntelliJ Community. I use a lot because the extension for AsciiDoc is just wonderful, it’s just too good. There are people who say Vim, Emacs, Kate, other stuff.

Walid : For everything that has to do with cats, for example?

Fabrice : I think that now, the official platform is Slack. For a long time, there was Slack, Google Chat, IRC in parallel and more after projects that have other tools, like Mattermost, Discord. My project is both on Discord and on Matrix IRC. I stopped using Discord after two weeks, I couldn’t take the advertising messages in it anymore. Projects bring their own thing. When the project, in addition, is overseen by one foundation or another, the foundation brings its tools, these recommendations, these tricks. And then, there are things that you can use or not depending on. Like the Eclipse Foundation, they’re on GitLab, they refuse to use JIRA, for example. So, we can’t put a project at JIRA if it’s for the Eclipse Foundation, so it has to stay on something else. You see? Yes, JIRA. For everything that is produced, it is JIRA. For anything upstream, often, it’s very, very sufficient GitHub.

Document no-code

Walid : This brings me to the last part that I wanted to address, that we talked about a little before and that I thought about a lot, since that’s the field I’m in now, which is the whole no-code, low-code part. So you, you do what is called doc-as-code. And the problem is how do you do doc when there is no more code? It’s a pretty interesting field, especially when, like me, you come from development and you arrive in tools in which you don’t develop anymore or quite little. How do you do that? When we were talking, you told me: yes, but in fact, how does it work? With the tools for the general public and the tools that are used in general, for example, we have a French no-code community where there are about 10,000 people, something like that. And finally, even people who do a lot of no-code, there are still a large part of them who don’t do docs. However, as I say every time, when you are an IT professional, you have to write docs.

And so, you have tools that have become established over time to overcome this. You have certain tools, I’m thinking of automation tools, for example, which allow you to document in your automation workflows, you document parts, you basically do what you used to do in code with it. And you have tools like some front tools, for example, where there’s nothing. So, you have to document in another way. And so, you have a whole ecosystem that has been built around it. There, for example, you were talking about JIRA. It’s interesting because in the no-code and startup world that I’m more involved in, the basic tool for documenting is Notion, which is basically a tool that can do everything. It makes you databases, it makes your knowledge base, it makes your ticketing, it does everything to you. Everything I was doing before with ticketing tools, you do it in Notion, so less well and certainly less optimized, but you can link everything, it’s impressive. It’s another way of doing things. You have in front of you a tool where you can write docs, it becomes a process, once you understand how it works super simple and you can hyper structure, you have lots of templates and everything, it’s really quite interesting.

And besides that, all the stuff that you can’t document, that you could do in code on everything related to dependency management, regression testing, that kind of thing, with no-code, either you don’t do it, or you have new tools that are created. And there’s one tool in particular, for example, that I use a lot and that I’m pretty close to the development team with called ncScale. It’s French people who do this and it’s a tool that allows me to do a little bit of what I used to do with my ITSM tools, which is automated inventory, dependency management, this kind of thing around no-code tools, it’s really interesting, and documentation. And so in fact these new forms of documentation where in the end, you no longer have code, so you can no longer document in code like you, you are used to doing.

Fabrice : Notion, it’s a bit like a wiki, isn’t it?

Walid : Notion is both a wiki and a database. Unfortunately, it is not a free tool, and whose user interface is really extremely well thought out and extremely logical, which allows you to link everything. To tell other people, they told me: basically, it’s just JIRA with a great interface.

Fabrice : JIRA or Confluence?

Walid : Confluence, sorry.

Fabrice : For example, if it’s like Confluence, what’s missing in Confluence is that there is no process for validating the change. I think the most important thing we use Git for is the review. This is the pull request, the review and therefore the validation of the change. That is to say, you want to change something and there will be five people who will read the change and say: OK, it’s okay. There’s this idea that it’s not: you change, you publish and then afterwards, if it’s not good, we change. It’s: you propose a change, we check and once it’s accepted, we’re sure that everything is fine. I’ve used Confluence a lot for internal procedures on documentation that doesn’t need validation, that doesn’t need to go through a validation workflow. And so, for that, a tool, a wiki, Confluence, whatever, Drupal, any system that allows you to write something and publish it, everything is good. There are people’s preferences. There is what works better, what is closest to the rest of what you do, but everything is good.

What makes the difference is when you want to introduce a validation process.

For release notes, we started to introduce the fact that in each JIRA issue, we have a field that is with the content of the release notes. It worked well as long as writing the content and validating it was done in one go by the same person. I read what’s in the ticket, where often, it was tickets that were copied by the way. Ok, there you go. And I write and I make my sentence and it’s done. And I don’t think about it for five minutes. We then passed it on to users who were more junior and as a result, there was a need for validation. It became a gas plant because we had to add a field to say: draft, it’s a review, it’s validated, it’s OK. But on the other hand, we use a JIRA field which is a field that has no history. So, we can look at the logs of the changes, but it’s not something that’s made for that.

Walid : I’m not the biggest specialist in Notion, but I’m not sure you have that kind of validation workflow notion.

Fabrice : The internal documentation and the documentation of the product you built for users are two different things. I think that Technical Writers, typically, are more there to go and do your documentation in front of the client. Internal documentation, you need to introduce validation processes at a time when the team is growing. Above all, the degrees of seniority are changing. The person who is more junior, he has to be able to change things and know that there is someone who will see him back and that allows him to get started. I found an app that I really like, which is called Obsidian. Obsidian is that, it’s a knowledge base. It’s done in Markdown with the two or three Markdown extensions that allow you to make links and include between files. So it’s perfect, it’s great. One of the extensions is to be able to put the content in Git. It allows two things. The first thing is that it allows you to have a history, that is to say to see what happened before. And the second thing, it allows you to have the same content on your phone and on your computer and to pass the content from one to the other without going through a platform or another thing.

It’s a Git repository . It introduces the notion of history, not really the notion of validation, but the notion of history in the doc and you can see when it has changed. I know that I am using more and more as a measure of personal hygiene. What have I been doing these days?

Impact of Artificial Intelligence

Walid : Before we hang up the microphone, a subject that I can’t not talk about is the arrival of artificial intelligence and the impact it will have on some of the publications and your work. Do you already have ideas or do you already see things that were previously made by humans and are now being done by artificial intelligence?

Fabrice : I find it fascinating. I think that what will happen, it is difficult to measure. I’ve seen people who had fun making punchlines for marketing campaigns that asked an AI to generate the punchlines for them and it worked really well. That’s one of the characteristics of this thing, is that you can say to him: look, I’ve made a rotten sheet, can you make me compatible with the Bible of how we write? And if you’ve trained your model well, it’s going to do it. When you’re writing docs in uncharted waters, when you’re on something brand new where artificial intelligence, it doesn’t have much to sink its teeth into, it’s a parrot it needs existing content, so, when you’re writing about something that’s fundamentally new, artificial intelligence, at least for the moment, She doesn’t have much to find. I try to tell myself that at night so that I can fall asleep. Otherwise, I see how, for example, the Ansible project was used on a project called LightSpeed. It’s not documenting the code, it’s writing the code from the documentation.

That is to say, I want to do a task that does this, so we write it in natural language: install a server for me, install this package for me and the tool will write the code of the Ansible playbook for the user. So for now, we’re writing the natural language and it’s going to write the code. We have this part that is being put in place and that still requires human control. It’s just a template that makes the work easier. The job of Tech Writers, which is the opposite, is from code, describe what you want. At that point, the AI needs to have a ticket or a brief for the code that is super well done. That’s right? This is rarely the case. Or a way to go and find out as well as a human being why I want to do this and how I’m going to do it, because that’s it, you have to find both things. For the moment, I don’t know. I thought a few years ago that when we had everything automated, we would still have to document the automation and that it was a good idea to go and do some documentation.

Walid : You can already ask ChatGPT to write you the text of your pull requests.

Fabrice : If the Technical Writer, his role, is just to do that, it’s not a job of the future. Above all, I think it will change the way people consume doc. It doesn’t really make sense to say: I’m going to continue writing documentation if people aren’t going to read documentation anymore. If people, they’re going to ask questions to another. The writers‘ job will be to produce content that artificial intelligence will ingest and that will be useful to artificial intelligence. I think that for it to work well, it has to be content that is even more formatted, that has even more metadata. Because I think that raw content is not very useful. For the moment, there are still people who add metadata to content. Maybe it’s going to move that way, people who are more language-bound, they’re going to move more towards producing raw content to feed the machine. But I don’t know what will happen. Where we’re going, I don’t really know.

Op-Ed

Walid : Finally, I have a traditional op-ed. So it’s up to you.

Fabrice : Free software, people, it’s good! Contribute to free software. I don’t know if I’m really an old idiot to say that or what. I have the impression that the expectations for the younger generations are no longer the same. I don’t know if Linux will end up being more than for servers and not at all elsewhere, for example. I ask myself this question. I ask myself: what will the new revolution be in five years? Because in any case, everything changes every five years. It’s still interesting this world where everything changes very quickly.

Walid : That’s the last word. Thank you Fabrice for taking the time to talk about these subjects around documentation. I think that if you liked it, of course, don’t hesitate to share it on social networks and talk about it around you. See you again.

This episode was recorded on May 3, 2023.

Transcription by Raphaël Semeteys

Learn more

• Fabrice Flore-Thébault’s LinkedIn profile
• Fabrice’s Github profile
• Fabrice’s lectures
• Fabrice’s talk on creating a documentation pipeline with Antora
• The Continuous Documentation Regulars Meetup
• Red Hat website

License

This podcast is published under the double license Art Libre 1.3 or later – CC BY-SA 2.0 or later.

Create a free, free, privacy-friendly Android OS? This is the challenge launched by Gaël Duval!

In this interview, we discuss with him the creation of the project, the structuring between company and association, the business model as well as the relationship of /e/OS with its software ecosystem. We also talk about the relationship with phone manufacturers, especially Fairphone, and the creation of their own product line, but also about the different modalities of software and hardware support.

podcast.projets-libres.org/@pr…

Sommaire

• 1 Interview with Gaël Duval: /e/OS & Murena
• 2 Links about /e/OS, Murena and Gaël Duval
• 3 License

Interview with Gaël Duval: /e/OS & Murena

Walid: Hello and welcome to Free Projects! My name is Walid Nouh. I fell into the cauldron of free software more than 20 years ago. Whether you are an experienced librist or a neophyte, come and discover with me the portraits of the women and men who make free software. Community, business models, contributions, we tell you everything! New episode: today we welcome Gaël Duval to talk about /e/OS and Murena which is the trademark associated with /e/OS.

You may know Gaël Duval as the founder of the first desktop Linux distribution called MandrakeLinux in the late 90s, early 2000s. You’ll also see that he worked on another project afterwards called Ulteo. But today we’re going to focus on the degoogled Android OS he’s been working on for a few years and it’s a great pleasure to be able to welcome Gaël on the podcast. Hello Gaël, I hope you are doing well.

Gaël: Hello, thank you for inviting me to this podcast and it’s not too bad.

Gaël Duval (source: stateofopencon)

Walid: Before we start talking about /e/OS, I’d like you to answer the traditional question of introducing yourself and telling us how you came to work in free software, and what you’ve done in free software so far.

Gaël: Basically, I’m a computer scientist, I’m a computer scientist, a bit of a hard guy, academic. So computer science is still a passion that goes back a long way, I must have had my first microphone at 10 years old, it was a world that attracted me a lot and then I spent a lot of time on computers, I chained several models in the 80s. It was a rather fertile period for computer science. I don’t know, all those who lived through it have a big memory of that time, I think, because it was swarming everywhere, it was extremely creative, a lot around the game often but not only, and with machines and systems that were not at all compatible with each other in general, But it made for a pretty exciting set, especially I think for 10-15 year old kids at the time.

That’s kind of what naturally led me to this software engineering profession. And when I got to university, I discovered two things: that there were not only microcomputers in life, there were also computers that were a little more professional, what we called workstations, and then there was the internet too. I was vaguely familiar with the Internet because I had heard a little about it, and also because I was fortunate, when I was 17, to have an English correspondent, who was in Cambridge, and his father was actually an astrophysicist. He was an astrophysics teacher and he showed me around his lab and all that, and I noticed that he was sending e-mail messages on a computer and that really struck me. I said to myself “hey, there’s something interesting”, I was a bit interested in the modem etc. And at the end I noticed that we really had computers that were much more powerful, much more serious and at the same time connected to the internet 24 hours a day. They each had their IP address globally, it wasn’t private addressing at the time.

And then, of course, as someone who was already passionate about computers, I threw myself into it body and soul. And to answer the question, how did I come to Libre? Well, a little frustration, that is to say that at the same time there was this absolutely incredible world that I discovered at university, of Unix workstations. Unix, an operating system that really struck me because I couldn’t even imagine that we could have systems that could be multitasking, multi-user, etc. And I discover this in this kind of wonderful world, a little ideal, a little hidden in the end, reserved for students of the time, researchers, all that. And next to it, in the general public, at the beginning of the 90s, what do we see developing? Windows 3, then Windows 95, on PC-compatible devices and that was really the not exciting thing for me at all. I tried to make the link between the two, actually, because I couldn’t afford to buy a machine to run Unix, obviously it was worth I don’t know how much, but it was really out of reach for a student. On the other hand, there were still these compatible PCs with Intel 386 processor, 286 and all that and at some point, totally by chance, I discovered, I don’t know exactly the year, but it must have been 94, 95, 96, I don’t know, I discovered that there would be a Unix operating system that could maybe run on large machines, PCs with 386 processors. And digging deeper, it was Linux actually, it was the beginnings of Linux. Linux was released in ’91, so maybe 2 years before, 2-3 years. And then, when I did some research, it seems to confirm that yes, maybe on my 386 which was running Windows 3, I could maybe run Linux instead, that maybe we could even run X Windows System, so the graphical interface that was running on Unix at the time. And so, here I am going to buy 50 floppy disks from FNAC, and I’m coming back, because there were already the first Linux distributions, at the time I had selected Slackware, at the time it took 50 floppy disks to install it, so I bought 50 floppy disks, and then I go back to the university and I download the whole distribution Slackware, and I run each floppy disk to save it on, and I come home with my 50 floppy disks, and then I spend the evening installing Linux and it works.

at the time I had selected Slackware, at the time it took 50 floppy disks to install it

So that was really my first steps in Linux: somewhere towards free because it’s a notion that I didn’t really know. In the early 90s and 80s, there was still a notion of sharing, of software, which was quite strong. So in a way it was quite natural for me to go for free. Then I discovered this a little bit later, the GNU project, etc. I looked at it and started to look at everything you could find on FTP servers, all the software out there, compilers, GCC, all that.

Walid: I feel like I get along when I discovered free software and I said to myself “wow, what a new world, that’s really what computer science is all about, it was really great”.

Gaël: That’s it.

Walid: So after that, you worked on Mandrake and you worked on other projects, can you tell us a few words about it?

Gaël: On Mandrake, so I was finishing my studies, in fact I was in… I was doing some kind of civil service at university, which gave me a lot of time to get interested… Finally, I actually wanted to create a Linux distribution that was both… that has the power of Linux and at the same time the ease of use that could be found on Windows for example. Also, for the general public, I thought it’s a shame that Linux is reserved for experts who have to learn the command line, which most won’t do. The idea behind Mandrake at the time was really this: is there a way to allow as many people as possible to be able to enjoy the power of Linux with modern tools and a modern user interface?

That was really it. After Mandrake, which kept me busy until 2006, I created another company and we also made free software called Ulteo. Initially, the idea was really to make an online office with it. There was a Linux distribution by the way called Ulteo Application System, which was based on Debian, and the idea was to say: with the Internet we can probably have a system where your data will be accessible anywhere whenever you want, wherever you want, with any device. So that’s why there was a Linux distribution for the PC and there was a system that allowed you to access this data in a web browser and synchronize everything. So your data from your PC was constantly syncing with the cloud and you could find your apps and data in the web browser. And that, at the beginning, the approach was quite oriented towards the end user as well and for many reasons, we pivoted towards the professional, towards B2B.

And we redeveloped the solution from a B2B perspective. The idea was to virtualize PCs, put them in the cloud, and have them accessible from anything, including a tablet, an iPad, that kind of thing. For those who know Citrix, the idea was to make a kind of cross-platform open source Citrix, because we supported Windows and Linux, which didn’t work very well commercially. We were a bit late following our first B2C approach. And that kept me busy until 2014-2015. Then I met people with whom we created an incubator and a startup accelerator, so 2015-2016-2017. We supported a lot of startups, so we saw a lot of people who had ideas, who wanted to create their own business. We’d talk to them, challenge them a little bit, then sometimes we’d help them, sometimes we’d finance them. And that’s been a really interesting moment because I’ve already met many, many people, whereas naturally computer science pushes you to… Well, yes, you have a lot of social relationships online, it’s virtual. But then I really met a lot of people, great people, super nice people, crazy projects.

It was pretty exciting. And in one of the projects, there was a company that was developing a smartphone operating system that was based on FirefoxOS. It was an attempt by the Mozilla Foundation to create a system that was a bit of a competitor to Android and all that for mobile. And we had a lot of hope in FirefoxOS, because it was totally free, it was independent. Unfortunately it didn’t work out very well, because, for reasons of strategic choices by the Mozilla Foundation, they apparently had, from what I understand, quite a few development plans in Asia. They went to Whatsapp because apparently in Asia everyone uses Whatsapp, even in 2016-2017. And when they went to Whatsapp and told them that it would be really great if we could have a version of Whatsapp for FirefoxOS, Whatsapp told them that we already have 100% of the market with iOS, Android, so we really don’t see why we would spend money to please you. Basically, that was it, as I understand it. And so they decided to shut down FirefoxOS and say there’s no path, there’s no business model. And so this company that I had met that was making a derivative of Firefox OS essentially for the African market I think with Orange, they also stopped. They were like, “Oh, they’re quitting, so let’s stop.” They stopped everything, they folded everything. It was a pretty crazy story. But I’m telling this because it’s just for the record.

For me, it allowed me to discover a world that I was less familiar with, which was the world of the smartphone in fact because I come from the world of the PC. And the world of the smartphone, it’s the same, it really fascinated me because in the end, what is a smartphone? It’s just a computer that is now very powerful, which also has a camera, a wifi connection, etc. So a lot of sensors and finally it’s a concentrate of the best we can do in computing both in terms of hardware and software. And I also found that absolutely fascinating. And the more I became interested in it, the more I said to myself “hey, there are things going on in terms of personal data in smartphones” that I didn’t really suspect. I had heard a little bit about it but the more I dug in, the more I realized that the business model of the smartphone was still really linked to the collection of personal data, especially under Android Google, where we have several megabytes of personal data that are constantly captured every day, which allow us to profile users and sell them more expensive advertising. But also on iOS finally because iOS pre-installs Google Search and gets paid handsomely by Google for it. So in the end I realized how much this wonderful world of the smartphone, it was completely rotten by its business model which was based on advertising and that finally these tools were becoming so present in our lives, collecting so much of our personal data that they were really installing a kind of very unhealthy thing, where we exchange a pseudo gratuity, which is never the case in the end, we capture all your personal data and to do with what? to sell advertising, but maybe not only. That is to say, when you have big companies on a global scale that collect all your personal data and become very intimate, because what is it? it’s your location in real time, if you have Gmail, it’s all your emails, so your email exchanges, it’s not encrypted, they read it constantly, they scan it, the apps you use, how you use them, when you use them, your internet searches, your browsing history, it’s your whole life in the end. And that’s constantly being sent to Google, Apple, etc. And when I realized that, I said to myself, there’s still a problem, because in theory we’re in a democracy, so all of this normally has safeguards. Except that you never know how it’s going to evolve, you never know how much power these private companies can take, can’t they get hacked, can’t sell themselves to powers, well, I don’t know, to dictatorships, etc. So anything is possible.

And when I realized that, I said to myself, there’s still a problem, because in theory we’re in a democracy, so all of this normally has safeguards. Except that you never know how it’s going to evolve, you never know how much power these private companies can take, can’t they get hacked, can’t sell themselves to powers, well, I don’t know, to dictatorships, etc. So anything is possible.

And they have our data. These people have our data, have our children’s data, etc. On a global scale. So for me, it was a really big problem, and I think I’m not the only one. And then I said to myself “well I don’t want to use an iPhone on the market anymore, not Android or an iPhone, I want to stop using all the Google Docs and all this stuff, all the Gmail. So what do we do?” And when I looked for alternatives, well as in the web there are 2-3 things, there are things, but on the smartphone there was nothing. FirefoxOS had just died, so there was Ubuntu Touch, but which wasn’t in very, very good shape either and there are a few projects but ultimately for me and then and potentially for my loved ones and for the general public there was no alternative to iOS or Android. And then I said to myself, as a computer scientist and entrepreneur, maybe I’ll dig into the question: can’t we do something, recreate an alternative? These are crazy ideas and I also think that if I asked myself now, I would say to myself “but no, don’t do that, it’s impossible”.

At the time, I realized quite quickly that finally all the bricks that are necessary to recreate this mobile ecosystem, both on the smartphone and the basic building blocks of the cloud, email, calendar, etc., were already available. Android is open source, we have things like Nextcloud, we have email, almost everything is available but on the other hand there is one thing missing, it’s actually the binder in the end. Because they are quite disparate bricks: they are not necessarily made to work well with each other. And that was really the beginning and the idea of /e/OS: to say how do we bring all these bricks together and recreate a product that is pleasant to use, that offers all the guarantees in terms of personal data protection and that can also be available on smartphones, the largest number of smartphones on the market.

So that’s really how the project started.

Walid: So you’re saying that you’re actually going to create a project. The first thing I’d like to ask you is where does this name i come from? I haven’t really heard an explanation so I’d like you to say a few words about it. And the second thing is from the moment you decide to create the project, what skills do you need to get started? How do you surround yourself? Where do you find the people you’re going to work with on this very first draft?

Gaël: So about the name, it’s a big story. At the beginning the project was called EELO, which is the name on which the first Kickstarter was launched, which launched the project. And then no luck, I think it’s June 2018, or maybe July, but I think it’s June 2018, I receive an email from a Dutch company asking me to stop using the brand.

At first, I thought there would be more annoyances. And then I ask a lawyer who specializes in filings, domain names, trademark names, all that. And he’s like, yes, wait, because it’s still a big company, they have a trademark that looks similar. So yes, they had registered the EELLOO trademark. So it looked like. And one thing led to another, we tried to negotiate etc, they were totally inflexible, they didn’t want to know anything. Because often you can make a cohabitation of trademarks by specializing the classes in which you file them, but they didn’t want to know anything about it. Knowing that they were in human resources software, so absolutely nothing to do with what we were doing, and at one point my lawyer told me that he had just received a letter which, in lawyer’s language, said that there was no negotiation and that they would go all the way, that is to say that they would put the budgets that would eventually be necessary to assert their right in name.

So it was really not at all a time when I could commit the financial means to defend myself on this. We just stopped and changed our name, plain and simple. And why /E/? I don’t even remember too much. That decision was made almost overnight. We had a kind of injunction with a threat that we would have to pay every day if we didn’t stop. And I don’t know, it was while talking with some friends, there’s this name that came up, a kind of derivative of EELO, and that was actually supposed to be totally provisional. The idea was to say to ourselves, we have to change our name, well, we need something for tomorrow. Okay, and then we think about it and then in a month we put a new name. Except that it lasted a lot longer.

Walid: That’s the permanent temporary.

Gaël: Finally, the name has disadvantages but it also has an advantage. That is to say that the disadvantage that it’s a bit of a weird thing, /E/, when you type it on a search engine, at first it didn’t work too much, now it’s fine.

But on the other hand, if you type in the search bar of a web browser, it will look for your /, so it’s in your file tree, and so it doesn’t work at all. But on the other hand it still has an advantage, it’s that it was so weird, you see it’s the advantage of the disadvantage, it’s that the name is so weird that finally there are quite a few people who started to say “yes this name is really crappy and everything”, and everyone was discussing it in the user community, There were those who were for it, there were those who were against it. The majority was against it, I must say, and every time I am asked, I am asked again, but when do you change your name, it’s not possible. And in the end, it still has the advantage of getting people talking and having a kind of thing that happens in terms of communication, buzz, and then finally we introduced Murena because we still needed a brand that was secure.

So now it’s deposited in the US, thing, it’s pretty well bordered. We’ve Murena.com, so that’s really the trademark. And the idea is that really now, the people who are going to discover us, they will discover the Murena online services and the Murena smartphones. And the Murena smartphone, ok it has /e/OS, that’s the name of the OS, it’s a technical thing like there’s iOS, there’s MS-DOS, some weird names. Now it’s less serious and I think that for the moment there are no plans to modify /e/OS because in the end the consequences are still very small since we have this “commercial” name called Murena. That was the question about the name and then I don’t know.

Walid: The second question was who did you surround yourself with to start this project?

Gaël: Oh yes, that’s really interesting. And by the way, I don’t know if it’s always like that in all projects, but at the beginning I started, I was really alone. That is, I was in my corner, testing stuff, installing LineageOS, modifying LineageOS, recompiling, etc. And then we launched a Kickstarter at the end of 2017, and the idea of the Kickstarter was given to me by a friend because he had already done one. He told me “your idea doesn’t look bad, but I think you have to confront it”. And besides, I didn’t have that much money to invest in it at the time, why not do a kickstarter? And in a month and a half, the two of us, we worked on this kickstarter, we created video content, we created photos, 3D animations, something a little crazy. And at the end of 2017 we released this kickstarter with the idea of finding 20,000 euros, or 25,000, I don’t know, to be able to start paying maybe a developer.

In the end, the Kickstarter made x4, in the end, because then we extended it on Indiegogo. We found nearly 100,000 euros and I received a lot of messages: great feedback from a lot of people, from many countries around the world, who thanked me for the project, who encouraged me to continue it because they themselves were already looking for alternative solutions to Android and Apple. And that, at first, I had a desire, but then it reinforced the idea that there was probably something quite important to do in the end, that I wasn’t doing it too badly.

That was really the trigger, it was this Kickstarter, which also brought a lot of visibility in terms of press. For example, I think we had to have France Inter, we had Le Point… In India, we had, I think, the biggest Indian newspaper, the equivalent of the New York Times in the US, but in India. He must have written an article about us and so there are a lot of Indian developers who wanted to work for us all at once. And all of a sudden, there’s something being created, a community based on just an idea.

That’s what’s crazy, there’s nothing, actually. There’s just a few drawings, an idea, a thing, “I want to do this, I’m going to do it like this”. And then, all of a sudden, there’s something that is created, boom, and that settles in, and that supports the project that we’re talking about and it’s a lot of connections. It makes people want to work on the project, who introduce us to other people, it potentially makes investors. It was quite an incredible moment and on the needs very quickly I had to find a developer: it sounds silly what I’m going to say, but I had no doubt about our ability to be able to transform LineageOS and de-Google it in fact, because I had seen that there was Micro-G that allowed things to be done, etc. So for me it was almost a given, I just had to find an engineer at some point, or it would be me or an engineer who was going to put things together.

That’s what’s crazy, there’s nothing, actually. There’s just a few drawings, an idea, a thing, “I want to do this, I’m going to do it like this”. And then, all of a sudden, there’s something that is created, boom, and that settles in, and that supports the project that we’re talking about and it’s a lot of connections.

On the other hand, there was one thing that was close to my heart, it was that in terms of the user interface, I found that there was a deficiency in what I was seeing. So I was like, hey, we’re going to have to recreate a user interface that’s a little bit better. And here, it’s a lot more difficult because developers who are specialized enough in Android development and who have enough sense of the user interface, either I did it wrong, but I had a hard time finding. And he was the first developer I hired, he was an Indian who made the first launcher of /e/OS. The rest happened quite naturally. There was a beautiful encounter at the very beginning, which was made totally by chance, and that’s what’s crazy and sometimes leads me to think that there may be a destiny in life. Pretty quickly I realized how sprawling Android is, it’s huge, it’s gigabytes of source code, it takes 2 hours to compile for a machine. It’s much worse than compiling a Linux kernel, by the way you recompile the modified Linux kernel for Android when you recompile an Android distribution. And at one point I said to myself “wow, between the number of phones that are going to have to be supported, which are all going to be different with specificities, all the versions that are going to follow one another, plus the different basic versions of Android, we’re going to quickly have a very big software engineering problem”.

There you have it, maintaining a Linux distribution is already quite a colossal thing. But this was power… I don’t know, at least to the power of 2, to the power of 3. And luckily, at the beginning of 2018, following the Kickstarter, I was in a place where it was a bit like the operational base of the Kickstarter, and there was someone knocking on the door. I don’t even know how he actually found me. He said, “My mom showed me an article, what you’re doing looks really good.” His mother showed him an article! So in fact her mother she read Ouest-France and in Ouest-France we had a nice article that talked about the project, that explained what we were going to do.

And so he had read that and he was like “hey, that looks really good”. And the guy was coming out of school, he had just finished his computer studies and he said “I would like to work”. So I said “ok but what do you want to do? What do you know how to do?” He tells me “I’m more of a web developer”. It seems to me that it was this: he shows his resume. I’m like “ok good web development ok why not…” and then we talk and at one point he says to me “yes also I know Git and GitLab pretty well” and then I go, “ah, interesting!”.

And finally, in fact, the guy who is always with us is Romain, our… now that he runs all the engineering from us, he was super savvy in Git and GitLab. It was kind of his passion. He was a bit of a GitLab freak. If he listens to me to this day, he won’t want to say that, but that’s kind of it. He turned out to be extremely good, extremely sharp, to set up all this infrastructure that was going to help us manage the sources, trigger the compilations, etc. Continuous integration, etc. It was, I think, I don’t know exactly, if I hadn’t had that meeting at the time, how it would have gone otherwise.

We would probably have found other solutions, but it was an accelerator in the end, because after that the project really started on a good basis. We’ve never really tinkered. From the beginning it was something with an industrial spirit, it was square: management of issues in GitLab when there are problems, tickets, etc. So project management. It was something I actually experienced, in the end I wasn’t necessarily looking for it, but it was a key element from the beginning. After that, it was more about finding developers, doing interviews, starting to finance yourself too because even 100,000 euros at the beginning goes quickly, it goes very, very quickly. And then there was also my own situation, which was a bit complicated to manage because I was in this accelerator incubator, the one we had co-founded. But at some point I quickly realized that it was taking up all my time and I couldn’t combine the two. So I had to make that transition, it was a bit complicated.

Being able to finance myself was not easy either. In 2018 I created two entities: the first was e Foundation. So the Foundation is a non-profit association. The idea of e Foundation is really to say: we don’t know what will happen, we do open source, we want it to stay that way, in any case that the core of the project remains open source. e Foundation is the association on the e.foundation domain name that offers the product in open source: this is the guarantee that whatever happens, there will always be this open source core, no one can buy it. And next to it is Murena, which was not called Murena at the time, but now it is called Murena and which is a company on which I was able to find funding. At the same time, private funding, Business Angel investors, BPIFrance grants, private funds that also help the development of projects like ours. This allowed us to recruit more and I think that, at the end of 2018, there must have already been 5-6 of us on the project.

Walid: So let me understand, is eFoundation an association under the law of 1901? Gaël: Yes, that’s right. Walid: It doesn’t have a developer? Does it have intellectual property? What is its role?

Gaël: The link is open source actually. If it wasn’t for open source, I think it would be very difficult. But there are two entities that can each contribute to the product because it’s open source. And so if you look in our GitLab, you’ll see that sometimes it’s marked Murena, sometimes it’s marked e Foundation. And the Foundation, yes, because the Foundation has resources, because we have a lot of people who donate to the project, because it’s open source, because we sometimes win projects, calls for projects, in fact we may be able to talk about it again but we won a big European project not long ago.

So we have resources: we also pay people on the Foundation, often more subcontracting, freelancers, who contribute to the project in the same way that Murana contributes to the Open Source project. That’s how it works.

Walid: So you have two work forces that come from two different entities and contribute to the project, right?

Gaël: Exactly.

Walid: So you were saying that you’re about 5-6 people, so that’s the number of people who contributed to the first version of /e/? And by the way, when will this first version be released? Gaël: The first beta version was released in October 2018.

We are at 5-6 people and also contributors, which I don’t count in the 5-6 people. That’s 5-6 full-time equivalents. We also have contributors and in particular we have a major contributor on the cloud and infrastructure part, a German, who loves the project. He is still very supportive of the project and did almost all the first infra mail, the part based on Nextcloud. And that’s it, otherwise we would never have been able to develop it. Then he handed over the reins and it was taken over by the team, a real infra team. So it’s 5-6 people plus, I don’t know how many, 5-10 external contributors, plus people contributing translations, plus people reporting bugs, testers.

It’s quite a virtuous thing, quite communal, it’s quite typical of free projects. This is pretty typical, but we’re not a purely free community project, like Debian can’t be. It’s still a bit of a hybrid between developers who are paid, salaried, and community contributions. Open source allows all of that, and I think that’s one of the beauties of open source in the end: it allows people who come from different backgrounds to work on a common project in a fairly serene way.

Walid: So in this first beta version it’s coming out, how many phones are it available on? What is the first feedback at this time, how is it going for you?

Gaël: It’s going pretty well actually, I was almost surprised that we could release a beta version in October 2018 because there was a lot of work to do. We started with LineageOS, which was already a version of Android that ran on a lot of phones. So we weren’t so limited in terms of phone models because it was already ready. On the other hand, there was still all this preliminary work of “we remove all the calls to Google including in the lower layers, the default DNS, all that stuff, we put Micro G by default, then reassemble everything, then recompile then”. So there’s still a very big effort behind it, but we were able to release, I don’t know, maybe for 20 or 30 models from the beginning. It wasn’t too much of a problem in the end, thanks to the LineageOS community, I readily admit that. So it was pretty well received at the time, because it wasn’t doing badly. And then there was this somewhat unique thing which is the synchronization between the phone and the cloud, for those who want it, because it’s always a bit of a subject… It’s not always easy. In the end, we offer you the whole ecosystem: it’s not just the phone, it’s not just the cloud, it’s a whole, phone plus cloud: you’re at home, it’s your data, we don’t touch it, all the guarantees. And it worked quite well: after the kickstarter, it was the second start of the project. There was also this whole phase, I remember now, before we released something, where there were a few people who said it was just vaporware, that nothing was going to happen, etc. But I’ve been through this before, so it didn’t stress me out too much. And then, at some point, you pull the thing out. The trick works, people are pretty happy, those who test it. That’s it, now let’s move on. We’re a real project, we exist, now we have to iterate, we have to improve things.

Walid: It’s very clever to start with a Kickstarter because if you do your Kickstarter well, and I experienced it in one of the companies: we had done a project that we had financed by Kickstarter. If you do your project well, you have access to publicity and notoriety that you couldn’t afford. And so it’s a real accelerator if it works well. So there, you have a first community that is created with users and people who will test the product. You say you’re looking for investors: what business model do you offer them to these investors?

Gaël: Investors at the time were what we call Business Angels (BAs) and in general they don’t bother you too much, especially at the beginning. They just see that something is going on, that they want to be part of it, so they don’t bother you too much about the model. And it was a good thing because I didn’t have a business model, I didn’t know. In fact, it came naturally: we asked ourselves the question, could we sell the system to phone manufacturers? But the reality is that the ecosystem of the phone world, the smartphone is totally blocked by Android or by Apple, iPhone, etc. on the other side. But they definitely want to be Google’s Android certified: it’s something that’s completely invincible. We saw right away that it would be quite complicated, at least at the beginning. On the other hand, in the community, as we already had users, people who were interested in the project, some installed the system themselves on a phone and then we had people who either didn’t have the technical skills to do it, or were afraid to do it because it’s true that when you install a system like this on a smartphone there is always a risk of bricking the phone (the block completely) if it doesn’t go well. And then other people didn’t have the time to do it either. So very quickly we received two types of requests. There were some who wanted to send us the phone and have us do the installation work that we send them, even if it meant paying a little money. The second request was, “But I’m willing to buy you a phone with /e/OS actually: what do you have, what can you do?” And so we tested both. The first one didn’t work at all.

We started receiving phones that were in very, very different states from each other. There was nothing square about them: sometimes you couldn’t even unlock them! We didn’t have the PIN, we didn’t have anything. So we had to ask again, endless exchanges… Sometimes they arrived in a lamentable state: the cracked screen, the swollen battery, we’ve seen it all. And the few phones that we flashed, that we were able to send, there was someone who must have spent two days on each phone. So two days of work for an engineer going at 20-30 euros per hour, that’s the economic model that doesn’t work at all. You can’t charge a customer 1000 euros to install an OS.

So we gave up because we saw that it wasn’t going to work. And for the time being, we prefer install parties: we encourage that. Have install parties, we’ll give you a hand, maybe we’ll send you goodies. The other one, it happened differently: in 2019 but I think it was around June, someone introduced me to Recommerce. Recommerce is a big refurbished company in Europe: they mainly refurbish iPhones and Samsungs, if I remember correctly. One of the bosses of Recommerce had heard about the project and he thought it was great. And then they invite us, in fact, they invite me to visit their premises in the south of Paris. We talk, and soon enough, I explain to them what we do. Naturally, we come to the subject of the smartphone: they have smartphones, I have an OS, well a valuable fit that worked quite well! A great story to tell. Very quickly we selected two or three models: the S7, the S8, the S9: the Samsung Galaxy which could have a fairly large volume (i.e. a few dozen per week, it’s not much). Then we organized a whole trick to flash the phones: at first they were the ones who flashed at their logistics provider, so we developed a tool that allowed us to flash the phones in the service provider’s factory. And then it started like that, so I think towards the end of the summer of 2019, something like that. We started selling refurbished smartphones on our site, quite simply. And it ended up going so well, that pretty quickly we didn’t have enough to sell actually. We had demand outstripping supply. So that’s been a great way to get started. And I think we’ll do some refurbished ones, well we’ll do a little bit more, but not on Samsungs.

But on the other hand, very quickly he asked himself the question of how we can increase the volumes: and then refurbished it didn’t work because there were weeks when we only received 5 phones when we could have sold 50. In the end, at the beginning it was the business model that prevailed, it’s almost like selling cans of peas, but except that we put super good quality peas in them, not disgusting sweet peas.

Walid: I’m going to cut you off because I find it quite funny, I myself work in the refurbished sector and you can see that the problems are the same: access to the deposit is really the key. If you don’t have access to the pool of refurbished devices, well in fact your model doesn’t work very well.

Gaël: Oh yes, you can be limited, that’s for sure. But fortunately we found solutions to solve it afterwards.

Walid: So that brings me to my next question, which is: when did you start meeting Fairphone ? And by the way, is Fairphone the first brand you work with or have there been other brands you’ve worked with before on the subject? How is this first meeting going?

Fairphone 2 with /e/OS
(source: fairphone.com)

Gaël: Well, it’s been a few years, but I think I’ve tried to get in touch with several manufacturers. There was a very big manufacturer that I won’t name, but we quickly understood it was the same: it was going to be difficult. And especially, probably, maybe in a year or two, because with boxes like that, they have cycles that are completely crazy. When you’re a start-up that’s just trying to move forward, to survive, you can’t afford that. And Fairphone is the same, it’s a kind of fate thing. That’s enough… right at the moment. We were starting to think that we really need to find a solution because we don’t have enough phones to sell. And I found myself at a workshop organized by the European Commission in Brussels, an open source workshop where there were quite a few people from all over Europe who were in the open source world, or not far from the open source world, who discussed a lot of topics. And then at lunchtime, they give you sandwiches at the European Commission, it’s really frustrating, you see, you have sandwiches…

And then I come face to face with Agnès, Agnès Crépet, who works at Fairphone and whom I only knew by name before. But I had never met him. Knowing that I had already pinged Bas (Van Abel), the founder of Fairphone, many times on LinkedIn. You know, a big kick, but it didn’t take. And there, with Agnès right away, we hit it off well. In addition, Agnès is a girl who is easy to talk to, she is very nice. And then she says something like “oh but anyway we already know you because we have Fairphone 2 users who tell us: but why on Fairphone do you put Google Android, why don’t you put /e/OS instead? it’s much more virtuous.” So I tell him “well, listen, if you want we can maybe consider stuff”. Afterwards she organized a meeting in Amsterdam and we met Eva, their CEO at the time.

Eva very professional, at first: “not sure our board will want to”, well it’s good because for me it’s square, it’s frank. You don’t have illusions, false joys. And so it took a little bit of time, but not that long. And then they tell us “well, we’re going to do a test but in a very pragmatic way, that is to say that we’re going to give you a little help so that you can port /e/OS to Fairphone 3” which was going to be released or which had just been released, I don’t know exactly. It wasn’t supported by LineageOS, and then we make a very simple deal: “we agree on a price, you buy phones from us and then you do what you want, you flash them and you sell them”. That’s how it really started. So we had a development effort: I think there were two or three months to port /e/OS to Fairphone. It’s the first time we’ve worn on a new phone. At first I was like, “Wow, are we going to make it?” And in the end it went pretty well. In June 2020, in the middle of lockdown, I started flashing with my daughter, the first Fairphone at home, which we received in a box of 50. It was pretty epic. And then pretty quickly, we put it up for sale and it worked really well. I think there’s really a couple between Fairphone hardware that’s more virtuous, that’s more durable, and an OS that’s much more respectful of personal data like /e/OS. That’s really how it started. After that, we continued with the Fairphone 4, now the Fairphone 5.

Fairephone 4 with /e/OS (source: fairphone.com)

Walid: In her interview, Agnès said that at Fairphone they sell as many Fairphones with /e/ as they do Fairphones at Orange. I was quite surprised because I naively thought that /e/ was more of an OS that was made for people who were a bit technical, who weren’t afraid to flash their phone, etc. And actually, not at all.

Gaël: No, no, not at all. That’s the goal too, that’s always been my goal. I absolutely didn’t want to make an OS reserved for people who have know-how. I really want the thing to be able to be used by anyone without any specific technical knowledge. But I’m glad Agnes said it, so I can talk about it too. It seems that we sell as many Fairphones in France as Orange. To bounce back on the end-user side, we have 2 or 3 types of users that we have identified: we have people who are very worried about the personal data side, that was kind of our heart, the heart of the thing at the beginning.

We also have a lot of people in open source who are like, “Oh yes, it’s really the mobile OS that’s really totally open source. Well, I can install whatever I want, Ubuntu Touch or a lot of other stuff. Well, on the other hand, for my friends or for my family”, and we see a lot of them in fact, at the Capitol of the Free there are people who come to tell us, “I use GrapheneOS because that’s what, but for my whole family I put /e/ on them, they’re super happy. And it works very well, there are no big problems.” For me, it’s a good satisfaction because really this ambition to want to bring a system that is truly virtuous and that can be used by as many people as possible, it works. It really works and even at home, for once, even my partner, I’ve never forced her, obviously she knows what I’m doing but I’ve never forced her. For the first time, she bought her own phone online. I told him I didn’t want to give him one, I didn’t want to deal with it, I didn’t want to do after-sales service. She bought it on her own, and one day she said, “I bought a phone from you.” “Ah ok”. And in the end it goes really well, she uses it every day, she’s a teacher, she’s not in computer science at all. My daughter who is 19 years old also uses it every day, it’s the same, she’s not in the technical world at all.

And there you have it, so for me it’s the best proof that it can work for as many people as possible and that’s cool.

Walid: So to finish on the subject of the economic model, how do you finance it now?

Gaël: How do we finance ourselves now? So we’re already making revenue, so that’s the best thing to finance ourselves, both on phones and the part we talked about a little less but it’s the cloud. We have 100,000 accounts that have been opened on murena.io, and in these 100,000 accounts obviously there are some that are more or less active. In those that are active there are people who really use it every day: and at some point they want more storage. So they take plans from us: we have plans depending on the storage available between 2 or 3 euros per month, 20 or 30 euros per month. I think it’s something like that, so that’s revenue.

So it’s the small streams that make the big rivers. Sometimes we refinance ourselves with investors, but we also have aid, BPIFrance for example, subsidies. We also have other funds, I’m thinking of funds like SIDN, it’s a Dutch fund that comes from the world of domain name sellers. They have quite a bit of money, I think, and they help projects like ours because they think it’s going in the right direction, in fact, it’s freedom of the internet, etc. We also sometimes win projects: there are plenty of calls for projects, often in groups. Europe is very supportive of open source today. They give a lot of money in subsidies to open source projects because they have understood, I think, that if we want to regain independence on the subjects of software, digital technology, etc., in the current situation, there were not so many other solutions than to switch to open source, to promote open source, the emergence of an ecosystem that is European.

So today they give away a lot of money. And that’s how we finance ourselves: in different ways, in different sources.

Walid: How many of you are now working on the project in person paid?

Gaël: There are a little more than 40, 42, 43 of us I think. A mix of employees and freelancers. It’s not necessarily very well known, but we don’t have an office. We are totally teleworking, all of us have always been teleworking, which has allowed us to get through the months of the pandemic in a fairly serene way because our activity has never stopped. And so we have people all over the place. The hard core is France obviously, we have other people in Europe and then we also have people in India, we have our designer Andros who is in Brazil. So we’re really a decentralized project. All those who are not in France we can not employees so they have service contracts in fact but it is like employees.

Walid: So let’s move on to the privacy part. What I wanted to know is how these privacy issues are going on the project. Do you have researchers who audit your code, do you have people who do security audits? Since it’s really something super important to you, how does it work?

Gaël: There’s an essential point in what we do, I think, is that we’re open source. Everything we say, all the promises we make, we can’t be told that it’s not true. So either it’s not true, but at that point, we’ll be able to correct it. That is to say, since it’s open source, anyone with a sufficient level of expertise will be able to verify that what we say, whether it’s true or not.

There’s an essential point in what we do, I think, is that we’re open source. Everything we say, all the promises we make, we can’t be told that it’s not true

And we’re betting a lot on that, especially compared to Apple. So, Apple isn’t really a competitor. Anyway, Apple is a luxury brand, it’s like comparing myself to Dior or Chanel. The reality is that around their products, they do a lot of marketing around the protection of personal data. What I want to say, because sometimes people come to us and say, “yes, but my iPhone, already your iPhone is worth 1000€, and then secondly it’s a luxury product, and then thirdly what Apple says about privacy, already if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see that in the details, it’s not as simple as that, for a lot of reasons. I don’t know if it’s time to get into these topics, but they are able to detect content that won’t be appropriate, for example, even if it’s encrypted. And then actually, the end-to-end encryption that we often talk about, ultimately it’s only available on some services, but not on all of Apple’s services. And then finally the big question about Apple is either they believe or they don’t. It’s kind of like a religion, because Apple, they’re not open source at all. So unless you’re doing very thorough technical audits, you either believe them or you don’t. And we’re different, we have the source code, it’s public. You go to gitlab.e.foundation and you find all the source code of what we do, including the cloud part, and there you can have it audited as you want. Some don’t deprive themselves of it. I would like to say that we have sometimes had people who were more or less well-intentioned, who went to see and investigate what we were doing. Finally digging, it’s not pejorative, they really went to put their nose in it, dig to try to find, put their finger where it hurts. Sometimes they put their finger where it hurt. 2-3 years ago, there were some things that security experts found in /e/OS that weren’t up to scratch. Well, stuff that wasn’t working the way it should. Sometimes there are also bugs, sometimes there are regressions, it happens. But we address them, which means that once we get feedback on the thing, we check if it’s true, if it’s not true, and if it’s true, we put an R&D effort on it and then we correct it. That’s the first point. And then the second thing is that we also, fortunately, have universities that are interested in what we were doing, and in particular the University of Dublin in Ireland and the University of Edinburgh in Great Britain, which have people who work a lot on the subjects of personal data protection. They made comparisons between the OS and they looked at what was happening on the network, on calls to Google. They validated that /e/OS today is almost the only mobile operating system that by default does not send any data to Google or the manufacturer.

So, we also have that validation. We also have security audits, less on the OS and more on the cloud, which we order ourselves and pay for from security companies. There you go, so it’s a mix.

Walid: Now, I’d like us to move on to the subject of smartphones, which follows the discussion I had with Agnès on Fairphone. I’d like you to explain how and when you came up with the idea of saying that you were going to make your own smartphones? Gaël: That’s always the question of the volume of what we can supply, why not Fairphone? because Fairphone, we don’t have too many constraints on volumes. I think the more we sell, the happier they are. But I’m going to say something that’s not going to make them happy, but I’ve already told them, so it’s not going to come as a surprise: Fairphones, they’re expensive, in fact, they’re very expensive. And so, okay, there are people who can afford them, and then there are others who can’t afford them.

Personally, I still want smartphones running /e/OS to be available to as many people as possible. You can probably find a second-hand Galaxy S9 and then flash it yourself, it didn’t cost very much.

Walid: That’s exactly what I have in front of me, I have an S9 that I bought refurbished and flashed myself, but you have to know how to do it.

Gaël: Well, you have to know how to do it, it’s always the limit of the thing. For people who don’t have much money but would still like to have a smartphone with /e/OS, what is the solution today? Unfortunately, not everyone can afford a Fairphone 4 or 5, so we also needed phones that were a little more entry-level. So we were able to do it with Gigaset on a model, the GS290. Then at some point we had this opportunity to launch our own brand so the Murena One, which was released last year in May, and which is available at a much more affordable price. On the other hand, it is indeed less virtuous than the Fairphone in the sense that it is not designed to be really durable like a Fairphone. It’s a shame but hey, it’s a first version. In the future we will try to do better. But we needed, and I think that even in our strategy it’s also important, that we can have control over our own equipment, to have something that is also a bit of a reference, accessible for not too much. And then it worked pretty well even though it’s not a high-end phone, but it does the job. It has a screen that is very decent, it’s relatively fast. We did it again with the Murena 2 this year: we just finished a crowdfunding campaign with a little novelty. The Murena 2 has two small switches on the sides that allow you to physically mute the microphone, the camera, and then the other is a software switch that allows you to cut off all network access. We thought it was quite funny to tell a story about it. It’s a useful side because clearly today even if we make an OS that we control and master, we are not immune that one day there is an application that is downloaded, that has access to the microphone to the camera, malware, viruses can happen too. And so this thing is really the guarantee that if you buy the Murena 2 today, if at some point you want to be sure that it’s not going to listen to you, that it’s not going to open your camera, well you’re going to do it and you have absolute certainty, because it cuts the circuit of the camera and the microphone. And we’re in the process of launching that today. We’re in the process of shipping to the first Kickstarter backers. And there you have it, so in fact the idea is that we really have a range, both Fairphone phones on the market, which is reassuring because there are people who want to be reassured, so Fairphone reassures them, and then our own range that we are developing under our name.

Murena 2 (source: murena.com)

Walid: So if we go into a little more detail, I was wondering if you had gone through an ODM, what we call an ODM. Original Device Manufacturer, so a company that you’re going to have with your design and that’s going to have you make your phone, is that really the case for you? How did it go?

Gaël: We’re not quite there yet because when we have an ODM, we have to commit to volumes that are still too large in relation to our size. So in fact, we go through an intermediary who works with ODMs, and the intermediary finds customers who have somewhat similar or similar needs. They make a phone on certain specs and then they talk to their potential customers again and say “here we have this phone, are you interested in it, etc., how much do you want from it?” For the moment, with the Murena 1 and the 2, we work like this because the orders we make are a few thousand maximum. An ODM today, if you see it below 20,000 or 30,000 units, it won’t make you an original design, eventually it will do like our intermediary, i.e. it already has a model off the shelf, and it can rebrand it to you on 2000-3000 units.

That’s how we operate. The advantage is that you can still have access to the sources of the Android core that is tested on this hardware to develop it. So it makes it easier to develop and it allows you to have more control over things. Today, that’s how we operate.

Walid: So in the end you just need them to provide you with the material and the sources? You don’t need software support from them since in any case you’re the one who will maintain the OS, right?

Gaël: It depends. On the OS in general, it’s true: on the very lower layers, we still have software support. Sometimes there are things that we don’t have access to, or we just don’t have access to certain things. Typically a camera focus setting: we notice that on a lens it doesn’t work well. We turn to the service provider and then he works with the ODM to fix the problem and provide us with an update. So it can be very hard stuff actually. We can’t go that deep here, we’re a little bit beyond our field of expertise.

But otherwise yes, we have control over the OS, totally.

Walid: What Agnès was saying is that typically on the Fairphone 3, they hadn’t negotiated some contracts very well, which means that there are certain components on which they had problems with support when moving from versions of Android. So my question is, how long can you commit to maintaining the phone and being able to mount versions? How’s it going for you?

Gaël: That’s kind of the limit of the model. I think what we’re talking about, Agnès, is software support on firmware, especially the modem typically.

The fingerprint sensor, for example, was the example she gave. There’s two things, you’ve got the OS and then there’s all these very low-level layers. So clearly that’s the limit of our model, it’s that we, the small firmware that is used to exploit the camera, the fingerprint sensor or even the NFC module, we don’t have control over it. These are proprietary components. Unfortunately in the smartphone world, this is the norm, we have no choice, we suffer it. I hope that one day we will find a way to address this problem better, but right now we are completely stuck. After that, it depends on how you work. The problem, I think she was going to refer to, is possibly having a firmware that won’t work anymore because they have a version of Android that’s too restricted, either it’s going to work but it’s a little outdated. For now, we’ve never really seen this problem and we continue to be able to keep old phones alive, including the Fairphone 2 that they stopped supporting in April: we continue to support it. Clearly, on really old models like that, you’re going to have the OS that can be quite up-to-date, even maybe very recent, very functional, but you can have firmware in the lower layers that are going to be quite old. Potentially, there may be questions about security updates that will be old, etc. So there can be those kinds of questions.

But you still have a phone that can go on living. And for a lot of people, that’s still important. For sustainable development, this is also important. We’re trying to juggle all that. And I don’t think we were stuck, at least for now. We’ll see how it goes with the Fairphone 3. Really, you see something that stops working because the firmware is too old or that kind of thing.

Walid: I discovered /e/ myself because I installed it on a 2017 Moto E, an old phone. I flashed the phone with /e/ and I was super impressed: the phone has become super fast and I still use it as my backup phone. Last question on this subject: what has the Murena One taught you in terms of feedback?

Gaël: So the Murena One, we encountered problems, what did it teach us? Good question. Maybe on a project like this, you really shouldn’t leave anything to chance, that is to say that the thing has to be bordered, but really on all subjects. What we noticed is that on the Murena One port, when we ported /e/OS to the Murena 1 hardware, it was relatively fast, it takes a month, a month, a month and a half, it depends. And then, at some point, you have the impression that everything is working, that is to say that the phone starts, you have the screen, the touch screen it works, you have the sound, you have the Wi-Fi, the SIM it seems to work, all that.

Murena One (source: murena.com)

And then, you say to yourself it’s cool, that’s it, it’s good, it’s done. Except that, if you push your tests a little further, in depth, you will often start to encounter problems on a particular thing. For example, Bluetooth works. Oh yes, but on the other hand, I tested Bluetooth audio on AirPods audio, and it doesn’t work, the sound doesn’t work. Then you say to yourself, “oh, it’s stupid, because Bluetooth works, the thing, the connection is made, but the sound doesn’t come through, it doesn’t arrive”. In the end, I didn’t finish the job, I didn’t finish the job. You have the impression that your carrying effort is intense at the beginning and that afterwards it’s ok, but in fact no it’s not exactly that, it’s that you have a big effort to make at the beginning to make it work, then you have a kind of plateau where you will continue to develop, to improve things, to take your product to the next level. And in the end, to really go to an acceptable quality, to put a product on the market for a user who doesn’t give a shit, they just want it to work, it’s normal, there you still have a huge effort to make to finish all the little details and sometimes come back to your technical partner, the intermediary of the ODM, and tell him “well yes but there on the second lens, the focus doesn’t work well or you have to be at least 3 meters”, etc., and go into this kind of details so that in the end you are pretty sure that 99% of the features will work as expected. We were a little aware of it before, but with the Murena 1 it was really a big realization that you have to plan almost 6 months for a launch.

Walid: You can’t do unit tests on that, it’s complicated, it’s necessarily human who will have to test?

Gaël: That’s right, and then with a combinatorial explosion of possible cases because it’s a stupid thing, but sometimes you’ll have a phone that works very well with an Orange SIM and then you’ll realize that you have a customer who uses a Bouygues SIM and that, in his case, tethering doesn’t work. And then you say “oh yes anyway”. Just the fact that it’s a Bouygues SIM, the rest works, SMS works, but tethering doesn’t work. I never imagined that you could have specific cases like this on a particular operator. And we have a few of them in Germany, and each time it can be a bit long to debug, to test because you have to find the SIM, you will test it on which network, etc. So it’s a big challenge to make a Smartphone.

Walid: yes, that’s clear. The next topic that interests me is the relationships you have with other projects and with the free ecosystem in particular. What is your relationship with LineageOS, with MicroG? Do you pay them for developments? How does it work? What can you explain to us?

Gaël: It’s an ecosystem that is profoundly unstructured. So it’s wild and it depends a lot on the relationships you can have with a certain person who is in the ecosystem, that’s mostly it. LineageOS, basically we have very few relationships. So we have relationships with LineageOS developers, who sometimes come to work for us. But in fact, LineageOS is quite a community-based project, which is not really centralized. On the other hand, MicroG, much more. For the time being, we are funding Marvin Wißfeld who is the founder of MicroG.

We are funding another person from elsewhere on this project who is contributing, and a third person.

Walid: Is it about specific features or is it more about sponsorship?

Gaël: So for MicroG it’s really sponsorship. The idea is that he can work serenely on the project without worrying about going shopping tomorrow. On MicroG we don’t influence, we don’t say “hey, we need this, we need this, we need that” and then sometimes we say “it would be nice if we had this. Do you think we can do it? Does that fit your vision of the thing?” It works more like that. Yes, yes, there is a real support that has been there for at least two years, maybe a little more. Micro-G, for those who are listening, is a totally open source software brick that allows you to recreate the entire Play Services part of Google because we remove it. It’s proprietary, we remove it, we don’t want it in the OS, so we replace it with MicroG and that allows access to certain services for example geolocation etc. We use Mozilla databases but it can also be to access the push notifications that arrive in your phone: it goes through a Google service so we want to anonymize it. So we’re going through MicroG for that. But in Play Services there must be 40 or 50 APIs. It’s colossal: it’s their way of owning Android that is basically open source. And so out of those 40 or 50 APIs, there’s maybe only 10 that are implemented. These are the most visible, the most important. Most people don’t realize that there are still 30 missing that aren’t implemented. But there’s still a lot of work to be done on MicroG. That’s why we’re adding resources, we’re trying to find funding for MicroG, we’re setting up projects for them.

So there you have it. To answer your question, it’s really on a case-by-case basis, depending on the fit. Are we contributing? Yes. On Nextcloud, for example, we contribute patches, improvements, fixed bugs, stuff like that. On other projects too, we’re pushing stuff. And after that, it’s very variable. On a case-by-case basis.

Walid: I find it really interesting to understand how a society evolves in its ecosystem.

Gaël: Maybe add to that. As it happens, it hasn’t been announced yet, but I can speak to it, I think, because it’s done anyway. he Foundation has set up a project following a call for a European project. We did a tremendous amount of work to file a major application this year. This project is called Mobifree, and in this project, we invited a lot of European projects, including F-Droid. F-Droid is an open source app store. Including MicroG, there are a lot of nice open source projects that we use around mobile, so on the app store, on MicroG, on the OS, on a lot of subjects. The European Union has subsidized us to the tune of several million for this project. It’s really a subsidy and it’s the Foundation that will redistribute all this money to all these projects. So that’s what we’re also here for, to promote the open source ecosystem in Europe.

It’s also our way of contributing, of finding funding to keep it alive.

Walid: So the clock is ticking, and I’d like to talk about FairTEC. Can you tell us a bit about FairTEC? What is your role in FairTEC?

FairTEC (source: fairtech.io)

Gaël: FairTEC was initially an initiative of Fairphone, which launched the idea of joining forces to launch a joint offer. You see, Fairphone, they make phones at the hardware level. We did the OS and then you have other players. Telecoop, they offer mobile phones with a slightly different vision: the idea is not to overconsume. Their data plans, they don’t do 50 gigabytes because they tell you that maybe it’s not useful to consume 50 gigabytes. And everywhere in Europe, you also have WEetell which does a bit of the same thing, you have Commown on the smartphone rental part. We all got together, we understood that a Fairphone customer, he might want to have /e/OS on it and maybe with a Telecoop SIM you know, or WEtell in other countries, so it really started like that.

So, in terms of business, it didn’t really come to fruition. We are not yet equipped to successfully sell a set consisting of a phone, a SIM card, and possibly other accessories to a customer who would like to have it. Currently, if he wants the SIM card, he has to go to Telecoop, and if he wants the phone, he can come to us, to Fairphone or to Commown. On a business level, this did not materialize as we imagined. However, it has allowed us to communicate, to let people know that we exist, that we have a different and more virtuous vision of the smartphone and telephony market. It also allowed us to get to know each other better and work together. I think we’re all kind of on the same page. At the moment, we are thinking about how to evolve FairTEC to revitalize it and perhaps make it a little more concrete.

Walid: The last topic is about the challenges ahead for /e/ and for Murena. This is a very broad question. What are the challenges you see in the coming years?

This is a very broad question. Sorry.

Gaël: Obviously, you can imagine that on an OS like /e/OS, we have projects in all directions. Unfortunately, a bit too much, so we try to be focused. That’s also why sometimes there are frustrations, because you have small topics: for example, default applications. We should be able to uninstall them. It’s been 3-4 years that we’ve been saying and agreeing, but in fact, a small, quote-unquote, feature like that behind a development that is colossal. So far, we haven’t done that. I think one day we’re going to do it, and right now, it’s in the roadmap. But sometimes, you have other priorities. When you have a big bug, when you have a big thing to integrate, a new version of Android to support, it’s always a question. You always have priorities, you have to make choices and manage resources. That’s the side that can be a little frustrating.

So, for me, the future is really about continuing to progress. We also have topics on end-to-end encryption that we want to bring to the cloud. We have a lot of topics about tracker detection because we haven’t talked about it too much, but we have a module in /e/OS that allows you to detect trackers, well, trackers in French, and cut them off. It’s a trick that works well but today works in a fairly static way, that is to say that you have to feed it regularly with identified lists of trackers that you have known. And that’s something we’d like to make a lot more dynamic. And so we have a thesis in artificial intelligence that will arrive this year, a PhD student who is getting into it because we have leads, things that have been done in other fields, ad detection, adblocker, all that, that we should be able to set up on the OS, but with a lot of challenges. And research is quite exciting. For us, in terms of strategy, what is important is to grow. I’m convinced that the world is changing, there’s a lot of things going on, sometimes it’s a bit scary, but I think there are also a lot of people, a lot of people who want to make more virtuous choices in their lives. They often prefer to eat organic, maybe have an electric car rather than a diesel car, because you know you’re having an impact, because you want to have a healthier life and have more virtuous values. We’re really committed to that, on the protection of personal data, but also on sustainability because the OS we’re developing, it allows phones to live longer and just a small parenthesis, but 80% of the carbon impact of a smartphone is on its construction, its marketing and only 20% on its use. So if you make it live three times longer over its lifetime, you divide, you mitigate its impact over three times as long, it’s very interesting.

There you go. But so we are totally convinced that in Europe at least, but also probably in the United States, something is happening, that the market is asking for something else. After that, we have to get bigger, and in order to get bigger, we also need to be able to make ourselves better known. So, marketing, communication. We have to start really thinking about it a lot more than we have done in the past, and then finance ourselves because there are times when we have to invest to grow, to develop products, to make ourselves known. So, a lot of challenges, but that’s the nature of a project like ours and it’s quite exciting, it motivates you to get up in the morning.

Walid: I think there’s still work to be done, for example on the professional profile. I find that it’s not necessarily very clear and that there is really work to be done, especially when you have a professional account which is a Google account, it’s a bit complicated.

I wanted to point out that I thought your release rhythm was very cool, which was basically a month, instead of something like that. And then I wanted to know a little bit how you build the roadmap?

Gaël: We do one release per month, at least in general, unless there are any mishaps along the way, but because we have security updates to push into the product. And yes, I totally agree with you. On the pro side, in 2024, this will be the year when we will start an extension to B2B. Today, we were really focused on the personal user. And here, we’re going to move more towards B2B offers that we’re going to derive, both in the cloud and in smartphone fleet management. So there you have it, all these topics we’re going to start really working on them.

Walid: Open source smartphone fleet management, we talk about it a little bit with Florent from Commown in his episode, there’s not much, there’s everything to do. We’ve swept the subject quite a bit. Before I leave you, I’m going to give you the floor for an op-ed. You can say whatever you want to tell us.

Gaël: I just want to say, come and take a look at what we do. I think that’s also what you were saying earlier, which is that in this smartphone market, which is dominated by giants, there are now commercial practices with the aim of selling you a smartphone as quickly as possible. In other words, your smartphone is going to live an average of 2.7 years, apparently, if the statistics are to be believed. After that, it is considered obsolete, and it is encouraged to buy a new one. We are not in that perspective at all. It is believed that a smartphone should, on the contrary, live as long as possible. As you said with your Motorola, I’ve also noticed that there are phones that are 6, 7 or even 8 years old. Take an old phone, running Android, that hasn’t been maintained for years: it’s completely outdated, apps don’t work anymore, it’s slow because of unnecessary apps, etc. You install /e/OS instead and you end up with a phone that’s as good as the first day, if not almost as fast.

Take an old phone, running Android, that hasn’t been maintained for years: it’s completely outdated, apps don’t work anymore, it’s slow because of unnecessary apps, etc. You install /e/OS instead and you end up with a phone that’s as good as the first day, if not almost as fast.

And then you realize that the smartphone industry is selling you something completely fake. When you are told to buy the new phone because it’s so much better, so much faster, that’s kind of true, but not that much. Okay, there’s going to be a little bit more RAM, but apps, now, if you don’t have at least 3GB of RAM, it might start to get complicated. For the past 2-3 years, the specs have changed very little, so there’s no reason why phones can’t last much longer. What I want to say is, take an interest in what we do. You’ll see, it’s a much more serene world with phones that are there to do most of the uses we need: take a picture, send an email, send text messages, call, receive calls, use a few apps, and everything goes super well. You won’t be bothered by ads everywhere, viruses, and you won’t hand over your personal data to Google.

Walid: That’s the last word. First of all, I would like to thank you, as a very satisfied user of /e/OS, for all your work.

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us in depth. For listeners, if you enjoyed it, feel free to spin this episode. You can leave comments, especially on Mastodon, where I reply quite regularly, by email or also on LinkedIn. You can find all the contact details on the projet-libre.org website. See you soon, stay well and Gaël, I hope to see you next time.

Gaël: Thank you.

This episode is taped on December 29, 2023.

Links about /e/OS, Murena and Gaël Duval

• Gaël Duval’s LinkedIn profile
• Gaël Duval’s Mastodon Account
• Gaël Duval’s website
• /e/ foundation
• The Murena site

License

This podcast is published under the double license Art Libre 1.3 or later – CC BY-SA 2.0 or later.

podcast.projets-libres.org/@pr…

Sommaire

• 1 Interview with Benjamin Jean
• 2 Learn more about Benjamin Jean and Inno3
• 3 License

Interview with Benjamin Jean

Let’s meet the profession of lawyer specialized in free software, with Benjamin Jean.
Benjamin is a lawyer by training, and founder of Inno3

Walid Nouh: Hello and welcome to Free Projects!. My name is Walid Nouh, I fell into the cauldron of free software more than 20 years ago. Whether you are an experienced librist or a neophyte, come and discover with me the portraits of the women and men who make free software: communities, economic models, contributions, we tell you everything.

Hello and welcome to Free Projects!. It’s July [2023] 5th and today we’re going to talk about the profession of free software lawyer. When I think of the term “free software lawyer”, I immediately think of licenses, but also of some of the media lawsuits that we have had or other lawsuits about license violations. Yet, this is only a small part of what lawyers do.
To talk about this profession, I invited Benjamin Jean, a French actor who has been involved in free software for a very long time and founder of the firm Inno³. Benjamin will present to us the different actions he carries out on a daily basis.
Benjamin, thank you so much for being here, I hope you’re doing well.

Benjamin Jean: Hello. All right, thank you very much. Nice to be with you.

Benjamin Jean (source: LinkedIn profile)

Walid Nouh: Could you tell us about your background and when did you discover Free Software?

Benjamin Jean: Benjamin Jean, I am a lawyer by training, specialized in intellectual property. In intellectual property with two themes: everything that was applied to music, jazz music, everything that was improvisation and collective work in music and also everything that was related to software development because I had done it myself a little before. As soon as I finished my studies, I was hired by a free software development company, knowing that I had done my thesis at the time on the subject of open source license compatibility, so I was already quite immersed. So much for me.
Today, I am the founder of Inno³ , which is a somewhat hybrid structure. There are ten of us today. In the firm, there are only three lawyers, including a PhD student, a PhD student and the rest are skills that are either software engineers, designers, or more socio-oriented, uses. Above all, we support both acculturation, the understanding of the legal dimension of licenses in which actors who use or disseminate free software and Open Source ; The whole community dimension as well, how to organize collaboration within a diverse community, the public/private actors internationally.

Walid Nouh: You tell us that you have a bit of a technical background At what point, in your career, did you come across free software?

Benjamin Jean: From the moment you develop. It wasn’t that long ago but still, in 2001 I think, my baccalaureate project was to develop a search engine. I used open source extensively, in fact that was the basis.
In any case, to develop, you had to use free and open source software. At the time, I didn’t have the legal culture that I later acquired, which allowed me to specialize not in development, I don’t develop at all anymore, but in the legal dimension associated with it. Beyond the legal, all the tools that allow this interfacing between many actors all over the world.

Walid Nouh: As a lawyer, how do you define a bachelor’s degree?

Benjamin Jean: There are several ways to answer this. The very notion of license is not something that is defined by law for the copyright part, it is more a vision, it is the terminology that is used in the US.
A license is an offer to contract in the sense that the author, or authors, of a software, associate their software with an offer by saying “if you ever want to use it, then you must respect the conditions that are associated”. It is therefore an offer of contract by which the author gives, in any case shares in a non-exclusive way – that is to say, he shares his rights, but he also keeps them for himself, he does not dispossess them – all his intellectual property rights associated with the contributions he has been able to make for the whole world, for the entire duration of the rights and free of charge, This is also an important point.
Whoever wants to use the software accesses the software, reads the contract, accepts it and, from there, can benefit from the rights that are in the license, as long as he complies with the conditions attached to the benefit of these rights. This is where there is sometimes misuse: if you don’t comply with the conditions, then the licence ends and you become an infringer. Very recently, there was a lawsuit lost by Orange on the subject, regardless of who lost it, a lawsuit that reminded us that the simple fact of not respecting the license does not allow us to claim the benefit of the other parts of the license, so we fall back on the counterfeiting.

Walid Nouh: So, initially, you started by developing, then you went to law school. How did you manage to integrate yourself into this legislative work around licensing?

Benjamin Jean: It’s always the same, it’s meetings, it’s people with whom I’ve had to set up projects. At the beginning, the involvement was mainly in the communities, such as Framasoft and I am still part of it, but by far, I am by far the most inactive of the association. We had created a sub-project, which was also an association called Veni, Vidi, Libri, which was doing the task of responding to the requests of the various projects that were stumbling over the issue of licensing, the issue of CLA contracts [Contributor License Agreement], contribution contracts, anything that was a little too legal for them and that seemed easy to us on the one hand to solve and then to document to allow others to find answers. This is the subject of Veni, Vidi, Libri.

Veni Vidi Libri (source: inno3)

What interested me, and which also responds to part of what you mentioned earlier about the process of creating a license in directing, is precisely that there were very few actors working on these subjects. When I first became interested in analyzing free licenses and Open Source, what was complicated was that there was very little literature so, overall, it was reading two or three bachelor’s degrees a night, drawing an analysis from it and, from analysis to analysis, trying to come out with a matrix and a reading grid. Today, these are things that are much more shared. Moreover, it is very easy, from a license, to find the structure that can then be compared to another license.
At the time there wasn’t all that, so there weren’t many people still involved and a community that was quite small, but that helped each other a lot, that sought to share the legal solutions that were found by one or the other.

There was also an understanding of the legal profession. I don’t know if it’s well worded, but a lot of free licenses and Open Source were written by non-lawyers, people who were not in the legal profession at all; That’s a good thing because it means it met their needs. On the other hand, in the same way as when a lawyer develops software, there are some imperfections in the way of doing things.
Then, there were these meetings between lawyers and developers, hackers, free software communities, in which lawyers began to be more involved and to bring to the drafting of contracts that were both more traditional in the sense of the uses that existed in the legal world, but also, perhaps, more relevant, perhaps more suited to the needs of the projects from a legal point of view.
The work of writing a license is something that doesn’t happen every day either, I think it’s only part of the lawyer’s role in the free and open source community. This work is now being done more and more in consultation between lawyers, between the communities concerned, and it also contributes to the commitment of the actors.
If a license isn’t used, it’s of little use. Today, many licenses are no longer used and, in the end, are somewhat relegated to the background. Sometimes we see projects that use them and, when this is the case, we regret a little because we know that behind it there is not really a doctrine in the sense of being able to interpret the inaccuracies of the license, there is no follow-up: if we ever want to contact the authors of the license they are not available, They don’t have dedicated resources. There is still a role of vision, a spotlight that is put on only a few licenses. This is also what the Open Source Initiative is increasingly doing, i.e. trying to combat the proliferation of licenses and helping developers and communities choose the licenses that best suit their projects.

OSI (source: wikipedia)

Walid Nouh: Is that what you call standardization? In fact, I discovered that at the beginning of free software there were a few licenses but nothing well standardized and that, at some point, there was a need to standardize licenses to be able to scale up and have more understandable things.

Benjamin Jean: That has been done, but not by lawyers. You know that law is a lot of common sense. At the time, in the very early days of free and open source licenses, they were just project-by-project licenses. We had the GNU Emacs Public License, the GNU General Public License , and so on. One day they said to themselves, “If we want other projects to be able to reuse the license and to be able to share code more easily from one project to another, we need to have a generic license.” The GNU General Public License, the GPL, is this idea of “I take a specific project out of it and make it a license that can be used on other projects”. The first projects that used it were Linux, Perl . It showed this interest for projects other than those of the Free Software Foundation at the time, to have generic tools that could be used, because it was a bit agnostic, at the time it was considered as such. For me, the success of free and open source licenses is precisely that they have become standards.

Licensing is a legal interface — I don’t know if I used the term interface earlier. Licenses are really what allow humans or organizations to work with each other, so for it to work, they have to be standardized, it’s like code. The success of free licenses and Open Source That’s really it: wherever you are in the world, this version of the MIT It’s the same version, to use a completely free license; License Apache 2.0 is the same version, we associate it with effects that are almost the same, and that’s why we can work together.

Walid Nouh: So there’s a lot of licenses out there. What’s the point of having licenses on a French or European scale?, because we’re talking about MIT, we’re talking about Apache licenses, which are licenses that were written by Americans.

Benjamin Jean: Yes, completely the majority of licenses are American, anyway. It can be explained, I could spend some time on the explanation.
The question of the underlying need for new licenses is, for me, crucial, but it’s not that automatic. This may be part of the biases of lawyers: lawyers often tend, when they are asked to draft a contract or to modify or amend a contract, to start from scratch, because, simply, they have better control, it responds to their practices, their uses, so they are confident.
I think there are quite a few free and open source licenses that, at the beginning, were written because it was secure. And that was certainly also one of the reasons why open source, in the beginning, had so much enthusiasm from companies: a lot of companies said “great, I’m going to create my own license”. At the time, right after the creation of the Open Source Initiative, in the 2000s, we had the definition, the open source definition, so there are a lot of new licenses, including the Mozilla Public License, that took the existing licensing models and modified them a bit. We ended up with a proliferation: in five or six years there were hundreds of new licenses. Then, fortunately, we went back, we limited the number of licenses, but I think that at the time it was a good thing for companies that were not borrowing from Free Software to feel confident by saying “we adapted it; We had this need, we did it. »

The issue of French-language licences — licences CeCILL not to mention them, they are those of the CNRS/Inria — were drafted by French research centers because they considered, this is a fair and very legal view, that licenses Open Source did not meet the formalities and obligations to which they were subject. Creating these licenses was a way to remove a barrier to open source, so it was an interesting response from that point of view, saying “we can release under the CeCILL license, plus it’s compatible with the GPL, so later, if people want to merge, take some of our code to develop, reuse in some other projects, they can do it.”

The EUPL license is a little different. It was Europe that said “because of my statutes, I cannot commit myself like a stranger”. Europe cannot end up in the court, I mean anything, of South Carolina, because there has been infringement. There is therefore a stance that was to say “we must necessarily have contracts that are adapted to the specificity that is Europe in view of the whole world”. So this is a new licence, which is not an uninteresting licence, which is currently used mainly by Europe for its own programmes, and which is not intended to be used by other projects. In fact, as written, it is a license that mainly allows other projects to use code that has been developed under the EUPL license, but it is not a license that aims to centralize third-party developments on its own projects.

CeCILL licenses, in France, are a little different. I think that at the time there was this need, today there is no longer this need, people use classic free and open source licenses, no longer need to use CeCILL licenses to be reassured. On the contrary, when I discuss it with research centres, I tend to advise them not to use CeCILL licenses because, in fact – this is a repetition of what I mentioned earlier – they find themselves without internal support or even sometimes with disagreements on how to interpret the license. I think that if you use a free and open source license, most of the time it’s to simplify your life. Anything that complicates collaboration, interpretation, that leads to discussions, to further negotiations, is rather to be avoided.

Walid Nouh: Depending on the licenses used, it can be more or less complicated for a developer to contribute to a project. I guess if you’re a foreign contributor on a project that uses a CeCILl license, it must be more complicated.

Benjamin Jean: Let’s just say that it’s very cocky, it displays the French flag. Those who know the licenses will say “anyway it’s compatible with the AGPL, so I don’t even need to read it, I check the AGPL license”. Those who don’t know the license, who will read it to try to understand it, it’s complicated. If you read all the CeCILl licenses, for me there are real topics, it’s not as fluid and clear as it should be.

Walid Nouh: You mentioned the fact that at the beginning, when you arrived, you were a small community of lawyers, that you talked a lot. What does the French legal community in which you work represent? I guess it’s not a very big community, that you all know each other.

Benjamin Jean: Yes. There aren’t many lawyers who work on these subjects, in fact there are quite a few who have also worked at the firm, I think that we feed through the internships, through the people who come through us, this training, this acculturation to Free Software and then it’s maintained.
It is not easy to say how many lawyers are now working on these issues. I think that in France, globally, it is mainly the lawyers of companies either who unlock free software and Open Source, who have this sensitivity, i.e., increasingly, heavy users of free software and Open Source who are forced to improve their skills on the game Open Source Compliance, thus bringing their software into compliance with the licenses of the components Open Source that they use. It comes slowly. That’s one way of counting it. Every year we give training and every year, for the past ten years, I think we have trained about twenty people. We are not the only ones to provide training on these aspects, but almost, I think it is quite representative of the people concerned.
In addition to lawyers, there are lawyers within companies. There are no law firms that do just that, that are only focused on open source. On the other hand, there are still quite a few firms, rather digitally oriented, that are starting to show competence in these subjects because they have enough clients to maintain their level of expertise.

FSFE (source: wikipedia)

At the European level, there is a network of lawyers led by the Free Software Foundation Europe. It’s very open, and there are plenty of American lawyers. Today there are more than 500 of us; At the time, more than ten years ago, there were about ten of us, now it’s several hundred, in fact I think we are well over 500 now. And here, it’s exchanges between lawyers to be able to put on the table a little bit of the topics of the moment, sometimes also to identify the key resources to anticipate conflicts because there are some, it happens. It’s also another way of seeing that the community has diversified with projects like SPDX that are technical-legal. SPDX has two sides. One of the sides is to be able to have a unique identifier per license and the second is to be able to have a file in a format that concentrates all the information, the metadata of a package of a global project. There are a lot of lawyers from a lot of organizations as well. However, we can see that competence is increasingly shared.

Walid Nouh: How do you talk to each other in the community? Do you have meetups like in free software? For example, we can meet at FOSDEM [Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting] and do our team meetings. How do you collaborate between lawyers from different countries?

Benjamin Jean: I’d say it’s mostly through events. There’s a list I was talking about earlier, a FSFE mailing list. Otherwise, it’s more events that FSFE organises. There is also an annual event called EOLE, European & Free Software Law Event. This is an example. The interest of this type of event is to be able to meet, exchange, update our respective practices.

EOLE (source: inno3)

EOLE, for this year, is a bit related to what you just mentioned: there is a final face-to-face event, in Paris, in December. But we organize a few webinars, even workshops, plus workshops. I moderated the first one, the second one was moderated by Malcolm Bain, who is a Spanish lawyer who is very involved in these subjects, there were about twenty people. Each time, they are truly lawyers who share everything they can share, both on the needs and on the answers provided on their side. There are more needs than answers today, but that is precisely the purpose of this sharing.

Walid Nouh: Earlier you were talking about a license and clarifying well-known licenses like a GPLv3, an AGPLv3. Are there still things to clarify or is it more about newer or less used licenses?

Benjamin Jean: There are still grey areas on GPL-type licenses, but they are voluntary grey areas. I don’t think there’s necessarily a consensus in the legal community on this, but the license is also a bargaining tool and it can be used to twist the arm of those who don’t want to share. There is always that issue. Not everyone around the table has the same goals. You have to be aware of the fact that you don’t agree all the time, so that you can save yourself a few weapons in case of disagreement.
In GPL-type licenses, there are things that are interpreted in particular in the FAQs of the FSE, the Free Software Foundation, in an ultra-extensible way or in a rather biased way. When reading the FAQs, the questions are asked in such a way that the answers are obvious. However, sometimes the questions are not so simple. This dimension of interpretation of licenses is an issue for me. We try to support in maximization, so that there are more and more people who use, who join open source communities. For us, it’s about acculturation and erasing all the grey areas.

On the interpretation side, we launched a project, I didn’t talk about it earlier, but it’s a bit like what I was talking about, which is called Hermine. It is both a software for bringing open source compliance, internally, to organizations, especially from a legal point of view, and also an open database, under an open data license, for interpretation, or at least for understanding related to licenses. The goal is to do this work: rather than having a different reading of the same license or convergent readings, we don’t even know it, to have a standard, a somewhat consensual reading of this license by telling ourselves that everyone can then install the software at home and modify the database, but that we start from a starting point to facilitate consensus and also to better manage risks.
I think there is still a lot of work to be done, but we are starting to find solutions that are sometimes technical. The example of Hermine is technical, even if it relies on a community of lawyers who feed it, and that’s a good thing. The interest of the technique is that we have channels, the shape is there, so we are forced to agree on what goes through these pipes. This is a good thing because it simplifies the answers internally and also externally. One of the challenges of open source is also the collaboration we will have with the other players in the Supply Chain, the idea is that we are more or less in tune with the answers we can provide to each understanding of the licenses we use globally.

Walid Nouh: Let’s say I’m someone who wants to make free software, I’m going to upload my code to a platform, I’m going to have to choose a license. If I’m not an expert, what are the big things I need to pay attention to? And where can I find documentation to learn more about these topics?

Benjamin Jean: To answer the first point, when you want to release under a free or open source license, the first question is: are we able to do it?, so we already know what are the constraints we have internally, within the organization, on the one hand. We can have contracts with third parties, it doesn’t matter, there can be contradictory commitments, and with regard to the project too, especially if the project uses dependencies that are subject to binding licenses, whatever they are, it will condition the choice we can make in fine with its own license.

Other factors must be taken into account on the organization and on the project. I say anything, “I am a French administration, the number of licenses, the choice I can make in terms of distribution under a free license is limited”; there are about fifteen licenses that can be used by the French administrations and not others, there is a list by decree of the Prime Minister. All right, you have to take that into account.
The project itself is a SaaS [Software as a Service] project, the same, you have to take into account the specificities related to the project because not all licenses integrate these types of exploitation.

Once we have a clear vision of what our needs are and also our internal constraints, the way we proceed when we want to rationalize the choice of a license is to list our objectives: what is important to us?, simplicity, internationality, modularity, compatibility with other projects. So we list a few things like that, we really have to do it on a blank sheet of paper which allows us to objectify why we would choose this license or that license. Once you’ve done that, it’s pretty easy. There are a lot of free licenses and Open source, as we said earlier, but, overall, the most used licenses are about fifteen, 10/15 licenses. So we can take the most well-known, the most widely used licenses and, just based on the criteria we established before, determine which ones meet the need.
It’s quite easy once you’ve done this exercise, it really doesn’t take much time, to converge on the choice of the Affero GPL or the choice of the Apache license.

It’s a little more complicated when you’re in a large group, when there are a lot of people with a lot of different needs that are sometimes incompatible, but it can be reconciled.
In the light of the criteria that are important to us once we have laid everything flat, it is interesting to note that sometimes two completely different licenses can be quite relevant for the same project. It’s a choice, we have to choose: either we stay, I have an example in mind, on Affero LPG because we really want to orient towards the popular dimension of the project, to make sure that all the contributions are well paid, reshared and so on; either we choose the Apache license because we think that in the end it will maximize uses and, overall, we know that the actors will actually pay, or we set up other mechanisms that are not necessarily legal so that they are encouraged to redistribute the contributions they make to the project. It’s all understandable overall.

Where can I find resources on these topics? There’s Veni, Vidi, Libri , that was one of the goals of the site which is no longer online, so it’s problematic.
On Wikipedia you can find a lot of information. It must be said that at the time, when we launched Veni, Vidi, Libri, Wikipedia was very incomplete on these subjects, this is no longer the case, now there are a lot of resources.
Secondly, there are some tried and tested methodologies. We had shared things, but more in the form of articles. I find that it is perhaps not easy enough, today, to grasp these different steps that lead to the choice of license. It makes me think, it just comes like that, that maybe it deserves to have some kind of materialization, formatting just on a page of everything I just said to clarify: I have to choose my license, here are the different steps and what it can lead me to. We do it on other projects. We are currently working on what we call a commons model canvas, a kind of Business Model Canvas adapted to the implementation of a logic of commons within a community, i.e. a project of open resources that are managed and maintained by its users. These are things where there’s a little bit of brain juice at first, but once you put it on you can put it on A4 or A3 and it’s quite debilitating, people can quite easily grab it afterwards.

Walid Nouh: So it would be within my reach?

Benjamin Jean: That would be helpful.

Walid Nouh: When I do interviews with free software projects, I always ask which license they chose and why. The answers are quite interesting.
If I take my example, in the software I use you will often find two licenses that are quite opposed. There are many who will choose AGPL licenses because they want to be sure that all contributions will be returned. At the other end of the spectrum, there are quite a few projects that use an MIT license. I’ve always had a bit of a problem with that because, for me, the MIT license is, basically, you get the source code and then you do whatever you want with it, you can include it in proprietary software. What makes people want to choose an MIT license?

Benjamin Jean: On the example of MIT or Apache, but MIT, I think that it is precisely the projects that are in a search for excessive simplicity. In fact, we prefer to set aside everything that would be a little too legal, too complicated and, in the end, these are projects that consider that if there are no contributions it is not very serious and if they have to come, they will come. There must be no restrictions on its use.
MIT is because we want simplicity to excess, we want the reading to be done, it’s five lines.
The Apache license is when you are in a logic where you want to favor uses, but you still want to secure legally. For me, it’s quite well-known, it’s just a standard. People aren’t going to read the Apache license every time they see it, they understand that it’s an Apache license and that’s enough for them.
The advantage of MIT or Apache, even more Apache, is from a more industrial community point of view, it’s going to be a big plus to the contribution because in fact it reassures them.
MIT is perhaps more about communities, and in fact in research it is very much used. This is more, I would say, an affinity, it’s not personal, it’s just that the researchers are used to, so they are comfortable with projects under the MIT license. When they see other projects, they can simply be put off. If they have to compare them to another project that looks similar but is under the MIT license, they will favor the MIT project.
There is this communication side through the use of open source licenses that can be important. That is my first answer.

The question of how we can engage, beyond the dimension of the choice of license, I think it’s the whole question of the tools we make available to the community, the way we animate in the sense that we really provide all the processes, the rules and the framework so that the actors feel confident, can easily contribute, share their contributions on the project without feeling completely stupid because this is effectively their debut. It’s more these devices that are going to be useful.
That’s for projects that are quite community-based, open and more with individuals.

For projects that will concern organizations, we will think more about partnerships or distribution logics as well, saying “in the end you have an interest in participating in this project because you have a lot of trouble with your business, so there are other contracts on the side that secure the whole”.

An important point. We talk about licenses, but in a project, there are other aspects that make it safer, I’m thinking in particular of CODs. DCOs are these little documents, I don’t know what term to use in French, attestation of authorship, overall it’s just a statement from the author who says that he is aware that what he puts in this project is distributed according to the license of the project, already he indicates that his contribution will be distributed under a free license, and attests that he acknowledges that he does indeed have the rights to what he contributes and, if he does not have them, he has had the authorization of the persons concerned.
These are things that we see almost systematically today, which are in a completely horizontal logic in the sense that we do not seek to centralize rights, everyone remains the holder of their own rights, but which make it possible to erase other risks, to reduce other risks that we have in theOpen Source which is that we use contributions that are brought by people we don’t know and if the person brings anything we are responsible. Lawsuits have been lost on this, behind it there is a company, otherwise there is no point in attacking. This was a company that had a community project and that automatically put on its site the version without any validation of all the contributions that were made to the project. Someone, in my opinion in good faith, took code that didn’t belong to them, contributed it to the project. The company that published the code found itself in a situation of infringement because it published a third party’s code without its authorization and it was convicted.
The issue is how we can reduce this type of risk in a community project because it is in our interest for people to contribute, but we also don’t want it to generate too much risk for the organization.

Walid Nouh: Do we know if there are licenses for which there are more lawsuits or procedures than others?

Benjamin Jean: Yes. There are plenty of copyleft licenses, i.e. with an obligation to share it identically, such as the AGPL, the Affero GPL, the MPL [Mozilla Public License], the EUPL. Copyleft licenses have obligations that are quite restrictive because they impose this sharing of the project’s evolutions, sometimes with grey areas: we don’t know exactly what is the scope of what must be shared, this is where there is sometimes ambiguity, and therefore conflicts.
These licenses, through these particular obligations, will lead to more lawsuits, because, when these obligations are not respected, those who have shared the code, the authors, the rights holders tend to react quite violently by saying “this is the main condition that we associate with the reuse of our code, if you don’t do it if you are an infringer. We’ll warn you once, the second time we’ll hit it very hard.” I think it’s more like those licenses.

Now, to reuse what I have just said, there are still many lawsuits that only concern a non-compliance with formalism. That is, these are people who have said to themselves “I don’t share the source code of the project that I’m reusing because, anyway, it’s available on GitHub in such and such a place”, so they just provide the link. Yes, but the license requires you to provide the source code, not the link. The companies maintain their position, the judge reads the license, considers that indeed they should have done more than that and condemns the company for non-compliance with the license. It’s a bit silly because if they had listened to the community a little bit and if they had better understood the risks in the sense that the very principle of free and open source licenses had been taken into account, they would have been a bit silly. Open Source which is to rely on intellectual property, so the risk of infringement action if it were not respected, all these organizations would not have been condemned as they were.

Walid Nouh: It’s a topic that comes up regularly: if you’re doing a free project you don’t necessarily have a lot of money and if you think there’s a license violation, in that case what organizations are available to you in the free software community to help you defend yourself, because it can be very expensive?

Benjamin Jean: The point is that not just anyone can take action for violating a license. Let me make a quick aside: in the bill for a digital republic by Axelle Lemaire, in 2016, there was the proposal of an article that aimed to allow companies to defend the interests – it was talking about the commons but it could completely concern free software – of communities or people who freely distributed their products, but who were not able to act on their own. There would have been associations, such as consumer associations, which would have been able to act on behalf of. It was not included in the law as it was finally published , and that is a shame.
The problem today is that only rights holders are able to take action for infringement of their licence. If these holders are not structured in an association, in a foundation, in a legal entity that has the means to be able to take legal action, sometimes it’s a bit like David against Goliath, it’s still very difficult to consider taking action against a huge player. Nevertheless, there are a lot of lawsuits in Europe, especially in Germany, that were initiated by the same person, Harald Welte, who was a contributor to Linux, to BusyBox, and who, on that basis, had the interest and the ability to act. He was the one who acted, but he was supported by local associative structures, which financed him in his actions, which was all the better because he was not doing it to make money, he was just doing it to enforce the licenses and he was only asking for compensation for the costs of the lawsuit. It wasn’t profitable, I think it was a very commendable and strong involvement on his part, asking him to pay for everything on top of that, it was complicated.

There are a few structures that are a bit umbrella structures, umbrella foundations, structures that help projects.
The one that would go the most in this direction is the Software Freedom Conservancy, with Bradley Kuhn, which plays this role of hosting projects, but also acting to defend the interests of the projects. They initiated a few lawsuits. It’s still very complicated because often the people who are counterfeiting are also partners. That’s the principle, so it’s a bit like the stick on one side and the carrot on the other and it’s not always easy to know who is typing and who is proposing the carrot, who is trying to rely on these new entrants in free software and Open Source to strengthen the ecosystem and who is hitting on these same players because they are not yet doing things well, so, sometimes, it’s complex. There are structures, I’m thinking of the FSC, so this one.
In France, I know that the Free Software Foundation France, a local chapter of the association, also helped Harald Welte to act against Free at the time. [The Free Software Foundation France was dissolved in February 2022]

Walid Nouh: How does the Free Software Foundation France help? Does it provide resources or money?

Benjamin Jean: From what I know, but I am not involved enough in the structure itself, for me the FSF France is a copy, it just allows to support actions. I am not sure that it has the dedicated budget, that it can really provide the financial means. On the other hand, they make the contacts, they make the network, the interface with other actors who have the means and who can participate in.
I think at the time it was more to provide support and to make sure that the action could succeed. For someone who is not in the business, arriving in France and acting was far from simple. I think they made this intermediation that ultimately made the action possible.

To my knowledge, there are no dedicated funds, except, perhaps, in foundations that have their own budgets.

Just to finish on that, I forgot his name, there was also, in the Linux community, a person who had been a bit of a troll on the subject, a historical contributor who was acting but for personal gain, i.e. he was acting against a lot of companies just to make money on the basis of non-compliance with licenses. What I found interesting is that the community distanced itself from this behavior precisely because it was not in line with the spirit of free software and open source.
I think it’s a good thing, even if it’s not quite sustainable yet, that it’s not a business as such to attack organizations because they’re misusing or not licensing.
It’s a process that takes time, you have to see with all the actors involved in the work. These are people who are quite willing. It’s rare, it’s exceptional, that there’s a desire to harm or that there’s a real knowledge of the misapplication of licenses.

Walid Nouh: If I come back to you and the Inno³ cabinet, what are your daily topics and your current ones?

Benjamin Jean: We mainly work on free software and Open source, a little bit open data and open source hardware and, sometimes, we work on approaches that are a little more macro, or at least more global, such as open science, open innovation, open science and open innovation, plus innovation postures.
We intervene at three main levels: at the project level, we do code audits. In this case, it’s really about identifying, in the code that is used, all the dependencies, the recursive dependencies, having the broadest, most exhaustive Bill of Materials software associated with each license that corresponds to each part of its dependencies and components. We also often do this work of rectifying the license information that is not the right one, because it is still a lot of metadata and it is quite perfectible and to come out with an analysis and a precise idea on what are the ins and outs with regard to all the components used.
The SBOM [Software Bill of Materials] side is a part of our business.
On the project, we always do a lot of valoro, project valorization, so define what is the economic model that we can move towards according to the needs, what the project meets and its needs, and the target communities.

Then, we also do a lot of open source strategy and policy. It’s really about meeting all the departments of an organization, understanding what their processes are, their challenges, their resources and seeing to what extent they can change to better integrate the open source community. It’s a little more than compliance, because we also integrate everything that is sustainable, so the vision of the underlying communities, there may possibly be links with quality or safety. That’s more for private players, there are some public companies too.

We’re doing a little bit of public policy. At the moment, we are doing quite a bit with France Relance. It’s about integrating into policies this idea that everything that is going to be funded must be distributed under a free and open source license, must be produced within the framework of communities that also perpetuate resources over time, so think about that.

The last point, the last level of intervention, is more the ecosystem in the field of mobility. Here we are on an intermediary vehicle, we have done it in other subjects, which is to say how do we bring together all these players, from a more or less developed market, so that they can produce shared web resources and maintain them over time. This is really a systemic vision in which free software, open source, open data, are all means of bringing about collaboration, or at least a clarification of the framework of collaboration between these actors.

Walid Nouh: On this subject of SBOMs, software bills of materials, are companies coming to you to do this work? I saw him do it with French industrialists when I was in presta and it’s a really long, tedious job, which requires a lot of technical skills.

Benjamin Jean: Yes. They are businesses. We also do it quite a bit on behalf of local authorities, there are quite a few local authorities who are in this logic of “we are spreading our project in Open Source, we allow other communities to be able to use it since they have the same needs, the same basic missions.” There are also companies that ask us to help them with this.
Generally, these are not things that we try to perpetuate in the sense that we do it to help them develop their skills and we try to document, to support these actors in understanding the methodology, because it is necessary. It is indeed tedious and the goal is to make it as automated as possible.
Hermine really aims to automate as much of that as possible. The goal of Hermine [16] is to be able to propagate each decision that is taken and to mutualize. In a project, when we detect a dependency that, I mean anything, like a license has a bad SPDX identifier, we fix it once and the goal is to fix it for all the other occurrences of that same dependency. These are things that we try to associate, or at least to equip them. Hermine’s goal is that they also have the tools that allow them to last over time.
One last point. These are indeed things that take a long time, but it’s also a pretty complete job when you allow you to generate Bill of Materials software.
There is a real revival of interest, an awareness of this, especially because in the US it is now something mandatory: as soon as you work with the state, you have to provide exhaustive SBOMs. There are even more and more players positioning themselves on it and that’s a good thing. In fact, we realize that before, what was delivered to the customer did not correspond to what actually worked on the servers in the end. So there was a pretty huge lack of knowledge, because of digital technology and perhaps the complexity of development, of what was actually being bought and what it entailed in terms of the impact of licensing.

Walid Nouh: At the level of the French state, who is working on these issues?

Benjamin Jean: In France, the DINUM, internally, is quite structured with a free software and digital commons pole. There are several of them now. It is also the role of DINUM to have a vision of the infrastructure of all the administrations, of the other ministries to be integrated.

I had worked with them on the French government’s contribution to free software policy a few years ago, which also aimed to be instantiated by any ministry.
Then, beyond the DINUM, these are subjects that we hear. In research centres, this is quite common. There is a real need because there is a lot of open source in research. In the valorization that is made of research projects, on the other hand, these are skills that are still little known and developed, so we often intervene with them.
Then, from a more political strategy point of view, the ADEME, the ANCT, the National Agency for Territorial Cohesion are the key players. Recently, we carried out a mission for the Ministry of National Education, which is increasingly using open source as part of the services it provides to the territory and also encouraging the production of free and open source software.

I’m thinking about it now. In Europe, there is still a fairly strong incentive for free software, and for the digital commons as well. The term “digital commons”, on a voluntary basis, is the terminology that sometimes simplifies access, or at least the change in the posture of public and private actors. For me, it’s quite representative of free software as we understand it, that is to say that it’s oriented, it’s finalized: we think about users, we think about communities. The idea of these commons is precisely that these communities finally get hold of what they need. It’s really moving towards free software, whereas we’re talking about the digital commons. Europe is doing this more and more. This is an important awareness because it reinforces and then supports the policies of the states and, in the states, of the agencies.
Beyond that, on a European scale, there are also pooling that are interesting. We carried out a mission for Europe a year ago, called FOSSEPS[Free Open Source Services for European Public Services], which aimed to identify critical open source software used by the administration in the ultra-broad sense, French cities are part of it, all public actors, and finally to ask themselves what is strategic, critical. It was at the same time when there was a use, in quotation marks, “very important”: we realize that in libraries there is software that is used by all communities, I am exaggerating, so yes, it is critical, it must not work anymore, we must be careful that there are no vulnerabilities and so on.
The other situation was critical because in situations that are indeed critical: I say anything, to promote the role of the SAMU in route calculations, it must not work from one day to the next; It may not be the best example, but there was also this other dimension.
It’s interesting to see that Europe is seizing on this rather lofty and strategic vision of open source with the idea of providing answers, some of which are funding, but not only.

Walid Nouh: It is good that we are talking about the European Union. Because of my past as a librist I may have a bias, but I had the impression that in France or Germany we were rather well off because it is possible to live from free software. In your opinion, are there countries that are more advanced in terms of open source structuring or do they all do it in their own way in different ways?

Benjamin Jean: I think France and Germany are pretty good indeed. The Germans are very industrial in the use of open source. They have very industrial responses as well as quality.
Netherlands, the same, we can take them together.
Italy is much more political: there is an obligation that everything that is bought with public money is open source.
In Spain, precisely in Barcelona, there are more commons logics, it’s interesting to make sure that there are communities of suppliers, economic actors, communities of communities that federate in order to be able to maintain over time.
In the United Kingdom, it was more interoperability logics that also went towards maximizing open source.
In fact, overall, we see interesting things everywhere, but I think it’s relatively different each time. It’s also interesting to see the differences between all these actions.

Walid Nouh: In the end, when you’re talking to people, when you get to the same point but through different front doors, it has to be really interesting.
Last question: are there any major European issues that you follow closely or on which you intervene?

Benjamin Jean: There is the issue of European regulations that may impact open source communities. We had seen this in particular for the whole security dimension, so CRA, Cyber Resilience Act, saying that if too many constraints are placed on communities, Open Source As part of the necessary vulnerability audit, in any case of security, cybersecurity of the end sectors, both we understand the need, but, at the same time, it is not adapted to the communities, so we are going to put the responsibility on the communities for things that they cannot generate. It was a real risk in the sense that a community is not a company, it doesn’t work in the same way and the more we impose on it things that are not interesting to do, the more we disengage the actors.
I think there are really topics like that. To my knowledge, there have been no foundations in Europe, not even actors, who have sought to mobilize to explain how to get open source communities out of these constraints, out of this framework. A bit like exporting against the US. For me, the right way to do this is to say “as long as the project is public, that it is distributed according to a free license, we consider that we do not impose the same thing on it as if it is a project that is not public or of an organization”, it allows us to make the distinction. That’s a point.

Secondly, I find interesting, and rather beneficial, the way in which Europe is currently operating its funding, I am thinking in particular of NGI, Next Generation Internet. These are micro-financings, they are 20 or 30 million. Instead of giving these tens of millions of euros to a project with very large European players and research centres, every four or five years it starts all over again and we start from scratch. In this case, it is non-profit organizations, associative structures that are delegated these budgets and which, then, micro-finance to the tune of 50 to 150 k, rather 50 k, very concrete projects.
I find it super interesting because over phases of three/six months, a year max, it’s based on very punctual, well-defined needs, and then it’s step by step, that is to say that whoever gets financed a first time can get financed a second time. I find that these logics are very compatible with the free and open source software communities and it’s very simple to answer them. I think it’s really a great development from a European funding point of view. Before, they were detached from the field, and now, on the other hand, I have the impression that they are much closer to the field than the majority of other funding we can get.

Walid Nouh: From what you said, I would say that in terms of free software, the future looks bright, or at least it looks positive.

Benjamin Jean: I tend to be positive in general. We are fortunate, at the moment, to have a dynamic that is really very favourable. It’s not yet something sustainable in the sense that it’s based on a few individuals, it’s based on a few experiments, it’s not notched, it’s not set in stone, but it’s still so much better than what it had ten years ago. I feel like we’re moving in the right direction. In addition, with this convergence that exists between the actions of many ministries, and also private actors who understand these logics of pooling, of free software and community development of projects, we are moving on the right path.
I think the more it goes, the more digital will go towards that. I could have reservations, but I think that now everyone is aware that we have to take ownership of, or at least understand, what we are using and that there is no better way than to participate in the governance of the projects we use. There is a growing maturity among public actors and private actors, and I think that this is really going in the direction of the development of free software and a freer and more open society.

Walid Nouh: From my point of view, I also had the impression that the GDPR had given a boost to the use of free software with all the issues of privacy and data ownership.

Benjamin Jean: In fact, for everything. We talked about Framasoft very quickly, but from a point of view Privacy, respect for privacy, what we are aware of is that if we rely on free solutions that are provided by players across the Atlantic or in China, yes, indeed our data is what makes their services profitable.
On the other hand, if you rely on local actors, if you can’t do it yourself, you have other costs but you can control them and you know why you have them. I think it allows us to better understand what we buy, why, how, to better understand the digital world.

Walid Nouh: There are topics that we barely touched upon, that deserve a full show, I’m thinking in particular of the economic model of free software, because that’s really the kind of subject that interests me a lot.
Since it’s now time to conclude, I’m going to let you speak, Benjamin: are there any topics or a message you’d like to get across? It’s the open forum, it’s yours.

Benjamin Jean: I have already said a great deal. What I would like to add is the expression “the road is long but the way is clear”. Overall, we feel that the meaning of the story is the one we had in mind and that’s a good thing. There is still a huge need for acculturation and to improve skills on all these subjects. I think that’s one of the big points of the years to come, it’s not over and it’s not because we’ve all understood why we have to move towards this that we all know how to do it. This is perhaps where there will still be important associative, community initiatives. Don’t be afraid of not knowing, do it together and discuss it. I’m glad I had that exchange now. Earlier, I had a call with a project that asked a lot of questions about the use of open source and the implications from an economic point of view. We need to talk about it, move forward and share knowledge. Don’t hesitate.

Walid Nouh: That’s a very good last word. Thank you, Benjamin, for taking the time to talk about the subjects that are your daily life and that everyone deserves to know, in the end, because these are questions of governance, public money, and what we want in terms of what we want as a type of society. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us. I hope to see you again soon.

Benjamin Jean: Likewise. Delighted, see you soon.

Walid Nouh: For listeners, if you liked it, don’t hesitate to talk about it around you, to share it on social networks, to leave us a comment on streaming platforms, the podcast is available on all good streaming platforms.
Stay tuned for the next episodes to come, there are still exciting interviews in entirely different areas.
I wish you a very good day. See you again.

Transcription made by the APRIL transcription group, also available on APRIL®.

Learn more about Benjamin Jean and Inno3

• Benjamin Jean’s LinkedIn profile
• The Inno3 website
• The Hermine project website

This episode is recorded on July 5, 2023.

License

This podcast is published under the double license Art Libre 1.3 or later – CC BY-SA 2.0 or later.

podcast.projets-libres.org/@pr…

Sommaire

• 1 Interview with Manon Corneille from Open Food Facts
• 2 Presentation of Manon Corneille
• 3 The genesis of Open Food Facts
• 4 The different sub-projects carried out by the Open Food Facts association
• 5 The structure of the project / its legal form
• 6 Sources of funding for the project
• 7 The relationship with the Next Generation Internet Fund (NGI) and the NLnet Foundation
• 8 What is a digital commons?
• 9 Open Food Facts and Citizens
• 10 The Nova Index
• 11 Projects or applications that are based on Open Food Facts data
• 12 How apps consume and contribute to Open Food Facts
• 13 Open Food Facts and Researchers
• 14 Open Food Facts and French State Structures
• 15 Open Food Facts and consumer associations
• 16 Database data moderation
• 17 The work around the Nutri-score
• 18 Open Food Facts and Manufacturers
• 19 Open Food Facts around the world
• 20 Open Food Facts and the State
• 21 Is it an asset to be a French association?
• 22 Solicitations for other databases?
• 23 Relations with Europe
• 24 Future challenges for the association
• 25 Final Words
• 26 To go further around OpenFoodFacts
• 27 License

Interview with Manon Corneille from Open Food Facts

Walid : Welcome to this new episode of Projet Libre. Today, we’re going to talk about a rather fascinating project, I must admit, called Open Food Facts. I first heard about this project because I saw a lecture on a Perl conference day in Paris at La Villette in 2015. There was a conference on Open Food Facts and I must admit that afterwards, I didn’t necessarily follow much. And I was very happy when Manon, who is with me tonight, contacted me, because it allowed me to be able to get back into it a little bit and to be able to prepare, in fact, a series of two episodes. In this first episode we’re going to talk with Manon Corneille today, it’s going to be an episode for the general public. We’re not going to talk technical.
And a second episode behind it will be a more technical episode in which I can address all my geek questions. But the idea tonight is that we have an episode that we can play to people who don’t have any particular technical skills. So as I said today, I’m very happy to be with Manon Corneille, who works on the Open Food Facts project and who contacted me.

Presentation of Manon Corneille

Walid: Manon, listen, welcome to the podcast, thank you so much for being here and taking the time to talk with us about Open Food Facts. First of all, I hope you’re doing well.

Manon : Very good, thank you very much. Thank you Walid for your welcome. We’re excited to be able to talk a little bit about the project. So to introduce myself, my name is Manon Corneille, as you said, I’ve been in charge of partnerships at Open Food Facts for the past two years. I’m working on developing partnerships with food manufacturers and I’m also working on the internationalization part of the project, so we’ll have the opportunity to talk about it maybe a little later. So it’s a pleasure to be here tonight and thank you again for the welcome.

Manon Corneille (source: LinkedIn)

Walid : So the first thing is that I’d like you to explain to us how you discovered free software and the digital commons? How did you get into it actually?

Manon : So a little bit by chance since I don’t have a technical profile at all, these are subjects that are often a little difficult to grasp when you don’t have technical skills. But suddenly, I found myself, well, I rather entered through the door of environmental impact and I was also very interested in everything that has a systemic impact on food. So it’s rather this door that made me discover Open Food Facts and through the Open Food Facts door, I then discovered the world of open data, the world of free software. And by the way, I find it fascinating.

Recently, in the fall, we went to a forum organized by NGI in Belgium. And I was able to meet a lot of free software players. And it really opened my eyes to this super powerful ecosystem. It allows a lot of things. I wasn’t necessarily familiar with that world. And it opened my eyes to all that open data allows and the values it carries in terms of transparency, independence, accessibility, the fact that everyone can contribute, share knowledge and build together.

And there you have it, I think it’s great. So kudos for hosting a podcast about free projects because we need more visibility.

Walid : Absolutely. There’s something you didn’t specify, I think, is when, when did you join Open Food Facts?

Manon : I joined Open Food Facts two years ago, almost two years to be exact.

Walid : Okay.

Manon : That’s it. Before that, I worked for an environmental impact consultancy for cities. So these are urban heat island diagnostics. That’s why I have more of an environmental impact background at the base.

The genesis of Open Food Facts

Walid : Very, very interesting. If we start with the first part, which is the genesis of the project, I would like to understand a little bit how the idea of Open Food Facts was born?

Manon : Good question. Open Food Facts was born in 2012, a little over ten years ago now. So this association was founded by Stéphane Gigandet who is a fascinating person, who leads a lot of projects. At the time, he was running a blog called recettes.de, which is still active by the way, with a fairly active community. On this blog, he lists recipes and in these recipes, he was interested in being able to enrich them with nutritional information as well. So he looked for a database of nutritional information, he couldn’t find it, he decided to create it.
And so little by little, that’s how Open Food Facts was born. Then, gradually, he managed to surround himself with people who are interested in the subject of nutrition and who have contributed to enriching the database as well.
So there you have it, the project was a citizens’ project that lived on about 1000 euros of annual budget until 2017, if I’m not talking nonsense. Over the last 4 or 5 years, the project has really become more professional and there has been the recruitment of employees. Today, there are 8 of us in the team and we are surrounded by a lot of volunteers. So it’s super exciting.

Walid : Did he create it on his own or did other people come quite quickly? When he created the project, did he immediately create the form, which is an association?

Manon : So no, in fact at the beginning he created the project on his own, he created the database on his own. But the association… April 11, 2014. So yes, the association wasn’t created right away. Stéphane started to get his foot in the door in 2012. In fact, after that, he met Pierre Slamich, who is the co-founder of the Open Food Facts association. And so they decided to formalize all this a little bit by creating an association.
And for the record, the association was launched on May 19, 2014, which is the day of the Food Revolution Day, with the mission of trying to make transparency about the food system.

Food Revolution Day 2014 (source: yummyinspirations.net)

The different sub-projects carried out by the Open Food Facts association

Walid : Before we get into the structure of the project, to give a first overview, what does the Open Food Facts project contain as a sub-project? It’s not just the food database?

Manon : Yes, absolutely, it’s a question that interests more and more people because we’re starting to take an interest, we’ve already been interested for a few years now, in the environmental impact of both food products but also beauty products, everyday products. Consumers are asking themselves more and more questions and to meet this demand, Open Food Facts has a lot of ideas, a lot of verticals. So we have Open Product Facts, which is the database of everyday products. We’re going to be able to find a plastic duck, a plate, a microwave, everything we can buy as a physical object. We will be able to offer consumption advice: for example, we will be able to store instructions for the use of certain objects. Advice can be given if the person is looking to throw away their item or give it away or recycle it. We will try to guide the user so that he can extend the life of his projects. We’re super excited because we’re going to work on it in 2024. It is a project that was funded by the AFNIC Foundation. We have the means on it, so we can’t wait to be at the end of the year to see how it goes.

Then there’s the Open Beauty Facts app, which deals with everything from cosmetics and beauty products to sunscreens, shower gel, etc.

Then, very recently, as a result of inflation and everything that has happened on the issue of prices, we have a small group of members of the Open Food Facts community who have come together, who have decided to create Open Prices, the first open price database. So here, it’s very time-consuming and it’s a project that is extremely large because there are also a lot of stores so it’s a gigantic number of data points. But in just 15 days, we already have data on more than 5000 products, so price data, and that’s only for food at the moment, but who knows, depending on the success of Open Product Facts and Open Beauty Facts, maybe we’ll extend it to other verticals.

The structure of the project / its legal form

Walid : Great. So now let’s talk a little bit about the structure of the project. We mentioned this in the introduction. So the structure that carries the project is an association under the law of 1901.

Manon : Yes.

Walid : I would like to understand at the time why this choice was made to make an association and not, for example, I don’t know, a foundation or a company. What made the founders Stéphane and Pierre choose this legal form?

Manon :

given that it was a participatory citizen project, a little bit on the model of Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap, it made sense to choose an associative status. Then at the time, Stéphane and Pierre were very close to Christian Quest, who is the founder of OpenStreetMap (Editor’s note: France). So they took a little bit of inspiration from how they worked.

Manon Corneille

OpenStreetMap is an association, and that’s how things happened quite naturally, in the end.

Walid : Okay, it’s a French association. Are the employees all French employees?

Manon : Yes, today, anyway. We are all based in France, working from home, and we meet once a month in Paris. And we’re starting to have a new type of role, which is the ambassador role. So we have an ambassador in Germany, an ambassador in Belgium and an ambassador in Croatia. They do not have the status of employees. These are all people who work on a voluntary basis. And then, we have about 300 or 400 volunteers who help us every day to work on the quality of the data, to develop the mobile application, to develop the website, to help us translate all the content we can have, many other things.

Sources of funding for the project

Walid : It works, we’ll come back to it in any case, I’m very interested to see how it all comes together. We have seen the legal structure that supports the project, so at the beginning we understand that in the first years there were no employees, that afterwards there was funding, so then there are employees who arrived, now that there are people like you who are paid by the project. If we’re talking about paying for the project, it leads right to the next chapter, which is a bit of a big chunk, which is the economic model. My first question is, what are your sources of income? That was one of the first questions I asked myself, it’s wow, you do a lot of things but how is it all financed?

Manon : That’s a very good question, especially in projects that are free. I have the impression that this is a topic that comes up a lot, that is difficult to fund. People are very motivated, but there is not necessarily a lot of money. So for us, we are now about 30% funded by subsidies from the public. We will work for example with Santé Publique France, with ADEME, and therefore we will make projects for them. This is funding that is still earmarked. For example, we are currently working with Santé Publique France on the support of the Nutri-Score, the new version of the Nutri-Score. We have a little bit of education, we discuss with manufacturers to make adoption easier.

Then there is another part that comes from philanthropic organizations, so foundations, such as the Google.org Foundation. Two or three years ago we won the Google Impact Challenge, with the sum of one million euros. So it allowed us to put a lot of butter in the spinach for a few years.

We were also supported by the Mozilla Foundation, or players like OVH, which has been funding our servers since the beginning. We also have the Free Foundation, which is on the infrastructure side.
So 30% of the public, about 30% of philanthropic foundations. Then there is another big third that comes from European projects.
We are trying to forge partnerships with different actors in Europe to be involved and participate in these projects. And then we also have a lot of donations from the public. So we do donation campaigns every year to try to raise a little bit of money. That’s pretty much how it’s organized.

Walid : What I understand is that, in fact, you have both funding that is for specific themes, funding that is prizes, etc. which you have as you wish, a funding cushion of about 10% that is from the public. So in the end, you don’t really have any problems being independent and financing yourself.

Manon : For the moment, we have enough funds to see the next two years, but the difficulty, I think, that is present with many free software projects, is that we don’t necessarily have trouble getting funding, but that the projects are always earmarked. So that means we have to deliver, we have deadlines to meet, we have specifications to respect, and that puts a lot of pressure on the whole team. For the year 2024, we’re going to try to prioritize a little bit the search for unearmarked funding, to be able to finance all the maintenance of the common in the end, because we still spend a lot of time interacting with the community, responding to contributors on GitHub who have done some work and that’s great, but it requires a lot of support.
Same on the manufacturer part, we may talk about it again but I spend almost a third of my time responding to requests from manufacturers, finally doing support. All the maintenance and upkeep of this common that we create together is not always financed to the extent we would like.

Walid : Do you also have funding from manufacturers or partners, and do you have other players who help you finance this database?

Manon :

For the time being, we really have a red line, it’s even written in the statutes, we can’t accept funding at all from agri-food players since we’re totally independent, so no one from the agri-food industry on the board of directors or in the finances.

Manon Corneille

The relationship with the Next Generation Internet Fund (NGI) and the NLnet Foundation

Walid : We mentioned it earlier and that’s a subject that interests me a lot and on which I will normally be able to do episodes in the coming months. We talked a little bit about NGI, Next Generation Internet and a little bit about its armed wing, which is the Dutch foundation NLNet. I wanted to know what your report was, did they also fund you or are funding you? Because they fund a lot of free projects. And I’ve already had the opportunity to interview the people from Perturbe, the people from Castopod and more interviews to come as well, people who are getting funded by NLnet. So I wanted to know if that was the case for you too.

Manon : Yes, absolutely. We are very happy that this organization exists and also to see that the resources at home will increase year after year. It’s great to see that Europe is putting the resources behind all this. We started our relationship with NLNet, which we knew well, so there you have it, as they are people who have been funding open source for a long time. So over the last few years, we have benefited from three types of funding. One recently, there, via the NGI program, which will allow us to boost our research on Open Food Facts.

Walid : I’ll interrupt you for a second. So NGI, Next Generation Internet, is one of the funds, one of the European programs for financing free software. It has a new version called NGI Common, but we’ll certainly talk about it later. Excuse me, it was just to clarify.

Manon : Yes, you’re doing well, you’re right.

So, a project was funded last year that we’re going to do this year, which is the development of our research tool. So we’re going to be able to search more easily in Open Food Facts, we’re going to be able to put a lot of filters on the panel on the left. We’re going to be able to have a much more ergonomic search. And then, it’s true that thanks to NLNet and NGI, we’ve also been able to finance two other projects in the past, so we’re really happy that this fund exists. And now we’re also preparing a file for the month of March: another NGI call (Editor’s note: call for projects), this time more focused on Europe-US collaborations, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed, but we’re really happy that this program exists.

What is a digital commons?

Walid : I had just mentioned it before, there is a new program that has been announced, which is called NGI Common and which is a new fund of about twenty million euros I think to finance the digital commons. So my question was, what is your definition of a digital commons, do you consider yourself to be a digital commons and also are you going to be a beneficiary of this fund?

Manon : So are we a digital commons? For me yes, I admit I’m not necessarily an absolute specialist. I consider that, as the Open Food Facts project is open-source, the database is open-source, all the code, all the algorithms are open source. This benefits a lot of players. Today, there are just over 300 mobile apps that reuse our database. There are more than 3 million unique visitors every month who watch Open Food Facts, who consult us for their knowledge. Over the past ten years, there have been more than 600 scientific papers using Open Food Facts. So in that sense, I consider Open Food Facts to be a digital commons. We are regularly solicited by students who are doing PhDs, by scientists, by all kinds of people. They see a lot of value in this database. So my answer is yes, but it’s up to you to tell me if it’s the other way around.

Walid : Listen, I have the impression that when you ask the different players of the digital common headset, it’s not very simple. I had the opportunity at FOSDEM to ask the people at NLnet and the answer was not very obvious either.

Manon : Yes, that’s right.

Walid : Well, the definition is not necessarily very clear. So we can imagine that in the coming years or months, you will benefit from these funds on the digital commons?

Manon : We hope, in any case, that we will follow them closely. We will apply if the stars are aligned and a project can make sense.

Open Food Facts and Citizens

Walid : On this subject of financing, I think we’ve done quite a bit.
I wanted to talk about another one of my favorite topics on the podcast, which is communities. And so, I’d like us to talk about the communities around Open Food Facts. I have seen a certain number, I was going to say, of indifferent personas, and the first is the citizen. I wanted to know how citizens take ownership of the platform, what do they have at their disposal? Can you explain to us how citizens interact with Open Food Facts and how?

Manon : With pleasure. So, we have the classic case, the most common case of the use of Open Food Facts by a citizen. It’s the consumer who goes to the supermarket and asks questions about the products. So at this point, he’s going to be able to use our mobile app that you can download on Android, Apple Store, many others for that matter. And so it’s going to scan the barcode of the food product and from there, on the app, it’s going to see all the information related to the product. So certain information is already displayed on the product such as the list of ingredients, the nutritional tables, but he will be able to see them digitally, which will also allow him to compare several products together in a quick and easy way, which is a little more difficult to do in real life. So we’ve got this app that’s the majority interaction.
Then we also have the website. In this case, it’s more of a home use. If I’m going to ask myself questions about which cereals would be best suited to my diet, I can enter my food preferences in Open Food Facts. So I explain that for me, salt is very important, sugar is very important, I absolutely don’t need sugar in my diet. And after that, I’ll be able to search by category and see the products that are most suitable for my diet, since we also calculate an Open Food Facts score, which is the score of correspondence with my diet. So we’re going to have match percentages. This makes it possible to do research outside the supermarket as well.
The information that consumers are most interested in today is going to be anything that revolves around nutritional information: whether they have specific diets. More and more, we see the case that people are interested in the environmental impact, and therefore in the calculation of ecoscores.

And also, we hear a lot about ultra-processing, additives, emulsifiers. And so here it is rather the Nova index that will interest the consumer.

The Nova Index

Walid : What is the Nova index? Because we’re going to talk a little bit about the Nutri-score later, but I don’t know too much about the Nova index.

Manon. : then it’s the Nova group, more precisely. It’s an index that ranges from 1 to 4. So Nova 1 is raw products, not processed at all. If we take the example of an apple, it’s going to be an apple.
Nova 2, for example, will be an applesauce, so a little more processed, either by the manufacturing process or by the addition of additional ingredients.
Nova 3 is a little more transformed. And Nova 4, even more so: for example, in our case of apples, it could be apple candy, where there are lots of additives, preservatives, etc.

Walid : Earlier, we talked about the fact that Open Food Facts was a bit inspired by OpenStreetMap. I was wondering if there are user groups that do a bit like Open Street Map and go to a place and map. I was wondering if there are groups of citizens who will volunteer to map a certain number of products etc without necessarily going shopping?

Manon : yes it definitely happens so we’re not aware of everything that’s going on, but it’s what we call “scan parties“. So we regularly organize them with the Parisian community, but yes yes it’s done. We get together and we scan and enter data all together. But it’s true that it’s much more fun to do it with others.
There are quite a few researchers who organize this on their own as well, because they are particularly motivated to have the data and to enrich the database. So they surround themselves with their friends who are researchers or not, and they do scan parties.

Scan Party Guide (source: openfoodfacts)

Walid : The next question is, how many articles are in the database, for example Open FoodFact, and how much of the information entered by citizens does it represent? Is that quantified?

Manon : So today we have a little more than 3 million products on the base. The citizens’ contribution represents about 80%. That’s still huge. And so the remaining 20% is either going to be data that we’re going to recover through win-win partnerships that we’re doing with reusing mobile applications. So they feed on the Open Food Facts database, but in return, they send us fresh data, updated by their users.

And we also work with manufacturers who send us their data by various means.

Walid : That’s a whopping 80%!

Manon : Without the citizens, the project would not exist, that’s clear. They also help us a lot with everything that is data correction, not only do they enter, but in addition all the updates, it’s a painstaking job that is precious.

Walid : I also think that because we touch on food, which is quite fundamental. I don’t know if on cosmetics or on other bases, is the rate the same? Or is food something that really interests everyone?

Manon : I pretty much agree on that. It’s true that we eat every day. Over the course of a year, we have 1000 meals. It’s a number that we like to highlight.

So 1000 opportunities to make better decisions. But it’s true that the subject of food touches a lot. And there you have it, the fact that each of us, individually, we all have specificities, particular needs, specific diets, gluten intolerances. There are a lot of profiles. Pregnant women, for example, people who eat halal, people who have allergies. It’s true that food is a subject that speaks a lot and brings people together, that’s for sure.

Projects or applications that are based on Open Food Facts data

Walid : The second type of actor is projects and applications that reuse your data. So the first thing I was wondering was, what are the types of non-citizen actors that actually interact with the Open FoodFact database?

Manon : We were talking about it a little bit earlier. So there are these famous reusable apps, as they are called. So actually, these are mobile apps that are developed by people like you and me, who are starting their project, a start-up. And so, in order to run their project, they need a food database. So there, there are all kinds of apps, apps to track calories, for example, so more slimming-oriented, apps for pregnant women, which we were talking about earlier, or for people who eat halal, apps that are more fitness-oriented, for sports audiences, apps of all kinds.
Among the most well-known, there are, for example, ScanUp, Foodvisor, Y’a quoi dedans? , which is the application of SystemeU, My Health.

Few people know this too, it’s true that I forgot to mention it, but for example Yuka, which is one of the most well-known applications, was launched thanks to Open Food Facts a few years ago now.
We are delighted to see all these projects see the light of day. We don’t see them as competition at all, because that’s often the reflection we get, doesn’t it bother you to see all these new projects that are maybe sometimes better known than you?
Not at all.
Our mission is to make all this food information accessible to a greater number of people. In fact, these mobile applications are considered to be impact multipliers rather than competitors.

Walid : So these applications have access to the entire database in the end?

Manon : Yes, absolutely. They have access to the entire database and they can also access via our API

Walid : which allows you to interact remotely with the database

Manon : Absolutely.

Walid : If I’m making my own application, what do I need to meet in order to use OpenFootFact data?

Manon :

So, it’s unfortunately difficult for us to keep up with all the projects that reuse OpenFootFact, but in the best of all possible worlds, the rule in any case is to respect the ODBL license, which stands for Open Database License, which stipulates several rules, including attributing the source of the data.

Manon Corneille

So this means that in all the pages where Open Food Facts data is mentioned, they must display the mention Open Food Facts, possibly our logo, a link to our site. Then, the second obligation is that they must share the data as it is, i.e. raw, without having retouched or altered it. So that happens a lot, people download the whole Open Food Facts database and do data cleansing and then republish. So that’s not a problem. This is not compliant with the ODBL license. And then there’s also one last rule, which is that they can’t mix an open database with a database that wouldn’t be under the same license. It is often said that licensing at ODBL is contagious. If we mix these two databases, it will mean that everything must be released under an open license. That’s what you have to respect. After that, we try to hunt a little bit and call people to order when we see applications that don’t comply. But it’s still a lot of work.

Walid : I guess it’s quite time-consuming because you have to detect and then you have to make contact…

Manon : It goes without saying, but I think you can imagine that these projects are not funded, so it’s a matter of maintaining the common and respecting the constraints.

How apps consume and contribute to Open Food Facts

Walid : If I’m an application that uses your data, can I enrich the data? What data can I enrich? We don’t do it like that, I guess we still have to talk to you. What happens if I have an application where I want to enrich your data?

Manon : Yes, there is indeed a contact. So we have this exchange with about twenty applications today. So we set up exchanges, data transfers. It’s still a bit technical and as you can see, I’m not the one who takes care of it. So I don’t have a lot of technical details, but maybe Alex (Editor’s note: Garel) can give you some in the next episode.
But there you have it, so it’s an agreement where the application commits to sending data in return. And it’s on any type of field. So all the information that we can have on the OpenFoodFacts product sheet, reusers may or may not send us data, or not for that matter.

They decide how much and what type of data they want to send back to us. We take everything, in any case.

Walid : Doesn’t that cause moderation problems?

Manon : So, we consider data that comes from a reusing application in the same way as data that comes from a consumer. Therefore, the most recent data is considered to be more important. But it’s interesting that you point this out because, for example, manufacturers have a kind of shield that makes their data more legitimate than data that comes from a mobile application or a consumer. And it’s going to be protected for a while. But that’s not necessarily the case for mobile apps.

Open Food Facts and Researchers

Walid : I wanted to talk about it later, because I watched one of your conferences for professionals and that’s one of the things that I had spotted, that I found very interesting: these were the tools that were made available to them. But we’ll talk about that later.
To finish on this part, we talked about the applications that use your data, but apart from the applications, what other organizations use your data?

Manon : We’ve talked about it a little bit, there’s the whole community of scientists, whether it’s on nutrition or health subjects. There, for example, there are quite a few debates around additives, emulsifiers, etc. There is a paper that was published by Mathilde Touvier from EREN, which makes the link between these additives and their impact on health, particularly on forms of cancer. So there you have it, a particularly interesting case that EREN is conducting.

Walid : Can you explain what EREN is?

Manon : So EREN is the nutritional epidemiology research team. That’s right, excuse me for the shortcut. But suddenly, which is directed by Mathilde Touvier, who is the director. She appears on TV from time to time, she has a little bit of a reputation on all these subjects.
A few years ago, they launched a cohort. In fact they are following, I don’t know the number but I think it’s around 1000 people, they are monitoring their health and they have been following everything they eat for a little over 10 years. And so the idea, it’s something that’s never been done until now, it’s the cohort that’s called NutriNet Health, if you want to go and see, and so they track everything that people eat and their impact on their health. And they regularly use the Open Food Facts database to get information about the nutritional tables, the ingredients of what people are eating as part of the study anyway.

Walid : So that’s scientific, researcher, basically?

Manon : That’s right. We also have a little bit in the spotlight among the cases, there is what was done during the creation of the Nutri-Score. So the research team that worked on the Nutri-Score in 2016 used Open Food Facts to challenge the Nutri-Score formula they had made and therefore check that there are not 95% of the products that come out with Nutri-Score D. So checking that their formula allowed them to have results that were a little bit homogeneous and that really allow you to make a difference within a product category, to see a little bit the different scores.

Open Food Facts and French State Structures

Manon : That’s the scientific part. After that, there are quite a few state agencies that reuse our data. Last year, we did a major project with ADEME which consisted of collecting data on packaging materials, and therefore the packaging data of food products. Thanks to them, we were able to collect data on more than 12,000 products. This new database, which is unique in its kind, ADEME was able to rely on the data collected on packaging to refine their environmental impact index.

So that’s another subject, but as a result, ADEME is currently working on the future official French eco-score which will make it possible to calculate the environmental impact of food products. And among the components of this environmental impact index, there will be a focus on the impact of packaging. And so they worked with the data that we were able to collect to refine their criteria a little bit.

Manon Corneille

Open Food Facts and consumer associations

Walid : Are there any other players?

Manon : So yes, it’s true that Open Food Facts, in the end, we’re in the middle of this whole ecosystem. We have a lot of discussions with consumer associations as well, whether it is theUFC QueChoisir, recently we’ve been working a lot with it, we’ve been talking a lot with FoodWatch Also, so there’s going to be a little bit more about consumer protection and there in particular it’s also about inflation, all the topics related to the shrinkflation (Editor’s note: reduflation) too. Shrinkflation is the fact that manufacturers put less product in the packaging or they have degraded the quality of the products to save money and maximize margins. So Foodwatch is following this closely and is therefore supporting the Open Prices base to conduct the investigation and try to defend consumers as best as possible.

Database data moderation

Walid : I think we’ve done quite a bit of a tour of the different actors. I had questions that had to do with the moderation of the base actually. Because we have a lot of data here, this data is entered by actors who are different. I was wondering, and this is the case for Wikipedia or many others, about the moderation of this data. Who does the moderation? Who’s looking at the errors? Who checks? What have you put in place over the years for that?

Manon : A question that comes up a lot too. We have several levers: the first is going to be the community. That’s really the heart of the project. It’s all about community, we don’t say that often enough. But as a result, we have a team of about fifty people in our Data Quality team, so it’s a team that is dedicated to data quality, who every day will go and correct sheets, make the comparison between photos and data entered verbatim, so there you have it, update products, enter them, correct them.

A second lever that we have and that we have been working on quite intensively for the past few years, well for the last two years, is everything that is going to be related to machine learning and artificial intelligence. So we have developed tools that allow us to detect errors automatically, with also tools that allow us to read the information that is present on the photos, OCR to be exact, and to compare it to the text values. So these are tools that complement and are super useful to the community to then go and make corrections.

After a third lever that we have, it’s going to be our pro platform. So in 2019, it’s been five years now, we developed a platform dedicated to professionals to allow them to import data in bulk into OpenFoodFacts, something that is not possible at all on the public platform and that allows them to do other things, maybe we’ll talk about it later. But as a result, this professional platform makes it possible to make the data more reliable since we have a contribution that comes from the professionals who are at the source of the data. So in general, the data is pretty clean. And then, on top of that, we set up a lot of what we call data quality checks, so data verification points.

So there you have it, check for example on a nutritional table the information is indicated per 100 grams. And so if I add up the amount of all the nutrients per 100 grams and that number is greater than 100, then there’s a problem. And so this kind of logic test, we have a little over 180 of them today. And it really allows you to be able to bring out the mistakes and then correct them. So we have all these tools that exist today. But we must not forget that out of 3 million products, you can’t be perfect.

Moderation remains a big challenge. It’s never going to be exhaustive, but we’re still doing our best.

The work around the Nutri-score

Walid : In the end, it’s the same moderation issues as data moderation everywhere, but it’s interesting to see what you’ve put in place.
One of the little asides I wanted to make, it was what I think is that it’s a little bit about it but I wanted to see if you had any more things to add, it was on the Nutri-Score, because I think it’s one of the most visible things, at least I don’t know very well about Open Food Facts, it was a little bit of a review of the work of the Nutri-Score. That work, etc. Did this work make you stand out?

Manon : Yes, definitely. Especially since the Nutri-Score today is calculated in 8 European countries outside France, so it is true that it allowed us to shine even more. So, what I would eventually have to add is the effort we made and the impact we had on the democratization of the Nutri-Score because it’s true that there was a first collaboration on the challenge part of the formula based on data.

Walid : What year was the first work?

Manon : So that was in 2016. It’s going to be almost ten years, it’s passing. And so after that, in fact, we integrated the Nutri-Score formula into Open Food Facts, which makes it whether the manufacturers like it or not, we calculate the Nutri-Score and whether it is visible or not on the package, we make it accessible to consumers through our application and our website. We are convinced that this had an impact on democratization since our application was already used quite a bit and it allowed users to familiarize themselves with the index and to appropriate it little by little.

Walid : Have you seen any direct contributions since this work with Nutri-Score?

Manon : So we’re aware that there are some, I don’t have the figures, but there is a certain part of the community, well, users in any case, who use OpenFoodFacts only for the calculation of the Nutri-Score. So it’s definitely important for the development of OpenFoodFacts. By the way, there is often confusion that OpenFoodFacts created the Nutri-Score, which is not the case, and I want to make it clear. We have been more of a vector of democratization, but we are not at the origin of the Nutri-Score.

But we’re very proud of it and it’s useful for the development of Open Food Facts, that’s for sure.

Open Food Facts and Manufacturers

Walid : The next big piece is what I’ve called Open Food Facts and its environment, and the first one is the industry. What I’m really interested in is understanding what the industries are interested in working with you. In 2012, the base was created, in 2014, there was the association. Initially, you were largely unknown. What actually made the industry work with you? What’s the point of it?

Manon : Actually, at the beginning, it was born in our interest, since we were interested in their data. And so, in order to convince them, we had to develop a tool that was useful enough for them so that they didn’t have to worry about whether or not to join Open Food Facts. In fact, given that there was already a lot of data present on food products, so data that was entered by consumers, the interest for the manufacturer is already to correct this data that already exists, because in general they don’t like it too much when they see that their product has been photographed by a consumer with a light that is certainly not ideal, with the photo of the hand holding the product.
So it’s not really marketing. So the primary motivation will be to correct the data and add photos that are clean.
Another lever, and still it’s a little minimal, but it’s the fact of highlighting this transparency approach. CSR (Editor’s note: Corporate Social Responsibility) matters more and more, brands like to highlight when they do things for the planet, for good, for society. So there are some companies that are surfing on that a little bit. In general, it’s quite easy to convince manufacturers, given that it’s free to join the platform. It allows them to keep up to date and make sure they have their own data. And it’s an approach that is for the common good. So in general, they put in the resources and they contribute.

Walid : If I’m a professional, in addition to correcting my data, what else do I get out of it?

Manon : yes, so good question. We have this tool that allows you to import data in bulk, so manufacturers can import an Excel file for example, with all the data in columns in a raw file. But beyond that, we have tools that allow manufacturers to have opportunities to reformulate their products. For example, we will give them advice on how to improve their Nutri-Score. So we’re going to be able to identify by analyzing the list of ingredients and the nutritional tables, we’re going to push them all the products for which, by making a minimal adjustment on the amount of salt, fat, sugar, all these products for which a minimal adjustment will allow them to change the Nutri-Score. So switch from Nutri-Score B to Nutri-Score A. And so that’s an analysis that they’re often fond of.

Walid : The question I ask myself is, is it useful for big industrialists? Because I imagined, like that, that it could be used by small manufacturers potentially. But is it also useful for big manufacturers?

Manon : Oh yes, yes, yes! It’s useful for big guys too, yes yes. Then in general they have tools on their side as well that are certainly pushed, but I have examples where really manufacturers of all sizes can use these tools. And we also have a tool that allows them to compare the nutritional qualities of their products with all the other products we have in the base, so products in the same category.

For example, if I have chocolate cookies in my product portfolio. We’re going to compare my chocolate cookie with all the chocolate cookies from Open Food Facts. And I’m going to be able to say, Manon, your cookie, there, it’s 15% sweeter than the average cookie on Open Food Facts.

Manon Corneille

Walid : Okay. It’s quite interesting. While doing some research, I came across a platform, but which seems to no longer necessarily exist, which was called Numalim. And actually, the question I was asking myself was, do you have competitors? I feel like Open Food Facts is unstoppable. That is to say, it is an association that has no bias. Being a competitor with Open Food Facts seems complicated.

Manon : Actually, no. In any case, I have never come across a similar project, which is an association and which is collaborative, where consumers can participate and enrich. We haven’t seen any others, no.
Afterwards, we met a type of actor, but in this case, it’s private actors. For example, there is NIQ Brandbank. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, maybe not, because it’s a bit niche. But basically, it’s a player whose job, in fact, is to digitize the information of food products. So, the manufacturers will send them the products and after them they have a very professional process which consists of making very nice photos of the product, entering all the product information, marketing descriptions too.

So their job is to showcase their customers’ products and so they have a bit of a foothold because they’ve been around for a long time. So they also have a big database that sells very expensively and in fact we can’t even consider them as competitors, since we don’t bring the same value to the world at all. In quotation marks, they are very customer-oriented. What they do is high-quality data, but it’s not the same price.

Open Food Facts around the world

Walid : The question I’m asking myself, because we haven’t touched on it too much, is how many countries do you have data in? In how many countries? Because there, we talked a lot about France, a little about Europe, but in how many countries?

Manon : Today, we are present in nearly 200 countries, so almost all countries. Let’s say that we have the beginnings of a database in nearly 200 countries. After that, if we look at the number of countries in which we have more than 50,000 products, I think we must be around 30 countries. So we’re mainly in Europe, the US, South America a little bit too.

Walid : It’s crazy.

Manon : But we’re always surprised, it’s quite incredible. Sometimes we receive emails from people in Venezuela who explain that they wanted to enter data but that they are blocked, they have a bug. They want to contribute and we’re always amazed by the scope of the project, it’s quite impressive.

Open Food Facts and the State

Walid : Great, I’m picking up my thread. The second actor in the Open Food Facts environment is the State. Initially, how did the state look at you and now how do you collaborate with it?

Manon : I don’t have all the history, I’ve only been here for two years, but I know anyway and I notice that we are seen more and more as a credible player and almost unavoidable in fact, because we are being asked more and more about European projects. We have established fairly solid relationships with Santé Public France, which has been supporting us for five years now, with whom we are working in particular on the evolution of the Nutri-Score, and ADEME, with whom we worked last year. We also talk a lot with the General Directorate of Health and the Ministry of Agriculture. There is a sense that there is growing confidence in all these state agencies, which I hope is right. We’ve proven it with the number of products we’ve been able to build and the whole community we have today. But we feel that they are increasingly recognising the usefulness of the Open Food Facts database and in particular the tools of the digital commons.
We were talking about that a little bit earlier. But I think there’s a real awareness at their level. It’s nice that they also communicate the fact that they use these kinds of tools. yes, that’s great. But it’s true that it’s something that has really been done over the years and that hasn’t been done in a snap of the fingers.

Is it an asset to be a French association?

Walid : Does the fact that it’s a French association play a role in one way or another? Maybe if it had been done elsewhere, it wouldn’t have been the same legal form and it wouldn’t necessarily have been the same independence, I don’t know. Does the fact that it’s in France play a role, so already certainly with relations with the state, I suppose, but does it bring additional things?
That’s a question I’m asking myself when I talk about it with you.

Manon : Yes, so it’s true that on a European scale, I think that Open Food Facts was finally very well placed by being in France because already on the issue of food, the French are more involved than average, it seems to me in any case.

When it comes to food, the French cook a lot, are interested in their health, more than for example a British public where they eat a lot of ultra-processed products and there is a little less debate around scores, etc. It’s also the country where the Nutri-Score was born, so obviously I think it plays a role. And a little more recently, on the issue of environmental impact, France is really a country that is a leader in Europe on all these subjects. So for sure I think it’s fertile ground to be able to develop this initiative. We are delighted to have had the outstretched hand of all these actors of the State and we hope to replicate this success in other countries. We are in discussions with some ministries of health in Spain, Germany and Ireland. We hope to replicate that a little bit and be able to bring them the value that we bring to Santé Public France and establish ourselves there too.

Solicitations for other databases?

Walid : Do you have requests to make databases out of food?

Manon : It’s a little bit like what happened with the project on food packaging with ADEME, it came from them. Otherwise, no more than that, apart from the case of Open Product Facts, which is a hot topic and was funded by the AFNIC Foundation.

And otherwise, things happened quite naturally for Open Beauty Facts. And I forgot, we also have Open Pet Food Facts for animal feed.

Relations with Europe

Walid : My last question on this subject is relations with Europe. We’ve just talked a little bit about your relations in Europe. Who were you in a relationship with? What were the reactions of other countries to Open Food Facts?

Manon : In fact, not all countries react in the same way when it comes to food. For example, in England, there’s a lot of talk about everything that’s ultra-processed at the moment and consumers are very interested in that. In Italy, for example, they are putting on the brakes compared to the Nutri-Score. So as soon as they understand that we are working with the Nutri-Score, the discussion is usually complicated. Because the Nutri-Score, for the record, doesn’t highlight all their local products, such as olive oil, ham, cheese, etc. So Italy has a little bit of a difficult relationship with this index. But suddenly, our relations, we discuss with a lot of actors, we try to replicate a little what made the success of Open Food Fact in France. We are talking to government departments, researchers and manufacturers as well. We try to do as many trade shows as possible to meet the manufacturers.

We were in Italy last year, and in Germany as well. The difficulty is to have a database size large enough to be credible, both with consumers who will find the information they want, because if you don’t have a lot of products, people won’t use the application. If you don’t have a lot of users, manufacturers won’t want to send their data. So there’s actually this question of the threshold of sufficient products to be met to make Open Food Facts take off in other countries. For international development, at least, we talk to all possible actors, so manufacturers, researchers, ministries, consumers, and reusable applications as well. For the moment, the priority, at least for this year, is rather on the countries of Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, so the neighbouring products, where it is easiest to trade. But Paris wasn’t made for another day. And Open Food Facts from all countries won’t be done another day either. We are also counting on the development of the ambassador role to have local actors who can engage the community and develop the project like this.

Future challenges for the association

Walid : We’re going to move on to the last part, which is a bit of a conclusion. We’re going to talk a little bit about the challenges ahead. So, I had noted some technical challenges, but we’ll talk about that in episode 2. I wanted to know what the relationship challenges were in terms of organization, etc. ?

Manon : A challenge that is non-technical is going to be the commitment of the community, to be able to structure the effort of all these volunteers who want to get involved in the project. We tried to do some work on team organization. There’s the communication team, the partnership team, so with profiles that tend to want to meet people through email reminders, etc.

Financing teams, a data quality team and more technical teams as well. So we tried to divide the effort into different poles and for each team. We have a person employed by Open Food Facts who manages all of this and who tries to animate the community of volunteers. We have a few volunteers in each of these teams. It’s still difficult and it still takes a lot of time. It is an effort that is not funded today. So we talked about that at the beginning of the episode, but it’s still a challenge. Keep contributors motivated.

Walid : It’s always a challenge in free projects to keep contributors because we’ve trained them, they have the experience and we don’t want them to leave.

Manon : yes, it’s also difficult to estimate the progress of a project because you don’t know how long people will be involved, you don’t know. It’s hard to plan when you’re volunteering because you can’t demand to do things either. And to also be able to keep the documentation up to date because there are a lot of things, a lot of projects, even within Open Food Facts. And so for all the newcomers who are new to the project, in general, they pull their hair out a little bit because it’s quite bushy. There’s also something you can count into the challenges.

Final Words

Walid : Yes, very interesting. I think that if we talk again next time, we will talk about this relationship between volunteers and employees. I think there’s a lot to say, but unfortunately, we’ll have to take more time. Listen, we’re coming to the end. I would like to leave you with a final word. Do you want to convey a message to the listeners of Projet Libre?

Manon : My message is to be careful what you eat. Take care of yourself. Let us not forget that we are all on this earth together. So all the projects that involve the community, that contribute to the common good, we must not lose sight of them, even if we are all caught up in our daily lives and by our smartphones and all these notifications etc. Take care of yourself, engage in open source projects, that’s what will save us.

Walid : Thank you very much. It’s a nice conclusion. Maybe a little ambitious, but… When you look at how far we’ve come since the creation of Open Food Facts, I’m not sure Stéphane and Pierre thought that one day it would do all this. So you also have to dream, I think, it’s important.
I’m also going to thank you for contacting me. I think I’m also going to thank Pouhiou from Framasoft who talked about me.

Manon : Definitely.

Walid : He’s one of my volunteer sponsors! There you go. Listen, thank you very much. It was exciting.

So we’re going to meet again soon for a second episode which will be more technical in which I think I’ll be able to ask all the questions that I didn’t have time to ask here. Thank you very much Manon. And then, listen, see you soon. I hope we’ll have the opportunity to talk again about all your projects, you’re in them, etc. in the future.

Manon : With great pleasure! A big thank you to you Walid, it was super nice.

Good luck for the future and see you soon!

This episode was recorded on February 14, 2024.

To go further around OpenFoodFacts

• OpenFoodFacts, the wikipedia of food products, Anca Luca, FOSDEM 2023
• Presentation of the Open Food Facts project and its prospects Pro Days 2023
• Join the association as a volunteer
• Support the association
• The Open Food Facts Blog
• Open Food Facts’ Slack
• Open Food Facts’ LinkedIn page

License

This podcast is published under the dual license Art Libre 1.3 or later – CC BY-SA 2.0 or later.

podcast.projets-libres.org/@pr…

Sommaire

• 1 Interview with the Castopod team
• 2 Presentation by Benjamin Bellamy and Yassine Doghri
• 3 Free vs. open source
• 4 Introducing Castopod
• 5 The technologies that power Castopod
• 6 Castopod’s license
• 7 Introducing Ad Aures
• 8 The presentation of Podcast 2.0
• 9 To go further
• 10 License

Interview with the Castopod team

Walid: Welcome to another episode of Projet Libre. Today, I’m really excited because we’re going to be talking about a podcasting platform called Castopod and its development team. I’m delighted, since I migrated to Castopod at the end of last year.

To talk about Castopod, I have with me Yassine Doghri and Benjamin Bellamy whom I’ve had the opportunity to meet, Benjamin on several occasions, and Yassine not so long ago. So listen up, Yassine and Benjamin, welcome to Projet Libre, I hope you’re all fit and well.

Yassine: Great, hello.
Benjamin: Hello, thank you.

Presentation by Benjamin Bellamy and Yassine Doghri

Walid: So, first question, I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself and tell us how you came to be involved in free software. Benjamin, the honor is all yours.

Benjamin: Hello, my name is Benjamin Bellamy, and I’m an engineer. Over the past twenty years, I’ve led projects in a variety of industries, including publishing, book distribution, online media, television and e-commerce.
And I’ve always been a staunch supporter of free software and open source, as well as a podcast enthusiast: so the road was paved, I’d say. This led me to set up Ad Aures four years ago with Yassine, a company dedicated to creating fair and sustainable ecosystems for the podcast industry.

Walid: Yassine, what about you?

Yassine: My name is Yassine Doghri, and I’m a computer engineer. I co-founded, as Benjamin said, Ad Aures with him four years ago and today I work as an architect and main contributor on Castpod, mainly. I did a few other projects for Ad Aurès on the side. There you go.

Walid: How did you discover free software?

Yassine: So, how did I discover free software? It’s pretty classic. As I’m a web developer, I started working on projects and using open source tools a lot. And so, one thing leading to another, little by little, I began to understand the ins and outs of free software. Because it’s not necessarily open source, free. I’m pretty much a values person and that’s how I discovered it. I’ve been lucky enough to work on an open source and free project, so I’m very happy today.

Walid: and you Benjamin?

Benjamin: I started computing in the ’80s on MS-DOS 3, at a time when, frankly, there wasn’t much talk about it, and I started to get interested, I think, when I actually started working. I started working in 98, at the time we were already using the Apache web server, we were already using a lot of Linux and there were starting to be distributions that prided themselves on being user-friendly, in particular Red Hat, which was doing a lot of work.
It was also around this time that we started to get Mandrake and company (Editor’s note: see interview with Gaël Duval). Well, it was still user-friendly for people who knew how to recompile the kernel, but it wasn’t yet as usable as it is today. Because today, anyone can use Linux. At the time, it was a bit tricky, especially when it came to running corporate services. But it worked pretty well, in fact it was quite stable. And it was a bit of a revelation to realize that, at a time when I was still totally formatted by the times, a Lotus Notes server on Red Hat was working really well.

Walid: We’re about the same generation, both of us.

Benjamin: yeah we’re old yeah.

Walid: before I introduce Castopod, I’d like to tell you a funny story: when I started the podcast, I didn’t know Castopod. I discovered Castopod by watching a talk Benjamin gave at FOSDEM. And by the time I was watching the talk, Benjamin had been listening to an episode, he contacted me and said “yes your podcast is cool”. I thought it was very, very funny.” There you go.

Benjamin Bellamy (source: benjaminbellamy.fr)

Benjamin : There’s no coincidence.

Walid : That’s it, and so I said to myself “damn, that’s stupid, I didn’t even look for a free podcasting platform when I created my podcast”. Still, I was a little ashamed.

Benjamin : So no, we’re the ones who should be ashamed. Clearly, we are, I said, we love podcasts and we are ardent defenders of free software but we are not the best at marketing, we’re not going to lie. Sometimes we miss it a little bit. That’s also why we’re very happy that you’re inviting us so that we can talk about what we do and then make as many people as possible discover our solutions and how they can or can’t help them. We realized by searching all the podcasts that talked about free software that there are very few that use Castopod, including those whose creation is after the creation of Castopod.

Free vs. open source

Benjamin : I just wanted to come back quickly because I think it’s not bad to do it as a preamble: you ask us how we discovered free software and you didn’t talk about open source. And I think it’s interesting to make the difference in the sense that globally today between what is open source, free software, free software, freeware, we tend to lump it all together, it’s not super important because very often free software is open source and it’s free, but it doesn’t necessarily go the other way around. And we’re a defender of free software, not necessarily open source.
And I wanted to take this opportunity to reiterate this a little bit because it seems fundamental to me today, especially when you call yourself a defender of free software, to say what it is. Open source software, to start with the simplest, just means that when you distribute software, you distribute it with its source code. So how does it work, what’s inside. That doesn’t mean it’s free at all. Typically, when someone makes a website, they will give the source code which is often going to be HTML and that’s not why it’s free. Since it’s free, it means that I have the right to run a program for whatever use I want.

You can’t tell me, you can use that to do that, but not to do that. I can use it for whatever I want. I can study it to see how it works and modify it if I feel like it. I am free to redistribute it, that is, to modify it and redistribute the changes I have made and thus improve it for the benefit of everyone. So where free, everyone understands what it is, is that you don’t pay. Open source means that you have access to how it works inside, it’s also technical. Free is a bit more philosophical, it’s really about freedom. I have the right to do what I want, what I want within the limits of the user license. But in any case I have the right to use it for whatever I want, to study it, to modify it and to redistribute it. And this is fundamental, especially today when questions of digital sovereignty are at the center of all concerns, where we ask ourselves a lot of questions about “but what are they doing with our data? Where are they going? What are they using it for?”, and to be able to study how it works and what’s behind it, that’s fundamental today. So why is there this conflation?
Because very often free software, well very often I think it’s systematic, we have access to the source code. It’s hard to see how you can make free software without giving access to the source code. And in fact, as soon as you have access to the source code, you tend to say it’s free because I can take it, I can copy it, I can modify it.
So there are still economic models related to free software and I think we’ll talk about them in the context of Castopod later. But in any case, these three notions, which are often confused in fact, are very different and that’s important, because it’s also important to understand why we wanted to make free software. We didn’t want to make free software because we wanted it to be free, we didn’t want to make free software because we wanted people to be able to have access to the source code, even if it goes through that, it’s because we think it’s essential that people are free to publish their podcast with the possibility of modifying, to know how it works and to redistribute if they make changes.

Introducing Castopod

Walid : To go further, you can listen to the episode with Benjamin Jean and also the episode with Raphaël Semeteys and Gonéri Le Bouder on the economic models of free software.
Now I’d like you to introduce me to Castopod. What is Castopod? How did the idea of Castopod come about?

Benjamin : So I’m glad you asked. What is Castopod? So let’s make a little technical preamble about the podcast.
What is podcasting across the Atlantic? In fact, it is a mode of broadcasting multimedia files that are essentially sound. What we call podcasts, we have a technical definition, because we’re engineers, is an MP3 file in an RSS feed: that is to say the possibility of publishing sound programs in MP3 format or other sound format, moreover, via an index file that will list all of my episodes, we talk about shows, episodes, in an XML file which is a computer formalism to list a set of elements. When we said that, we didn’t say much, except that it has a lot of implications. The first is that anyone can today, yesterday or tomorrow say, “I’m going to do a podcast and I’m going to upload my XML files to a server.” And listening apps, we know a lot of them, we know Apple Podcasts which is the most widespread historically, today there is Spotify, there is YouTube which has started to do it in a certain weird way, we may be able to talk about it later, there is AntennaPod, PocketCast, Anytime, PodcastPlayer, Podfriend, Podverse, I’ll mention a few, including open source ones.

And all these programs are able to understand the famous index file, the RSS feed, and download the MP3 files. What is very particular about the podcast and which is very different from the internet that we have seen develop since 2007 is that the podcast is decentralized: that is to say that any listening software can go and get its MP3 files anywhere. So I don’t have a closed silo, I don’t have a closed platform. I’m in an ecosystem that’s totally open, totally interoperable, where anyone can publish a podcast and anyone can play a podcast. As long as we’re talking about the same protocol. This is often compared to SMS, where no matter my phone, my carrier, my sender or my receiver, everyone can exchange messages with each other.

On the podcast, this is still the case. This is not the case, typically, if I’m on YouTube : my YouTube video, I can only have it on YouTube and not anywhere else. I’m in a closed ecosystem. So the podcast stayed open, which means starting to choose, if I’m a podcaster and I want to publish a podcast, a podcast host. So I can choose self-hosted, I can go and get a solution from the market. I had looked at about a thousand podcast hosts out there, which is significant because they all have the same value, which is to say that all of these hosts all have their content that is going to arrive in Apple Podcasts, in Spotify in exactly the same way. There is no one that is going to be more or less visible than another. Among these thousand, there are still a hundred that are bigger than the others. But it’s a must. That is to say, I have to start by finding a host and entrust them with my MP3 files. It’s going to make it an index, an RSS feed, and it’s this RSS feed that I’m going to then entrust to all the platforms of the cases.

Castopod is a podcast hosting platform, so there is an interface on which I will be able to define the name of my podcast, its description, the language I use to express myself, possibly the category, do I talk about religion, news and technologies, is it for children. After that, I’m going to publish episodes. For each episode I’m going to put an MP3 file, I’m going to be able to put an image, a description, a publication date. I’ll be able to say do I publish every week, in series, there’s a whole bunch of parameters. And Castopod will generate this famous RSS feed which means that my episodes will appear on all the platforms where I want to be referenced. It’s me as a podcaster who decides where I’m listenable, where people can listen to me. If I don’t feel like being on Apple Podcast, I may very well not be there. If I want, I can be there and so I will choose the platforms on which I want to be heard.

Why did we develop Castpod? Because in fact, we were already working in podcasting and for a whole bunch of reasons, we were doing tests and we needed to do tests on a number of podcasts. And so, we were looking for an open source podcast hosting solution because we didn’t want, when we were testing 12 podcasts, to pay for 12 subscriptions with a professional hosting provider that charges podcast per podcast. We made a little list of prerequisites, things we needed. And then we said to ourselves, we need an open source solution because we want to be able to do what we want, we want it to have such and such criteria. And then we started to search, to look everywhere on the sites that referenced open source solutions, podcast solutions, and then to choose the solution that met all our prerequisites. And we couldn’t find any. And it was a long way off: that is to say that overall we had about ten points, we found one that ticked 2-3 boxes, but we were very, very far from the mark. So we were a little disappointed of course, we used a solution that still exists called Podcast Generator, because it’s PHP, there’s no database, it’s very simple, the code is very old, it’s not MVC, it’s very old, but hey, we used it as best we could. And then one day, I think it was at the Pas Sage en Seine festival in Ivry-sur-Seine, I met Ludovic Dubost from XWiki, to whom I talked about it and to whom I mentioned my wish list. He said, “Oh, but there’s a company, a company called NLNet who subsidize projects with European funding, European subsidies, as long as it’s open source and in addition they are very much a driving force on everything that is Fediverse / ActivityPub“. It turns out that we wanted a podcast platform on the Fediverse, we’ll talk about it later I think, and he said “well made a file of about ten pages and our project was accepted”. We got a subsidy of about 40,000 and a few euros, which is not nothing. Which is a far cry from the blow that the development of the platform represents today, but it’s still not nothing at all.

And above all, it reinforced the idea that there was a need, that there was a place, that it was not normal that there was no open source podcast hosting platform that met the functional and technical criteria that we have the right to expect today. And that if a European body was willing to finance it to the tune of 40,000 euros, well, there really was something to be done. And it wasn’t so much the amount of the subsidy that convinced us, but the fact that there are people waiting for more. And that’s how Castopod was born. So what started out as a wish list has become a side project and is now a full-fledged project to which we devote a lot of time, energy, passion, blood and sweat.
And we’re super happy with the reception it’s received and the fact that people are using it. And as such, I want to thank you doubly for inviting us and using Castopod.

Walid : Yassin, do you want to add anything?

Yassine : You mentioned it for the Fediverse, but I think the differentiating point of Castopod is that it is connected to the Fediverse. That is to say, it is integrated into a social network that is federated. Castopod integrates a federated social network. But here are the other hosts, there are none today that are also integrated into the Fediverse.

The technologies that power Castopod

Walid : What I’d like to talk about now is the technologies you use in Castopod. Technically, what is Castopod made of? Yassine, do you want to talk about it?

Yassine : Castopod is based on a PHP framework called Codeigniter. It’s not very well known, but it’s in the same style as Symfony or Laravel, although it’s a little more capable, a little lighter. So, we based it on that. It allows you to develop web applications quite skillfully, so it’s great to get to grips with.

And as a result, it’s a web application, so PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, which is the most classic. Knowing that we modeled ourselves on WordPress, the WordPress model, namely that today 70% of websites are on PHP, and a lot of WordPress today on the internet. And so we wanted to keep this idea a little bit, it’s that today Castopod can be installed on a shared hosting so at a few euros per month and so it allows users who would like to have a little Castopod of their own to do it without problem.

Youngest child : I’d just like to add, when we developed Castopod, we really modeled ourselves on the WordPress model, whether it’s the economic model or the technical model: that is to say that Castopod, it can be downloaded in one click from castopod.org, and it’s a zip file, and you unzip the zip file at your host, Yassine said it, It can be shared hosting.

And then you follow a wizard, an assistant. You’re going to have to fill in the database info, two or three odds and ends, the name of your instance, etc. And it works. The idea was to remain as easy and least expensive to deploy. Of course, today you can use Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Yunohost. There are plenty of ways to deploy Castopod, but there’s always the option to unzip, install and it works.

And that’s without the need for a big virtual machine. If I have PHP MySQL, it’s going to work.

Castopod’s license

Walid : License question. What license are you using and why did you take this license?

Benjamin : So we’re under the AGPL V3 license, we asked ourselves the question before recording this podcast and we thought maybe it was in alphabetical order because AGPL was the first one. More seriously, as we told you, we like free software, free software, to put it mildly.

So we wanted a viral license and then we were also guided by NLNet. Most of the Fediverse software today, whether it’s Mastodon, PeerTube, is licensed under AGPL. In fact, we didn’t think about it for very long, that is to say, we didn’t really think about our brains

Benjamin Bellamy

Basically, anyway, today, when you have server software, it’s either GPL or MIT. We were leaning towards GPL and then NLNet reinforced this idea a bit. It was a natural choice. Maybe we didn’t ask ourselves enough questions, but today we’re pretty happy with this license. I think it’s in line with our values.

Walid : I didn’t know that NLnet was funding projects from the very beginning. It inspires me that we really need to do an episode on European funding because there’s really a lot to say.

Benjamin : So NLnet funds projects from the very beginning. It finances projects for companies and individuals. So I don’t need to have a self-employed SIRET to get NLnet financing. You have to know that if I’m on my own developing software, I can go and see them. Applications must be submitted once every two months and, depending on their workload, they respond either very quickly or a little slower.

And importantly, payment is made exclusively upon delivery of the source code.

Introducing Ad Aures

Walid : We talk about it in the episode on Peertube. Okay, we started talking about it at the very beginning now, let’s move on to the presentation of Ad Aures. I’d be interested if you could tell us a little bit about your company, what is it, what is it, what are your activities, what do you do on Ad Aures?

Benjamin : Of course, so as I said earlier, Ad Aures is a company dedicated to creation. We like the podcast a lot because we are a consumer of it, we like the podcast because it is an ecosystem that is decentralized, on which everyone can intervene, which is not the case in other ecosystems. However, it’s complicated to make a living from it. It’s simple, I create my account and then I just have to follow. In the podcast, I have to find a host, if I want to monetize, there are plenty of solutions. Do I want to advertise? Do I want to go to a financing platform? Do I want tipping? Is that… And anything is possible. And it’s not necessarily easy to understand and then it’s more difficult to hold on to success stories. And the idea of Ad Aures was to say today there is this fabulous ecosystem with this richness of content which is incredible because there is also a freedom of tone, format, language that you can find nowhere else because I can change hosting whenever I want and keep my audience. My audience can change their listening software and continue to listen to me. Finally, interoperability really comes into play. But when we said that, we didn’t pay his rent. And creating content, you can create quality content for free because it’s your passion in your spare time, but it means that in my free time, there’s someone who’s going to pay me a salary and rent.

So at the end of the chain, there’s bound to be someone paying. And while we’re at it, there are people who want to monetize their content directly and we think that’s completely normal and even commendable. We need to offer them solutions. And so we, we claim to offer a particular solution, it’s not the only one, there are many others, and once again we think it’s very very good that there are many, which is an advertising monetization solution, which is not based on user profiling, that doesn’t use cookies, so anyway there are almost no cookies in the podcast ecosystem, because people use dedicated software, which is numerous and multiple, but which will be based on semantic indexing. So in fact, among the tools that we have developed and are working on, there is a semantic indexing engine that allows us to study content and understand what the concepts are evoked. I’m really talking about concept, not keywords. To do indexing and recommendation. That is to say, by calculating semantic distance, we are able to say that one content is close to another because the subjects are related, because they are close, there are many possible reasons. So obviously, it uses a lot of artificial intelligence.

And we can use this either to do discoverability, which is one of the major issues in the podcast ecosystem, or to advertise, i.e. to recommend promotional items, advertising products that are directly related to the content I’m listening to. And we have a lot of testing operations with different degrees of completeness on this, which allow us to advertise. We work a lot in affiliate mode because we find that it works really well, especially on the podcast which is a highly cultural product and then it also allows it to be the content that goes to the advertising and not the advertising that goes to the content, which is kind of the usual mode of operation that we have on the internet today. I’m not going to go into too much detail, but today we’re developing tools for podcasters that allow them to respond to all the issues that may arise, including modernization, which seems to us to be the sinews of war, somehow. And of course, all this works with Castopod, which is the hosting platform, which is the first link in the chain.

Walid : To continue, it’s about understanding both your positioning in relation to others, so that’s what you’ve just given a little bit, that is to say how do you differentiate yourself from others, what do you bring that is different, that makes people want to work with you. And then afterwards, what I’d like us to talk about afterwards is a little bit about your contribution to the podcasting industry. What do you carry as a value, as an expectation, etc.? What do you highlight?

Benjamin : This goes back to what we said in the introduction, which is to say that we are really convinced that podcasting must remain free and must remain decentralized. We really don’t want the podcast to close in a closed silo. And today, there is a real risk. And for that, the angle we took is a functional one, which means that we try to provide functional answers to the problems of content creators who operate in a decentralized world, in an open world. Where today YouTube has opened its platform to podcasting, that is, you can go to YouTube Creator and then enter the address of your RSS feed and your podcast is going to be injected into YouTube and behind you will have access to all the features of YouTube.

I have no problem with that, I think it’s fine as long as YouTube doesn’t have a monopoly on podcasting. And we know that if there’s no alternative to monetization, if there’s no alternative to how I’m going to be able to improve my discoverability, that’s inevitably what’s going to happen. So for us, it’s paramount to provide alternative functional answers to YouTube. When you enter your podcast into YouTube, there’s information that comes in, there’s nothing that comes out of YouTube. If you create your podcast from YouTube, it won’t be accessible to other podcasts. YouTube is a black hole actually.

There are things that go in, but nothing comes out of them. They suck up the value, but they don’t reshare it. They don’t reshare information, they don’t reshare content. YouTube as a company by the way doesn’t create any content, they decide what you’re allowed to say, what you’re not allowed to say, whether you’re allowed to say swear words or not, literally, but they don’t create anything, they’re just there as a referee and as a functional provider of a number of tools. Again, I have no problem with that as long as they don’t have a monopoly and it leaves a choice to be able to express themselves because if I want to say something that doesn’t suit them, that contravenes their general condition of use, that I can say it elsewhere because YouTube is not the law, T&Cs are not the law, the law is something else. And so for us it is essential to maintain a decentralized ecosystem where there will be free competition in the capitalistic sense of the term, that is to say that different companies, different players will be able to propose solutions, but they still have to offer solutions. So that’s really what we want to do, that’s why we offer monetization solutions, because we know very well that we can offer the best platform on the planet if the prerequisite is to have to work for free, it’s not going to work for everyone. If the features aren’t great, it’s not going to work for everyone. And that’s where you put a lot of effort and invest a lot of time and energy.

I think it’s a good time to talk about Podcast 2.0, or at least to introduce it, because what we need to be aware of when we talk about podcasts today is that for about fifteen years, the entire podcast ecosystem has relied entirely on Apple.

Apple literally held the podcast at arm’s length for 15 years, which is to say that they had pretty much the only podcast index, the only podcast directory, so the set of listening apps depended on Apple to have the list of podcasts that exist.

Benjamin Bellamy

They were very much in the majority: which is quite absurd in fact, having a totally free, open and decentralized ecosystem, on which we have a player that has a market share of much more than half. But they didn’t get any financial benefit from it, and we have to be grateful to them for that. They kept the thing afloat, which is to say, they continued to keep the index alive, to give API keys to people who asked for them. So you had to ask for permission, but hey, in any case they did it and they gave it. They were the ones who decided who had the right to read and write on the index, but they did it for free.
The problem is that for 15 years, when you wanted to make a functional evolution of the podcast, you had to ask Apple, since they were the ones who had the index, who were at the center. And that if I want to add a feature, I have to be able to put it in the RSS feed, and so it has to be referenced in Apple’s central index. And if Apple doesn’t want to, I could put whatever I want, no one will be able to see it and it won’t do any good. And Apple refused any functional evolution on the podcast for 15 years. When I say all, it’s not almost all, it’s all. There have been zero functional evolutions on the podcast for 15 years. Which is quite incredible because we’re talking about a period from 2000 to 2015, a little bit later. In this period, a lot has happened and even on the internet and the podcast has had no improvement, no functional evolution. You take a podcast from 2000, a podcast from 2018, it’s exactly the same. To keep the content of the RSS feed there have been no changes, there has not even been a new category. There are people who have said it would be nice to have a category for ecology. Apple said NO, we’re not touching anything. So today, if you’re doing an ecology podcast, you don’t have a category, which is a bit of a bummer because there’s a bunch of them today.
And so what happened is that in 2019, if I’m not talking nonsense, Adam Curry, who is one of the pioneers of podcasting, both technically and in terms of content (he is one of the first podcasters) got fed up and he decided to create Podcast 2.0, i.e. a specification that allows the podcast to evolve, backed by podcastindex.org, which is a podcast index to say “well, we shouldn’t depend on Apple anymore, we need to have an index that is open source, open data, open to everyone without needing to ask for permission and in which we can add information to be able to add new features”.

Podcast Index (source: github)

When I talk about features, it can be very simple stuff, it can be very complicated stuff, it can be transcription, chaptering, links, speakers’ names, geolocation, well it can be anything you can imagine but what’s important is that Podcast 2.0 is open to everyone and anyone can say “Me, I’d like that feature. I wish we could add that. »

What’s really amazing is that when we started developing Castopod, it was just before the release of Podcast 2.0 and Podcast Index. So we had a project to develop a podcast platform that would be linked to ActivityPub, knowing that it was not easy because we were going to create our hosting platform, people were going to be able to connect to it via ActivityPub, we are thinking of Mastodon etc. which had already existed since then, and had already been popular for two years. But for the rest, for the others, for podcast listening apps, we had no legitimacy, no seniority, a voice that doesn’t carry weight. There was little chance that people would buy in. And Podcast 2.0 was a great springboard for us, a kind of megaphone, because one of the first things we did, we said it would be nice if we could add in the RSS feed the possibility to link to the conversation, especially if it takes place on the Fediverse, of ActivityPub, so that listening apps know where this conversation is taking place. And it was integrated and today we have listening apps, from people we don’t know at all, but who have implemented this feature that we had requested.

Adam Curry (source: wikipedia)

Walid : When you started, how did you get in touch with Adam Curry? Which platform do you use? How did it actually go to insert yourself into this nascent ecosystem? I would like you to explain that a little bit.

Yassine : Actually, what happened was that the chance we had was that we arrived, we started to develop Castpod when Podcast 2.0 and Podcast Index arrived. So there was really an alignment of the planets that happened at the right time. We started developing Castpod in May 2020, well back in 2020. It was really…

The presentation of Podcast 2.0

Walid : Wait, I’m going to ask a question about this because it’s a transition, given this temporality, was one of Castopod’s vocations also to be a kind of state of the art of what was going to happen in Podcasting 2.0?

Benjamin : In hindsight, yes. I don’t know if we realized it at the time. We assumed that Podcast 2.0 was great. We couldn’t have asked for anything better, we would have wanted to do it, but we didn’t have the legitimacy of an Adam Curry, clearly. And what’s really great is that in less than six months, we ended up with about forty platforms, hosts, listening apps, that were following Podcast 2.0. In fact, before Podcast 2.0, there was also a chicken-and-egg problem. If I added a feature as a host and no listening app integrated it, well it’s useless. And on the other hand, if as a listening application I integrate a feature but no one provides the information on the hosting side, it’s useless. And all of a sudden, everyone looked at each other a bit like an earthenware dog and no one made the first move, no one agreed. Obviously, there are a lot of features that were in the air, people were asking for them. I’m thinking of Giovanni from Podcloud who had already written technical specifications saying we should do this, we should do that. It can’t work on its own. The stroke of genius of Podcast 2.0 is to have a voice that is audible to everyone, that makes everyone agree and that says well, here we are, we’re all going to do this.

Walid : He’s independent of everyone else after all?

Benjamin : Actually, there are a lot of things. There’s the fact that Adam Curry was already famous, he had legitimacy as a podcaster, he had developed the first podcast index in the 2000s, there’s a lot of stuff. And then the fact that he comes in and says “Apple-style governance where everyone asks a person and that person just says no to every request, it’s not very encouraging.” That is to say, at some point people end up getting bored, of course. So the idea was also to say “we’re going to do a community and participatory project” and so to answer your question, how do we ask for the addition of a feature in Podcast 2.0? In fact, it’s done on GitHub, it’s done in an ultra-classic way as you would ask for a new feature on any project. And then, there are some kind of sprints, I don’t know if the word is the most appropriate, but in any case, it looks like a sprint that takes place every month, every two months, every six months, in fact, it depends, where you validate. There are back and forths, there are people who say, “Ah, but it would be better to add this thing. This feature has to be at the podcast level, at the episode level, at the level of both, it has to be a character string, an integer.” It can be very technical, it can be very functional. Sometimes there are a lot of people who respond, who feel involved, sometimes no one cares, it really depends on what you have to offer. There are no-brainers, typically, having transcription in the podcast to allow for better accessibility, better SEO, better discoverability. It seems obvious to me that it has to be done and so it was done very, very quickly. And today, it’s only Podcast 2.0 platforms that offer that. Unbelievable, that is, today you’re listening to a podcast on Apple Podcast, you’re sure, there won’t be any subtitles, there’s going to be no indexing of the podcast content. It’s impossible because Apple today doesn’t have a built-in Podcast 2.0 feature, which makes me as a listener say, “Don’t use Apple Podcast. It’s just the most backward platform in the entire podcast ecosystem today.”

Walid : I’m going to give an example because I discovered when I migrated to Castopod, I discovered a feature called the management of stakeholders, the “people”. There’s always the issue of, OK, I’m the host of the podcast, there’s the speakers, but possibly, I’d like to thank other people, actually, or quote other people who put me in touch, who helped share the episode, etc. And in fact, I discovered that you, you implement speaker management and therefore on a speaker, I can put a link to LinkedIn or etc. And that in fact we also find ourselves facing the implementation in client applications where typically, I don’t know me, Podcast Addict will implement this part of Podcasting 2.0 and so you can see, and it’s cool the speakers, but that if I use AntennaPod which is my usual player, he doesn’t see it. As a creator, you have great tools at your disposal, but they are not always available to your user who is going to use. It’s kind of dumb.

Benjamin : Yes, absolutely. So actually, what you have to see is that features are like everything, but it’s not unique to podcasts.

Not everyone uses all the features, not all software implements them. And that’s completely normal. And then even, and this is deliberate, there are Podcasting 2.0 features, we are pretty sure at the time they are released that they will not be unanimous. But that’s by design, which is to say that we can’t predict the success of one feature over another, because at the end of the day, adoption is the listeners who decide, it’s the podcasters who decide, and it’s certainly not the people who are around the table in the podcast 2.0 community when we say “oh well, It would be nice to do that.” After that, the functional spectrum of applications changes from one to the other. That’s also why, as a podcaster, you have a responsibility to tell your listeners to use a certain app instead, because there, you’ll have more information than anywhere else. And there are features to manage donations, funding, money, there are features for… Maybe there’s a lot of stuff.

There are some who will manage the transcript by displaying it in subtitle mode, there are some who will manage it by displaying it in scrollable text mode. After that, everyone has their own needs and prerequisites. That’s what’s great about podcasting, is that there’s no one right way to do it, there are plenty of ways to do things that are more or less adapted to the content and to the listener.

Walid : Yassine, I wanted to ask a question: have you contributed to these features, these new podcasting 2.0 features and if so, on which you have contributed?

Yassine : So yes, especially at the beginning we had a lot of feedback to do on the different specs that were implemented, the different RSS tags that were implemented.
Each time, we have discussions with Benjamin to find out what was best for us, for Castopod, and then by becoming part of the podcast ecosystem.

Benjamin : Actually, I was the one who intervened directly on Podcasting 2.0, at least on the requests. So I was saying, there’s everything that is “social interact”, that is, the possibility as a listener to be able to interact with the podcaster from the listening app. We also worked a lot on the recommendation.
So that’s a work in progress. We regularly give our opinions and in fact all this is available either on GitHub or on Mastodon. In general, what happens is that discussions start on Mastodon, someone says “oh well, I’d like to do that” and then depending on the echo that there is, it’s going to be… Either people say “yes, that’s a really good idea” or “no, I don’t understand” or “that’s a bad idea”.

And depending on the answers, well, it will give rise to a new request on GitHub. And in the end, it gives rise to a specification in the DTD, the namespace of Podcasting 2.0. We didn’t say it, but at the end of the day, it’s nothing more or less than a DTD on a namespace.

Walid : And these specifications, are they supported by an organization like the W3C or is there a standard or is it just a community project?

Benjamin: Today it’s a purely community project that is governed by the rules of the community. There isn’t one person who says yes, no. It is the whole community that decides what can exist and what will exist.

Yassine : So it’s Adam and Dave (Editor’s note: Dave Jones) who are at the origin of the Podcast Index project and it’s Dave who takes responsibility for managing the different sprints etc to include according to what the community says should be prioritized or not, etc. So he’s the one who manages the project schedule.

Benjamin : He has a secretarial role more than a project manager’s role. He’s there because someone has to move the machine forward and then he says, well, here we are, we’re going to close for this sprint, we’re going to close on such and such a date. Behind the scenes, he is not the one who takes responsibility for what goes in or what doesn’t. He is an animator.

Walid : Last question on the subject of Postcasting 2.0. This is an issue that we have already discussed together. We were talking about chaptering and you’d say to me, “Oh yes, chaptering, basically, we implemented it as soon as it came out, we didn’t go back on it too much, etc.” But it’s something we implemented as soon as it came out. So my question is, when do you implement the new features, do you implement all the new features of Podcasting 2.0? How do you make a choice about what you want to implement or not? It’s based on what?

Benjamin : There’s no simple answer to that. It really depends. It’s not that there isn’t a simple answer, it’s that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. It really depends. Of course, a feature that everyone asks us for is likely to be implemented faster than something that no one cares about. And usually, that’s how it goes. It can be a personal choice because we think it’s good or because sometimes there are things that make us love it.
There are some features that we find more interesting than others. I am thinking in particular of geolocation. Personally, I thought it was great to be able, in the 2000s, when we’re all used to using OpenStreetMap or Google Maps, to be able to search for podcasts by geographical area, to say such a podcast is about such and such a place. There are a lot of tourist podcasts for example, and not being able to do a geolocated search on a piece of content, I thought it was completely crazy.
As soon as the spec came out, and it wasn’t very complicated, we implemented that. That is to say, the possibility to say such and such an episode is about such and such a place, or such and such a podcast is about such and such a place, and behind it on Castopod, we put a map where we will have pinpoints (Editor’s note: dots on a map) to be able to visualize which episode is about which geographical area. And that, in my memory, anyway, it’s a trick, I thought it was so cool to be able to do it. And then behind it, by the way, as soon as it was implemented, there was someone who said to me “Oh well, we’re doing a podcast festival in Amsterdam and we have this problem and we’re interested, wouldn’t you like to come and talk about it? And so I went to talk to the festival, the podcast in Amsterdam, about this feature.

So there was a real demand as well. So in general, but it works a little bit for everything, it’s not specific to our organization, to our way of working, we’re talking about open source projects in addition, what is most in demand is the most likely to see the light of day quickly. And anyway, in the end, you have to have a price that Castopod open source if there is a podcast 2.0 feature that is not implemented and there is some, we don’t implement everything today, anyone can add it, the code is open so anyone can add what would be missing and then there are things too or because Castopod evolves a lot from one version on On the other hand, there are changes that are made, whether they are invisible changes or visible changes, whether in the administration part or in the public part, there are many, many changes that take place and that’s the same, there are people who contribute and who will modify this or that. All goodwill is welcome.

Walid : We’ll talk about the community part later. But Yassine?

Yassine : I can add when will we implement the new podcasting 2.0 features?

When we started Castopod, Podcast Index came at the same time, Podcasting 2.0 as well. So the first beacons, they were still very interesting and there was a lot to do. So we added them as soon as they came, we released them on Castopod, we were sometimes even the first to do it.

Yassine Doghri

And then, as Castopod matures, we have to make choices about more stability, make choices of… even features that there are on Podcasting 2.0. Some of them we haven’t implemented directly, and now we’re relying a little more on the community to make choices in terms of priority, as Benjamin said. There you go. The interesting features that we thought were interesting at the beginning, we have implemented them all.

This episode was recorded on January 23, 2024.

To go further

• Interview with Adam Curry and Dave Jones on Castopod’s blog
• Castopod Index
• Free to you show on Podcasting

License

This podcast is published under the double license Art Libre 1.3 or later – CC BY-SA 2.0 or later.

wawa

2024-01-01 08:55:10

Introduction aux modèles économiques et gouvernances des logiciels libres – G. Le Bouder, R.Semeteys

projets-libres.org/introductio…

Podcast : Introduction aux modèles économiques et gouvernances des logiciels libres - G. Le Bouder,

Comment sont gérés et financés les logiciels libres ? Quels sont les modèles existants et leurs évolutions au fil du temps ? Ces questions sont simples et pourtant les réponses ne sont pas évidentes.

^{wawa (Podcast Projets Libres !)}

podcast.projets-libres.org/@pr…

Sommaire

• 1 Interview with Maxime Lathuilière – inventaire.io
• 2 Introducing Maxime
• 3 The Path to Inventory Creation
• 4 The beginnings of the project
• 5 But what is inventory at its core?
• 6 The choice of the AGPL license
• 7 The technologies used
• 8 The first inventory financings
• 9 What is Wikidata?
• 10 Funding by Wikimedia
• 11 Other financing
• 12 Next Generation Internet (NGI0) and the NLNet Foundation
• 13 The community around inventory
• 14 What is Fediverse?
• 15 Why ActivityPub is not suitable for an inventory tool
• 16 ActivityPub features implemented in inventory
• 17 Inventory and Bookwyrm
• 18 Progress report after 10 years of the inventory project
• 19 Inventory Challenges
• 20 Presenting inventory to someone who doesn’t know
• 21 Presenting inventory to a free software developer
• 22 Conclusion
• 23 License

Interview with Maxime Lathuilière – inventaire.io

Walid : new episode of Projets Libres!.

Today we’re going to talk about a tool that I discovered a long time ago, in 2015. At the time, I was looking for a solution to manage my library of books and a bit by chance, I had come across this inventaire.io tool. I watched a talk my guest gave today, Maxime Lathuilière, at a meetup at Mozilla in 2015. Indeed, it’s going back up.

I had continued to follow the project a little bit and I thought about it again because I saw a news on Mastodon that inventaire.io had received funding from the NLNet foundation. We’re going to talk about that later. I told myself that we absolutely had to talk about inventory.io so here we are so I’m with the founder of inventorie.io.

Maxime, welcome to the podcast.

Maxime : Thank you, hi.

Introducing Maxime

Walid : So the first thing is that I’m going to ask you to tell us a little bit about who you are, how you discovered free software and what does it mean for you to do free software?

Maxime : As you said, it’s starting to go back up, now it’s been maybe 15 years…

I’m familiar with free software and in fact I was… I’m starting from a very long way. So between 2008-2010, I was still a student in business school and I was very far from the issues of the web, free software, etc. But I became interested in it because I had a hunch that there was something that could be done to solve environmental, social, resource information management problems. That is to say, it seemed to me, at last, I began to embroider a digital utopia which was that we will be able to organize information on resources with free tools and free knowledge and this will allow us to have more control as citizens over the impacts of our consumption. So I was very much in the perspective of a consumer-actor, a bit of a hummingbird. Through our individual actions and consumption choices, we will be able to solve environmental and social problems. I’ve moved a little bit since then because I’ve realized that there are some dead ends, but that’s how I got my foot in it. I started to dig into these questions, I started to take an interest in the web, and I came across conferences that made an impression on me: so around 2010, I’m thinking in particular of the lecture that Benjamin Bayart gave at Sciences Po on What is the Internet?
Maxime Lathuilière (source: wikimedia)
I watched a lot of conferences like this, which were perfect for me, since Sciences Po and business school have a bit of the same profiles. We are people whose teaching is not very technical. This conference in particular made an impression on me because it takes you by the hand and it makes you think a little bit about protocols, the political issues of an information architecture, etc. And so it kind of got me on my foot in the stirrup on that. And so I started going to see a lot of things. I went to see what Framasoft, Mozilla, Wikimedia were doing. And so I started hanging out more and more in those environments and educating myself like that, little by little.

Walid : It’s funny, I would have thought you had a technical background.

Maxime : I discovered this… In fact, in business school, I arrived there, if you dig even deeper into archaeology, that’s how I ended up in this mess. I was in high school and I was interested in economics and sociology.

I had been fascinated by the introduction to SES, so Economics and Social Sciences. And when we went to the Bac S, we didn’t have those classes at all. And so at the time, and maybe also a little bit to distinguish myself from my brothers and sisters, I went for an ES baccalaureate rather than an S baccalaureate, whereas now there would be a lot of things in the S baccalaureate that would interest me. But so I ended up in high school, and then I was told “the best thing you can do is prepare for a business school. I thought I was going to be able to go to business school and do entryism, make things happen from the inside out like you can be naïve at 16.

And so there I was, on that path, and I believed in it for a while. I started, I continued to be interested in environmental subjects. And free software has made us do that. I came to free software because of its political aspect. And gradually, it was free software that also gave me the tools of technical emancipation. That is to say, the whole community, they were perhaps even stronger at the time, was pushing you up the ass to install Linux rather than your Windows. And so I started to go and scratch a little bit, see how I could install this on my machine. And so gradually, I was able to realize that finally, the step to go from a non-technical profile to a technical one, having after knowledge, and then I still had some technical appetites, I was doing video editing, I was already doing this kind of hacks.

I was gradually able to realize that it wasn’t that insurmountable to start scraping web technologies, so HTML, CSS, JavaScript, which were designed as consumer technologies. That’s kind of how I found my way around.

The Path to Inventory Creation

Walid : Can you explain a little bit about the process that leads to the creation of inventories? Where does it come from?

Maxime : I have to start from my digital utopia of managing information on resources with free software and free knowledge.

From that idea, I started with ideas of “we’re going to have tools controlled by citizens in free software that will replace Amazon’s interfaces, FNAC’s interfaces, etc. in the organization of resource information”. The example I gave perhaps in the conferences you saw at the time was when you do, for example, if you buy a computer on the FNAC website, the graphical interface is proprietary and you don’t control it, the recommendation algorithm is proprietary and you don’t control it, and the data itself.

And so, you’re very limited as a buyer in what you can do, play as a comparator, as a recommendation tool. But I wanted to go out and get this information out about the resources and this choice of proprietary interfaces, and have control over this information and be able to inject third-party data into it, so KUE What to Choose, or on computers, there may be consumer groups or user groups that will be more competent to judge the hardware, which I would trust more than FNAC or Amazon or I don’t know. And so I started with this idea of being able to make free software as an alternative to these proprietary interfaces. And so, it seemed to me that it was interesting that I, who had this side, what I had learned in business school, what I knew about the world of sales, marketing, allowed me to make a kind of bridge between free software and access to information on resources.

In fact, the most blocking point is getting sellers to share information about what they sell in a standard format that can be reused by tools etc. So you have to have a community around a tool that will have a significant use so that sellers are interested in putting their data in this standard format. We are still very, very far from that. But that’s what motivated me at the time, what to do, I wanted to be able to make a prototype of something that went in that direction, to have a free tool to manage information on resources. And at that time, so around 2011, I was in touch, I started spending time with the community around collaborative consumption that was growing at that time.

So it was we’re going to be able to… The archetype, the example we gave all the time was that we’re going to be able to lend each other drills, we’re going to be able to carpool, etc. And so it was peer-to-peer exchanges of resources, loans, etc. So I was kind of caught up in that, because there was a dynamic, there was a group, in particular I was very much on the side of Ouishare, where there were a lot of people who were interested in it. And in particular, in Ouishare, there was a subgroup of radicalized librists who were Ouishare Labs, or with people more inclined to free software than to consumption in general, collaborative consumption.

There were ideas for experimentation, protocols, how to inform your network of the resources you have and what you can offer them, so to lend them, give them, etc. In this bath of ideas that was Ouishare Labs, this idea of inventory began to germinate. At that point, I thought… Even if there was…

I had done a few years before a project called BookSurfing, which was a kind of first version, but at that time I was absolutely not technically competent to realize this idea. But I kept working on the idea and from 2013 I started to really switch to a technical learning research: to go and learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, HTTP. What I needed to develop this project. I was able to start the inventory codebase in 2014 as a result of all this research.

Walid : 2014, it’s been 10 years…

Maxime : That’s right, it’s going to be in June of this year, it’s going to be the 10th anniversary of the first commit on the Inventory repo, which is a bit scary.

The beginnings of the project

Walid : Several questions on this, the first one is do you start on your own or are there all these people around you from Ouishare Labs, but the inventory project was really me the one who carried it?

Maxime : I started the development on my own and it took a long time afterwards to get people into the project. It’s also a question of how to get more of us to carry out this project.

But so in 2014 I started on my own and then there is Jums who joined me in 2016-2017, who started to take an interest in the project and who gradually started contributing code and who has been in the project ever since. And so we’ve both been coding on the project ever since. And then we have a lot of contributors who come to help us with other aspects, especially translation. We have translations into many languages by people most of whom we don’t know.

The whole bibliographic database aspect, there are countless contributors because one of the particularities of the project is that we are building a database that enriches Wikidata and therefore will reuse contributions from the Wikidata community. And then we’re going to have contributors at Inventory who are going to enrich the two databases, Wikidata and Inventory.

But what is inventory at its core?

Walid : And Inventory being a kind of front. Can you just explain in a few words what Inventory is?

Maxime: Inventory is two projects at the same time. There is the project that we present to the general public. Everyone is asked to create an inventory of their books and for each book to indicate whether they want to give it away, lend it, sell it and indicate to whom this book will be visible. So it can be publicly visible, people will be able to see. If we want to indicate our location, we can then see this book as being in the corner. But you can also restrict visibility to your association’s group or just your friends. And there you have it, so that’s the first pillar of the tool. The first part of the tool is this book sharing tool.

And to enable this book sharing tool, there is a second pillar, a second part of the project which is the bibliographic database, which is an extension of the Wikidata database and which will try to make it as easy as possible to share books by having the most complete and user-friendly database possible.

The choice of the AGPL license

Walid : I had two questions for you on that. The first is what license did you use for the inventory project and why did you use that license? And the second question then is what technologies did you use to develop Inventory?

Maxime : So on licensing, it was a difficult question because licenses are important issues and I wanted licenses that were not necessarily available in the existing system. While I was interested in free software, I found that it could be problematic to write code that would then be reused by… if we imagine that the inventory project was immensely popular, perhaps Amazon would want to have its own inventory instance. And I found it annoying that the license allows this type of reuse. I was interested in CopyFarLeft licenses, Peer Public Licenses, anti-capitalist ethical licenses.

There were things that existed, but it’s very little used compared to everything that is CopyLeft, so free software, GPL license, AGPL. This also makes the software incompatible with all those GPL and AGPL licenses. I ended up being satisfied with the AGPL license, which is an adaptation of the GPL, so the GNU Public License, which is a virus license, so you can’t close the code. The code will remain open, if we make significant changes to it, we will have to put them back into the codebase. And AGPL adds to that that it’s suitable for online web services, because there’s actually the issue of the user of the software that wasn’t originally covered in the original GPL and is dealt with in the AGPL. It seems to be working well enough for Google to consider this license toxic and refuse to use any software licensed under AGPL. So it seems to be working. We’re continuing with that and for the moment there’s no reason to change it.

The technologies used

Walid : What about the technologies you use?

Maxime : There are many technologies we use. I recommend the stack.inventaire.io site where we detail in detail all the technologies we use.

The most important ones are JavaScript on the server side, so with Node.js and Express, and on the client side. So historically, I left in 2014 with what I had learned at that time, which was Backbone And since 2019 we’ve started from Backbone and we’re moving towards Slender and we’re getting there soon, we’re at we have to be at 90-95% transition, we’re going to be at the complete end of Backbone soon, which is going to be worth celebrating, because we’re still gaining a lot in code maintainability. Yes, for the JavaScript aspects. Then on the server side, we use a CouchDB database, so it’s NoSQL. JSON is stored directly in the database.

Elasticsearch for everything that’s searched. LevelDB for everything cached.

The first inventory financings

Walid : The second part I’d like us to talk about is the financing part. What I understand is that in 2014 when you started basically, there wasn’t really a business model around inventory, how did it evolve actually? How do you finance or finance inventory?

Maxime : So from 2014 to 2018 it wasn’t funded. I actually had the chance in 2014: I participated with Michael Fozeu in a competition that was organized by , where we were asked to make a prototype of an application that would work with Cozy Cloud.

Walid : What is?

Maxime : It’s the New Generation Internet Foundation.

Walid : Okay.

Maxime : So it was, because I’m not completely sure it still exists. They were running this contest and they were offering a prize to submit applications that used data in Cozy Cloud. It was while doing this contest that I completely adopted the technical stack of Cozy Cloud which was Backbone, CoffeeScript, CouchDB. For the purposes of this competition, I learned all these technologies.

Then, I directly reused it in the inventory and I was able to get 7000 euros in price from the for the prototype we had made, as a reward for this prototype. And then, I lived frugally with that 7000 euros, living half the time at my parents’ house, half the time in communities right and left, especially in Germany, where there were very frugal approaches to food recovery, recovering unsold food, and being very much in the sharing of resources. And so I was able to live frugally with what I had won in the competition.

I received a little bit of RSA, because I have never been employed, it was very short in 2013, but since then I had not been employed so I was not entitled to unemployment. Then I was able to get funding for inventory needs. I was also developing tools to work with Wikidata. And so I was able to get funding from Wikimedia to work on some of these tools. I was able to get maybe 8000 euros to work for 6 months on these tools.

What is Wikidata?

Walid : Can you remind people, for people who don’t know, what Wikidata is?

Maxime : The somewhat simplistic way I present it in general is the Wikipedia of data. That is to say, we have a wiki, therefore a database that anyone can modify, enrich, and whereas Wikipedia offers you to modify text and therefore to share knowledge through text. Wikidata will offer you to modify structured data, i.e. we will have a subject that will have a property and a value for this property. For example, FOSDEM will be able to be a topic, and we will be able to say FOSDEM, nature of the event, event, annual periodicity, website, and we will be able to link to the website.

So it’s no longer text, it’s subject, property, value. And that’s a lot of things. It allows in the first place, so Wikidata is first and foremost at the service of the Wikimedia projects. Wikipedia, which we know well, but also Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and others. And so the Vietnamese Wikipedia doesn’t need to be updated to have the latest value of the number of inhabitants of Lyon because a person will be able to come to Wikidata and put the last value for the number of inhabitants in Lyon and it will be able to automatically update the value on all Wikipedias that reuse Wikidata data.

So that’s the first goal of Wikidata. Then there is a goal of reusing the data externally as well. There are projects, especially in research. There is the Wikicite collective, which had worked a lot on this, on the reuse of Wikidata data in research. There is the Scholia website, which also provides access to data in Wikidata on all research articles, the authors of those articles, who cites whom, etc. So there’s a lot of work in that direction, and there are projects like Inventory that will be able to reuse some of the Wikidata data that interests them. So in our case, it’s everything about the authors, their works, the publishing houses, etc.

Funding by Wikimedia

Walid : So you said you had 8000 euros in funding from Wikimedia, right?

Maxime : That’s right, if I remember correctly. This funding was to improve tools that I had already started to develop, especially JavaScript tools, to reuse Wikidata data, to simplify it in particular, because the Wikidata data model is a bit hairy, a little fleshed out. The first need we have when we retrieve Wikidata data is to be able to sort through all this noise to really get the essentials.

Then, little by little, we’re going to see a little bit of detail because there’s a richness of the data model that’s interesting. But in the beginning, we really want simple data. I created a tool on this called the Wikidata SDK, which has since become the Wikibase SDK because Wikidata is an instance of Wikibase, in the same way that Wikipedia is an instance of MediaWiki.

So there’s the Wikibase SDK to use the data. And also, for inventory purposes, after a while we needed to be able to modify the Wikidata data from the inventory. For example, being able to add an author to a work entity in Wikidata and without leaving the inventory to make it more convenient. And so there was this need to be able to do it easily and so I developed Wikibase Edit which allows you to make this modification on a remote Wikibase, managing permissions, etc. Because I’ve become a fan of command-line tools over the years, I’ve also written a tool called Wikibase CLI, CLI stands for Common Line Interface, and so it’s a tool that allows you to read and write Wikidata, and any Wikibase, from the command line. Those were the three main tools that I was funded to do.

Walid : Okay, you’re funded for the integration between inventory and Wikimedia?

Maxime : This funding was strictly for the tools themselves. That is, Wikimedia did not fund inventory.

Walid : I’ll make an aside on that, how do you actually contact the people at Wikimedia? How does it work? You’re going to see them and say, here’s my project, this is what I’m trying to do and everything. Were there already other projects that were trying to make their data customers as well?

Maxime : It’s an important part of the life of the Inventory project. Since 2015, I have tried to get closer to the Wikimedia community because I saw that there were things to do together, that we had to work together and there were mutual interests in working together. I was very lucky, so at that time, I was living in Lyon and the Wikimedia hackathon that year, in 2015, was in Lyon. Whereas it’s a hackathon that takes place every year in a different European city. And so I was able, realizing it at the last moment, to go and see them and go and discuss with the Wikidata team. And so I was able to start from there to discuss, to exchange. I came back to the next hackathon and we were able to exchange like that.

And so in 2018, I knew enough people and I felt legitimate to send a proposal. And then this proposal had a call for community feedback on whether this proposal is interesting for Wikidata, for Wikimedia. And there, I was fortunate to have the support of a large number of people I had met at these events and who knew my work, who had been able to see the evolution of the inventory and the tools and therefore who recommended me in this funding.

Walid : So it starts with a physical meeting.

Maxime : For many of them, yes.

Other financing

Walid : Okay, I’ll close that parenthesis. What did you get next in terms of funding?

Maxime : In 2019-2020, with Jums, we worked, so we actually put on a performance. We weren’t funded for inventory, but we did a service for the BNF and the ABES, who wanted to experiment with the use of Wikibase for their knowledge base needs.

Walid: What is ABES?

Maxime : it’s the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education.

Walid : Okay, okay.

Maxim : they are the ones who manage the FIDOC, which is a bibliographic database of Higher Education, where you will find all the information on… In particular, I think they are the ones who make the site thèse.fr, so there’s all the information about theses, PhDs, etc. And so they have a data sharing initiative and they wanted to experiment on the possibility of using Wikibase for that purpose. And in the same way, I had met a person from ABES who had invited me to apply for this call for tenders and so we were chosen and we were able to get funding for a service. In a way, it was a service that meant that we didn’t work on inventory at that time, but at the same time it was able to finance us, to have financing like that and to be able to continue working on inventory. And so that was in 2018-2019 and from 2020, we had another person called Hellekin who recommended that we apply for NGI funding, which is Next Generation Internet, so it was NGI Zero, which is a subset of NGI, which aims to fund free software, among other things. And at the time it was NGI Zero Discovery, there are a lot of names, we get a little lost, Discovery was very focused on everything that was search, and in particular they were very interested in everything that could be integrated ActivityPub.

Next Generation Internet (NGI0) and the NLNet Foundation

Walid : We’ll talk about it later, it’s a topic for listeners who follow a bit of the podcast that we’ve already talked about with Peertube, we’ve also talked about it with Castopod. It’s a fairly recurring topic, funding via NGI and the NLnet foundation. So in the end, you applied for one of the calls, it was through NLnet, right?

Maxime : It was via NLNet, yes.

Walid : It’s filling out a form.

Maxime : That’s right. On the NLnet website, there are regular calls for applications. NLNet is part of a consortium. There are several organizations in this consortium, including small singularity, of which Helenkin is a member. This consortium is going to recommend to different projects, it’s going to make this means of funding known to the free software community and so it’s started to fund a lot of projects so as you said but then it’s NLNet that manages so we apply on the NLNet website and it’s NLNet that reviews the different projects, chooses which projects are funded and then we are in contact with NLNet to obtain the different types of… so we sign a Memorandum of Understanding to record our agreement on what is going to be financed.

Then we make the corresponding developments and ask them for payment once it’s done.

Walid : So what does this NLnet funding imply? What changes from the moment you start to get this funding? And by the way, you’ve had several too? What’s actually changing for you?

Maxime : What’s different is that we don’t have to pay ourselves anymore, which makes a huge difference. Also it structures the development a little bit, that is to say that in relation to…

When I started the project in 2014, I was a complete novice in technical project management. So I learned while doing the project. After that, Jums brought experience. He had worked as a developer in an organization where there was already more professionalism. So he was able to bring things to the table. But after NLnet, it forced us to have a vision: a little more to anticipate what we were going to work on in the next few months.

That is to say, ideally, we want to be able to offer features for which we are asking for funding and that it corresponds to the work that actually makes sense at the time. It forced us to think a little bit more upstream about what we needed to do now.

Walid : What do they see interesting about inventory that makes them want to invest money in Inventory?

Maxim : what interests them in Inventory is not so much the book-sharing aspect as the innovative side of how we will reuse data, structure different databases, all this with free licenses on the data and on the software, and how we will build this knowledge base on top of Wikidata, in relation to Wikidata.

It’s this whole aspect, it’s the whole bibliographic data pillar, federated data, that they’re mainly interested in, even if they’re also interested in the… So then it’s always interesting, here I say this, it’s more in the feedback we got on the third financing that has just started, but depending on the interlocutor we have in front of us, at NLNet, there will be an interest in different things. In any case, sometimes the focus is on different things.

But so yes, lately, it’s been more about this federated data aspect.

Walid : So actually, basically, from the moment you start to get NLNet funding, so there are several, it allows both of you, that’s it, to pay a salary, that it becomes your business in the end?

Maxime : So it was already our de facto activity, but at least we could be paid. In 2019 we created the Inventaire association which has two members, so Jums and I, and we were able to work in this association whose statutes are available on the Inventaire wiki to go and see it, and so since then we have been an employee of the association.

Walid : So it’s interesting to see that in the end this funding can change everything in a project.

Maxime : It’s likely that if we hadn’t had this funding, at some point we wouldn’t have been able to continue the project. I had already come to spend many years in a frugal lifestyle and after a while there is an exhaustion in being a bit in nomadic mode and always paying a little attention to your expenses. And so having the opportunity to make a living from the project you’re working on full-time is still critical in the survival of the project.

The community around inventory

Walid : Next point, we’ve started to talk about it a little bit, it’s the community around inventaire.io. Who is your community?

Maxime : So in the end, we’ve already seen a lot of different aspects of this community. So there’s a whole aspect to Wikimedia. So we have many users of Wikidata, of Wikipedia, who come to find in Inventory the means to manage their library while being very close to Wikipedia and Wikidata. Because on Inventory, once you see your inventory, you can also go and explore the bibliographic database. And everywhere in the bibliographic database, we’re going to show excerpts from Wikipedia with a link to the corresponding Wikipedia page, show Wikidata data.

And so for someone who is a contributor to Wikipedia, to Wikidata, it’s interesting to see all this data that they contribute to. It’s quite appreciated in the community, that aspect. One of the ways Wikidata characterizes inventory is through a visualization of Wikidata. That is to say, from their point of view, there is the Wikidata interface which is a bit austere, we see very raw, very minimalist data, and there are different visualizers and inventories is one of them.

So that’s a part of the community, then there’s obviously the whole free software community, where maybe it’s the moment when what warmed my heart was the last free software day in Lyon (LDLR: the JDLL). It seemed to me that this was perhaps the room in the world with the highest density of inventory users. Because I spent a lot of time there in Lyon. And in the free software community, that’s where there were the most people familiar with the project. It motivated me a lot at the time on the project, because we get warm feedback, and in particular I’m very grateful to Framasoft who has supported the project for a long time, who had done an interview, published an interview in 2019 (Editor’s note: in fact it was a mistake by Maxime, it was in 2021 on Framablog) which also brought us back a lot of their community, French and French-speaking free software.

And then there’s a third aspect, but one that we may not know as well about, which is the whole world of book lovers, librarians, book professionals, who sometimes find…

The librarians we met, who told us that it allowed them to continue working from home because they continue to be librarians. That’s kind of what we’re proposing. Everyone is invited to become a librarian in their network. And so there you have it, people who love books can find in this tool a way to live their passion.

Walid : What do you know about your community of users, other than when you meet them physically in a room?

Maxime : So we know what we can see on the site, that is to say that on the site we can see, there is a map where we can walk around and see the local groups, the users who have substantial inventories. What we’re seeing through this is a lot, so maybe the biggest collective groups of users, they’re going to be activist groups, groups that want to share knowledge on a specific subject, so we’ve seen groups of developers, groups, anarchist libraries that are going to do their inventory because these associations have a room with a library but don’t necessarily have library tools and are going to use Inventory as a tool librarian.

Walid : That’s what I was looking for when I came across Inventory.

Maxime : That’s the initial goal of the project. That was kind of the idea I had that we could have groups by companies, coworking, associations, that each collective could have its library distributed like that.

Walid : Are the majority of the users French-speaking or are they spread across a lot of different countries?

Maxime : I don’t have very detailed statistics on this, but with a wet finger of what we see on the map, the air of being half in France, another 40 percent elsewhere in Europe and 10 percent elsewhere in the world.

Walid : And so the last question I have about the community part is that as a project, an inventory, what gives its community a tool to be able to interact with the project? Is there a forge? Is there a forum, a discussion channel?

Maxime : So we have different tools. In the first means of contact we have, in general it is either by email, because the site offers a contact email, or by social networks, especially present on Mastodon, Fediverse. And once there’s that first contact, we invite people to join our chatroom. In particular, we have a discussion group on Matrix Element where we have now started to divide by topics, bibliographic data or technical topics, or general discussion. So we invite everyone to join the topics that interest them in there. Conversations are by default in English so that you can invite people a little more widely than just the French-speaking world, although sometimes the discussions come back in French, if people are not comfortable in English.

We also have a wiki where we will document the project. We’d like to do more and more tutorials that help newcomers to the tool get familiar with the tool. We’ve launched drafts, there’s still a lot of work to be done, so if there are people who want to contribute, it’s very welcome to make tutorial sheets to help people come and adopt the project.

So the tool is the forge. We have a git forge, so we’re still on the Github. That time will probably come to an end. Here we take a close look at everything that is being done on federated forging projects with ActivityPub. In fact, you’d like to be on a free forge. It’s always the problem of how not to be cut off from contributors. If we could go straight to a federated forge, that would be the best. There’s a lot of movement in this space. For the moment we’re staying on Github, but we’re keeping a close eye on what’s happening on other free forges.

What is Fediverse?

Walid : Next point, this is one of my favorite points, it’s the Fediverse. So we’ve already talked in other episodes, but I talk again and again each time with the projects that fit in with the Fediverse. There’s a whole inventory section around Fediverse and ActivityPub.

But first, the first thing I’d like to ask you is, what is your definition of Fediverse?

Maxime : To the trick question!

Walid : That’s why I ask for it from all projects, actually. That’s because it’s for everyone to give their own take on the thing.

Maxime : There are several Fediverse, actually. I think there are several possible perimeters. The broadest definition is all social networks federated around federation protocols. Today, we hear about ActivityPub, but before ActivityPub, there were already Diasporas, Frendi.ca. There were already things that existed and that are considered part of the Fediverse, at least in its history. Because today it’s true, a lot of things are happening around ActivityPub. This is perhaps the second definition today of Fediverse, which is all these tools, these social networks that exchange with the ActivityPub protocol.

Walid : So my second question on this is, what is the inventory space in the Fediverse?

Maxime : It’s typically Mastodon, it’s about exchanging micro-blogs, exchanging notes. From a technical point of view of ActivityPub, it is the software that publishes notes. The servers notify each other of the new notes available and we have a flow of information and activities. And so for this purpose, ActivityPub seems to work. So there are criticisms to be made about the viability of this mode of operation at the scale, about what we see, for example, instances that, having limited disk space, are forced to delete notes from the history after maybe two years, delete what they have locally. And so that means that we can no longer access notes older than two years, which is problematic from an archivist’s point of view or just from the point of view of people who want to have access to the context of these old notes.

But hey, overall we manage to recreate with ActivityPub, with Mastodon, a kind of distributed Twitter. It works pretty well, we have a large user base. It also works quite well with posting comments on videos, so on we see Peertube or I think there are other software that I may not know as well. There are different things like that that come together with Mastodon and where the feedback seems to work. But as soon as we go to uses that are less in the commentary, it seems to me that it can become complicated.

And in particular, inventory from this point of view is a bit weird. That is to say, when you create an inventory of your books, you can think of it as an activity stream, but the activity stream is less interesting than the database that is built up by this inventory. That is to say, having the latest books added to your inventory is interesting, as a topicality. So there are two questions that the inventory is trying to answer. It’s:

• I’m looking for a book that has it?
• What books are available in our networks, what could I borrow if I wanted a book?

And these two questions, from an HTTP request point of view, well, protocol, it’s not necessarily very practical to go through ActivityPub to do that.

Why ActivityPub is not suitable for an inventory tool

Walid : Is that the case now?

Maxime : No. I’ll tell you why it’s complicated. It’s that when you’re looking for a particular book, you want to query a database and that says “well, well, I have such and such a book in the database, well, such and such a person has such and such a book and could lend it to you. And that in the ActivityPub model, it would require having the information that such and such a person has such and such a book. So it would require having been there at the time when this person, who may be on another instance, published the activity that he had such and such a book in his inventory. And that would mean being able to keep this information over a long period of time because maybe in 5 years, this person will still have this book in his inventory and I would still like to know where can I find this book, but the activity will have to be able to be still available. And in fact, it seems to me that this model of ActivityPub where each server will locally copy the database that will then be searchable shows its limits for this type of use. And that we’d be much more… It seems to me that it would work much better to keep the reference data on the instances and that when I make the request to find out who can lend me this book, my server will ask the other servers who has this book. And so that would mean that someone who has their inventory server on their Raspberry Pi could just have their inventory data locally, but then go and query the server of a library that has 50,000 references without having to have their data locally. And so just go and ask for the piece of data that we’re interested in. So there you have it, it seems to me that for stock querying, ActivityPub is not the finite federation protocol.

ActivityPub features implemented in inventory

Walid : Do you currently have any implementation of ActivityPub or none at all?

Maxime : We have an implementation of ActivityPub that aims to share inventory activities. That is to say, when you have made the choice to make your profile fediverse, it is a logism that you have invented, so you can go into its parameters and make your profile fediversible. From there, this will mean that typical people on Mastodon or elsewhere on the Fediverse will be able to follow your profile and receive activities when you add books to your inventory. That’s one aspect. And so that’s the flow of activities, it allows us to know what’s new in the inventories of the people we’re interested in.

Walid : There is no notion of commentary?

Maxime : No, there is no notion of commentary. It’s a bit of a minimalist implementation that focuses on this workflow aspect. There is a second implementation of ActivityPub which is based on knowledge and in particular it allows you to track not a user but an entity. So we’re going to be able to follow an author, a publisher, a work, and when there are changes that are made to the bibliographic database, for example when there’s a new edition coming out with a given publisher, and if we follow that publisher, we’ll be able to see in its behemoth feed that there’s a new edition that has been added for that publisher. So that’s very experimental because there are uses that can be interesting but it’s not always obvious. It’s not necessarily that the edition has just been released, it could just be that the data was missing from the database and someone was going to indicate the data. But it’s an experiment that we wanted to carry out and for which we had funding and funding.

Walid : This brings me to what you were saying at the very beginning and which echoes the episode with the people of Open Food Facts with the whole notion of getting the publishers to put their own data on it, since it is themselves the source.

Maxime : But for that, they have to find an interest in it, you have to have a critical mass. Yes, and they are generally cautious. So we, in addition, in relation to Open Food Facts, I think that Open Food Facts is dealing with behemoths, food giants. So that’s yet another category. We have the publishing houses. There are giants, but there are also a lot of independent publishers.

We don’t have a collaboration yet, but I think it could be something that could be interesting, especially for small independent publishers, to help them structure their data. Then, for the most part, the web is not their job, and so there can be some apprehension, lack of knowledge of the confidence they can have in a project like this, and perhaps of the usefulness that there can be in being present in the database like that. In any case, for us, it is one of our objectives to support independent publishing houses in their effort to offer the readership things that are not offered by publishers who are all concentrated at Bolloré. All the ways we can support them, we’re warm, we’re interested.

Inventory and Bookwyrm

Walid : last topic on this news item, I have a friend of mine who once told me about a tool, (hi Fabrice), called Bookwyrm. It’s funny because we were talking about it earlier about anti-capitalist licenses, it has an anti-capitalist license. It’s a tool that allows you to do book reviews and the first time I saw it I was there “but it’s great this thing but in fact there would be things to do with Inventory!” and so in fact I wanted to know if you had done things with Bookwyrm which is also another service that itself is also federated if I say no nonsense and so there you have it I was wondering if you have any relationship with the people at Bookwyrm, if you’ve ever done things with them.

Maxime : We had exchanges, in particular by various contributors who came to propose integrations in one direction and in the other, and there is in particular in the existing today, there is a use by Bookwyrm which reuses inventory data.

Walid : Do we say “Bookworm”?

Maxime : I think it’s “Bookwyrm”.

Walid : OK, I didn’t know how to put it.

Maxime : After that, Bookworm uses data from OpenLibrary and inventory.

So that’s a first integration. We’d like to be able to post reviews that have been written in Bookwyrm. We’d like to be able to display them in Inventory. We can’t do that at the moment. This goes back to the problem I mentioned before, which is that typically, the requests we would like to be able to make are “for a given work, give me the reviews that correspond to this work”. And we don’t know how to make that request to Bookwyrm today.

And so, because we don’t know which body to ask him about, there’s no way to make a federated request. The only way, again with ActivityPub, is to listen to the activities to build the database locally. So in the absence of that, at the moment, we’re not able to display those criticisms. We also have another problem with the data structure. You should be able to search their database by ISBN or by Wikidata ID or by OpenLibrary ID or Inventory ID.

Be careful, open library or inventory, we’re going to find a way to make these requests. So it’s a technical problem that we have. And then there’s also the consideration of, “do we want to have the ability to federate, write reviews in Inventory and then be able to share them with Bookwyrm”?

It’s a recurring topic and in fact, it could be interesting, but it’s true that the two projects are often compared and it’s not always easy for people who come to work on these subjects to see the differences.

We really focused on the physical objects delivered and on the management of their loans, donations, etc. Whereas Bookwyrm really set out on an alternative to Goodread, talking about books as ideas, talking about books as works. And somehow, these two tools could have connections, could have overlaps, but it’s not directly competing in use. You can’t manage inventory with Bookwyrm, you can’t manage loans, make exchanges, etc. And today we can’t make… So we can but it’s not really optimal to make reviews today in the inventory.

Walid : Ok, I’ll follow it with interest if things change in the years to come, because it seemed to me that there were indeed some nice synergies on this.

Progress report after 10 years of the inventory project

Walid : The last part is what I call the challenges ahead. In fact, I wanted to know a little bit, update, where are you and a little bit, what are the things that are going to happen? First of all, where are you at? What do you think of the project after 10 years? What’s good? What’s wrong? How do you see it? That’s the first thing.

Maxime : That’s a difficult question because we’re often with our noses to the grindstone. So here, we have to raise it a little bit and see the project a little more broadly. There are clearly things that motivate me to continue the project. There is sustained interest from different people. We get a lot of feedback from people who think it’s a great project. And so that’s kept the project going all these years. After clearly there was no audience success, the number of users is not insane and so it raises the question of the usefulness of the project sometimes. We say to ourselves, well, is it worth spending so much time on a project where there are not 500,000 users? After us, it’s, and I think I’m thinking in particular of Jums, who reminds us of this regularly, who says that if there are a few users, a few groups of users who have a use, for example, in associative libraries, in collectives, where they will be able to share knowledge like that, in fact, that’s enough for us.

It already justifies the project of being able to help collectives share knowledge. That’s enough motivation. It can be complicated sometimes on a daily basis, after 10 years, to find the motivation for a project that is still relatively unknown to the general public.

Walid : You don’t give a presentation, for example, at FOSDEM?

Maxime: I did a lot of them in the first years of the project. I got a little exhausted.

I used to run stands, I remember, in 2015, running a booth in parallel with COP21. No, it wasn’t there. The COP in Paris, there was a festival, finally there were booths where there were free parties where I would run the booth all day and make a presentation, etc. Very enthusiastic.

And actually, it takes an insane amount of energy to do a day like that. And so it’s true that right now, maybe I don’t have the level of energy that I might have had at that time. I’m saving myself a little bit more. At FOSDEM, I went a little more to peck and chat with people. I was available to discuss, but I didn’t feel the energy to go and give a presentation, which meant blocking out months in advance. It can be complicated.

And on this point, it’s true that this is one of the aspects, it seems clear to me that there is a need for relays, there is a need for there to be new energies that come to join the project so that people still have the desire to go and see everyone to talk about it, because maybe we are tired after ten years.

Inventory Challenges

Walid : You actually just answered part of my next question, so who were the challenges actually, what were the challenges for the coming months, years of the project? The first challenge was to get new blood. Do you see any other challenges, other big challenges ahead?

Maxime : Then there are the challenges, so we’ve just signed an agreement with NLnet for the developments over the coming year.

So in the challenges to come, there is everything that we have agreed on and in particular there is the inventaire.io site, which is the main body and, to my knowledge, the only one because, in particular, because we have more or less discouraged from creating other bodies by saying as it stands it is not necessarily a good idea. And the reason for this is that creating new instances today means starting from an empty bibliographic database. We have Wikidata, which is still available, but we don’t reuse all the work that is done on inventaire.io to improve bibliographic data. And so, one of the major projects will be to allow new instances to be created, while reusing inventory.io data.

And so, it’s possible that the two pillars of the project I was talking about in the introduction will be more clearly separated in the future. And so, that we have another site that is dedicated to bibliographic data and that the inventory part can be more easily decentralized, so that we have several instances of inventory and therefore of management of its inventory of books that reuses shared bibliographic data.

This is perhaps the biggest challenge for the year and then we have a lot of challenges on how we will be able to improve interactions with Wikidata, because it was a bit of a crazy challenge to embark on a project that uses a database controlled by another project. This means getting involved in the other project’s data model choices, etc. And this poses difficulties for which today we have a certain number of answers. The project has had time to mature on this. And sometimes patches too. And there are things that we’d like to improve, and these are also big projects where we’re going to try to solve problems that we’ve been identifying now for a number of years on the way we interact with Wikidata to be able to improve the way we reuse data, and also we’re going to be able to share more data with Wikidata, especially design data. These are perhaps the two biggest challenges ahead for the project from a technical point of view.

And then there are these technical challenges and we have, as you said, there is an organizational and communication challenge because that’s really, I think, what is perhaps the most problematic today. So it’s our difficulty in bringing new people into the project. That is to say, we are very happy with all the contributions we have in the bibliographic data, in the translations, but there are still very few people who come to help with code. And one of our hopes is that with decentralization, we’ll be able to unlock this because we hope that people will be able to install the inventory software and see how they can improve their instance and therefore come and contribute. So that’s one of our hopes on the code contribution aspect. And then there’s a whole communication issue, where we’ve tinkered with stickers, flyers, but it’s still very small, we don’t distribute many much, we print very little. There may be a lot of work to be done on this, in terms of communication, and to find ways to make this project known, which is now, because for a number of years, I may have put on the brakes by saying: no, but it’s not ready, it’s not ready. I think that now we are at a level of maturity where we can bring people from the general public to the tool without them breaking their teeth on bugs etc. I think that now might be the right time to speed up communication and the problem is that we are the nose of the technique and so we can’t take this time to play dumb.

So here too we may need help, new energies and on that.

Presenting inventory to someone who doesn’t know

Walid : We’re coming to the end of the interview, I’d like to move on to a little conclusion and in conclusion I’d like to ask you two questions. The first is how would you present inventory in one or two sentences to a user who doesn’t know? What would you say to him?

Maxime : So it will depend on the user, I usually adapt the presentation in public.

Walid : You take someone who is at a party, you take someone who doesn’t know, so you don’t know the technical past, how do you explain it in two sentences or three sentences, what does Inventory do?

Maxime : inventory allows you to make an inventory of these books, so for each book say whether you want to lend it, give it away or sell it and choose who can see this resource next. It’s a way of presenting the project. And another way of saying the same thing is actually that it’s a tool that allows you to build federated libraries. We will get to the point where collectives can have a common library distributed, and therefore each one becomes the librarian of the rest of the network. We help collectives to create distributed libraries. That’s another way of looking at the project.

Presenting inventory to a free software developer

Walid : Second question, how would you introduce Inventory to a free software developer? What would you say to him in a few sentences?

Maxime : It’s a very rich project with a whole bunch of questions and it’s exciting because we’re going to be juggling a whole bunch of technical bricks, on structured, federated data issues. We’re going to do SPARQL, HTTP, ActivityPub. We now have questions about decentralization, how we are going to publish software that can be reused by different people.

And so have questions about how we make this distributed maintenance as easy as possible. And we’re going to have the whole question of federation other than through ActivityPub. So to answer all the questions I was asking about how we go about questioning different bodies about what they have in their database. So we have questions about which protocol to use to make these federated requests. Maybe it can be DHT (distributed hash table), maybe it can be other peer-to-peer protocols. There are a lot of technical challenges and then there’s the whole bibliographic data part where there’s modeling for all those who are fans of books, comics, manga, there are a whole bunch of things to do on how to represent the data.

Are you interested in moving from the complexity of reality into a more or less coherent data model? There are things to do. I’m thinking, for example, of the example of how to represent Dragon Ball Z, a series like Dragon Ball Z, in structured data. Do we represent by chapters? Do we represent by volumes? And if so, in what language.

This is perhaps too traumatic an example to begin with. This is not a good example to begin with.

Walid : No, but that’s fine.

Maxime : There are a lot of interesting things to scratch off. And for me, it’s a project that I always find very rich, especially because of all the things it makes known as a book. I discover books all the time, I discover publishers all the time, subjects, it’s fascinating.

Conclusion

Walid : Maxime, thank you very much for responding to my request and we were able to meet at FOSDEM so we were able to talk a little bit this year, it was cool for me too to prepare. If you liked it, leave me some comments, mainly on Mastodon, it’s always a pleasure to have. Maxime, thank you. Good evening to you, stay well.

And then I hope to see you again next time on the podcast to talk again again.

Maxime : Well, with pleasure. Thank you to all listeners and join us in the chat. We hope to see many of you….

This episode was recorded on February 29, 2024.

License

This podcast is published under the dual license Art Libre 1.3 or later – CC BY-SA 2.0 or later.

Tobias

2017-04-01 20:00:13

Home

friendi.ca/

friendica – A Decentralized Social Network

^friendi.ca

podcast.projets-libres.org/@pr…

Sommaire

• 1 Peertube with Pouhiou and Booteille
• 2 Introducing Framasoft
• 3 Presentation of Booteille and Pouhiou
• 4 The genesis of Peertube
• 5 The complexity of Peertube compared to other software created by Framasoft
• 6 The beginning of Peertube’s development
• 7 First reactions to Peertube v1
• 8 Peertube’s financing methods
• 9 Development Team & Community
• 10 Peertube and the Fediverse
• 11 Peertube and Content Creators
• 12 Examples of well-known or notable Peertube instances
• 13 Peertube v6 and the roadmap for 2024
• 14 Introducing Peertube to a content creator on Youtube or to a Youtube user
• 15 Conclusion
• 16 License

Peertube with Pouhiou and Booteille

Walid : welcome to Projets Libres! for this new episode. So now, I’m delighted today, because we’re going to talk about a software, again, that I really like, like in most of all the episodes I do, it’s Peertube.

Peertube is a software that I use personally, which allows me to publish videos on the Internet without having to go through YouTube. I use it, personally, for the memory of my sport, to avoid putting in fact all the old videos and everything that happens in my sport which is skating. And so I have my own instance that I put gigabytes and gigabytes of old videos on. And so that’s how I got to know and love Peertube. And I really wanted to do an episode on it to know a little bit about the history of Peertube, why it was developed and also everything that goes around the software itself, which is a little bit about the creative economy and having Framasoft’s vision of where do they want to go with Peertube, where do they not want to go. And so to do this, I’m delighted to have with me Pouhiou and Booteille who are two members of Framasoft and with whom we’re going to exchange on this subject. So I hope you’re doing well and you’re ready to talk a lot about Peertube today.

Pouhiou : I’m super hot.

Walid : And you, Booteille?

Booteille : yes, definitely, it’s going to be good.

Introducing Framasoft

Walid : Before I give you the floor to introduce yourself, I would like us to give us a quick introduction to Framasoft. I think one day we’ll do a full episode on Framasoft because there’s the same, there’s a lot to say about it. But here I would like us to focus a lot on the Peertube today. So could one of you please introduce what Framasoft is?

Pouhiou : Come on, I’m going for it. As a result, Framasoft is a non-profit association, in 1901, whose social purpose, the objective is popular education on the issues of digital technology and the cultural commons. It’s a big word, but behind all this, in fact, the idea is to try to find a way to facilitate in the lives of a greater number of people, both the use of free software and ethical software, because it’s not because it’s free that it’s enough for it to be completely ethical. So there you have it, and to facilitate a healthy, emancipated, autonomous digital life, etc. The association has only 38 members, 11 of whom are employees and I am one of them, so what? ?Unity? ? is a volunteer member.
We are financed almost exclusively by donations, we have more than 50 active projects, it is an association that is almost 20 years old, well that will be 20 years old next year. And according to Professor Lalouche, the Wet Finger Institute, this is totally a rough estimate, we believe our actions benefit more than 1.4 million people every month. It’s very difficult to know because one of the rules is that you don’t track.

Walid : I thought you were saying that there were actually more members in Framasoft?.

Pouhiou: It happens a lot. After all, there are a lot of people who are welcome to contribute voluntarily to our projects, so if we manage to welcome the contribution and that, it always requires time, energy of care, within the limit of the human energy available, but it’s a very small association and it’s really one of the specificities of Framasoft, The idea of first gathering a small group of humans for that group of humans who agree on values and ways to make a manifesto, which is on our site framasoft.org, agree to move forward with all the projects that the association can launch.

Presentation of Booteille and Pouhiou

Walid : Now, I’m going to ask both of you to introduce yourselves.

Booteille : So I’m Booteille. I have been a volunteer member of Framasoft for a year and a half and I spend a little time doing popular education or pedagogy around digital issues. I do this both on a voluntary basis at Framasoft, I also do this a little bit with the little resourcefuls, another association in which I am.

And on a professional scale, I set up a self-employed company to support structures in their ethical digital transition and help them get out of Google, Microsoft, all that.

Walid : What do you have in your past?

Booteille : I learned to program when I was a teenager because I liked manga and I wanted to help with the administration of a manga site. Then I ended up owning this manga site. I made a living from advertising, especially from Google, which was very lucrative at one point, not much more very quickly. And in fact, I’m just an eternal curiosity who was interested in a lot of subjects and that’s what gradually led me to free software as well.

Walid : You joined Framasoft as a volunteer a long time ago?

Booteille : a year and a half ago.

Walid : Okay. And you, Pouhiou?

Pouhiou : I’m Pouhiou, I’m an employee of the association and currently co-director of the association. So the idea is really to work a little bit on strategy, on the community and then also on decision-making so that it is done as much as possible as a collective, all this within the association, that’s my job. In fact I got a taste of free software, I didn’t come to free software through software, I originally had an artistic career, I was an actor, I did community radio, I was even a youtuber by the way, not by being an employee at Framasoft, as a beginner, but I was a youtuber, I had a channel with more than 42,000 subscribers on Youtube so I could talk about it.
It was while making novels that I started blogging, that I realized that I didn’t want a boundary between my works and the readership, and so I put them in the public domain. And so when I finished the first blog novel like that, I contacted Framasoft and said “Hi, if you want to talk about it on the blog”, they said “Hi, we have a publishing house, we’d like to publish a novel, we’ve never done it, would you say so?”
And that’s how I discovered it and I joined the association, and that’s it. I was first a volunteer and then for a while I did communication as a communications officer.

Walid : beautiful circuitous paths to get to where you are.

Pouhiou : Absolutely.

The genesis of Peertube

Walid : So if we now start to get to the heart of the matter, to talk about Peertube, what I’d like to understand first is how Peertube actually came about? What is the environment like at the time it is born, in fact in what year do you start working on it? Can you tell me a bit about the genesis of Peertube?

Pouhiou : So I’m going to go for it because you know that you weren’t necessarily there at that time, even if you know the history. Framasoft launched a campaign between 2014 and 2017 “Let’s de-Google the Internet” where it was said that there was a problem with the tools of the web giants. So we’re going to identify 30 tools from the web giants, we’re going to put 30 free software in front of them and over 3 years we’re going to release services like this for these tools. The one we didn’t release was the alternative to YouTube. There was free software that made it possible to make video platforms, but it didn’t solve all the problems.

And in particular, in fact, we realized that there were three problems when you want to make an alternative platform to YouTube’s, to Google’s.

One, the problem of trust. You have to trust the software. So for that, obviously, you need free software. And what’s more, what’s nice would be to have a free software that is really community-based and not maintained by a company that can shut it down or make fake bread from source, things like that.

Secondly, the other problem is that if you put your video server just for you, that’s cool, but you’re all alone in your armor and you have a small catalog of videos. And one of the great things about YouTube is that you can find all the videos in the world, since everyone comes to upload their videos. But for that to happen, you’d have to welcome videos from all over the world, and that’s very, very heavy. And so, you have to find an architecture that is not centralized and that allows you to have a huge catalog of videos without the need for Google’s server farms. That’s the second problem it posed, and one that free software at the time didn’t address since it was also centrally architected.

The third purely technical problem with hosting an alternative to YouTube was whether a video was successful. And when you’re a host, you have to fear success, because success means that everyone comes to download the video to watch it on their screen at the same time. Streaming is just downloading that fades as you go, but it’s downloading. And so, if everyone comes at the same time, it creates a traffic jam at the pipe, which is called the pass-through bollard. So there you have it.

And so here too, we had to find a technical trick so that when there’s a video that’s successful, which is pretty cool in general, at least for the creators, it’s pretty cool, how do we technically do it so that there’s no need to have internet fibers and Google’s submarine cables? So there you have it, we needed to address these technical issues and that’s how we started to look into it.

Walid : You started to look into it, what year was it in?

Pouhiou : We’re in 2017, we’re in the last year of degooglisons, we realize that there are things we’ve done in addition that weren’t planned in the original plan, things that we won’t do: typically the email.

At one time we were thinking of doing a Framamail and we said to ourselves, well, if we do that, we would have to hire three administrations full time, we would have to make sure that it was disproportionate means, we were not going to squeeze ourselves. So what do we do with YouTube?

And I remember FOSDEM 2017, we were in Belgium, several members of the association, so at the beginning of February 2017, and we said to ourselves but how can we solve these problems, these problems of having to host videos from all over the world and all that. We look at the free software that existed at the time, you had Media Goblin, Media SPIP, Media Drop I think, yes thank you. And it didn’t respond because we were in the centralized architecture. And I start off as a joke to say “but what about Popcorn Time ? Popcorn Time is free software and it’s a software that was used so that pirated movie torrent files could be viewed in streaming mode with a Netflix-like interface.

So it was a trick totally used mainly for illegal sharing of crops. And I’m like, “But if Popcorn Time, behind it, we put seedboxes to boost the videos a little bit and we make an upload interface, we can maybe use it so that the videos are finally hosted as torrent files and on the Torrent federation and avoid this centralization. So we were thinking about that.

We thought about it but we weren’t sure. We said to ourselves, it doesn’t matter, we won’t make it in 2017, we’ll put it in the next three-year plan. During those months, someone came across a project by a young student, whose nickname was Chocobozzz, and who suddenly had this project to say “hey, but I actually want to make a video platform, but federated like Diaspora“. And in addition to the fact that it’s federated, so rather than having a centralized architecture and a giant server, a giant server farm, you just need a network of lots of small servers, so that’s great, it’s the web, you know. On top of that, precisely for the problem of a successful video, I want that in addition to streaming, there is a peer-to-peer distribution of videos, which allows that when everyone wants to watch the video, people can exchange bits of files with each other, their computers can exchange bits of files with each other, And as a result, it’s resilient. And so there you have it, we came across this student project, we thought we were too crazy.

Walid : So Chocobozzz, he was just a computer science student?

Pouhiou : It was his last years of study and all that. We start contacting him. I think it’s been a year or two since he started working. But you see, it was a side project for him, to have fun. And then to train too. And then, suddenly, we start to say to him, “Hi, actually, we’re interested in your little project on the side. Can’t we at some point finance you, do something together, to see if we can come up with a proof of concept, something that works?” Something where we say to ourselves this can work and so we can put marbles in it. At that point, he told us “listen, no, I’m coming out of school, I’m going to a job, so no, well”.

Except that a few months later, he says “actually I’m going to be between two jobs, I’m going to have I don’t know 3 to 6 months free”. And so we said “listen, we pay you for 3 to 6 months, you work on your personal project professionally, we make sure of that to see if it can work and if it can work, then we decide what we do together”. And that’s how, at the end of 2017, we arrived in front of the audience saying “hi, we have this project, we want to do a fundraising campaign, would you finance so that we pay Chocobozzz for a year to get to a V1? because we have a V0 that holds its own.”

Walid : Two questions, the first one, Chocobozzz, was he already quite convinced of free software?

Pouhiou : I don’t want to speak too much for him, for the record, he’s very comfortable with the fact that he’s not the one who speaks, because he prefers not to take the front of the stage. That’s it, but I don’t want to speak for him too much, but it seems to me that from the beginning there were a whole bunch of values, and in particular values to say how can we get out of this centralization that necessarily favors the monopolies of the web giants. So there was already that. And so, how can I, as an engineer, respond technically to problems to try to think differently about a video platform? There you go. There was already this approach, there was already a free license that we then refined together when we moved to V1. For him, there was already something. And then there you have it, he was inspired by Diaspora, he was inspired by things like that, well yes he was already in the free and open source community.

The complexity of Peertube compared to other software created by Framasoft

Walid : Was Peertube one of the things that was technically the most difficult or did you have other projects that were more technically difficult than Peertube?

Pouhiou : Technically? Humph…

Walid : I’m going to rephrase, were the technologies already available for the other projects?

Pouhiou : No, not all of them. Not all the technologies were available on the other projects and services we wanted to release. There are a few that have been developed for example by Sky, our favorite sys admin historically. There is typically Framagenda which allows you to have a synchronized and shareable agenda, etc. In fact, it is based on an installation of Nextcloud, which is a whole software suite, and in particular for synchronizing folders and files. But when you create an account on a calendar, you have almost no space to share files. You should have 2-3 megas, the minimum possible.

However, what was needed was to have a Calendar application from Nextcloud, which manages calendars, contacts and everything like that, an application that was sufficiently advanced and at the time it was not. And so, we took an intern from an engineering school, we told him “six months, we’re offering you this internship”. He was someone we already knew well, who was a little genius of free software, who had already been a contributor to Wallabag, which had allowed us to do the service Framabag, which is a service for keeping articles in your little personal web article book, or web pages, or signed, things like that. And so, Thomas developed the Calendar application, which already existed in Nextcloud, but he developed in such a way that really all the features, whether it was easy to use, etc. And we were so happy with this work with Thomas that after that, at the end of his internship, we made him a job offer and he is still a developer at Framasoft today.

The beginning of Peertube’s development

Walid : If we go back to Peertube, how are the beginnings, the beginnings of development on Peertube? That is, you’re running a crowdfunding campaign?

Pouhiou : yes, a first, yes.

Walid : How much money do you think it takes to develop Peertube in the first place?

Pouhiou : For us, it was actually a year’s salary, including all contributions and charges. When I talk about loads, I think more about premises, a computer, things like that. And so, I don’t remember exactly, but I think it was 50,000. We had set up funding of 50,000 euros, it seems to me.

Walid : And at the end of the fundraising campaign, how much do you come up with?

Pouhiou : We got a little more, we got 68, 69,000. Again, I’m doing it from memory and I didn’t look at the numbers.

Walid : Have you achieved more than the goal?

Pouhiou A: Yes, absolutely. I believe that this is the case with all Peertube campaigns, that we achieve more than the objective. In general, even on “donor” campaigns, knowing that there were two crowdfunding campaigns for Peertube, one to get to V1, where we had more than 50,000 requested, and another for V3, which included the search engine throughout the federation and live.

And on these two crowdfunding campaigns, the money was given specifically for the project and therefore was dedicated exclusively to the project obviously, in accounting we call it a dedicated account. But apart from that, and today we prefer to say anyway that in any case all the donations dedicated to Framasoft go to all of Framasoft’s projects. Because we realize that inevitably, at some point, it balances out. And then because, for example, we can’t say that even Chocobozzz is going to work 100% of his time on Peertube.

If I go back to that era of V3 and live, it’s actually in 2020, it’s in the middle of the pandemic. And during the pandemic, as a result, our Framatalk videoconferencing service sees its use multiplied by 10 or 100 in 15 days, it’s an absolutely phenomenal thing. And so Chocobos stopped coding live in Peertube and started doing system administration to balance the load on several servers so that Framatalk could hold up and we could provide video to people who were confined. You see, and so there are times when he hasn’t worked, because it’s normal at Framasoft, we all do 50,000 things. The crowdfunding campaign is going well, so V1 is funded.

Walid : What’s there at the time of V1, when you’re done with the crowdfunding campaign, what do you already have as a first base?

Pouhiou : We have a database that works, yes, but for example, at that time, we hadn’t yet switched to the database that we favor at Framasoft by PostgreSQL experience. I think it was still on MongoDB at the time, during the Proof of Concept. At the federation level, I think it was more inspired by Diaspora.

And at the same time that in the first months of the development of V1, so I’m talking about the end of 2017 to the end of 2018, there is ActivityPub, which is a protocol, a federation language that is accepted by the global web consortium, the W3C. And so now we’re like, actually, no, we really have to go to ActivityPub, then it’s going to be used by everyone, this thing. So we have to change everything in terms of the federation protocol, what we already had in the Proof of Concept. But even what we also wanted was what we didn’t have from the start, it was a video player that works in both cases, which was both the usual streaming from the server to the person watching and his computer, and peer-to-peer. The idea is to be able to do things in a transparent way and without it being visible at the level of people, both potentially. That didn’t work yet. We needed a video player that worked.

Walid : Initially, in the Proof of Concept, what was there?

Pouhiou : There was just streaming video playback where there was… There was already a bit of the federation protocol, it seems to me, of Diaspora at the time. There was streaming. Anyway, there were ways to do peer to peer. There were also ideas for everything that will be created, how to subscribe, how to subscribe transparently, etc.

There were some first ideas of federation but they were more modelled on Diaspora, i.e. everyone is federated to everyone and no one chooses to whom it is federated. On which we very quickly changed the authority of the poles by saying no, there must be real control of the people who serve an instance, who host an instance, who administer it. These people must be able to decide who I am, I am not. And as a result, it completely changes the architecture and the modes of federation. So there you have it.

Walid : How long did V1 take to develop?

Pouhiou : well, a good ten months, between 10 and 12 months, yes. And at the end of V1 we had all the promises that worked. And in addition, I remember that he had added, Choco, he added the ability to make redundancy from one instance to another, that is to say that typically if my instance I have quite a few … I have a big server with a lot of capacity, I can say well listen I’m going to support your instance or your channel or your video and if at some point your server it’s a little overloaded, it’s going to go on mine.

First reactions to Peertube v1

Walid : And so V1 is coming out, what are the first reactions and I mean what is the public reception of the free community around this Peertube? What happens at that moment? Is there a craze?

Pouhiou : yes, yes, no, there’s a real craze. Anyway, we also did some work on the side, to say we want to show the use cases we want, etc., so we also went to see content creators. I remember we were already in contact with DataGueule, for example, journalists who make videos to popularize and visualize data. We were also in contact with the gesticulating speakers, so there you have it, helping them to set up an instance and to be autonomous on it. So we wanted there to be things already coming out with it. And what was very interesting was that both the free software community and the technical community understood the small technical feat and in any case the intelligent side of the technical response to political problems.

The political problem is centralization by the web giants and a monopoly and the technical response is to democratize the means of broadcasting video and make sure that to broadcast videos and have the same advantages as Google, you don’t need to have Google’s means. So there was a real understanding and on the other hand there was a lot of work to be done to avoid having, especially in terms of the media, a little more mainstream, etc., the fashion of the time, which was, here is the new YouTube killer. That’s it and because at the time there was always a start-up coming out that said hello I have the new Facebook killer and sign up for Hello, sign up for thingie or the Twitter killer etc it was really the media fashion at the time in the media dealing with digital. And so we very, very, very quickly we said, when we announced V1, we basically announced this is not the YouTube killer. Our small association with 50,000 balls and a year’s work at a dev cannot compete with the web giants and the world’s biggest financial, technological, economic and cultural powers. I don’t believe it.

Booteille : and I think that here you are pressing a point that is very important with Peertube and many projects in particular led by Framasoft, it’s the idea that we are not trying to recreate a YouTube, we are not trying to recreate a Facebook, we are not trying to recreate all this, we are trying to build alternatives that are designed for humans who share our values or not, But that’s another concept. We’re not looking, I’m pushing this, we’re really not trying to reproduce YouTube. On the other hand, if there are cool features in YouTube that interest us, indeed, we will think about them, we will try to integrate them. On the other hand, always through our prism, the one who has our values and principles.

Walid : And indeed, I didn’t understand that the release of Peertube V1 was concomitant with the arrival of the ActivityPub protocol, which shows that the software was designed from the beginning for federation and grew with it. I have a slightly technical question, you addressed it Pouhiou a little bit before, you said on V0 there was a free license and then we refined the license for V1. So for V1, Peertube’s current license is a V3+ AGPL, what makes you choose this license?

Pouhiou : so you have to know that Choco, very quickly, when we said to him “Listen, we want to perpetuate your job within Framasoft and the development of Peertube, we want to take it as far as we can and that it will interest the world, what, you know.” And all that, he told us, “Okay, but then, let me be clear, now, the Peertube project belongs to Framasoft and not only to Chocobozzz.” So there you have it, and suddenly, we worked a little more on the license together, and suddenly, Framasoft, we have always had a policy on clearly 1, free license, everything we produce must be under a free license, we come from the world of free logistics, for us it’s obvious, especially since we are funded by donations, by the community, so the least we can do is to put our production back into the commons. Framasoft’s policy on these productions is that they are viral licenses as opposed to permissive licenses. You tell me if I’m expanding on that part.

Walid : No, it’s okay, I’ve already done an episode with Benjamin Jean on this.

Pouhiou : Benjamin Jean who was a member of Framasoft. Absolutely, great so it’s good. But that’s it, for us, it’s always been clear, so for a software, a license GPL v3 is fine and the A in AGPL In fact, it’s because, as it’s mainly a server-based software, it once again allows you to better protect the common one from the modifications that could be made on other servers.

So now there’s v1 so I don’t know when it is, my memory fails me, I didn’t necessarily find the article, I know that at one point the FSF had put Peertube as one of the main software to support. I’m wondering, from the moment V1 comes out and people start using it, does it push you to do a V2 right away? How do you finally organize after V1 and after the first feedback?

Pouhiou : Actually, we thought of V2 from the moment we succeeded in crowdfunding to finance V1. We said to ourselves, we know very well that we’re not going to succeed in one year doing everything we’d like to do and we’re not going to aim to deliver everything at once and put, that’s it… But we will aim for a progression in the life of the software and therefore year after year to improve it. So for us, it was thought of from the start like that and precisely that was the thing, it’s not a YouTube killer but we’re going to move forward as we go along and especially when we addressed audiences, we know that at the beginning of the life of Peertube’s development, we addressed rather technical audiences who better understood the issues, And then when that audience was acquired, we were able to address audiences that were a little more neophyte, and more and more we try to open up as we go along because the software is maturing and becoming accessible to a greater number of people, which it wasn’t when it was V1 or V2, Which is quite normal. So that was thought of from the beginning, and in terms of the welcome, in terms of the free software, it’s rather warm. Indeed, the FSF, I remember that even back then, Richard Stallman, himself, intervened on the guide to give us indications on how to properly implement the license in a way, with a rigorous protocol. The FSF asked us at Framasoft to offer them a hosting of a Peertube channel that we made on our Framatube instance, it’s one of the rare exceptions because we don’t usually host people on purpose. Well, it was the FSF, we made an exception.

But at the same time, obviously, there were criticisms that are also, after all, quite legitimate and all that, criticisms for example on the use of JavaScript, in addition to JavaScript in the form of TypeScript that was designed by Microsoft. Anyway, there you have it, and JavaScript is not necessarily very popular with all people who like free software. We’ve been trying to work a little bit on the issue of LibreScript, that’s what the free JavaScript version by the FSF is all about, and the exchanges we’ve had, which are a bit off-the-record, that’s it, but which are also not a big secret, is that we realized that LibreScript was written at a time when the way it’s done is no longer the best way to do it now and what it would take, it would change the way we can recognize free and respectful JavaScript code. So we would need an evolution of LibreScript, at least for us it would be far too restrictive to make Peertube’s JavaScript code compatible with LibreScript. It’s just work-wise, it’s just indecent. But here’s the thing, criticism, things like that, it’s like in the life of the free.

Pouhiou : I was on the outside of the assault at that time, and there was one moment that stood out for me, which was when Blender had monetization problems with YouTube and announced, “ok, basically fuck YouTube, we’re going to Peertube”. Me, at that moment, I saw Reddit go up in flames, I saw the Internet start talking massively about Peertube as an alternative to YouTube.

And then, when Debian donated 10,000 euros for the release of Peertube V3 with live and all that, there was another little boost in popularity. And I think that these two moments were really game changers also in terms of the community, in terms of the acceptance of the software as an alternative to making video.

Pouhiou : In any case, we can never say it enough, the best promoters of free and ethical digital are the web giants. Every time they do and they do things that go against the common good and people etc because they just want to give money to their shareholders, every time they do, it promotes free alternatives at the same time, every time Twitter has had a scandal with Elon Musk, it brought people back to Mastodon, every time a new Windows comes out, there are a lot of people who start to discover GNU Linux and a lot of cool distros.

It’s cool, we realize that every time they make mistakes, there are people who come to us.

Booteille : It really reminds me of the dimension of sidestepping. I’m quite a proponent of trying to build alternatives and an alternative digital environment that means that when it will require… Or at the moment when people want to make the effort to take that small sidestep towards us, this sidestep should be as simple as possible, as energy-efficient as possible. And that’s what happened in the examples you gave Pouhiou when Elon Musk buys Twitter, does etc.

Millions of people arrive on Mastodon. When Blender has problems with YouTube, bam, we talk about Peertube and we start funding Peertube. I think that’s one of our challenges as a free software community in any case, not to attack the web giants head-on because we simply don’t have the energy, we don’t have the means, but really to try to build alternatives that make people want to do it so that the general public, in fact, at some point can simply come to us because we’ve built easy doors, Because it requires as little energy as possible.

Pouhiou : If I may venture back, what’s great about it is that you realize that in fact the web giants are also locked into their economic and political model, and their choice of society. So their economic model is the attention economy, their political model is called surveillance capitalism, that’s it, and suddenly with the objective of having a captology, so to capture a maximum of attention to capture data to resell it, in fact they are locked in that and suddenly we have a whole space of freedom that they can’t afford because we don’t have the same constraints, We don’t have the same goals. Their goal is to capture attention.

And a very simple thing, for a very very long time on YouTube, you can share a video starting at 3 minutes 10 minutes. And if you watch, it gives you the web address, the URL of the video with T equal, well it’s not 3 minutes 10, it’s a number of seconds, but that’s it. It’s extremely easy for Google to code a “I’m sharing a link with you, the video starts at 3:10 and you finish the clip at 5:40, even if the video is 10 minutes long. It was almost useless to add a second parameter. To them, it was nothing. They didn’t do that for years. PeerTube, we did it two or three years before them, and two or three years later, Google copied. So they didn’t copy, they ended up doing it, you know. But that’s it, and we were totally free to do that because we didn’t need people to stay in front of their Peertube as long as possible.

We just needed them to see the snippets they were interested in, or to share the snippets they were interested in, even if it stopped after three minutes.

Peertube’s financing methods

Walid: What you just said just before makes me a good transition because I wanted to talk about how Peertube is funded, which is really a question I was asking. So we talked about crowdfunding, here we talked about Debian donations for example. I wanted to know a little bit about the different ways you can finance Peertube. Is it Peertube?

Pouhiou : Framasoft, depending on the year, is financed between 90 and 98% by donations.

In these donations, we still have to distinguish between two types of donations, donations from foundations, large donations in quotation marks, sometimes from companies, it’s rarer but there have been a few, and individual donations that still remain, like it’s three-quarters of our budget, it’s donations from legends. That’s generally for Framasoft’s activities. Regarding Peertube it’s mainly that, sometimes specifically for AV1 in 2017-2018 and for AV3 which was released at the end of 2020, it was crowdfunding, so specific financing with a specific objective etc. Except that for crowdfunding, you have to have something, you also have to create enthusiasm among the general public. So to say, we want to show that it’s possible and offer a V1, that was something. For V3, we want to offer you the search throughout the federation and the live. And we’re not just going to do YouTube, we’re going to do Twitch as well. That was pretty huge.

There was this first economic model of donation and crowdfunding. A very, very small part, but especially in 2022 especially, we had some performances.

It’s been services in development for specific developments. Typically, we had the Ministry of National Education which, in order to integrate Peertube into its platform apps.education.fr, which is a set of free tools made available to all teachers and students of the National Education, they needed to be able to connect to their account via specific protocols, LDAP, SAML, in short, thing. We developed the plugin that funded us. We also had an all-around media, so it’s a performing arts media hosted by Emerson University in Boston. All-around who needed different things on Peertube and who financed us different features that we wanted to do in addition so it was a good thing. But that’s still rather rare and it’s a very small part of the funding of Framasoft in general and Peertube in particular and otherwise in 2021, there for the v6 that we just released in 2023 and if all goes well, logically it’s good, for the v7 of 2024, on Peertube we received grants of NLNet. NLNet which is part of a larger collective called Next Generation Internet that funds projects for a better internet and that finances these projects by redistributing European funds, but redistributing them to different small projects by checking the progress of these projects. We have a very good relationship with NLNet and Next Generation Internet.

Walid : I advise all listeners to listen to the interview I did with Benjamin Jean in which we talk about this European funding. And that was one of my questions, do you benefit from European funding? So there you have it, you’ve just answered the question. In Next Generation Internet, what Benjamin explains is that in fact it is funding that is much easier to obtain with much less administrative side than what we could have before with European funding. And so it was just meant to benefit projects typically like Peertube.

Pouhiou : That’s right, at Framasoft we don’t have the energy, the know-how, the knowledge to put together a European subsidy file. It’s just a crazy job, it’s a part-time job over a year, etc. But even, you see, there are projects in the Peertube ecosystem, I’m thinking in particular of the Live Chat application, which allows you to have a chat during live broadcasts on Peertube. It’s an external application that’s developed by an external developer called John Livingston, who we’re embracing by the way. We’ve supported him several times, really, we’ve even supported him financially and then obviously we work in collaboration with him because we find his work very important.

And recently, a large part of his work has also been financed by an NLNet grant, while he is someone who is all alone in his own development enterprise, he would never have the possibility of putting together a European grant application, it’s not possible.

Development Team & Community

Walid : so in addition to ChocoBuzz, are there already at Framasoft, in general, other people who touch and work on Peertube, is there a community that has been created around Peertube, developers or people who contribute, who actually work on the tool?

Pouhiou : So for the Framasoft part, I’ve been dedicating myself for a few years to being Product Owner of Peertube, that is to say really working in agreement with ChocoBuzz on a strategy, on roadmaps, on things like that. But in fact, there are many of us within the association and even within the salaried team. There are some who will do blog posts, communication, toots, things like that. There are some who are going to work on strategies, on things like that.

But indeed, for a while, we were a little, even borderline, bottlenecks in terms of development since there was only one salaried developer who was Chocobozzz. And that it was starting to become too little given the scale of the project. Except that at Framasoft, we have made a rather radical choice to limit our growth as much as possible, because our objective is not to become a giant again and because we know that we function well as long as we keep a human scale, a human warmth in the salaried team, in the team of members of all the members of associations, in all of this. So there you have it, creating a new position within Framasoft, it was really a very strong challenge, it required a lot of work, a lot of thought, a lot of things like that. However, we knew that there was a need for Peertube and so there was a first request from Chocobozzz at the end of 2022 to say here it is in 2023, I don’t know if we will be able to have one more person employed at Framasoft for Peertube but I would like to know if I can work as a team while I’ve been working solo for 6 years on the development of this project. And I want to train someone, so I’d like to take on an intern.

And so we had a developer intern between February and July 2023, Wicklow, who came on this. So when he arrived, in addition I said eye to eye to Wicklow, “be careful, we’re going to talk about the possibility of opening a development position on Peertube at Framasoft, know if we’re going or not, I’m looking you straight in the eye, now you’re at the beginning of your internship, this position won’t be for you, Because if it’s something we do, then maybe we can understand someone with expertise to eventually make a mobile app, things like that.”

The discussions are progressing, the discussions are taking place and last July, during a camp where as many of the association’s volunteers as possible, members of the association for example, get together, we work again, “ok we feel ready to take on an extra person, and it’s still a risk for the association” because it’s a salary that we’re going to have to take out every year, monthly, etc.

But it’s too important, we have to go. And as a result, what type of position do you want, etc. And in fact, after a while, we realize that stop, we have to stop the, it’s going so well with Wicklow, we have to make him a job offer. And so since last September, we’ve hired a second developer on Peertube. It’s one of our big announcements at the end of the year because for us it’s a lot, it’s a big risk, it means that Framasoft is going to need more donations to continue to live, you see, but at the same time for us it’s essential and in particular what hiring a second developer will allow is both to have another person who will have expertise on the 200, 250,000 lines of code,

Booteille : 220,000,

Pouhiou: Cork , you see, it’s not everyone can make time for that. And if what is unfortunately called the bus factor, I don’t want it, but if one day Chocobuzzz takes a bus or takes a bus to go live another life elsewhere, which he wants, suddenly there will be no one left who has expertise. So it allows us to double this expertise and to have other people.

And then what we’re also going to ask Wicklow to do next year is to learn about mobile applications because we’d like to release a virtual application. But I’ll talk about that later, I think.

Walid : In terms of community, are there other people outside of Framasoft who contribute? And if so, how do you actually animate this community? Sorry, my old free software developer background is resurfacing.

Booteille : No, but it’s an interesting question, especially on the question of community animation. I would say maybe start with the numbers.

Since the birth of the Peertube project, there are about 400 people who have contributed to the Peertube code. So it’s still something. Knowing that the Peertube project is an extremely complex project. It really takes a long time to get used to the complexity of the code, the way it was done. And there’s a big maintenance issue, so it’s not so easy to see a piece of code arrive in the heart of Peertube because behind it, Chocobozzz and Wicklow today, and even all of Framasoft knows very well that we have to maintain the code we add, so we can’t just do things in a hurry.

You really have to take the time to accompany each contribution. The most common way to contribute, in fact, is really to report bugs on the bug tracker, either on GitHub or on Framagit. Otherwise, it will also be, if there are system administration problems, we will rather direct to the Framacolibri forum, to really organize the way we will be able to deal with the problems. And if not, we mostly welcome proposals as well. We launched ideas.joinpeertube, I don’t know if it’s this year or at the end of last year. End of last year.

Yes, right. Where we welcome a lot of proposals to improve functionality, finally to improve Peertube in general, and on which we are now basing ourselves today to establish our roadmaps, to know in which direction we are going to go with Peertube. Roughly speaking, for the numbers, that’s about it. After the question of community animation, as I told you, it’s complicated to contribute to the code, so it requires a lot of support. So we try to do it and at the same time we know that at framasoft we’re pretty bad at that, we’re pretty bad at accompanying, at welcoming people’s contributions, because it requires a crazy energy that we don’t necessarily have at the time.

Pouhiou : However, there was still a particular care given to the Peertube project and in particular by a desire on the part of Chocobozzz who generally spends at least 50% of his time on community animation. When we say 400 contributions to the code, it means doing all the tests, revising, integrating the code, etc. So there you have it, and it’s something he’s done and he’s continuing to do. The issues, discussing each of the issues and all that. So the issues are the feedback on the deposit of the code. There have been more than 4,500 exits that have been closed and there are 450 still under discussion. But all this means that there is still a large investment of salaried time precisely to try to welcome contributions. But it’s true that in the end the easiest and therefore the most numerous code contributions will be on what is the plugin system. And so as soon as there is a need to open the API so that a small piece of third-party software, a plugin can communicate with the Peertube code, we do it really easily. And you see today there are more than 130 plugins available for Peertube, more than 40 themes also to change the code physically. And these are contributions that are extremely valuable, as are the translations.

Walid : The work of a maintainer is long, it’s really long.

Booteille : It’s clearly long and very time-consuming. And it’s also, I was going to emphasize the fact that here, what we’re describing is also a part of the way we welcome contributions, of our way of animating all of this. Because at the end of the day, in the team, there are quite a few people who also actively monitor everything that happens around Peertube. We have a look at a lot of topics around Peertube, even if we don’t necessarily take part in all of it, but we try to really see what people are doing. A few weeks ago, we saw that there was an interface to produce a kind of TikTok based on Peertube. We’ve seen that, we’ve seen that the community is acting on this, we’ve also seen that a developer is building a mobile application for Peertube. We got into a discussion with them to find out a little bit about the ambitions and all that. So there is really, even if it’s not necessarily always visible, the desire to link up with the community and to walk hand in hand with the community that will help contribute to Pierre’s ecosystem. And finally, there are always communication efforts on Reddit, Mastodon, etc. around Lemmy as well, around the project.

Pouhiou : That’s why we realized that we were, when I was talking about a bottleneck, that is to say that given the time spent by Choco on maintenance and community animation work, it mechanically reduced its development capacity. And so having a new person in the development of the project is also to share this maintenance work that is necessary and that is beautiful, and to have more time to develop new features.

Peertube and the Fediverse

Walid : The next topic I wanted to talk about was Fediverse. We can see that Peertube is concomitant with the arrival of the Fediverse in the end. I haven’t done any episodes on it yet, there’s a pretty nice episode in I don’t know which podcast issue of Libre à vous, I’ll put it, where he talks about that, I think it was also reshared not too long ago.

Could you, just in two or three words, say for people who don’t know what the Fediverse is before we explain a little bit what is the place of Peertube in this Fediverse?

Booteille : Are you sticking to it? Or do I get into it?

Walid : Oh, it’s not easy! That’s the glue!

Booteille : We do it quite daily. The Fediverse, in fact, takes its name from the federated universe in English. The idea is to have, rather than having networks, centralized social media, managed by superpowers, we will rely on communication protocols, we are talking for example about ActivityPub, we talked about it earlier, but which in fact allows each entity to create its own small network, its own social media in its corner, And in addition to ensuring that this social media will communicate with others and create a federation. What’s great is that we could say “ok, that’s great, it works a bit like email and suddenly we can exchange emails from my gmail to my protonmail” etc etc

Except that’s only part of the Fediverse. One of the big advantages of the news item is that the protocol used between all social media is often the same and so even if we are on very different software such as Peertube and Mastodon, these two software will still be able to communicate together. And suddenly we arrive at a huge social media that brings together a lot of different social media, a lot of different functionalities, whose moderation is managed by more or less large entities, there are some large entities in the Fediverse, but in the end we spread all the burden of social media management. And today, I think that the news item is 12 or 13 million people interacting, either with the alternative to Twitter, or finally one of the alternatives to Twitter called Mastodon, which is the most popular news item software, or by sending photos on an alternative to Instagram called Pixelfed, either by posting videos on Peertube, by publishing events like on Facebook events with Mobilizon. In short, there are for many software, classic social media that are centralized and sclerotic, I want to say, there are today alternatives that are integrated into the Fediverse and that will communicate with the whole Fediverse.

Walid : What would you give as a concrete example for someone who can understand how Peertube interacts with the rest of the Fediverse?

Pouhiou : so the Fediverse, suddenly, from a user’s point of view, there’s a problem of complexity, it’s that it’s full of possible entry points, both in terms of uses, that is to say, well, I’d rather make small messages, little micro-blogs à la Twitter, so, I’m going to go to a Mastodon instance, but then, which Mastodon instance?

There are plenty of Mastodon installations on different servers, in different communities. You have to find your own. And so, if you go to Peertube, it’s because you’re going to want to share video content and build a collection of video content like that, as if you wanted to set up a YouTube or Twitch channel, for example. And the advantage is that, for example, when you publish a video on your Peertube channel, on Mastodon’s side, so the Twitter equivalent we’re going to say, on Mastodon’s side, this video will appear as a tweet, as a toot we say in Mastodon. And so the title of your video is going to be the message, maybe also a little bit of the description of the video, underneath it’s going to be the video as an embedded medium, like when you publish a video. And what’s interesting is that the Peertube has created a toot on Mastodon, but if you, on Mastodon, with your Mastodon account, you put a favorite on that toot, it will create a plus on the Peertube video.

If you answer the toot of the video, it will create a comment. If I reply to your comment, it will create a discussion nested in the comments of the video. It’s a little bit like being able to reply to a YouTube video with your Twitter account. Today we don’t imagine that it’s possible and since everyone has chosen to speak the same language, it’s not the Tower of Babel. We get along, no one is locked in their corner, we can talk.

Booteille : And it also creates an interoperability issue that we can address. That is to say, today if you want to migrate all your videos that are on Twitter to YouTube, good luck I think because you don’t have any suitable tools. In the Fediverse, it doesn’t totally exist yet to have possible migrations or import-export from one software to another in a very easy way, but in any case it can be considered much more easily than when faced with two entities that are financially competitors and all that.

Walid : Fediverse is a unique mode, which takes time to explore, it’s quite fascinating. We’re not necessarily going to spend more time on the Fediverse because it deserves an episode and we’ve already been talking for an hour.

Peertube and Content Creators

Walid : Now let’s talk about Peertube’s relationship with content creators. My vision of YouTube is that it’s a platform that standardizes content and it’s also a platform that dictates what you can say, well on what you can’t say, especially what.

And what I’d like to understand is what is, I was going to say ideology but anyway, what is your state of mind in relation to content creators actually?

Pouhiou : Anyway, I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t have an ideology. You may not have your ideology because it’s the dominant ideology everywhere, but in the end, even when you don’t want to, everyone is inside an ideology. And so there’s clearly an ideology around Peertube. And our ideology is to promote digital emancipation, in particular to be able to extricate ourselves, as much as possible, from surveillance capitalism, and therefore from this whole system that, basically, tries to milk our data as much as possible to create value, and to centralize it by giants and redistribute it to shareholders, basically. And so for us, the idea is to be able to promote that. And so the policy on Peertube is to have a tool for people who are kind of left behind by this.

Because today, typically me, when I made my channel on YouTube in 2014-2016, it was a sex education channel, popular sex education, sex positive, queer, woman, with influences from all of that, it’s something you couldn’t do today. Today, if you talk about menstruation or abortion on YouTube or Twitch, you’re already going to have words that are going to be banned or that are going to create censorship at the level of automatic robots, or you’re going to be under-referenced and put at the very bottom of the content and the algorithm and be invisibilized. And so we say to ourselves, but in fact, in the end, there are a lot of people for whom this model, which is normal, is… Google’s job is to sell advertising. So their goal is to do stuff that sells advertising and oh well, the subject of abortion, the subject of queer people, etc. It’s not selling. There are times when it’s not a good seller. So well, they don’t care about their business model.

And so we said to ourselves but there are people who just want to share content, there are teachers who want to share educational content, there are artists who simply want to share their creation with the general public, there are people whose objective is not precisely to collect money or glory, but to present their work or to present techniques, knitting shops that just need to show how you do this or that stitch in video to be able to sell yarns and needles.

So there you have it, all these people are being left behind by YouTube, by Twitch, by the stuff. And so we’re talking to them first. And be careful when I talk about this, it doesn’t include people rejected from these platforms of the web giants who have been fired because they have criminal content, who have been fired because they have content that endangers the lives of others or content that promotes intolerance. And here I’m going to be very clear, Framasoft believes very clearly and very, very clear in its position that there are limits to freedom of expression and that these limits are defined by the paradox of tolerance. It’s a bit philosophical, but to summarize the paradox of tolerance in a nutshell, if freedom tolerates even intolerant words and expressions, then we can end up with intolerance destroying freedom and freedom of expression. To protect even freedom of expression, we must not accept the expression of intolerance.

But be careful, this ideology is ours, we have to see how it materializes in terms of our actions on Peertube. And for me, it comes down to two ways of doing things. It’s that both in our development choices, when we are asked to make behavioral tracking tools or algorithms that will manipulate people into watching more videos, it’s not going to be a priority for us compared to moderation tools, accessibility tools, tools that will allow as many people as possible to be autonomous and to take over Peertube. And then we don’t just have a role as a software developer and publisher, we also have an editorial role because, for example, we maintain a search engine for content on Peertube with an index and so it’s up to us to choose what we put or not in this index. And if you don’t agree, you take the code of our search engine and the way to make the index, everything is free, you can do it on your side and have your own policy. But we’re going to apply our policy and when we are told “hello in your index there is fascist content, we say it’s intolerant, by the cause of intolerance, we kick it out of our index”. However, if I take the example of the fascists, it’s still free software, the first freedom is to use the software, if the fascists want to use Peertube, they can.

Our role will be to give the community the means to protect themselves from them, and in particular this is what happened with Peertube, there was even a very interesting study by a German institute which shows that far-right content and content that is also fake news and conspiracy theories, etc. use Peertube, but eventually are in their federation bubble, have been ostracized by the rest of the federation who have cut themselves off from them who don’t want to promote their content. It’s a way of saying, you’re free to use the software, but still, we don’t have to get down on our knees to serve as your platform and wallet.

Examples of well-known or notable Peertube instances

Walid : Not too long ago, for example, I interviewed Nick who does The Linux Experiment channel. During the interview, he talked about his business model, revenue with Patreon, with YouTube, with sponsors, etc. It would be complicated for him, on Peertube, to have a model that potentially allows him to live. Actually, the question I’m asking myself is, if I wanted to be a content creator by making videos and I wanted to try to make a living from it and I tried to post my videos on YouTube, what would be a good role model for you? Would the model be to go through alternatives, well, through funding like Open Collective or Patreon , that kind of thing?

Pouhiou : So I’d like to take a first start of an answer so that you Booteille really answer this question but I’ll go off on a tangent first if you allow it, it’s because I used to be a youtuber. To give you a little bit of my figures over 2 years 2014-2016, 42,000 subscribers, about fifty videos, 2 million views.

I enabled Google advertising on my videos because I didn’t want to be underlisted and I knew how Google worked. I got between $250 and $300 million views on 200 and 200 million views. I know this because this money was dirty for me, I redistributed it as a free condom. So there you have it, at the same time that I was starting YouTube, the fable of “you get 1 euro per 1 thousand views thanks to advertising” no longer worked.

And you have to realize that it’s been more than 10 years that advertising no longer funds content creators, the ads we watch no longer finance that. And that’s Google that put it in our heads because they were very clever, they released a video distribution tool, that’s a technical tool, and they associated it with a marketing tool for advertising distribution and attention capture. However, it doesn’t have to be a mix of the two. And we, at Framasoft, said to ourselves, the monetization of content, the financing of creation, etc.

This is a huge problem. We’re going to focus on what we know how to do, the technical tool. We make this technical tool behind it. The rest is not going to be our role, although it’s pretty cool that there are funding opportunities. But just to really get into your head, today ads on Youtube, on Twitch, etc. primarily pay the shareholders of Google and Amazon. It’s dividends, when you watch ads you’re offering dividends to shareholders, sometimes there are a few crumbs that are offered like that meager to the plebs of content creators, but it’s purely contempt money and nothing else.

Booteille : Oh no, not at all, and I think you’ve pretty much said the gist. I really emphasize the fact that I don’t feel like advertising is making money for a lot of content creators today. You pointed out initiatives like going to Open Collectives, Patreon, all that. I have the feeling that it’s more in the end, content creators are self-managing in terms of funding.

For many, they will go to platforms that are uncorrelated from YouTube or Twitch to ask for donations, to ask for regular funding, etc. Today, I don’t have the impression, apart from Twitch which has really integrated this subscription issue, I think YouTube has done it too, but has integrated it. On the other hand, Twitch takes 70% of the base commission and you have to have received I don’t know how many thousands of subscriptions for I don’t know how many months to claim half of the earnings. So we see that the content creators who do the best are often, with a few exceptions, obviously, there are giants, but will rather move towards platforms that are not linked to the video platform.

And so are we interested in getting caught up in the issue of monetization when really it’s an extremely complicated subject, as Pouhiou said, not necessarily we’re going to focus on what we’re good at, which is making software that helps people emancipate themselves.

Walid : So in the end, the real problem for the creator who wants to go on a Peertube instance is to make himself known?

Pouhiou : Absolutely. And that’s also why we’re much more interested in working on issues, both to help them get interesting statistics so that they can do what they want with them, because it’s sometimes with statistics that you’ll either find sponsors, or show your community that there’s interest in what you do, things like that. It’s also going to be about finding, and this is one of the future challenges of Peertube and other projects that we have around, in the Peertube ecosystem, to find how to highlight quality content, therefore content curation. There are already people, bodies that do important content curation work, and therefore how to highlight and promote this.

So, we’re going to try to initiate a few things to give ideas in the hope that they will be taken up and reproduced. But then we were also in contact, for example in the free software world, there are also the Spanish people from Goteo who make a crowdfunding platform. I think at some point, they were interested in figuring out how to build bridges between Peertube and Goteo to make it easier to use. We are very open to virtuous models like this of common financing, financing of the commons, etc. Again, as long as it doesn’t capture people’s digital lives against their consent, as long as there aren’t too many dark patents, attention manipulation and all that, we’re always ready to welcome third-party initiatives. And whatever happens, from the beginning, I think it was even since V1, there is always the possibility for video creators to have a support button and if you click on this button support the field is free: that is to say that people who upload the content can as well put a link I do not know to their PayPal or their what do I know, their patreon, or say if you want to support my videos send a nice postcard to my grandmother it will make her happy here you put what you want behind it so it’s insufficient we should facilitate all this, etc. But it was still thought out from the beginning.

Walid : I saw not too long ago that, for example, the European Commission had a PeerTube instance. Are there instances that are somewhat visible and known?

Pouhiou : yes, it’s because at some point we can also give instances of more video content and all that. It’s going to be super complicated because you always want to quote everyone and you can never think of everyone at the same time.

So at the institutional level, typically indeed, so the European Commission, there’s also the Dutch National Audiovisual Institute, I don’t know how to pronounce their name because I’m very, very bad, I’m sorry in Dutch, but anyway, there you have it, who is the equivalent of the Dutch INA who hosted their public video content on a self-managed Peertube instance, who have worked on scaling up, and who have contributed to the Peertube ecosystem.

I was talking about national education via their apps.education.fr platform. We’re also talking to other institutions that are considering these things, but I don’t want to either, well, these are projects, I don’t want to reveal things in their place, we regularly have institutions that do that. I was also talking about it, I find it very interesting, All-Around, so a media for the performing arts in a Boston university and which actually uses Peertube for some kind of webinars and I really like this use, it’s webinars for artists who are sometimes in Boston but who are sometimes in Gabon and sometimes who are in Russia, And so how do we make sure that everyone can see the videos at a given time, one of their needs was are we going to be able to have videos in 140p, so in very very very low resolution, for very very very low bandwidths, because, well, there are connections, especially on the African continent, which are complex. That’s it, and we’ve developed it.

And well, I’m going to talk about another one, then, which hosts Anglo-Saxon video content, from creators in general on YouTube, and what we call “edutainment”, so both education and entertainment, entertainment. I’m going to talk about Tilvids. It’s not for one over the others, but it’s because I found it very interesting as an approach. It was a person from the free software world, who was also a content creator on YouTube and all that, who said to himself “hey, I’m going to do Peertube and offer videographers to copy their YouTube channel on Peertube. People won’t need to worry about anything, but at least it will put their content on the federation as well.”

And he ended up with a problem, which is that as a result, a very large part of his audience is in the United States, and his server I think was in Europe. And as a result, the server was too far away and it created slowdowns in the vision. Well, he took another server in the United States, which put him in redundancy that we were talking about V1, you know, and so… In fact, it makes it a web relay, just as Google has relays, or Netflix for that matter, have relays everywhere to relay their video streams throughout the global Internet network. Well, in fact, he did it by hand with the Peertube software. I think it’s great to use redundancy that we didn’t imagine at first, but he was able to do it because the software is flexible.

Peertube v6 and the roadmap for 2024

Walid : Now let’s talk about the future, let’s say we’re in 2024 for example, we’re at the end of 2023, we’re in 2024. What are you going to do, for example, in 2024?

Pouhiou : I’m just saying what we just released, you see with the V6 which just came out, anyway, so there was already the remote transcoding which was, there too you see funded by NLNet and it was good because it was not at all sexy, but then on a technical level it’s quite revolutionary. It’s the fact of saying that today even if you have a very small computer for your Peertube server, the most difficult tasks that will be asked of your processor, which will be the tasks of transforming the video so that it is correct to stream, these tasks you can put them on another more powerful computer.

This means that today the Peertube network can become totally more resilient and share video transformation tasks that are punctual: it’s when you upload a video or when you do a live, you have to transform the video. You can share these tasks on big machines that would be dedicated to that. That was a real technical challenge and we’re super proud to have fulfilled it because it makes Peertube even more flexible. And then in V6, we’ve just released the video preview when you hover over the playbar.

Walid : That’s cool. Yes, yes, yes.

Pouhiou : I missed it. The fact, so if the admins agree of course, but the fact that a videographer can upload a new version of his video, you see when there is an update to be made, when there is a version that was problematic and where we fixed the problems afterwards, etc. The fact that we can add chapters to his videos, and then we also did a lot of in-depth work to prepare for next year, I’m going to let Booteille speak for next year, a lot of in-depth work to improve accessibility to the maximum level of our knowledge before asking for a complete audit of the accessibility and therefore the ease of use of Peertube and especially the difficulties for people in situations back-to-school.

Booteille : Well, I’m going to talk about next year and by pressing this Audi of accessibility. So the work that has just been done is really preparatory work so that in 2024 we can really have a quality audit and on the question of, is Peetube accessible enough for people with disabilities or other. That’s it, it’s a big big project, we’re really happy because we manage to get funding for it, which is again a feature that is not sexy for most able-bodied people, but which for us, is very close to our hearts and which has required a lot of work already this year.

So, in next year’s roadmap, I said it a little bit earlier, but we were inspired by the proposals we had on ideas.joinpeertube.org. So anyone can come and make proposals and we really, we pick every time we meet to make the roadmap, we pick from it. And so among the features we have planned, there is the import and export of accounts to be able to import your account. and finally export your Peertube account. So be careful, we’re not talking about migration, it’s not… it’s not going to be automatic at first, we go step by step but it’s really there it is: “I click on a button, it exports a Zip file or whatever. And then on another instance we will be able to import the account”. Don’t expect automagic at the moment, it’s a first step. But it’s already a step forward, it’s a feature that we’ve been thinking about for a long time, well, that we’d like to implement for a long time and we’ve been thinking about it a lot.

So be careful, this is a very complicated technical point to talk about techno that we use but we want to separate the audio and video streams and to be able to accept audio files only so that podcasts are more easily also hosted on Peertube but we really have a point of attention on this it’s in our desires we are working on it but we don’t know how technically feasible it will be the year next for today’s day.

Pouhiou : That’s why there’s a big break in the version we just released, it’s that we’re going to stop supporting WebRTC, right?

Booteille : WebTorrent.

Pouhiou : WebTorrent, WebRTC is still used, of course, sorry. WebTorrent in peer-to-peer video sharing and focus instead on the HLS part. Once again, it’s technical, but because by abandoning WebTorrent, it will allow what WebTorrent didn’t already allow, and therefore HLS, which was necessary especially for live. And what’s more, it will allow us to separate, for example, the audio-video streams. Separating audio-video streams is a first step that in the future could make it possible to have, for example, several videos with the same audio stream or several languages, which could be of interest to people like the European Commission, for example, for the same video.

Booteille : In the latest features we have planned for the moment, knowing that everything is alive, there is a desire to improve the range of moderation tools, in particular the moderation of comments, to make it much easier and more accessible for administrators, for content creators. There’s a lot of work to be done on that.

Two last points, a reflection on the categorization not safe for work (NSFW) or safe for work (SFW). We’re going to work with the internet cooperative , with whom we’ve already worked on this issue of how to better categorize content, especially sensitive content. So there you have it, it’s a job we’d like to do.

And finally, one of the objectives of Wicklow, our employee since September, is to start work on an official Peertube mobile application. Android and iOS app at first. We’d like to do Google TV too. The objective is to choose technologies, at least that allow us to adapt fairly well in the long term, in terms of the platforms that could adapt this application. So there you have it, it’s a pretty substantial roadmap with a lot of…

Pouhiou : Let me make one last point, Booteille too, there is also a work always with the internet cooperative, so there is a design service provider with whom we work very well, here it is, in a work of a complete remodeling of the Peertube interface which is starting to have its time, we can see there are places of problems simply because there are also features that have been added so Typically today, when you’re a content creator, the management of these videos is complex because there are so many possibilities, so now we’re going to rework all that and rework all of that with, first and foremost, a design survey, a survey of uses and starting from people’s uses to remodel the interface, and I think that’s already a very important job for us, It’s going to improve the effectiveness, but it’s also going to be hyper visible as soon as you change the interface, the menus, the colors, the things, the customization capabilities, it shows.

Walid : Two questions, I’m going to ask them together, otherwise I’m going to forget the second one, that’s for sure. The first is if you separate the audio and video streams, does that mean that tomorrow we could have transcription or that kind of thing, which is clearly a real issue for me. And I put the second one down right away before I forget. You were talking about making a mobile application, why not base it on applications such as Newpipe which can already allow you to retrieve streams from Peertube for example?

Pouhiou : For the first one, audio and video streams, in fact the question of transcription is independent of being able to separate audio and video streams.

So there you have it, but in any case, the question of transcription is being asked of us, in particular, by institutions. And now, it’s a project of one of the partners of the Peertube ecosystem to set this up and we are working with them so that it is a contribution that they make and that we support them as much as possible to integrate this contribution. But it’s clearly a need that we, too, have spotted.

And precisely, remote transcoding, the tool to be able to transfer a complex task in CPU to a remote computer, could also be used for this. Because again, transcribing audio into text and creating a transcript or subtitles, etc., is a task that is going to require a lot of work from the server CPU. And so, it’s a task that could also be proposed both in the body of Peertube but also as a separate task. So we’re trying to work on that.

So there you have it, but it’s not necessarily going to be us doing it, we’re just going to contribute. There you go.

Booteille : On the question of transcription, you should know that there is already a transcription plugin that has been developed by third parties, which can be integrated into Peertube, and from what I’ve seen, it works pretty well already.

So there you have it, you have to know that there is already an option, at least possible.

Pouhiou : And at the application level, one of the problems is to find PeerTube on the stores, on mobile uses, etc. As much as Newpipe is doing a really great job, for now it’s going to meet the needs that the first version of our app is going to do, i.e. just the needs of video consumption. But already, if you want to connect to your instance, which you would already like to put in the first version of the application, connect to your instance, have your playlists, have your subscriptions, have your notifications, etc., Well, that’s hard to find on third-party applications and we’re not necessarily going to ask Newpipe for it.

And behind that, what we like is that initially, this application will really be dedicated to the consumption of video content, so it’s really for viewers, but who can also make their playlists, manage their subscriptions, etc. And what we would like is that in the future, this application can also be used by video creators, possibly even to do a live live, and why not to instance moderators, administrators, etc.

So there you have it, and that’s something that we clearly can’t ask for as an evolution from third-party applications. So there you have it, we’re going to try to stick to it and then we’ll see if it takes, but we hope, we really see that mobile uses are essential today.

Introducing Peertube to a content creator on Youtube or to a Youtube user

Walid : We’re coming to the end. To conclude, I would like to ask you two questions. The first is what would you say to a content creator who is on youtube to talk to him about Peertube?

Pouhiou : so I like I already was I want you to relax content creator, I want you to relax, it’s totally possible that you have gotten so used to Youtube, that you have thought so much about your work according to Youtube because it’s very very very taking that suddenly Peertube does not meet your needs at all and your use case it’s ok, it’s okay, you’re not a bad person if you keep using Youtube. We relax, everything is fine, that’s the first thing.

On the other hand, you also have to be aware that you are hosted by Google or by Amazon and therefore you are hosted, you are at their place, literally and we really are, so without infantilization, but we are really in the case of Tanguy, who stays at mom Google and dad Amazon, you know. That is to say, at the same time, there is something super comfortable, you always have food in the fridge, you don’t necessarily take care of the cleaning, but at the same time you have to tidy up your room, you don’t choose what you are going to watch in the evening on TV, you can’t go on a porn frenzy the day you feel like it, or talk about rules at the dinner table, you know. Anyway, you’re not at home, you see, and that’s what’s complicated.

And so, well, the fact at some point to take your autonomy, so to use, for example, an empowerment and emancipation tool such as Peertube, it’s going to be both very liberating, it’s a wonderful adventure because really you can create a much more direct and much freer link between you and the community that follows your content and the community that creates content similar to yours and with whom you want to join forces. And at the same time, it’s extremely more work, investment, things like that. And so really what I want to say to you is, take it easy, take your time, that’s it, if you want to go in this process which is beautiful and magnificent, take your time, go quiet, don’t be isolated, surround yourself with people who look like you, with whom you tend to agree and all that, to try to find, or people who have already made your way, to try to find their tips, to share experience, etc. And take it one step at a time. There are a lot of people today who will maintain a YouTube or Twitch channel and a Peertube in parallel. The Peertube will either be a backup, etc. Or be rather highlighted on their site and all that, but we still use the web giants for the beginning. It’s totally ok to keep the two in parallel as well. But again, it’s more effort and good luck to you.

Walid : That’s a beautiful speech. So the second question for you Booteille, is what would you say to introduce Peertube to a YouTube user like me who is a big YouTube user?

Booteille : One of the feedback I get most often when I read Pierre Tube’s community, when he talks about it to other people, is that Peertube is reminiscent of the YouTube of its beginnings, of the first years of YouTube. That is to say, we will find a lot of content, but very different from each other, and there is sometimes a boring side because you say to yourself, “what the fuck are these videos, they are crazy”. And at the same time, there’s really something a little magical about the content that is created little by little and you can feel the freedom of people and their desire. I don’t know, sometimes you see videos of grandparents talking to their grandchildren, sometimes you see educational content, sometimes it’s music, there’s a little bit of all that and I think it’s really reminiscent of YouTube in the early years.

So it’s kind of finding that vibe there, knowing that suddenly there is no recommendation algorithm based on our behaviors and suddenly we get out of our comfortable bubble, out of our home with mom, dad, Google and Amazon.

We leave much more room for serendipity, the famous serendipity, that is to say that if we came across a video, we would never have gone to it, but bam, by chance, since the recommendation algorithm is extremely basic and is not based on our behaviors, I came across this video and I liked it. I’ve discovered a new person, I’ve discovered a new content creator who will make me want to do it. So there’s that, and then indeed, Peertube has its own flaws, especially in content discovery. We know that even if Sepia Search exists, so a search engine that allows you to search in the vast majority of what exists on Peertube, Sepia Search is not well known and it is not always easy to find what you want.

But since it’s free software and there’s a lot of hype around it, we put resources into it, people trust us to put resources into it, it’s free software that can only get better. Little by little, over time, you’re almost guaranteed to have software that literally rocks. I think it’s already tearing up today, but it can only get better.

Pouhiou : Just, when you were describing the act of hunting for videos and finding people’s shares, I had the image of a flea market. The magical and picturesque side sometimes.

Booteille : the messy side, I love it!

Pouhiou : and I’d like to add, since Frandasoft is in a donation campaign, and that if we make Peertubes, if we do things like this, it’s mainly thanks to people’s donations, that for the people who can and who like what we do, whether it’s Peertube or the rest, Don’t hesitate to support us with a donation, it’s safe soutenir.framasoft.org it happens. If I hadn’t said that, I’d be remiss myself.

Conclusion

Walid : Finally, I would say that it reminds me a bit of Web1 communities, all that. After all these years of being locked up by web giants, so there you have it, this will be my personal conclusion.

Well listen, Booteille and Pouhiou, thank you very much for taking the time to come and present on Projets Libres! Peertube.

There will be a lot more to say about… There will be a lot of things to say about Framasoft, of course. But maybe that will be for a future show, who knows. I hope that my listeners listened to the end of the conversation, and that they learned things, and that it made them, for those who don’t know Peertube, want to try Peertube. Why not mount a Peertube instance?

Personally, what I think is great is the fact that I store a lot of old videos, stuff from the 80s and 90s, stuff that could not be uploaded elsewhere at all because there would be rights problems. I don’t necessarily want thousands of people to see them, but it’s the memory of our sport, and it’s accessible to those who want to. And I think that’s super important.

Peertube is really a very important software, that’s why I wanted to do a show about it.

So listen, thank you very much. And then, especially for you who listen to this podcast, don’t hesitate to see Peertube and talk about it around you and share this episode. There’s still a lot of great stuff coming in the coming months, so stay, come back, give me feedback, it’s always very nice.

Pouhiou : thank you for welcoming us and then for this great podcast, the free project, indeed, share it as much as possible around you, go listen to the other episodes. Too good, thank you.

Booteille : Thank you very much.

Walid : See you soon.

This episode was recorded on October 4, 2023.

License

This podcast is published under the double license Art Libre 1.3 or later – CC BY-SA 2.0 or later.

podcast.projets-libres.org/@pr…

Sommaire

• 1 Interview with Lwenn Bussière from the NLnet Foundation
• 2 Introducing Lwenn
• 3 What is NLnet?
• 4 The legal form of NLnet
• 5 The NLnet Team
• 6 NLNet’s place in European free software
• 7 The Story of Next Generation Internet
• 8 What NLnet invests in
• 9 How to do monitoring?
• 10 What types of business models should be financed?
• 11 Applying and being selected: what does it involve?
• 12 The community around NLnet
• 13 How does NLnet advertise itself?
• 14 How does it feel to do this work?
• 15 Challenges ahead for NLnet
• 16 Conclusion
• 17 License

Interview with Lwenn Bussière from the NLnet Foundation

Note: This transcript contains additional clarifications provided by Michiel Leenaars. They are available indicated by italics.

Walid : new episode of Projets Libres! Today, we’re going to talk about European funding. I must admit that before starting Projets Libres!, it was a subject where I had an image of a very long, extremely complicated process, which required specialized people, etc. And one of the discoveries of the podcast, as we’re going to see today, is that there are now new ways of doing things to get simplified financing. I have to admit that it was a discovery, a very good discovery and that I told myself that I had to do an episode about it.

This year, in February 2024, at FOSDEM, I had the chance to meet the NLnet team and today, I am lucky enough to have with me Lwenn Bussière whom I will let introduce themselves afterwards. Let’s talk together about what NLnet is and its place in this whole European funding ecosystem. Lwenn, I hope you’re doing well. Welcome to the Free Projects podcast!.

Introducing Lwenn

Lwenn : Good evening, Walid. I’m delighted to be able to discuss NLnet funding with you. It was very funny when we met at FOSDEM, we had the booth with all the stickers of the projects we present and I think it made you very curious and very happy to find the stickers of different projects that you have already hosted with Projets Libres! On your podcast: Les amis de Peertube, Inventory, Castopod, Open Food Facts. And for us, it also made us very happy to see that there is communication that is also done in French free software. So, I’ve been working at NLnet since the beginning of the year. We’re based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and I came to NLnet by chance after finishing a PhD in philosophy.

I’ve been in free software more as a user since I was about 14 or 15 years old. When I start Linux, I think of high school. But it was never… Finally, programming was always something that was for others. Except that by doing more research, I found myself using a lot more tools and looking for free and open alternatives in the context of academic research in philosophy. It was something that was close to my heart, that fascinated me. And in fact, when I was looking for a job after my PhD, leaving research, a friend who was close to the NLnet people told me that they were hiring people to evaluate project proposals, funding proposals, and then communicate with the projects that we decide to fund and therefore do all this work internally as a funding officer, Let’s say.

So, the work is in English, so there’s going to be some problems in the translation episode, I’m going to do my best, but…

Walid : Don’t worry, anyway, I’ll make a transcription afterwards in which I write down in French all the English words we use.

Lwenn : That’s it. So yes, I joined NLnet in January and it’s been a pleasure to work ever since.

Walid : Where did you go to school? In France or abroad?

Lwenn : I was in France until about the master’s degree and then I went to Amsterdam on Erasmus and I never came back. The European exchange programmes are working. yes, that’s what we’re going to say.

What is NLnet?

Walid : So we’re talking about NLnet. Can you, first of all, tell us about the history of NLnet?

Lwenn : So the part that’s going to be interesting for the people who are listening to you, NLnet, is a foundation, a non-governmental organization recognized as being of public interest.

What we do, in fact, is that we obtain funds that are European funds, also some private funds from donors, such as a charity, and then we redistribute them to open and free software development projects. We generally give funding that is for short periods, about a year of development, which is small funding on the scale of European funding since our grants are between 5000 and 50000 euros for the first projects, with the possibility of extending over several projects. And our mission is to promote a free and decentralized Internet where users are in control of their tools.

And in fact, a lot of the projects we fund are not very sexy projects. These are projects that are fundamental building blocks, that build the Internet as we know it. It’s going to be network protocols, it’s going to be network tools that are deployed, it’s also going to be data storage solutions. So in fact, this whole Internet infrastructure that we know very well comes from free software and that it is based on an often invisible, often unpaid work of volunteers and enthusiasts. We are trying to divert some European funds, with the informed consent of course from the NGI Zero programme, to people who will actually build sustainable solutions for the Internet.

And historically, NLnet starts in the ’80s or ’90s. For the record, it actually started when UNIX enthusiasts came back from the United States in ’82 and created EUNIX, then actually decided to use EUNIX to make networking, creating EUNET (European Unix Network), which bootstrapped the European Internet.

And NLnet was officially founded in ’89 and has activities that are both charitable and commercial. And what happens is that in ’97, NLnet makes an exchange of shares with the people of UUnet in the United States, which will become Verizon. And this exchange of shares for a lot of money, at the time, a few million, created NLnet’s first charitable fund, which would then focus on its fundraising missions.

Michiel : NLnet started from a Unix User Group, NLUUG.nl (which still exists). This is an association, NLnet was created to professionalize the work done within CWI/NIKHEF and NLUUG.

I know you have a lot of questions about European funding, but what you need to know is that we get a lot of funding from the European Commission. European Commission through the NGI Zero program, but we also benefit from private funding, inheritances or people who trust us with more or less a lot of money and donors. So it’s the same, if there are people who are listening and who want to finance European free software, we can talk about the work we do and if they are interested.

Walid : But NLnet, so at the beginning NLnet is an internet service provider, so at some point NLnet is bought by U-Net which will become Verizon?

Lwenn: in fact NLnet is the sister of EUnet or Verizon, it is first of all an association of unique enthusiasts that begins to create the European Internet, in fact in a cooperative associative model and which becomes a commercial provider when in fact we start to take into account the commercial applications of the Internet in the 90s.

And in fact, like these free software enthusiasts, people like Teus Hagen or Jaap Akkerhuis are in the Internet Hall of Fame. In fact, they are also passionate about free software. So in fact, there’s NLnet, it starts as an access provider where all the funds that are not operative funds are paid back to free software through a donation process.

Walid : Oh okay.

Lwenn : Actually, right from the start, there’s this cooperative aspect.

Michiel : To learn more about the history of NLnet and the other organs, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLnet. for the history of NLnet and other organizations: It’s not very comprehensive but it’s a good context regarding the names. It would be great to have a page in French at some point, maybe we can have some Wikipedians to volunteer 🙂

The legal form of NLnet

Walid : NLnet, what is its legal form now? Is it a foundation under Dutch law? That was the case from the get-go or it’s something, you know that, if it’s…

Lwenn : That was the case from the beginning because in the Netherlands you can have a foundation that is for profit. So you can incorporate your company as a foundation. And in fact, in general, for small companies that have just started, such as Startups or SMEs (Editor’s note: small and medium enterprises), it is relatively interesting as a financial profile in terms of taxes, etc.

I’m not an expert on corporate rights, but it seems to me that in fact the term foundation doesn’t necessarily refer to NGOs, it can also be foundations that have a profit purpose. But in fact, in ’97, it definitively became a foundation recognized as being of public interest, not profit, whose mission is to support the development of an open and free internet.

Walid : Do you know if the original founders are still there?

Lwenn : No, they let us have control over the operation, but it’s true that we still discuss with them and we keep, in fact we keep very good ones, that’s something we talked about a little later, we tend to keep very good relations with our former members but also our old projects. So when you ask questions about our community, sorry for the spoilers, in fact we’ll often put in touch projects that we think have something to say to each other because we founded one of the projects and we can say “Hey, this new project that’s coming up, that’s very close to what you’re doing, Maybe you’re interested in talking to them.” And that’s something we do a lot.

The NLnet Team

Walid : How many people are you now?

Lwenn : Well, there are 9 of us, but apparently we’ve just hired 2 other people who are starting next week. It is a very small organization. From an outsider’s point of view, when I discovered NLnet, it was pretty crazy the impact, the number of projects and the amount of funding that was managing to circulate when I found out that it was…

So before my colleague and I, who were recruited in January, arrived, it was 6 people and I was flabbergasted to learn that.

Walid : When you told me that at FOSDEM, I wondered how it was possible.

Lwenn : You see the booth at FOSDEM, there were less than 10 people, you met all NLnet.

NLNet’s place in European free software

Walid : yes, that’s right. Then we started talking a little bit about the European Commission. One of the things also to introduce NLnet, how do you position yourself in the free software ecosystem in Europe?

Lwenn : Well, that’s a bit of a broad question. I think there are actually two sides to this question. We work with different partners.

We are part of a network of partners. And that’s something we rely on a lot because our partners, so the training NixOS, and our partners Radically Open Security, which is a company that does security audits, and whose net profits are donated to other associations, in this case to us, to free software, so as a donation. And in fact, these partners that we work with, also APELL, they will help us when we work with projects to be able to direct our projects to experts on different aspects. Nixos, they are very good at packaging. And in fact, packaging for Nix, it allows you to have what you develop that can run in any distribution. So it’s still super interesting and fast.

Working with a security audit, especially with what’s happening in the European political climate, the Cyber Resilience Act, is something that we ask of all our projects because you put your code all over the Internet, free access, open source. It’s still so nice when you have your funding to also be able to work with someone who will just read your code and check all your vulnerabilities to make sure that everything you do is good from a security point of view. We work with a university that helps us a lot, because they are passionate about accessibility. So in fact, each of our projects, they evaluate them in terms of accessibility, they do an audit to be able to help them improve their accessibility because the Internet should be for everyone.

Walid : Whether it’s security audits or accessibility, I’m thinking for example of security audits, it’s something that is complicated, that is expensive for an open source project, that in general we don’t necessarily do, because we don’t have the skills or we don’t know the people or it will cost us money or we don’t have the time.

Lwenn : That’s why when we select a project, the security audit and the accessibility audit if there is a user-facing interface are necessary. It’s part of the clauses that go with our donations, which is that there will be a security audit at some point. And I think it’s fantastic for the projects that work with us to have that opportunity. Because yes it’s expensive, it’s annoying to organize and also it’s hard to actually find experts in what you’re doing very specifically to take a look at your code. Because a database expert is not the same as a network system expert in terms of security.

Walid : The question I was also asking myself was if there were entities elsewhere, in Europe and then elsewhere in the world, that resembled NLnet? Do you know any of you at NLnet?

Lwenn : In European free software, there is no real equivalent, but people who have similar missions, yes. The Sovereign Tech Fund, which is better known than we are, also has much larger funding. So it’s going to be for bigger projects, I think it’s going up to half a million or a million. It’s much more important and they still have a slightly higher barrier to entry in terms of what type of project can be selected and the administration that needs to be done by the projects upstream of the selection process.

Michiel: Our budget is as big as theirs, and I think potentially bigger. They are certainly not larger: they have funded less than 20 projects since the beginning of their existence, i.e. less than 3 years.

Walid : Excuse me, Sovereign Tech Fund, who is behind this fund?

Lwenn : They’re very nice people, but they’re a little bit more, they work a little bit more with investments, I think, they have some private investments, and they also have some investments, ah, they’re supported by the German government.

Walid : Oh okay. yes, it’s German. Ok, and you’re talking?

Lwenn : Sometimes. We have some projects, in fact, that, after working with us, will work with the Sovereign Tech Fund because a grant of 50,000 euros for one year is a good springboard to then apply for other funding. And the other people I wanted to tell you about was the Prototype Fund in Germany as well, which is actually going to shortlist candidates before presenting them to the German government. But there is a difference, and that is that the Prototype Fund has to be incorporated as a company in Germany before receiving funding from the German government.

I think what makes NLnet unique, actually, is the speed of the process. Because, then, the people I had a call with this morning, who were accepted, were people who submitted their applications in December, before December 1. So, it’s been 4 months. It’s the speed of the end-to-end process, because then we’re going to start signing.

We work a lot with individual people, which makes us relatively unique, because in fact there is no administrative structure needed to apply. You can apply like no one else, you, Walid, you can write a project proposal tomorrow. You can apply with your company, or you can apply as a member of a collective or organization or a university.

Walid : It’s something quite unique that I, as an individual, can apply for funds that I don’t need to have a…

Lwenn : an incorporation.

That’s it, yes, that’s really… You don’t even have to be of legal age. And you don’t necessarily need to reveal a real name either. We just need a real name and an address to send the funds, but in terms of keeping your privacy, your anonymity, we can. Working with a minor with the consent of their parents is fine. I think it’s this openness that makes us different.

Walid : Last question on this, do the candidates have to be European? Do they have to live in Europe? Can they be somewhere else?

Lwenn : Projects must have a European dimension. European dimension can mean that one of the project’s collaborators lives in Europe. It may mean that one of the people who is developing is in Europe. This may mean that the project is done for the benefit of an organization in Europe. We want projects that have a European dimension, that have an impact in Europe. So we’re paying attention to that. But on the other hand, it’s something with which we have some flexibility on what it means to be European, because a lot of projects on Internet infrastructure are going to benefit European users.

The Story of Next Generation Internet

Walid : Next part. So there, you mentioned it a little bit at the beginning, but you talked about NGI0. Now, what I’d like is for you to be able to tell us more about what Next Generation Internet is. I’m interested in it because I don’t think I know the whole story myself. I’d love to tell a little bit of the story of what it is and how you came to work together.

Lwenn : In 2016, the European Commission is very sad about the results of its previous programme to develop the European Internet. It was Future Internet or something like that. She thinks that before creating this new programme, Next Generation Internet, and continuing to inject money into internet developments, which are a strategic place and a place of impact for the European Commission, they will organise a workshop with experts. The contact between NLnet and NGI was a bit of a coincidence because Tim Berners-Lee was invited to this workshop, he cancelled at the last minute. Michiel Leenaars, who is at NLnet, is invited instead and he will then work with Gartner on the open source community. It gives them a report, a study on how open source is revolutionizing the Internet and is a strategic and crucial place for which funding must be made.

And so, after this report, the European Commission decides that one of the themes that will have to be carried out by NGI is going to be NGI Zero, which is to promote open source, it’s still dynamic, it’s creative, it’s a place of exchange and it’s crucial to boost European open source for the entire internet infrastructure. NGI is not only NGI Zero, there are several themes that are carried by NGI. We work with NGI Zero, which are the open source funds, and there are also other funds to strengthen European technologies.

NGI Zero is the fund we work with, which has been allocated to us. The European Commission also decided to work differently from the way they worked with Future Internet, which is to contact foundations like ours, which are used to working with projects, to have projects submitted to them, to allow us to allocate the funds.

Walid : It’s a big change of strategy on their part in the end.

Lwenn : yes.

Walid : In fact, by delegating all the call for projects, follow-up, financing, etc., they just become the funders. They provide the funds, you know. Are they doing more than just providing the funds?

Lwenn : Yes. All projects that are funded by NLnet are evaluated by an external committee. So after we’ve done all our work upstream of research and evaluation, we’ve discussed with the projects to refine their application, we’re going to discuss a little more about how we work with our projects, there’s going to be an external committee that is validated by the European Commission, which will, In fact, to make sure that we are not doing absolutely anything with their funds. We have a very trusting relationship with the people at NGI, we interact with them regularly and we report back to them. What we’re doing is we’re also taking all the administrative work out of the projects so that they don’t need to do these reports and audits. We are the ones who take responsibility.

Walid : And these funds on NGI Zero, they necessarily go through NLnet or there are also other organizations that are also able to distribute funds, to finance projects through these funds?

Lwenn : So on NGI, there are other organs. In fact, NGI has several funds and each fund, I believe, is allocated to a specific organization or between different organizations, but NGI Zero does go through us.

Walid : Okay, so we started talking about it earlier, really about the funding that is done by NLnet. So what you were saying is that we have both funds that come from NGI0 and both funds that come from our own funds, that is to say donations. Are these the two ways you can invest in projects?

Lwenn : We regularly lobby people who we know have money to give to European open source to try to convince them to give us a raise.

So recently we also obtained the NGI Zero Commons funds, which is a new European fund for the digital commons. We had discussed it at FOSDEM, you were very enthusiastic about it. It’s a very intense moment for us because in fact with this fund we have almost as much, we have twice as much money as we have had since the beginning of NLnet, in total. Because now we have 21 million, something like that, for the digital commons. That’s wonderful. It’s also a lot of responsibility and it’s quite terrifying.

So yes, we have European funding, we also have donations, donations from individuals, small donations, a few euros a month, large donations.

One of our funds is a research fund, which is in fact a fund named by a person who, when he died, he and his sister decided to bequeath, I think it is half a million, to open access research on Internet topics. And so that’s a research fund which is a separate fund that we work with. We also have the equity that comes from the historic sale of NLnet. We have different sources of funding that are not only European funding, but it’s true that NGI Zero is still a program that we benefit from a lot and we can do a lot of very, very cool things with it, so it’s still wonderful.

What NLnet invests in

Walid : Now what I’d like to know is, you started talking about it a little bit earlier, is that what are you investing in? You talked about core technologies, so really the core technologies of the Internet, and actually, what I wanted to know was, are we talking about hardware, are we talking about software? So there you have it, what types of technologies are you investing in?

Lwenn: So, the European funds, NGI Zeo, have stricter rules than the NLnet funds. European funds are necessarily spent on research and development. Unfortunately, we can’t fund maintenance. So, it’s always research and development efforts. Server costs are not something we can do with our projects.

It’s sad, but it’s still innovation. And through these R&D funds, so it’s still open source, and it’s software development, also hardware development. We are trying to identify the technologies that are necessary for the functioning of the Internet as we know it, the technologies that make the Internet a more decentralized, more diverse, more accessible place, which also allow users to have more control over their machines, over their use of the Internet. In the same way, we finance hardware projects, open source hardware projects. We’d like to fund more. It’s often difficult to do material projects with the budgets we have because, well, you need money. Developing motherboards is expensive.

It’s very expensive. But when you have the opportunity to work with someone who is doing an open hardware project. We like it a lot. The types of technologies depend on the type of technology. I can’t name a type of thing that’s going to be our goal.

It’s so varied. We’re trying to focus on what’s going to impact the Internet for the better. What we like is when developments can be reused among several projects. We love people who make libraries, which can be used across multiple codebases.

It depends so much on how people use the Internet, too. Yes, network protocols are fundamental, but we are in the 21st century, social networks have also become a fundamental aspect of the Internet for many people. We started working very recently with a fund opened by Mobifree to be able to free up smartphones because now it’s fundamental.

Walid : We talked to Gaël Duval when I interviewed him about Murena and /e/OS and all that.

Lwenn : yes. In fact, that’s the beauty of that and that’s also why there are so few of us and why we have so much work, is that, in fact, each project, we have to see in relation to this vision, this vision of the Internet and try to calculate, wait, that’s very nice in terms of research, are people going to use it? It’s reusable, it’s solid, but will it still be there in three years? Will it still be important to have this solution in three years’ time? So as much as possible, we try to push for stacks.

So we’re trying to push for stacks that are open source as much as possible. Sometimes it can make sense because there are proprietary stacks, to have solutions to interact with proprietary stacks, like for now, because you have to be pragmatic.

How to do monitoring?

Walid : The next question that leads me is, given the number of projects you have, you must be super busy, how do you have time to do monitoring actually?

Lwenn : So that’s something I’m going to say several times through this podcast, is that we can’t do anything for candidates if they don’t apply. Why do I say that at this point? Because in fact, we learn so much from the projects we’re already working with, that tell us “Hey!” So I’m working on this thing, but actually there’s this new thing that looks like it’s getting super important right now right now, and just gave us a hell of a boost, because, oh well, that’s a topic that’s here. So yes, it’s true that we always need to be a little bit attentive or on standby, that’s also why we actually have calls for applications with very short and very regular temporalities, which are two months between each call for applications, like the people who are going to listen to this podcast.

Our next deadline for a call for applications will be June 1st. We’d love to receive applications, but if you miss it, there will be another deadline, either in August or October, depending on how overwhelmed we are.

So the fact that we have very short time frames also allows us to see where the people we work are at.

Walid : when I heard about it the first time, with the people I interviewed, and the discussions we had a little off-screen, the first thing I said to myself was “Ah, if we had had this in the 2000s”, about our projects, which ended up changing our economic model, because we couldn’t get financed, I said to myself, “Ah, there are certainly projects that could have continued to keep a community model,” for example, but at the time, there was no such funding.

Lwenn : That’s what we’re also trying to do, precisely, we’re also trying to advise the people who work, the people we fund and who work with us. We are also trying to see what their options are in terms of sustainability and in terms of business models. One of our partners, APELL, is the association… I can’t remember their names. Essentially, it’s pros at every possible free and open source software business model to try and see what makes sense for different projects.

So, that’s something that we care about a lot, which is also sustainability and how people can make a living doing open source.

What types of business models should be financed?

Walid : There are economic models that you don’t finance, I’m thinking for example typically of open core models or certain models for which there is some risk that one day the project will close? (Editor’s note: see the introductory episode on the economic models and governance of free software)

Lwenn : All the projects we fund must be under a license recognized by the OSI as an open source license. It’s going to be LPG, it’s going to be AGPL, it’s going to be MIT, essentially. So we already have this big constraint that these are licenses that are clearly open source. When we fund research, we don’t necessarily accept dual licensing models. Then, if it can happen that we work with someone who will have a proprietary solution, but also an open source solution that is entirely open source, self-standing and that integrates well with other things. That’s not a concern for us at all. But it’s important that our R&D funds are clearly open source and that it’s something that fits into open source stacks.

Walid : I meant typically projects where we’re going to say, well, here you have the version, it’s free, it’s open source, and then to have the additional features, you need the version, which is not open source, you know. And now you have to pay 50 euros a month, you see. Are you able to finance this type of business model or not?

Lwenn : I’m going to go back a little bit, if you’ll let me. In a very down-to-earth way, the way our funding works is not salaries, it’s donations. It’s donations on things that people have developed. So in fact, we don’t give money in advance. We give when we receive, well, when this person has developed the code, we have made an agreement that there will be a donation because we appreciate what this person is doing on the Internet. And these donations are conditional on everything that is done being open source. If someone has a business model that is open core, but the project they are applying for us with is to add features to the core (Editor’s note: core of the software), effectively, and to the completely open source, completely free version. Why not? If it makes sense, why not? We don’t have any preconceived notions about choices and economic models, but we do have these restrictions, which are that all these donations are conditional on the fact that the technologies developed are open source.

Applying and being selected: what does it involve?

Walid : The next part is how do you apply, how do you select all of this? Can you explain to me a little bit, I’m going to say a standard flow but a flow, how it works to get funded from the moment you make a call for applications to the moment you donate the funds?

Lwenn : I’m going to give you the version for the candidates, which is relatively simple, and I’m going to give you the version for us, which is relatively more difficult.

Walid : Yes, I’m very interested in yours, yours.

Lwenn : So, I think you’ve seen on our website, there are the different funds with “Do you have a project?”, “Submit your project”. And I don’t know if you opened the form out of curiosity. Our form is very simple. For a candidate, it’s about maybe half an hour of work. The reason we’re trying to have this form so simple is because it allows people to tell us what they think is important about their project. And what’s important for them, well for them, is to present their project, not necessarily with big explanations about how it’s going to revolutionize the technological stage, but just to focus on “I need money to do this, this, this and this, do you like it?”

So we’re really trying to simplify the application process. That’s going to be the application stage. Applications are held every two months. Then there is a waiting period while the applications are evaluated. And there are two rounds of selection. The first cycle is a pre-selection, or, finally, it’s a first selection where you decide which projects you want to ask more questions with or try to see if there might be something, versus which projects you think that, as cool as they are, maybe it’s not the right fit (Editor’s note: it doesn’t fit). So after a few weeks for the first cycle, we try to keep it under four weeks, but it’s difficult. yes, actually I shouldn’t say that because I’m already, we’re already late for April. We try to keep it under eight weeks, but it’s a bit difficult to be able to contact the projects that we’ve decided to discuss a little more with them versus the projects that we think are not necessarily a certain market for us. After this first round of selection, we will then have individual discussions with the projects, so they will receive one or two weeks after the announcement of the first selection additional questions to give details, explain to us a little more their vision, give us the technical details, give us a budget, etc.

And then we’re going to review all these answers, evaluate and try to decide which projects we think are viable and which we’re going to select. And then, when we have selected the projects after this second cycle, we will then send them to an external committee which will, as we said, check this list of different projects that we have noted and that we have pre-reviewed. And after that, when we have the final decision from the external committee, we can start. We can welcome projects and start working with them.

Internally, it’s a less straightforward procedure. For the April background, on our work dashboard, we receive 400 applications that come in and we will evaluate, so we will read each of these applications and evaluate them according to three criteria, technical excellence, impact and strategic potential and value for money or impact for money. So, there are these scoring tools, but it’s still very clinical and it’s not enough to represent the complexity of the projects. So, each time, we’re going to have to do additional research, go visit the different project sites, try to understand, okay, that’s your place in the ecosystem, that’s who you’re working with, that’s your stack, what are your relationships with the other projects that you’re part of, if you want to doActivityPub, what are your relationships with other ActivityPub projects, etc. So we’re actually going to take a look at all of this, formulate some preliminary questions as we decide on this first round of selection. So, as you can imagine, there are four of us, in parallel we are always discussing with our projects that are being worked on and founded. It’s a lot, but that’s it, it’s a bit like the pre-selection criteria and then afterwards, when we’ve decided which project passes this first stage of selection, by consensus, we’re going to ask them additional questions. Maybe it’s going to be something like, well, we’re thrilled with your impact, but we have some questions about why are you using this library instead of this bookstore. So it can be very technical questions, or it can be questions that are a little broader scope, like that’s just what we’re missing to make a final decision. How you see the impact of your project, or how you have organized your budget, or what are your research stages on this project, etc. That’s it, these are going to be the types of questions we’re going to ask, but they’re really discussion questions, to try to get additional information to make our decision.

After these questions, or this dialogue sometimes, since sometimes there can be moments when the projects start to be modified a little bit with these questions, like typically what I told you that we can’t finance maintenance but on the other hand that we can finance research we will discuss with some projects “hey I see that you have maintenance server costs it’s not going to work But I’m very interested in this aspect of your research, maybe a little less” so it can also be a negotiation stage where we can refine the project so that it has the best possible impact and the best possible financial aspect. After this stage of dialogue, we make this final selection, we send it to the external review committee and we can send the good news afterwards. So it’s a relatively quick process and very little administrative and very little headache for candidates. And in fact, our role, our mission, is to take on as many administrative headaches as possible for the projects we fund.

Walid : We talked about it a little bit earlier, but in the discussion, you look at the economic sustainability of the project? No, it’s more like that, it’s more about things that we discuss afterwards, in general, when we’re working with projects specifically. What I was telling you is that, in fact, anyone can apply. It can be individuals, it can be cooperatives, it can be researchers, it can be academic researchers, it can be companies. And that’s not something we discriminate on at all.

To obtain European subsidies because it is a project that is necessary and laudable and will never have a relevant economic model, because capitalism is an economic model. And it’s a social economic model that we value a lot. That’s our mission, if you will.

So it’s not… In fact, it’s something that we can advise some projects on that want to have leads to have a business model, but it’s not necessarily something that is a deal-breaker for us.

We’re happy if something needs to have a business model behind it to be able to continue. We are happy if this person can continue to support themselves. There you go.

Walid : While people are realizing what they said they were going to achieve, do you have regular exchanges with them?

Lwenn : Yes.

Walid : Well, I don’t know, it’s points? How does it actually work?

Lwenn : That’s also kind of the magic of this organization, it’s that the projects we work with are very autonomous. We don’t make points, we don’t make reports. What we have is that when we have selected a project, we will then set up a memorandum, so an informal guarantee that this person will receive charitable donations for his work towards a free internet. But this person sends us with this memorandum, we have a project plan with a description of the different tasks that this person has planned to do and we say yes it seems to us to be a task that is commendable and important and when you have done it we will give you 4000 euros. And then the projects send us payment requests. When they’ve done their job, they send us a link to their repository or to the doc or whatever, just to say, “Hey, I did what I said I was going to do, we’ll check and send the money.”

Walid : What does “you check” mean? That is, do you check that it has been done or do you check…?

Lwenn : Well, yes, we check that it’s been done, we check that it compiles.

Walid : yes, that’s right, okay, okay. You take the code, you take it…

Lwenn : We run it, if it’s packaging, we run it, if it’s a hardware blueprint, it’s a little more complicated, but we try to see if we can build.

Walid : Does all this take time?

Lwenn : Yes, yes, indeed. However, people do not report to us. We don’t ask for 12-page technical reports, “ah, I planned to do this for this reason, I decided to do that”. It’s really that simple, for the project you’re working with, it’s as simple as saying, “I said I was going to develop a bookstore, here are the bookstores.”

Walid : It’s great, it reduces the contribution and funding to something extremely simple for people. That’s really…

Lwenn : Actually, if you like, our starting point is that there are a lot of people who are absolutely brilliant in technical development and all these project management processes or financing organization, it’s hell.

And all the social processes where you have to talk to people, do reporting, etc. It’s an unspeakable ordeal. And so, what we’re trying to do is simplify the process as much as possible so that a lot more people can get funding for the free software that they’re developing by reducing the burden on those people. That’s also why the question you ask me about business models, what we want to do is to allow people to be able to develop the free software they want to develop without having to worry about how to sell it to venture capital (Editor’s note: venture capitalists, VC) or to set up a company on it.

The community around NLnet

Walid : The next topic I wanted to ask you about, I called it the community around NLnet, that is to say there are many projects that have been funded by NLnet, there are always more. Do you NLnet run a community? Do you only connect projects? So, I don’t know, do you have webinars? Do you have any events? Finally, what do you have to make people interact with each other in this community?

Lwenn : Do we run a community? No. It’s a choice, and it’s a deliberate choice. Because we think that the Internet should be decentralized, because we think that projects should interact in their own community for them and not in an artificial community of having received money from the same source. For us, it doesn’t make sense to do cohorts or promotions for people who have very different jobs. On the other hand, we love to create direct connections whenever we can. If a new project, we think it might be interesting to put them in contact with previous projects with whom we have worked, we will put them in contact directly. We do have a Speaker Bureau that allows you to contact us or ask if you would have someone to propose to speak at an event, to speak. We organize webinars that allow some of our projects, when they have resulted in our Success Story, to present their work and we have a network of partners, which I have touched a little about, who offer help and support to our projects.

And so we’re thrilled when we see projects that help each other, or that start working together, but we have a deliberate choice not to create our own community, forum, IRC, and then also that’s it, as you can imagine…

Walid : You don’t have time.

Lwenn : yes.

How does NLnet advertise itself?

Walid : That’s it, anyway. Well, yes. My next question, which is quite related to the one I just asked you, is how do you actually advertise? How do you get people to know each other?

Lwenn : Well, you! Our projects are our best advertising. We ask the projects we fund to recognize us in terms of funding because it’s nice, on their website or on their repo, a bit like they want. And it’s always really nice when we have new projects or new people reaching out to us and saying, “Hey, I heard about you from this or that other open source project that I’m involved with and I wanted to apply.” So our projects are our best publicity. It’s a bit like Mastodon, ActivityPub, but it’s true that we really like to keep things very technical and we like this word of mouth and we like the fact that we don’t need to do ads on Facebook, Google, Mastodon and we prefer on the contrary that it be recommended by your friends: “hey, your software project, I know you’ve been looking for funding for three years, maybe you should be able to apply for NLnet.” That warms our hearts when it happens.

Walid : Can you give a few examples, what I called success stories, of projects that have really developed through NLnet funding?

Lwenn : On the one hand, we like projects that become big and have a lot of development, but for us, every person who for a year or two has developed free and open source software with the funding they needed to be able to continue working on their passion, it’s a success story. But in terms of impact, we’ve done a lot of work with ActivityPub. I think you have this podcast on Castopod.

Walid : Absolutely, ActivityPub being my favorite topics on the podcast.

Lwenn : but we’ve also worked with Peertube and Mobilizon, WireGuard that are excellent in terms of safety, CryptPad that allow us to make… on which we exchanged for the plot of this episode, who make end-to-end encrypted collaborative documents, either on their server or self-hosted. Jitsi also, since we are in France, it is still interesting to mention. That’s some interesting examples, but it’s true that if you go to our site, we have more than 400 projects. There’s some very high-level stuff, social media. There’s some very low-level stuff, bootloader . And for very, very low level of internet architecture, we have just “on-boarded” a project to create autonomous batteries. Finally, to create open-source standalone battery development kits. There you go. We’re really at all levels of the internet stack, from energy to social media.

How does it feel to do this work?

Walid : I’d like to ask you a question that I didn’t write down in it but it’s interesting. How does it matter to you, personally, to fund these projects, these people who, with that money, will develop things that they might not have been able to develop otherwise? What does it do to you, really?

Lwenn : It’s incredible. Frankly, it’s incredible. I told you at the beginning that I came from a research background in philosophy, so it was quite a radical change, but something that’s wonderful and something that I really enjoy about my work is that I can exchange and learn from experts all the time. It’s really like being born a sniper every day, on a lot of different subjects. And it’s amazing to be able to work with so many people who are absolutely brilliant and help them achieve things that are useful for society. There you go.

Walid : Really, again, I’m thinking, if we’d had that in the 2000s, there’s a lot of stuff, it would have been great. So, it’s really great that it exists.

Lwenn : There was NLnet in the 2000s, but it was still very small, actually.

Challenges ahead for NLnet

Walid : Well, yes, we didn’t know you.

Last part, this is what I call the future. What I’d like to know a little bit is what are your challenges, what do you have in the future, what do you know you’re going to have to work on?

Lwenn : our big challenge at the moment is to grow, not really to expand but at least to speed up our processes to be able to maintain the level of attention that we pay to each of the projects that apply individually because as you see the evaluation process that I described to you it is still very very personalized and therefore succeed in having more capacities and or more speed while keeping this level of attention, It’s going to be a big challenge for us as a foundation and a bit of an ongoing challenge. We also talked about the NGI Zero Commons fund, which is very, very exciting and one of the largest funds we’ve ever worked with. The largest fund we’ve ever worked with. It’s going to take a lot of effort to find new talent and new people to work with and fund projects. And in fact, more generally, the things that we keep on the radar are more challenges for European free software in general. It is the Cyber Resilience Act that will affect European book developers a lot.

The Digital Market Act , which is very, very positive news that will really change the European free software ecosystem. So these are things that are exciting but are also quite scary to find the time, the energy to succeed in meeting them.

Conclusion

Walid : From what I understand from what you’re saying, we’re coming to the end of this interview. In closing, I would like to ask you a few questions.

The first question is “what would you say to a free software project owner who doesn’t know NLnet?”

Lwenn : In a few words. We’re giving money to European free software, come and apply.

Walid : All right. What would you say to a project leader who has already benefited from NLnet funding?

Lwenn : It was a pleasure to work with you. Applying for your first NLnet project doesn’t mean you can’t reapply. We’d love to see where you’re at and we’re always happy to see you at FOSDEM or elsewhere.

Walid : By the way, before I give you an open forum, I didn’t ask the question, but FOSDEM is a very important event for the whole free software ecosystem. Are there any other events you go to?

Lwenn : Yes, depending on our individual desires as different NLnet people, we have our own affections and networks and we are usually also present at the Chaos Computer Conference in winter.

Walid : Okay, and listen, we’re coming to the end of the interview, it’s the open forum. So the op-ed is, I’ll let you speak to get a message across, the message you want to convey to the listeners of Projets Libres!, and to all the people who might come across this episode.

Lwenn : to all listeners who are passionate about Projets Libres! and free software, if there are projects that you know, that are looking for funding, try to point them in our direction, because we love to receive new applications, see new faces, and also we try to help whenever we can.

Walid : That’s a very interesting conclusion. I myself talk about it very regularly around me, telling people, you should really apply. And by the way, Benjamin Bellamy from Castopod said that it was the people at Xwiki who helped him fill out the NLnet form and that’s how Castopod was born in the end.

Lwenn : Oh yes, something for the projects that have already worked with us, help your buddies, help the other projects you know that are in financial difficulties – everyone is in financial difficulty in free software – but help them to apply. Show them that it’s simple, tell them about your experience, the good and the bad and try to encourage them because you are the one who allows us to see new projects, new faces and discover talents. Typically what the XWiki people did in helping Benjamin de Castopod, we need that because we can’t do all that. Unfortunately, we don’t have time.

Walid : Well listen Lwenn, already you’re delighted to meet you at FOSDEM because I arrived at the NLnet booth, I asked if by chance someone would be French-speaking, I thought the answer was going to be no. I was told “oh but if you have to come back tomorrow, you have to meet Lwenn”, so I was super happy. Then I contacted you again and you said yes great it’s great we’re going to be able to do an episode, so I was super happy. It’s a subject that’s really close to my heart, really happy that we were able to make this recording, so thank you very much for that. I hope that we will have the opportunity to talk about NLnet again in the coming months or years on the podcast Projets Libres!. And then for the listeners, you understand, we have to get this episode to work with people who make free software, so I’m counting on you, that’s your mission. See you soon, thank you very much and have a good evening, see you next time Lwenn.

Lwenn : Thank you very much, it’s been a real pleasure to chat with you.

This episode was recorded on April 24, 2024.

License

This podcast is published under the dual license Art Libre 1.3 or later – CC BY-SA 2.0 or later.

wawa

2024-01-01 08:55:10

Introduction aux modèles économiques et gouvernances des logiciels libres – G. Le Bouder, R.Semeteys

projets-libres.org/introductio…

Podcast : Introduction aux modèles économiques et gouvernances des logiciels libres - G. Le Bouder,

Comment sont gérés et financés les logiciels libres ? Quels sont les modèles existants et leurs évolutions au fil du temps ? Ces questions sont simples et pourtant les réponses ne sont pas évidentes.

^{wawa (Podcast Projets Libres !)}

podcast.projets-libres.org/@pr…

The video of the conference is available on Youtube.

Sommaire

• 1 Transcript of the Open Source Software Evaluation Conference
• 2 Presentation of the speakers
• 3 Why evaluate open source software?
• 4 How to evaluate open source software?
• 5 Trends that will impact evaluation
• 6 License

Transcript of the Open Source Software Evaluation Conference

Walid Nouh: Hello everyone, thank you for being here. My name is Walid Nouh, I am the founder of a podcast called Projets Libres!. Today, I am very fortunate to be able to host a round table where we will talk about the evaluation of free software. With me, we have four guests. You will see different profiles who each have different interests in evaluating free software. The first person is Lwenn Bussière who is a Technology Assessor at NLnet. We’ll explain what NLnet is later. Thierry Aimé who is in charge of free software at the Ministry of Finance. Benjamin Jean who is the CEO of Inno3 and Raphaël Semeteys who is a senior architect at Worldline. I will give each of you the floor to introduce yourselves and explain a little bit about your structure, who you are and what your structure is. Louane, would you like to start please?