Lemmings, Think Different and Why Free Software is Important

Monty Taylor

http://inaugust.com/talks/lemmings.html

twitter: @e_monty

OpenStack
OpenStack

Mission

to produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.

Borrowed from Ubuntu

Time Based Releases

Six Month Cadance

Design summits each cycle

Release codenames in alphabetical order

Different from Ubuntu

No BDFL

All decisions are democratic

Naming Process

Pick a name from names of cities or geographical features near the summit location

Grizzly

San Diego

Grizzly bear on the flag

Havana

Portland, OR

not Cuba

Icehouse

Hong Kong

Street in HK

Juno

Atlanta, GA

Town in Georgia

Kilo

Paris

location of the actual kilogramme

The L Word

Vancouver

Lemming?

Lemming Peak

The Marketing Community was not thrilled

Lemmings commit mass suicide by following each other off cliffs

Except they don't

White Wilderness

1958 Disney Documentary

Staged footage

Camera crew forced them off the cliff

Won an Oscar, of course

Definition of Irony

The actual meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning

Recursive Definition of Irony

The lemmings metaphor only works because people are lemmings in their adherence to the myth that lemmings are like lemmings.

This could never happen to us, right?

MySQL doesn't have transactions

MongoDB is Web Scale

PHP is insecure

Frequent password rotation is secure

sysvinit needs to be replaced

Results

We didn't pick Lemming - we picked Liberty

Liberty is a town in Saskatchewan

Four Freedoms

0 - to run the program as you wish, for any purpose

1 - to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish

2 - to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor

3 - to distribute copies of your modified version to others

GPL is anti-business

Except it isn't

Definition of Eating Crow

humiliation by admitting wrongness or having been proven wrong after taking a strong position

Enjoyable Definition of Eating Crow

Microsoft purchases Revolution Analytics

R language is GPL

Sun/MySQL

Sun bought MySQL for $1 Billion

Oracle bought Sun

Oracle now develops and ships MySQL under the GPL

Linux

anybody here heard of it?

Android is the market leading Mobile OS

Linux runs:

Google

Facebook

Twitter

They run MySQL too

Linux is not just for big companies - it's startup friendly too!

HP ships a Linux server every minute

business unit that does is a $28B business

Why is Free Software Important?

1984 - Apple's 1984 Super Bowl Commercial

1985 - Apple's Lemmings Super Bowl Commercial

1997 - Apple's Think Different Campaign

Don't be a lemming

Everybody in this room is wearing a uniform and don't kid yourself

Frank Zappa

"Think Different" isn't about allowing for individualism, it's about defining an alternate tribe

And don't kid yourself, it's about selling product

What if you're this poor fellow?

http://worstcats.tumblr.com

How much of your life is computerized?

How many of the four freedoms do you have with each of those things?

superfish

My laptop did not come with any software pre-installed that is designed to "improve my shopping experience"

If it had, I am empowered to remove it

Why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists solely to make money. Money is an important part of a company's existence, if the company is any good. But a result is not a cause. We have to go deeper and find the real reason for our being.

David Packard

Free Software is a way that I can make the world a better place

Free Software is a way to reconnect with our humanity in a sea of white privilege

Free Software drives an unprecedented amount of innovation

Believe you can change the world

David Packard

Thank you!

http://inaugust.com/talks/lemmings.html

twitter: @e_monty