Episode: 2228
Title: HPR2228: linux.conf.au 2017: Russell Keith-Magee
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2228/hpr2228.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 16:11:31

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This is HBR episode 2228 entitled Linux.com.0 2017 Russell Keith Magic and is part of the series
Interview. It is hosted by Clinton Roy and is about 18 minutes long and carries an
explicit flag. The summary is a wide-ranging interview with Russell Keith Magic.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com. Get 15% discount on all shared
hosting with the offer code HBR15 that's HBR15. Better web hosting that's honest and fair
at An Honesthost.com.
All right, good morning everyone. It's the second day of Linux.com.au. We're at the coffee
stall so you'll hear some of those lovely sounds a little bit later on. It's quite early
so there's not too many people. Joining me here is Keith Russell McGee. Yeah, Russell
Keith McGee. Russell Keith McGee. And if I had a dollar? Well, you know, I join you and
I have sympathy. My name often gets twisted around thanks to a certain US president many
years ago and I'm probably one of the few people at this conference is actually happy that
another Clinton didn't get in because that painting my life is never going away. So I mostly
know you from from your Python stuff. Yes. So what brings you to Linux.com for you? Mostly
the Python stuff. So yeah, I'm giving a talk on Wednesday about essentially the stuff
that I've been doing in the Python community. But it is. And broadly speaking, I would
put that in a I would say that you are building Python libraries and frameworks so that you
can do cross platform work. That's right. Yes. So getting getting Python, which is traditionally
a desktop and server laptop language, you know, system administration language, web server
language and getting it so that you can write native user interfaces for your iPhone, for
your Android, for your set top box, for your watch, for no, with all these new devices we've
got. Well, if everyone's got them in their pockets, but the official device ecosystem
say you must use objective C or you must use Java or whatever the language of choice happens
to be for that platform. Yeah. Now, you know, obviously my interest is very much in the
Python space. I want I want to use Python everywhere. But the techniques that I've had to
use to get Python working everywhere are not especially Python specific. There's a lot
of similarities between the way Python works and the way Ruby works. So if Python works
and most of the languages of of that era work at one level, obviously you're my very
your language. You need to do it yourself. I'm not doing it for you. But there are
lessons to be learned and that's what I'm essentially talking about on Wednesday. Cool,
cool. So that's Wednesday. So that's that's not a mini-conf. That's actually like one of
the full full production conferences accepted tracks. So let me stop at you. We have three
days of like the proper conference where all of the talks go through a paved community. Yes.
But Monday and Tuesday are what we call mini-conferences where they're more community-run events.
So there's a I don't know I don't want to say a lower bar, but the papers that come through
on the mini-conferences, they're selected by the community members much more than the paper
community. Yeah. So the paper committee has a much higher bar to start with than there's just
yeah it's kind of an average good bar. Yeah. And I think I think also the more important thing
with the mini-conferences is that the the audience for those talks might be really small,
but that's the focus. Yeah. And it's very very very very very very
domain-focused areas. I think if I remember right the pi-confer to start as a mini-confer
one point way way quite potentially. So I so the concept of mini-conferences at least for
filling stuff are you got started I believe in Brisbane where I was a very minor helper in running
the Brisbane Conf. My workmate at the time Raymond Smith sort of rested control of Linux
Conferu away from the Sydney Central University people and he made Linux Conferu work in Brisbane
way back in 2001 or 2000 and I have been attending and helping out ever since.
So yeah. So yeah it's it's so today I am attending the open hardware mini-confer so I will be
spending probably three quarters of a day solving up one of the electronic kits that the local
packet spaces and get together. I think for memory it's actually like a little games controller sort
of things so I'm not entirely sure but it's one of the new SB boards so the little chips that
are taking over the world they've got the they've got the in-built wireless and they've got all the
features you could possibly want in a tiny tiny print. So yeah so I'll probably spend half
the day solving that in the quarter of the day solving my hands. So are there any particular talks
or topics that you're really looking forward to? During the mini-votes today today I haven't
actually haven't had that much of a look at the program yet. I think I'm probably going to
hang out in the community leadership summit for a little bit because I spend a lot of time
in the Django community and also now there's an emerging VW community so that's a topic of some
interest. I spent yesterday camped out in Woodcoff which was the Women in Open Space Open
Technology which was amazing. Chris Nogigabar gave an amazing introduction when he said it was
a series of amazing talks that just happened to be all given by women and when you've got someone
talking about how to use knitting to write cheering complete machines. It was something to behold.
The history of lock picking was incredible and on and on and on so yeah. I think my only disappointment
so far that it's something that happens quite often is that the mini-cops don't line up their
schedules. Yes and it means that it's very hard to cross between the streams. Now having
organized a couple of conferences that had many conferences this was getting the mini-cops
organisers to line up schedules up was the band of my existence two years running. So I think Chris
has taken the one approach and just said let it go. So yeah I can totally understand that but
there's a lot of good content there and I think like bearing any kind of conspic events everything
will be recorded. But in the main conference I know my co-collaborator partner in crime
Katie McLaughlin is giving a talk about JavaScript and how it's not quite so awful as everyone says
it is which which it fits in very well with some of the stuff that we're doing like we're in
beware but it's also just a sort of a healthy reminder that yeah this is a language it's not like
and it's everywhere it is everywhere so we kind of have to know it and as getting a lot better there's
a lot of a lot of the bad memories you have of JavaScript 10 years ago I started to get knocked off
so and we just kind of had to suck it up because it's yeah it's one of those things like
it's it's one of those things that when you're dealing with computers and you've already installed
the stuff you kind of forget how hard it is to install stuff so like one of the things that I do
is software carpentry where we're teaching researchers how to use computing to get their work done
better more efficiently more reproducible and you spend half a day installing stuff on the
computers and it's Mac it's Windows it's Linux it's a whole range of things some of them are
locked down tight yeah and installing this stuff is a nightmare yeah here we've got language that is
already everywhere yeah it would be silly not to try and yeah take a look at it yeah um what one
of the keynotes that I thought that um that was sort of right up your alley um I'm I'm completely
forgetting her name I want to say it's Nadia Nadia Park yes um so she wrote an ebook or a book a
little while ago uh roads and bridges yes uh talking about the um personal cost of open source
that businesses have been able to outsource yeah so there's an awful lot of uh corporate
entities that have built their entire megaliths based on top of open source software and they're not
giving back yes and I know that this is a particular uh drum that you have beaten in
past few years and I spoke to Nadia when she was preparing that report so the report as she wasn't
just a straight off book it was a uh uh commissioned report from the Ford Foundation in the United States
one of the largest philanthropic organizations uh in the world for that matter fairly you know
significant endowment then it's like that for the Ford yep yep um and they they have
money that they need to spend it all to maintain their philanthropic status and and they're looking
for ways to make a big impact and she managed to get into the ear of uh one of them to sort of
suggest the idea that there is this ecosystem of stuff out there that is literally keeping the
lights on um that no one's paying for and you know it's a recurring story here that founder
gives up burns out table flips because they've just been had the the pressures of the day job they
had to do to actually put food on the table for their family and the the pressures of an entire
community telling them what they have to do and I saw that with Django we've gone through a series
of Django committers who kind of do an amazing amount of work and then fly out because they've
they've just spent too much time working on that and I haven't seen any real reward whilst
simultaneously an entire industry in Silicon Valley is raising multi-billion dollar evaluations um
Instagram I want to say sorry Instagram is an interesting story because they have now
working up and decided that they're going to contribute so as of as of last year they are now
contributing but you know yes it's a good example they were a one billion dollar valuation
based entirely in Django that until last year had not contributed anything to the to the
maintenance of the tool that was underpinning their entire organization yeah now okay
that was the price we signed up for when we said it was going to be open sourced but now there's
the difference between the yeah literally the price tag is zero but that doesn't mean it costs
nothing and yeah you know if you know there's kind of a community attitude that that we as as
the open source community have embraced but business hasn't worked out a way to frame that in a
way that works on their balance sheet yeah yeah and and there's different sort of ways of looking at
this like if we if we look at it from from the green movement side of things there's environmental
costs to everything that we're doing nobody's paying yes we're all going to be paid in the next
20 or 30 years yeah um if we have a look at projects like open SSL that had very little
support like it didn't like I made didn't have a maintenance team at all and it hit the roof
yeah and all of a sudden all the companies around the world so oh we use this open SSL thing
everyone uses open SSL thing nobody's paying for yeah so it would be it would be nice if it didn't
take a cataclysmic event like partly yeah for everybody to wake up and realize it was not just
open SSL it's also the web frame works and the languages and the tools and the libraries and
everything else so and and there's there's sort of different costs like there's there's a there's
an infrastructure cost where you have to maintain these things to keep them up at a certain
level of quality there's a personal cost where someone has a day job and they have a night job
and maybe they have a family and you've got to abortion these things out um but yeah it's one
of these discussions and it's it's really interesting like like ladies confé you where you know
we're kind of um we're at the ars end of the world there's one of our politicians has previously
said so I feel that I'm okay swearing if if the politician has said it if one of our prime ministers
has said it I feel totally okay using that vernacular um so we're we have a very sort of strong
community focus and yet these things that are causing um friction and fractures inside of
our community at a very individual level we still haven't come to to grapple with that like the
the Linux Australia Council for example we don't I say we I'm not on the council but I have
been on the council we don't really have a stance on this this is not something that we have
turned from a sort of soft squishy thing into a hard concrete problem yeah and the thing
that's interesting is that from the other side of it I mean I I've got some exposure to it from
from talking to people you know my kind of discussions I've been having is that yeah sure
there are other companies out there that just want to you know take every every red cent they can
get that everything isn't nailed down but the vast majority of companies out there want to be
effective there just isn't a framework in which they can be effective you know they they uh
talking with uh Jacob Kappelmos back when he was working at Heroku it was like yes I I very
much you said we were saying that I very much want to donate large amounts of money but I have to
justify every line item in my budget yep and if I can like I can't just pay for support contract
unless I'm getting something yeah yeah you need to give me something yep now what that
something is is a little bit nebulous when it gets to something like open source because well
the end of the day the patches are coming free the software's coming free the supporters coming
basically from the community and yeah there is always that thing of oh you can sell you can sell
support you can sell consulting but if you don't need it you can't buy it yeah so you can't
just buy something that you could get free we haven't got the accounting language that lets
engineering spend that money and so it ends up being an advertising and marketing
yeah part of 90's report was looking at it as okay can we can we treat this a different way
can we look at this as a philanthropic thing yep and go after the philanthropic money to say okay
well would you the Ford Foundation like to be known as the person who keeps the internet's lights on
and then attach yourself to that and yeah what how do you reframe the discussion of the value
offering to make it appealing to philanthropic organizations yep yep yep and it's that sort of thing
like like Linux Australia has a fair chunk of change in in the bank and we use that upfront
to cover fees for conferences so like if we need to book a we need to book a conference hotel
they'll have a reserve limit and Linux Australia will cover that and it means that no one
organising any of our conferences as they have to go in debt personally so there's a whole
layer of angst that is removed yeah and and having you know having having that that body of
money there that you can pour on should you need it it's a very different thing from having a
a monthly paycheck come in yeah and and having having having that knowledge that some
large organization has your back should you need it is is what being a community is all about
yeah yeah having having that sort of network of friends yeah and I mean for myself for the
longest time it has been much easier just to say if there's something there that we're doing for
money um I will just do it for free yeah because as soon as you get money involved things get
messy yeah yeah um but like you you have it you have a really good point there where
it's actually it's it's actually really hard for companies to work at how to do all this stuff
because there's no organization that they can just send an invoice to and and give some money to
everyone's everyone does these things differently there's there's tip jars and there's patreon accounts
and there's you know a thousand different corporate structures that get set up for each of the
projects so there's the patchy group there's jenga group there's this group there's that group
there's no no worldwide open source um comfort group that you can just send a check to
yeah every 12 months yeah and know that the money will be going to that place yeah appropriately
so yeah it's it's one of those things and the the the burn brightly and then crash and burn
thing is something something that I've seen one of the projects that I'm sort of peripherally involved
with the hypothesis uh properties and it's taken a long time but it's it's a python project and he's
actually found a source of money through doing like a jar of a port of that uh that project is one of
that one of the ways that he's bringing your money yeah um and it's it's one of these things where
there's a lot of different ways of um getting like there's a lot of value in open source and there's
a lot of there's a myriad of number of ways of uh monetizing that value but when you're one person
and you're having to monetize in 16 different ways yeah like support or training whilst also
developing the software that enables you to raise money it's it's you know you go from juggling
a home life or work life and a personal life to to juggling like a small business yeah it's it's
it's nuts yeah it's it's it's one of these things that we really have to get on top of it's a certain point
so well I feel I've taken up enough of your morning so uh thank you very much my absolute pleasure um
and uh the big silver microphone will be here throughout the rest of the conference so if you
uh want us to end have another chat just just feel free to chat with an urge to speak at length
all right thank you very much no worries
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