Jon “Maddog” Hall – a legend in the open source community – takes the Monktoberfest stage to deliver a passionate, global talk on sovereignty, freedom, and control in the digital age. From Brazil to the U.S., from Raspberry Pi to quantum computing, Maddog challenges us to rethink who owns our software, our data, and ultimately, our future. He shares stories from decades of open-source evangelism, explains why nations (and individuals) must build technological independence, and ends with a call to action: protect your data and teach free software.
Transcript
OK, my talk today is sovereignty, which is an interesting word we’d get to in a moment. First of all — oh, I haven’t turned it on. Ooh first of all, who is Maddog? For those of you who don’t know me, I’ve been programming since 1969, in 1994, I facilitated him getting his first 64-bit deck alpha system, so he could port a 32-bit system to 64-bit system, I got him some engineering help from IBM and all of that, my management thought I was insane. Since that time I’ve been going around the world talking about open source software. And about even before it was open source. That was before we had computer science, it was computer black magic. So I’m going to do a few definitions here. I find sometimes it’s hard particularly talking about businesspeople, talking about freedom. You may have seen recently that we have some real hard problems with freedom in our country. You would think it would be something that would be natural, but it isn’t, and so I found out that when you talk to certain people, it’s a lot easier to talk about slavery. Because people have this mental image of what a slave is, right? You go and you don’t own yourself, you don’t own anything, you want to, you can’t do anything, you own everything to the massuh, OK, so when you come talk about slavery and then you talk about freedom, you have something to talk about. Businesspeople, freedom terrifies them. What they really want is control.
They want control over their business, they want control over their expenses, control over the marketplace, they want control, and so talk to businesspeople about having control by using free software. And when we talk about sovereignty, we have to remember where it comes from, it comes from a sovereign, it comes from a king, okay, and the king didn’t have to ask anybody’s permission. The king was the police person, the judge and jury and executioner. And they didn’t have to justify anything they did, they were sovereign and what we want is to be sovereign over our own lives, OK? Within the rules of boundary of good faith and laws and things like that, we want to have control over our lives, and that’s what freedom is all about.
Now, we live in a rather odd country. I love my country, don’t get me wrong. I think the United States is the best country on the face of the Earth, compared to all the rest of them. But we still live in a weird country and so let’s pretend for a moment we’re not in the United States, let’s pretend we’re in Brazil. I’ve been going to Latin America since 1996 and I’ve been doing a lot of work down there, various projects, you’ll hear about a couple of them a little bit later. But let’s pretend we’re Brazilians, so what do you think you might think about football — we call it soccer, they call it football and you might think about pier Anna.
And you might think about carnival. You might think about the 12th largest economy. Sao Paula is the second largest city in the Western hemisphere, New York and those are way down the line.
You might think about the University of São Paulo has 100,000 students if you want to do anything in the world, you could find an expert on that subject at the University of Sao Paulo and it is only one of several federal and state universities, many in Brazil, that are completely free of tuition and that you can go to if you’re qualified to get in.
If you studied hard in high school, if you’ve gotten good marks on the SATs, if you’ve got a good reputation, you can get in. That’s the way it should be, because they get the best, not the worst.
However, there is a problem. Because the fees and the room and the board and everything else of those students, their families may be too poor to pay for them. And so only 40% of those qualified students can go and take advantage of a university education.
And I’m trying to fix that. In 1969, some people say we put a man into space and onto the moon, some people refute that. But nonetheless, during those times we were working with slide rules and hand calculators, books of tables and human computers if you’ve ever seen Hidden Figures, the movie or read the book, great book, great movie. We can’t do any of that stuff anymore. Today computers are in control. We know that. If I was to snap my fingers like this and computers would disappear, planes would fall from the sky, cars would crash into each other, the people would die in hospitals, it’s as simple as that. We can’t run our world any more without computers. Countries would stop.
And so you have to think about the fact that in business — remember about businesspeople, careful you know, scared to death of freedom — you want to have two sources of supply of everything. If one company is making little screws you use goes out of business, you want to have another company over to, your business could keep going. But for some reason in computers, we tend to think of gee, I only use Microsoft, right?
Oh, I can get Microsoft from HP, I can get Microsoft from IBM, but yeah, there’s only one source of it, and that’s the problem. And you say, well, that’s why I buy it from a big company like Microsoft and I would say oh, a big company like Enron, like Nortel, like Kodak, like Digital Equipment Corporation, second largest computer company on the face of the Earth after only IBM, and boom, it was gone!
And then even if those companies are still in existence, what happens with an embargo? How many of you have heard of a little company called Cuba? Yeah, we’ve been at an embargo against them for 60 years. How many Americans has Cuba killed?
I give you a hint. It’s less than a dozen. Maybe it’s less than one.
And yet, how many times has the CIA tried to go down there and kill off Castro? More times than I can count, OK?
And other countries, Iran, Venezuela, I’m into the here to debate whether these countries are bad or good or anything else, but I will point out that there’s a country called Vietnam that killed 75,000 of our soldiers. Now, maybe we shouldn’t have been there, maybe we should. They killed 75,000 of our soldiers. And we only had an embargo against them for 9 years and now we’re — I’m not going to go into politics here, except maybe a little bit later. But you know, this is alienating a lot of our potential allies and stuff like that and it’s a shift in economics that is very terrifying to me. OK?
It doesn’t even have to be an outside war, an outside country. What about civil unrest? What would happen if a nuclear bomb went off in Redmond, Washington? How long would it take for Microsoft to put together an engineering team to put out the next edition of Microsoft Windows, that’s a problem. It doesn’t have to be a nuclear bomb. It could be a virus, like Covid. It could have been worse. Much worse.
And then, because remember, because we’re still in Brazil, we’re training all these students and everything, to qualify students to help to create an environment for production of things. And then when these people graduate, they wouldn’t go to other places to work because they see interesting jobs there.
Study after study of computer programmers and computer engineers find out it’s not the money that attracts them.
That’s further down the line.
I mean they have to make a certain amount of money, obviously to live, but after that, the thing that attracts them is it’s an interesting job, intelligent people to work with, and stuff like that, that’s what attracts them. And then what Brazil is doing is losing that investment and their future of keeping those trained people in their country.
Now, the same type of thing is happening in the United States, except we’re bringing in all these students to learn from universities, and then we’re kicking them out after they’ve been here. They don’t want to go. They would love to stay. But we still have problems right now with immigration.
And what are the other losses that you have? Well, because you’re not creating the companies that are doing interesting things, those companies are no longer coming to the United States to do — oh, sorry, Brazil, to do those interesting things, then more of your students leave, OK?
And that creates a shortage of engineering and manufacturing expertise in your country.
I mean, even if countries were to come back to Brazil after being in other countries, they would have to develop all that stuff to make the supply chain to create those products, and that’s not a one-year thing, that’s a five-year thing, that’s a ten-year thing, and so stability in your economic system is difficult.
Reliance on custom duties instead of income tax. I don’t know how many of you followed this but at one time in the United States we didn’t have any income tax, up until the Civil War. We relied on customs duties essentially to pay for everything in the Federal Government. The problem is we had this thing called the Civil War, cut off a lot of the imports coming into the United States, particularly the Southern United States, a lot of the duties went away and we needed more money to fight the Civil War. After the Civil War, the income tax was supposed to go away, but we had other wars and we had to bring back the income tax to keep doing that and the U.S. Government did, you know, get larger and we did have to depend on that.
Now, the duties went down, as the income tax went up, but Brazil, even though it has a high income tax, it also has high duties.
And complex duties.
Very complex duties. We’re about to experience that, because they took away the thing where $800 worth of stuff could come into the country without having duties applied to it. That’s gone away and you’re going to start receiving messages from your post office department and your shipping department saying, oh, by the way, you owe this much duties on this stuff and if you don’t pay it we’re going to send it back and all of our commerce are shutting down. We’re going to have whole departments set aside just figuring out how much duties we’re going to be paying for our commerce coming in.
Brazil was so bad that they even have duties on textbooks, so if you have an English textbook that you want to bring in to Brazil to study and learn from it, you have to pay a duty on that. And their duty isn’t just on the cost of the item. The duty is on the cost of the item, plus the shipping, plus the insurance, and it’s doubled. So the $35 Raspberry Pi. It costs $120 because it’s 100% of duty on top of that. And then if you want to make a little bit of profit, the street price might be $150, and suddenly the cost of this little computer so that your kid with learn how to program it is completely by the wayside. And particularly by a country that has GDP —
You have to think, remember, we’re in Brazil, you have to think about the billions of reals, which is their money, flowing out of Brazil for closed-source software, it’s going to Microsoft, it’s going to Oracle, it’s going to all of these places, right? And none of it is staying in Brazil, none of the expertise, none of the knowledge of how do that and the same thing for generalized hardware, Intel motherboards, things like that. Nothing there that’s creating really interesting high-paying jobs.
Now, closed source software is used by a lot of the schools, a lot of the universities and stuff and what they do is show the students how to use that software to solve problems, but the problem is, it only teaches you one time.
If you use free and open source software to do the same thing, you learn three times, number one how to use the software to solve the problem. Number two, how does the software work? How does it solve your problem? And No. 3, you learn how to make the software better so it solves your problem better.
So there’s no reason in the world why computer science and computer engineering curriculums should be using closed source software.
They say, well, that’s because all the people out there use Microsoft. OK, help me with this. You’re training students to be brain surgeons, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, leaders of government, they’re going through all these years of study, they’re really, really smart, and yet they’re too stupid to pick up a book about how to use Microsoft Office and load it in a day. You can’t have it both ways, they’re either stupid or they’re smart, OK? And then you have Raspberry Pi. The students of today, they get a laptop with a little label on it says you open up this box and you void the warranty, they get software that they buy or they download from the net, they put it on the computer and they run it, they write a little bit of HTML, and they say I’m a programmer. Wrong. I’m sorry. You haven’t even started.
You haven’t even cut the things — and this was why the Raspberry Pi was created. But the Raspberry Pi is not enough. It doesn’t teach you how to design hardware. Sure, you get a little circuit card and make the lightbulb blink, that’s great, but that’s not really designing a hardware. It doesn’t show you how to manufacture that hardware, or set up a supply chain. All of these things are things that we wanted to have in Brazil, and in 2012 I went down to Brazil to the University of Sao Paulo, which I’ve talked about before, and we started a project to design and manufacture Singapore computers, but that was not the real goal. We didn’t want to just make money doing this, in fact, we sell them basically at cost. We wanted to show other people at Brazil, other manufacturing companies how to manufacture and distribute these type of systems.
Now, in Brazil, there’s about 350 different companies that have surface mount technology machines, those of you know about manufacturing computers know what that is. It’s a robot that puts the thing on the thing and solders them. But there’s companies that make memory sticks and USB flash cards and stuff like that, they’re not going to make a computer, because this isn’t that much harder, but it is hard to get an operating system put into it to get applications that are run on it and stuff like that, and it’s a huge risk.
Well, we have cut that risk dramatically by showing them how to do it and how to make that. Not only a computer like this, but a computer like this.
This is a little sensor computer. It uses an M4 microcontroller, you attach all sorts of sensors to this, and it will gather data and transmit it to computers like this for processing, and then therefore out of that, into the internet.
This is edge computing. This is what the university is doing, and actually they’ve gone beyond this, they’re now Ryz5 processers there. They don’t have to rely on ARM anymore. So what about security? For those of you who don’t know, Dilmar Rouseff was forced out of office. I’m not saying that there aren’t, you know, there aren’t lots of these agencies around, you may have heard of some of them — CIA, NSA, you know, some from Russia — but we have to protect ourselves from that.
And closed source companies whose name I will not mention, but it rhymes with micro-boft, they’ll let you inspect their code. You have to take them into the office, you have to leave your camera, your notebook, your phone, your pencil and everything else outside and you can look over the internet at the source code for their operating system and you can see how it is written. However, there’s no guarantee the source code you’re looking at is actually the source code that built your system, because you can’t get that, OK? You’re not sure about that. So how do you know the code you’re looking at is the code that built your binary. You don’t.
And it’s not enough to inspect the code, you have to build the code, you have to work with people that you trust that the code is going to run on your systems. And this goes all the way through your BIOS and all of that, and nobody is completely sure. People will offer you private virtual networks and encrypting everything, and authentication is based on encryption, we all know that, encryption is your friend. I can’t tell you the number of times between 1983 and right after 2001, when the World Trade Center was attacked that I had to write Congress to tell them, don’t mess with encryption. Because encryption is the basis of authentication and if we don’t know who we’re talking to, then we don’t know who we’re talking to, OK?
Trust and secure storage is great inside of your own borders, but the problem is that certain acts that the United States Government can use to go to certain companies to force them to share your data.
And the companies have two choices: Either share the data or go to jail. It’s as simple as that.
So remember, we’re still in Brazil, you have to think about this. So you need to be able to work with free and open source business models, you need to be able to teach free and open source in your schools and businesses and universities, and people say to me, well, Maddog, it’s going to take a long time to do that, we have to train our professors, we have to train, you know, all these people and I’ll bring to you the stories of three countries:
In Lichtenstein, a number of years ago, about 50 years ago, they were one of the poorest countries on the face of the Earth, but they had a king who came from Vienna, Austria, to his country, saw his country was in shambles and the king decided to set forth a policy to turn that around.
And he focused on three major low environmental impact industries: Number one: Selling beautiful postage stamps, because they would make this really beautiful postage stamps and sell them to every postage stamp collector in the world and they would get a huge amount of money and deliver no services. Ultimate, OK?
Then I’m going to go to Malaysia had a Prime Minister — oh, I forgot in Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein had another major industry. Tourism was the second one and the third one was false teeth. Think about it, you take a little bit of enamel, a little bet of you go to your dentist and they send it off to Lichtenstein and magically this little bit of plastic and enamel is transferred into a $3,000 bridge that’s going to go into your mouth. High value, right? And in ten years, Lichtenstein went from being the poorest country in Europe to being the richest on a per capita basis, so rich that they eliminated income tax on their citizens.
Malaysia, poorest country in Asia, had a Prime Minister come in, had a plan, sold it to the people, got them behind it and in 25 years it went from the poorest country in Asia, to the richest, it’s an Islamic country, by the way, secular Islamic country.
And — so I tell people that if you had started this in 1994, you too could have one of the richest economies in the world.
And we started in 2012. Now we’re selling them.
So I’m here today to tell you about a new threat. I hate to end on a sad part. A new threat: Quantum computing.
And quantum computing is coming. It used to be just a few months ago, they say it’s ten years away. Then there’s been — different things saying that it’s really only two years away. But the problem is, if somebody breaks into your datastore and captures it and sets it aside, then in two years they’ll be able to decrypt it in 15 minutes using a quantum computer and your secrets will be known.
Think about the Epstein files. No matter how much they encrypt it, every secret would be known. OK.
So we need to think about — and MIT has already worked on this. They already have algorithms look at it yourself, sell it to your organization, take all your data, decrypt it from whatever you’re using now and reencrypt it with these quantum-resistant algorithms so you will be safe in the future, OK? Remember, don’t panic like Y2K. Don’t wait for the quantum computers to be there. Do it now!
And finally to end my talk, I want to remind people that October 18th is No Kings Day.
[applause].
But it’s more than No Kings Day. It’s also certainly strike day. On that day we’re not going to do anything. We’re not going to buy anything. We’re not going to pay any bills, we’re not going to do anything that way. So fill up your car with gas before that. Take your family for a picnic out in the country. Enjoy yourself that day, or protest that day, whatever you want to do, but don’t spend any money and please spread this, OK? Because if a quarter of the United States did not spend any money on that day, you can bet that Walt Disney would know it. Thank you very much. I’ll be around for the rest of the day, if you have any questions or comments. Thank you, sir.
