Episode: 767
Title: HPR0767: Maddog and "super dumb terminals"
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0767/hpr0767.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:06:34

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Hey everyone, this is Claire too, and I met this Southeast Linux Fest 2011 talking
with John Matidog, Paul, hey John, how's it going?
It's going very well, thank you.
So you're giving a talk, the keynote talk this year, do we have a title for that yet?
A hint?
I can't remember the actual title, but what the talk is about is making money with free
software, but talking about how to create local jobs and doing that.
Okay, well actually that, it sounds like it might have actually stemmed from something
that you spoke about last year, I think, both itself and OLF, I think I saw your talk,
Project Kawa.
Kawa?
Okay.
And this was, I mean, obviously people should hunt this talk down because it would be a
lot more clear than us just reiterating it, but it struck me after I saw your talk that
this was almost maybe sort of the way computing was supposed to be, that rather than having
that ubiquitous computer in every home where people don't really understand what they're
doing maybe or don't really want to manage all this heavy duty systems stuff, maybe
a sort of dumb terminal in every home might be sort of what computing was actually modeled
for.
Well, it's kind of a super dumb terminal, it gives you the graphics you need, it gives
you the processing power you need, it's on all the time so that it can do the things
you wanted to do, including things like be your telephone, be your TV, be your radio,
and alarm clock, be your security system, things like that.
I find that most people that can actually use a computer, because in particular, things
that they do every day, the problem is that the things that they don't do every day, the
things which really trick them, things like installing new software or doing backups
or getting rid of viruses and spam, these are things that people really don't know how
to do and they shouldn't have to do.
Now in large companies you have systems administrators to do all this type of stuff, but small companies
and the average person really can't, they can't afford that, but if you were to share
a systems administrator amongst all these people and each one of these people was to give
just a few dollars every month to this person for doing this work, you might be able to
find out that sure they can sit down, they can browse the web, they can edit simple documents,
they can do all the things that they want to do, and not have to worry about the stuff
that they can't do.
I have to tell you, after I saw your talk last year, the more I thought about it, the
more actually brilliant, it started to sound, do you have any status update on that idea
or that project?
I know it sounded like it kind of got started when you talked about it last year.
Well, we were having problems last year because we wanted to start this project down in
Brazil, the economics of Brazil and the economics of a systems administrator just works out very,
very nicely.
In Latin America, about 83% of the people live in an urban environment which means tall
office buildings and tall apartment buildings is a very dense environment.
In the United States, not as many people live in that type of an environment and the wages
for a systems administrator tend to be a little bit higher.
So we wanted to do this, start this off in Brazil and Latin America.
And unfortunately, just about the time we were starting it up, President Lula was coming
the end of his second term and President Duma hadn't been elected yet and everybody just
came to a branding halt.
But now Duma is in, she's following a lot of the same policies that Lula was following,
everything is starting back up again.
In addition, some of the people I've been working with have figured out a way of delivering
portion of Project Cawa and getting it started.
So we're actually going to be launching this in early July at the Feastley Conference
in Porto Alegra.
That's great.
Now we're not launching the full Project Cawa project because that's really very complex.
But we are launching a portion of it and we're going to be demonstrating to people that
a lot of the principles behind Project Cawa actually work.
That geeks really can be salespeople, they really can be their own boss, they really
can sell these things.
And if they start selling them, then improving this concept, then we think that the government
and other bodies that would help us do the full Project Cawa would then come in line
and continue.
So we're going to be, like I said, launching this at Feastley Conference in Porto Alegra,
July, late June, early July.
And we're going to keep going through various conferences in Brazil, extending it each time,
doing more training and things like that, building it up, and engaging the community to do
this.
So we'll be showing the community, they'll be able to follow along, step by step to see
what's happening.
Everything's going to be published, everything's going to be out in the open.
It is going to be a community project, it's not going to be a project of some company
who wants to do this.
It's going to be the community driving it forward.
And I and the other people in the board of directors will be guides and will be catalysts
to having it happen.
But we want this to be a community project.
OK, so it's obviously being centered or it's starting, I guess, in Brazil.
Do you, in your grand vision, do you even think it's possible for it to spread outside
of Brazil into a, I don't know, North America?
Absolutely.
And one of the things we're doing by publishing everything on the server, making it all
available, is if people in other geographic regions want to do this, they can at any
time.
So I would recommend to people that they lag behind a little bit because we want to pilot
things, we want to test things, we want to change, get them into shape, we want to apply
what we learn back again in a redundant type of way, not redundant, but a self-healing type
of way.
But then in a certain period of time, we'll translate everything into Spanish.
And now we will go up through Latin America and other Spanish-speaking countries.
At that point, I think it would be safe for people to say, well, let's make sure it's
in German or English or, you know, some of the other languages.
And let's see where it would be applicable.
So for example, in the United States, I could see it very applicable to a large shopping
mall.
We have a whole bunch of little stores in there.
They can't afford their own systems of administrator.
Let's put a nice, highly available server in there.
All the stores now have thin clients as their point of sale terminals, their accounting
systems, and things like that.
You can make an open ERP available to them.
And because Open ERP is a very complex package, the systems administrator could offer an additional
service of teaching them how to use Open ERP or helping them configure Open ERP for their
services.
So this is the way that the systems administrator can make even more money by providing these
base services to the people in the shopping mall.
That's a very cool example.
So is this, do you see this being very modular?
I mean, so you guys are doing your thing down in Brazil and then someone does decide, hey,
I'm this is sad.
Or I'm a person who can bring this kind of model to a shopping mall or to my local neighborhood.
And then someone else says, I can do it in my neighborhood.
Is it something that can happen in little pockets like that and then be absolutely, absolutely.
We call this the hamburger model where what we're doing is on the server, we will show everybody
how to make a hamburger stand or lemonade stand.
You don't need, you don't need to have a PhD to be able to set up a hamburger stand
or that.
And we'll show people and we'll have documents that people can then take in tailor so that
brochures that they could show to their end user customers, this is why you should be
buying the service.
We're also going to have brochures that they could take to the bank and say, this is,
this is how this thing works, you know, so that the bank can understand that their loan
will be safe.
Now, what might take a little bit longer and one of the things that we have to do in Brazil
is that we want to set up an underwriting service for the banks that are going to be
loading the money for these people to create their businesses.
We want to have an underwriting service so that if any one of the loans is not paid back,
the bank doesn't lose any money.
One of the reasons why banks don't give out loans, or if they give out a loan, the
interest rate is very high, is because of the risk factor of the loan.
But if you have an underwriting program that assures the bank, they're never going to
lose their money, then the bank says, whoa, you know, the only thing now is do we get more
money by lending it to this person or do we get more money by lending it to that person?
And if you've lowered the risk considerably, then that means that you, you know, even
though you're paying a lower interest rate, you may actually get the loan over a higher
interest rate because they have to figure a risk factor into that particular loan.
So these are things that we want to set up and it's going to take a little bit of time.
We also want to make sure that all the people that are doing this are at least certified
in LPI certification or some certification program because we want to make sure that
the people have the knowledge to be able to do this type of work.
And if they have the knowledge and they've gone out and they've signed up a number of
potential customers, then they should be able to approach the bank and say, hi, I'm
part of this program, you understand what this program is about.
Here's my list of potential customers, here's my certification, I'm licensed by the
government, I will go out and get insurance bondage to, you know, to make sure that if
I screw up somehow that my customers are covered and loan me the money.
And the bank will look at all over us, you know, reason not to lend them the money and
we could also have tax incentives in the government to help this go forward to say to the bank,
you know, we've seen this program, we like it, we think it'll help.
And it'll move people from being unemployed to being taxpayers.
We're also targeting people who are perhaps single parents because they would be able
to do this job from their own apartment house.
Right.
We're targeting people who have physical handicaps, physical challenges because it's no
reason why a person who is in a wheelchair or otherwise, you know, we blind person, the
reason why a blind person couldn't do this job.
So we're doing this and if we set it upright, we believe that this job could be done,
say you have 300 thing clients on your server, the base part of the job could probably
be done in about 10 hours a week.
So that leaves 30 hours a week for people to do other things like design websites, do
simple programming jobs, give classes that end users can use a computer system better.
I mean, what do you think about perhaps, you know, going down to the basement of your
building and once a week having a course that would say, here's how to use open office
better.
Here's how to use the web, you know, your web browser better.
And you pay, you know, equivalent of five bucks to attend the course for three or four
hours, you know.
I mean, there's types of things or things that we could offer and we want to offer to
make computing better and more efficient.
It's great.
It's a great idea.
I really, I'm really digging it more.
I think about it.
Where can people find out more information about it?
www.projectcawa.pojectcaua.org.
Right now, we're in the process of redoing our website, we were using one CMS system.
That was a very good CMS system, but it didn't have all the facilities we really needed.
So we're in the process of redoing the website for that and we probably should, we'll be
finished that about the first week of July.
Okay.
Okay.
Maybe a little bit earlier.
And once we've done our initial prototype launch, we want to be able to get feedback from
people.
So what types of things do you like about the prototype?
What types of things would you change?
And then, you know, what do you want to do for version 1.0 of projectcawa?
You know, what types of things you need for home automation, things like that.
So it really will be a back and forth between the community and the people who are kind of
guiding bunch of cawa forward.
And we want to have a lot of input from the community as to what they would like.
And for my viewpoint, this helps out not only projectcawa and Latin America, but this
helps out Linux itself and free software.
Because if you took it to its extreme, we're going to develop about two million new servers
with about a million and a half systems administrators who are all dealing with free software.
We may have about, we may have close to 400 million than clients that we're talking about
that can be manufactured by any number of manufacturing companies.
The design will be open.
And when you're talking about that many systems, then magically things start to happen like
open device drivers and open this and open that because the companies that make these
things will no longer be able to ignore the marketplace.
Thank you so much for talking to me.
I'm glad you could make it.
Is this your third self in a row or did you bring it here on the first one?
I wasn't here on the first one.
I think this is my second one.
Cool.
Well, welcome back and I look forward to your keynote.
Well, and I'm looking forward to your presentation on a video and anything.
Cool.
All right.
See you there.
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