hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1039.txt

Episode: 1039
Title: HPR1039: Matt Lee Gnu FM and Libre FM
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1039/hpr1039.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 17:49:17

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Mr.
Welcome, Matt Lee.
Okay, I'm running on not a lot of sleep here, so Red Bull.
All right, ignore this quote.
This is a quote that we use on the opening slide of all our presentations.
If you're going to have something on there, have some stupid quote from the past.
Sounds like we're smarter than we really are.
My name is Matt Lee.
This is the Northeast GNU.
I'm very happy to be back here again.
Thank you, Jonathan.
And I talk a lot, I talk kind of quickly.
And you know, an accent that may not be familiar to all of you.
So I apologize for that in advance.
As mentioned, I am the campaigns manager at the FSF.
Campaigns manager is kind of a weird title.
We have quite generic job titles at the FSF.
Campaigns manager for me.
I maintain some of our campaigns.
Effective by design is the one you may have heard of.
Play Og, which kind of pushes for free media for messing stuff.
Windows 7 Sins, which I guess will become Windows 8 Sins at some point in the future.
I bet a lot of our websites we just relaunched Effective by Design.
It works nicely on a mobile phone.
It works nicely on a big screen.
How can I think?
And I also organize events.
Such as the refinement, which is our conference that we run.
That's next weekend.
So first, a little bit about that.
It is next weekend.
And it's in Boston, which for those of you who aren't from around here.
It's like an hour away.
And we have a lot of sports teams and some subways and stuff.
It's a place to live.
You can still register.
And it is $60 if you're not an FSF member.
It's free of charge if you are an FSF member.
An FSF membership can accidentally cost about the same amount of money
as it does to come with the conference.
So you can choose to pay and come to the conference.
Or you can make a member.
Make a member as a much better deal for you.
You get given some cool stuff.
You get discounts.
I used to get support at work, which is, you know, really, really important.
Other reasons to come that are not myself far better, because of myself.
Some of them like Rue, when you've heard today.
We have some pretty impressive people coming along.
They're all the website.
It's quite staggering, actually, to think that these people will all be together
next weekend in Boston, talking about free software.
It's quite exciting.
You can register now at the website.
I'm not going to talk about my free software foundation work today,
because that's next weekend.
I'm talking about my other stuff.
You may know that I run a website called Libre FM.
You may not know that, actually, there is a company behind that.
Our company is called FuCorp.
We couldn't think of a good name for companies, which shares the most generic
company.
We could think of, which is FuCorp.
We are not a very good company.
We pride ourselves on a saying that is we protect ourselves from ever having to sell
out by having nothing to sell out in the first place.
We really are a company for the sheer reason that our lawyer thought best to have a company
for these kind of things.
To give you some indication of the company again, I'm the CEO.
Not a real company.
We are a 2.5 person company in a sense that we have a half-time person who
doesn't really work for the company and does some stuff with us.
In 2009, we started GNU FM, which is a software project and Libre FM,
which is a website.
In 2010, we started GNU Social.
Last year, we started GNU Local, which you weren't a hurdle because I'm telling you
about it today for the first time.
We are actually quite pleased to announce that actually contrary to how we've been going
so far, which is starting things you might not have heard of, we're actually going to
change some of this up and actually take what we've done so far and try and build
some new, interesting thing.
So, GNU FM is our first thing.
It's actually the most successful thing we've done so far as a company.
It's really active in terms of developing development work.
It's already an MPHP, and I'm willing to take on anyone who thinks that
if you were in another language, PHP, in my mind is the kind of the only way to
write web applications in a sense that every web server I've ever encountered,
even IIS on disgusting, broken Windows machines can run PHP.
So, sorry to all the other people out there who like other languages.
I don't particularly like PHP, I'm not a very good programmer.
But, you know, it works.
Libre FM is the site that most GNU FM users are using right now.
It has about 70,000 users.
Two big things have happened that caused that number to go up.
One was about three years ago when we first started the project.
There was a rumor that CBS, who owned last FM, were using that information
and passing along to the RIAA.
There's no evidence to suggest that's actually true.
But, the day that came out, our numbers went from like 15 to like 30,000.
So, that's nice.
And then, more recently, CBS, again, appeared to support SOPA and PIPA.
And, bump.
You know, with no marketing effort whatsoever, we're relying on the, you know,
the sort of a, they happenstance of other people making mistakes to build our user base.
Which I think is a good thing for a project.
And the problem with Libre FM is that really it's just one big website that runs on a single server
that you can't connect to the outer world.
And it's all just one big site and I hate that.
And so, pretty early on, we started talking about social networking.
And at the time, Facebook was kind of like the new coolness of the time.
Twitter was around, but yeah.
I didn't want to add social networking features to getting my phone because I thought that, you know,
hey, we've got a website that holds the listing information for these 30,000.
Also, X, last FM users who hate CBS, let's not add social networking features to those people
and then tie them into the site even further.
Which is start a new project to investigate how to do social networking properly
in a responsible way that supports freedom.
And then, if that's ever good enough, we'll kind of roll it back in.
Well, it turns out it is good enough.
We haven't done the rolling back in yet, but there's a particular status net.
You might have heard of this.
Identica is a big site that, well, a lot of us in free software.
We use status net as the code that runs.
Identica is also the company that runs Identica.
And we took our GNU social project and kind of based it on the status net.
But there's this weird relationship that we struggle to explain where we didn't fork status net.
But we do have this relationship where 15% of the code that's in status net now is code that was assigned to the GNU social project.
So there are two pieces of software, one piece of software, both called status net and GNU social,
and they're the same thing.
That's the ease of explaining that.
And that doesn't make a lot of sense.
We call it social status sometimes, but that's kind of a dumb thing.
You shouldn't do that.
But yeah.
So, GNU social is a thing that exists.
You all use Identica.
I hope.
If you do, you use some very social code every single day, which is nice.
And then there is GNU look.
And last summer, I really got into full square in a pretty bad way.
I don't know if you know what full square is, full square is this little thing.
So you can get an app for your phone, it's proprietary software.
You can also go to the website and check in at places.
And it's really good for figuring out if you go out to drink too much.
Or you go out to eat too much.
Or you go to weird parts of town too much.
Because it keeps a track of wherever you go on a map.
You can then go to the website and download this like KML file that shows you everywhere you've been.
Now, at least with this, you can figure out where you've been.
And you can control that information to a degree.
But full squares, full squares, proprietary software, proprietary software.
That's not cool.
These are dual maps.
And then now switch to open street map.
But again, everyone switch to open street map at this point.
We've spent about a week using some PHP code from the new FM and built this thing called the new local.
And it kind of works.
And the sense that it uses the like geolocation stuff.
There's an HTML5 and it goes out to the internet and figures out where you're running them.
Producers are mapping.
You can check in.
You can't do anything.
There's no prizes for being the best or the most or whatever.
But you do check in.
And that's about it.
And does I like it?
I think I'm the only person who uses it.
Admittedly, the people who know about it are about four people.
So, you know, I can't.
That's a pretty good one and four.
Use the software regularly.
So in summary, really what we have here is going to be FM.
It's very good at one thing, which is tracking what you listen to.
And it can play back music.
We have lots of freely licensed.
And what I mean, music under a free license.
Songs, different artists.
You can stream those.
And it's only works in free browsers, generally speaking.
There's a new social or status net to give it proper title.
And that stuff does social networking really, really well.
A lot of the reason that a lot of you here today, I hope, are partly because of something you've interacted with on a status net site.
I know people in this room because of status net sites.
And it's also federated, which is really important.
So you don't have to have.
Identicate.
You can actually have your own site.
And do the social networking thing in a cool way where you control it.
You run your own little mode.
And you're in charge of what goes on.
And then there's going to be a local, which is a form with a button on it.
And so we're thinking about this.
What can we do?
We have these three things.
And really, we're not, again, we're not very good at the company.
But we're also not very good at keeping up to date with these things.
And to be honest, you kind of like your new social diet a little bit.
And the reason for that is because it's the same as status net.
So it's like, why are we working on new social when status net has been developed?
So we have a plan.
Our plan is to improve GNUFM.
Our plan is to take the things we've learned from.
And the things that we've kind of already seen that work.
And to add those into GNUFM.
And to actually do a GNUFM release.
GNUFM is.
It's a GNU project.
And unlike most GNU projects written at PHP.
It doesn't have a dog book documentation.
It doesn't really have documentation.
It doesn't have configuration files.
It's kind of hard to use.
It's kind of hard to set up.
We're going to fix all those problems.
We're going to add the federation so that you don't have to use LibreFM.
Because please, I can't afford to.
I can't afford it.
It's not the service free.
I'm not lying.
I say I can't afford it.
I don't want to run a site that you will rely on.
And then it breaks down and you will hate me.
Like, that's my biggest problem.
So we're going to let federation occur.
So hopefully someone else will run a GNUFM site that you can join.
Or, you know, you can run your own GNUFM site and put your own music down.
And it'll be cool.
And we're going to use OStatus to do this.
Because OStatus is the thing that powers status and that.
It's been proven to work.
And they have things like events and polls and things that are kind of in there that we need.
You know, musicians play gigs.
That's how they make some money.
And it'd be really nice if a band on Libre FM or on a GNUFM was playing somewhere.
And you could go there.
You could find out about it through the site.
It seemed like an obvious feature.
We started working on that.
But again, this whole social thing came along.
It didn't really happen for us.
And also you can check in.
So that's the cool thing.
That's the one, the one useful thing, right?
You can go to, you can get on an event and press the button.
Your phone.
And then people will know you're there.
So, you know, look forward to that.
Well, there's also some like some cool things you can do for the artists.
The artists on Libre FM are actually really important because they are actually giving up their music.
And they are actually sharing it with you all for kind of a mutual benefit situation.
You can download their music.
It's under a free license.
You can remix it.
You can do things with it.
But, you know, there's an expectation there, which is that.
You're actually listening to it.
And you're actually like share other people.
And so, making our part of the bargain on Libre FM and Venue FM sites.
True is the next God for us.
And so, we feel like these things will help us do that in a way that.
Currently, we don't do it for a good job of.
We're also doing a redesign of Libre FM.
The site right now looks kind of weird and stay all and.
It's time to stop using the red color that lasts FM users for everything.
Because it's confusing.
We're working from an artist from Springfield, Massachusetts.
For those of you who are from here.
Springfield, the city that's going to further away from Boston than Worcester.
And we're getting new servers.
We have three new servers now, three not one.
So, that's progress, right?
And we also have a German host of all our music.
Right now, our music comes from Jemendo.
We do this database dump of Jemendo.com, which has a whole bunch of music.
Some of it's free, some of it's not free.
Some of it's an MP3, some of it's obvobis.
Kind of took the best of the best, the obvobis free stuff.
Pulled it all down and now have it on this host.
Thanks to these guys over in Germany.
And it's a really fast server.
And we're also working with archive.org to host all of the free music in the world.
On a collection on archive.org where you can go and download it.
So, that's kind of cool.
You know, you can go get it with music.
As I mentioned, we haven't got any documentation right now.
The instructions to install GNUFM are a text file.
You have to know the address, but it's not published anyway, really.
And so, yeah, we're going to write a book.
We're going to make a little book that explains how to install GNUFM.
And these things get it working so that, you know,
if you can make this part easy, then other people will use this software.
And then we're going to have this problem where we're like,
I don't want to be like Facebook.
So, we're going to have a giant behemoth that just steals your information and sucks.
All right.
So, like, the quicker we can get the book written,
the quicker we can at least have one other GNUFM site.
And then we can have the Federation will actually mean something.
If we can get two sites to talk to each other, then that's great.
But right now there's only really one site.
So, I hope to publish a look in a year from now.
We were started at Leopold 2009.
And this year, the conference, every year, the conference is kind of out of the anniversary.
To do some of this stuff, we're starting a publishing division.
Do we call perpetual monopoly?
Because there's a quote about perpetual monopoly in some like 1774 statute about copyright law.
And I thought that was a great name for a company that doesn't really like copyright that much.
And we're going to give all our books away under a share of life license.
And so, yeah, you know, plus it's fun to tell the lawyer.
And we started writing a book, which all of the, I think it's here.
All of the, yeah.
All of the speaker buyers that I've done for the last like three or four years,
tell everyone I wrote a book.
Turns out I didn't really write a book. I wrote half a book.
And we're going to finish the book there.
So, the book tells you how to write, how to run a company that does these kind of things.
And we figured it was better to wait until you run the company a little bit and see if it kind of didn't die immediately.
I didn't. So, you know, that's good.
We still, we made the reform in the first place because we selfishly wanted to make records and pretend we were a big record label.
I would encourage you all to start your own record labels.
Turns out what you need is like a laptop computer and a stapler. Right.
And so most of you already own those things.
If you don't, like you can go and buy them.
Make a record, release records, find friends of yours that are in banks.
Just release them.
Just, it's really easy.
It doesn't cost anything.
It costs like $10 to release a record these days.
We're recording a new full and powerful next week in my apartment.
Because we can do that.
We're also at this kind of crazy vision of like, let's make TV programs because that's easy and cheap and free right now.
Turns out making those things is really expensive.
Who would have thought that?
But turns out that using a camera at the cost of $100, you can make a pretty OK video.
It looks quite nice on the website.
So that's, yeah, that's a movie, right.
And that's off there.
And we're playing around with 3D printers because, you know, they are affordable at this point.
You can buy a 3D printer for not a lot more than a laptop.
And you can print out things.
You can make balls and toilets and stuff.
And we know that a lot.
We made the toilet.
You know, it's amazing.
We also have this thing that I like, I call FUBA, which is the name I'm most proud of.
Most things are the mind-tie life.
FUBA is a concept we have.
This is the very thing where basically we go to a bar and then we prepay for all of the alcohol.
So you can come to the bar and just talk to people who like either free software or free culture or maybe just drinking.
And the drinks are free.
You don't pay for anything.
So you can come out and hang out for as long as you like to hang out for in this cool space and meet some really interesting people.
And we do these about every six months in Boston.
We could do them everywhere else.
I could press the button.
We could do the middle places too.
If you want to run your own one, that would be kind of cool.
We could definitely like to talk about how to get the money.
So you could do that.
Jason Self is in the room somewhere maybe.
He's right there.
Jason Self last year paid for the drinks.
One of our events.
Selflessly.
He doesn't even drink.
All right.
Even tea totals support this idea.
It's amazing.
And I think someone, we actually ran out of money and then somebody else put down more money.
It was kind of, it was kind of way.
All right.
We also have this thing.
The 3D printing thing I mentioned before.
We are going to try and produce our own tabletop gaming miniatures.
Because that's what a record company that runs websites would do as a natural next step in its business plan.
The reason we do this is two things.
Really.
One is that Rob Myers, who's the other kind of, he's the full person.
There's me and Rob Myers is the full person and then there's a half person.
He really likes 3D printing.
He really likes sculpting things.
And I really like playing with little plastic men.
And so, we've kind of meshed the idea together.
And these things, you can print them out yourself on a home model.
The home model is about $1,000 at this point.
And it's not great for detail.
But, you know, these things are an inch high.
So, really, how much can tell do you need or something?
It's, you know, four feet away from you and most of the time.
And also, you can print them on these expensive.
Professional 3D printers.
3D printing, at this point, can print in color.
You can print a color model.
Right?
It looks kind of weird.
It looks like candy.
It's kind of dusty color color.
But it's color.
That blew my mind last week.
And we're also going to create some games under a free license as well to play with these managers.
The main reason we do this, of course, is because I spend a lot of my time when I should be working on, like,
Lebra Femme, or, you know, Femme, or, you know, finishing stuff on painting and playing with little dolls and stuff.
It's my one thing I do that's not on a computer.
We're going to make a skeleton.
Because skeletons.
With a bad apostrophe there, spelling mistake.
I just people.
There is your discol, you know, there's dead people around me.
It's simple.
And you can paint them silver.
And they become terminators.
Or you can leave them white.
They're already skeletons out of the box.
They're already white.
It's easy.
There's bone color.
All right.
You can just slap some ink on them.
They look amazing.
And I really want a big skeleton army.
And hopefully, a conference is like this next year.
I can bring the plastic dolls along.
I can all have a game.
Roll some dice around.
And there's the reference to this bathroom thing again.
Rob, Rob did the 3D skeleton.
You can kind of see it here.
It's actually a urinal.
A urinal.
You're not sitting in the back of the way.
3D printed urinals.
That's art people.
Here's a record we made.
Here's what the new local looks like.
And actually, this is the FSF right here.
And Libra FM.
We don't, we're trying to do a lot of things.
We're not always successful in what we do.
But we think that doing these things is fun.
And that it's an artistic thing.
It's something we can do and we can support artistic things.
This conference is amazing.
This conference, I didn't really pick orders into last night
but I realized so many people at this conference make podcasts.
That's their thing.
They just record people talking about free software.
They put it out there on the internet.
And they make these talk shows, these podcasts, these shows.
And it's amazing, right?
That's art with free software.
This is art with free software too.
We're trying to do everything we can do with free software.
Push free software as far as we can get it.
Maybe the movie about Boston went before a good.
It doesn't matter.
Because it's all freely licensed.
And we can, we can, if you have to edit things software,
it's not very good now.
We can release all the source files.
And it can be made better in the future.
It doesn't matter.
It's not going to go anywhere.
Well, having a party next Saturday.
Football is going back for one more night.
If you're coming to the conference,
you can go to the bar afterwards and Saturday night.
It's unofficial.
It's not related to the conference itself.
But you can do that.
Don't drink too much.
Because Sunday's got a lot of talks.
They're going to be good too.
You can come in.
You see, yellow card for me at the end.
I didn't bring the yellow cards.
Sorry.
Get the website.
And yeah, yellow card.
So we're right at some point.
But yeah, drinking.
And then.
And then.
Our website.
You can sign up for LibreFam.
It's good.
You know, we need some more users.
You know, don't.
Don't.
Don't.
All join up, though, because.
You know, if I'm coming.
Federation and stuff.
Try and try and install it yourself and tell us what's wrong with it.
You know, I did it.
It took me about two hours to figure out.
All the different PHP things I need to do.
But it works.
We've done other stuff.
You can see our catalog to date there.
We give everything a number.
If you look way back at the beginning.
Oh, man.
One of these buttons does it.
Yeah, there we go.
All right.
This number here.
We give everything a unique catalog number.
Everything we do.
Train tickets.
Bus tickets.
Presentations.
Songs.
Events.
Jason's self.
Has a number in the catalog.
You can come in there.
It will be fun.
You can also follow us on identical.
Occasionally, we'll update that.
But really.
I want to come back in a year from now and show you the really awesome
federated social stuff we're working on.
And if you know PHP.
Or if like me, you know enough PHP.
You can like mostly not break stuff.
You should definitely work on this project.
Because the more develops we can get.
There's quite a kind of cool thing with this.
You know, we have lots of developers working on it and stuff.
They get invited to conferences all the time.
Fathers down and such.
So if you'd like to be up here and talk.
As you can see, it's kind of fun.
Get involved.
And then you can go to conference and talk about, you know,
awesome, good stuff.
And I will promise anyone who signs up as a developer will be given
skeletons when they, when they exist.
Yes.
Any questions.
Hopefully not financial questions.
You know.
No.
Next question.
Yeah.
How many things are only relevant?
I think it's significantly higher.
It's like 22,000 songs.
Maybe.
That could be.
That could be.
That could be also.
It could be albums.
I forget.
It's a lot of songs.
Right.
You can go to Libre fam.
You can click on the listen tab.
You can go and listen to things.
Also, if you have an Android phone.
There's an application called LibreDroid.
It's on an F-Droid marketplace.
It's also on the Android market.
But we don't update that anymore.
So that we.
Because Android market is proprietary and horrible.
But after I don't exist.
So get it.
Get the application from there.
You can listen to songs.
They stream to your phone.
There is a download button.
You can download the songs.
To your phone in August.
For free.
It's great.
And the application will scrabble.
Which is the term that is used to describe.
Sending what you listen to to LibreDroid.
And if you still like last F-Droid.
Because right now they have features that we don't.
You can actually connect your last F-M account to your LibreFM account.
And when you listen to a song.
And since it's a LibreFM.
We then pass that information on to last F-M.
So you can actually use both sites.
And if you already use last F-M,
you want to make the leap.
You can do that too.
We have tools that thanks to the last F-M developers.
Can go into last F-M and pull out everything you listen to.
In the past.
And put it on last F-M.
You can have a copy of that yourself.
In a tab-delimited format.
It's quite nice to look at.
You can see the things you listen to in the past.
And you can kind of go out and scrub out that weekend.
You've spent listening to the Dave Matthews band.
Which I actually did that.
And I'm ashamed.
Yeah.
Any other questions?
No.
All right.
Well, we haven't.
We have plenty of time yet.
So I'm going to do the presentation again.
Unless you have any questions.
I can't do a live demo.
Mad Dog.
I mean, I mean,
I'm going to say that.
When the injury in that website or the
injury in the background place.
Yeah.
What you should do is point something that points over.
Yeah.
We should do that.
That was the intention.
I think that we just haven't had time to do that.
Because that's where people go.
Right.
We saw something there pointed over there.
Or they could download the app.
It says, hey, next time.
Update this app.
Update it.
There's actually one thing we were thinking about doing.
Which is actually it.
Even slightly more devious than that.
Is to release a new version of the application.
And actually have that application be after it.
So actually rather than release our software again, just to.
Yeah, essentially just give somebody else.
A free market store.
You know, marketplace.
That's a pretty good thing.
It wouldn't get updated.
I guess, but.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
And I would hope that you will all.
Join us in some of these awesome kind of more creatives like wackier ideas.
And if not at least come to my proper talk next Saturday.
At.
Leave me a planet.
And I think.
With that being the end of the talk, we're not going to go to the pub.
I'm going to go to Gillians and we're going to have a private room and drink beer.
So let's do that.
And let's also give a big, big round of applause to Jonathan.
And to everybody else who worked to make this content.
And if you think Jonathan's efforts are noble and getting accessibility into free software is a noble cause.
On the way out, there is a collection box.
Give some money so that we can send Jonathan to give talks at other conferences outside of Massachusetts.
Because planes and trains and hotels cost a lot of money.
And so sending him away.
It's a good thing.
Temporarily at least.
And.
Yeah, haven't spread the message of free software because you know.
It's an ambassador for free software we have with Jonathan and you know doing the right thing with accessibility.
You know, so many people have some kind of disability and free software needs to reach all of those people.
So let's, you know, we can have our fun.
Well, let's also, you know, take things seriously and make things for other people.
So that's it.
I'm done.
Oh, wait, one thing.
Sorry.
I want to get a picture of all of you.
Sorry.
My battery's right now.
God joking.
All right.
All right.
All right.
All right.
Done.
Thank you.
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