The speakers included Mark Shuttleworth, Simon Phipps, Ronan Kirby, Tim Willoughby, Tom Mackey, and David Coallier.

There is also a tar file of all seven OGG files, and a zip archive of all seven MP3’s.

Note: Simon’s lapel mic was acting up (poor mini-jack connection), so we swapped him over to a handheld around 14:10.

At FOSDEM ‘10 I sat down with him to talk about Micro-kernels, Embedded systems, and the state of MINIX 3.

Transcript to follow…

His FOSDEM lectuer can be seen below (XviD AVI download):

The audio (source) and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).

We spoke with Marie about the new Act in light of online communities and bloggers. We asked if the new law would give the Garda wider search and seizure powers for those found guilty of Blasphemy. We posed the question, “Is a blog a periodical?”

An excerpt of this interview aired on Wednesday January 27^th on FlirtFM (101.3MHz, Galway), during ITFreely, S2E7.

The audio (source) and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY).

Transcript to follow…

Sascha, project leader, spoke with us about what Eventphone do and what their kit comprises of.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcript to follow…

Transcription was provided by Niall Campbell.

The audio and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License (BY-SA).

DD: I’m sitting in the Burlington in Dublin with Jono, who has just started with Ubuntu Sprint. How’s it been going?

JB: It’s been really good. Every six months we have the Ubuntu Developers Summit, where we get together with the community and we have 280/300 people come along. In between each UDS we try and get our company together and it’s an opportunity for the company to bond and the team to bond and we don’t really do anything new we just basically sit in a room and work together and it’s been really good. This is the first day, I was in yesterday for a management sprint which was really productive but this is the first day of the proper sprint and it’s been really good so far.

DD: Ubuntu has recently released 9.04, cloud computing APIs. What future technologies are Ubuntu pushing? What do you see Ubuntu being in a year or two years time? What are you working towards?

JB: Many areas, there’s lots of UI stuff. We’ve got this incredible new design team that’s joined and they’re working very closely with the community to identify improvements and innovations in the desktop. The desktop has not really changed all that much in the last five years and as part of project Ayatana, which you can get to online, there’s many… Ayatana is like a Buddhist word which means “fear of consciousness”, and it’s basically all the things around you, and that’s what the project focuses on. It’s like a series of technologies that we’re releasing and working on and contributing to the open source desktop. It’s really funky what they’re doing. There’s also new work gone into the cloud and participating in the cloud revolution that’s happening right now, it’s still very early days but that’s looking really good. Our view with Ubuntu has always been to basically embrace technology and release the best open source software that we can.

DD: Of course, and you recently open-sourced LaunchPad, which was a huge thing for your ex-colleague Matthew Revell.

JB: Well, he’s still my colleague. He’s still there. Ex-cohost. The open-sourcing of LaunchPad was a phenomenal contribution.

DD: We thought it was never going to happen.

JB: I’m on the LaunchPad team so it was really nothing to do with me. Various people in the company were making various noises about whether it would be desirable to have an open-sourced LaunchPad and obviously it would be. You’ve got to point the credit squarely at Mark Shuttleworth. Fundamentally that guy invested millions of dollars in the software and he open-sourced it.

DD: In fairness, he was taking all the flak when people were coming to him saying why isn’t this open-source, you’re an open-source company with a closed-source product, this is the core of what you do. Yeah, fair play to the guy, he stepped up to the critics and said, right, we’re going to squash you and this is now open-source.

JB: Absolutely. LaunchPad is an incredible project and there’s many components in it that are so useful and so fundamental to Ubuntu development and I think it made sense. Open-sourcing big chunks of code is a long and laborious job. There’s lots of very uninteresting details that have to be straightened out before it gets out there, that a lot of people are never aware of. The LaunchPad team worked really hard in getting that together and Mark Shuttleworth set the ball rolling and he made the commitment and it’s our there, and the response has been very, very positive, I’m very happy.

DD: I can imagine. Speaking of teams, and you’re pretty much the team manager of all the teams, how have the LoCo teams being going around the world recently?

JB: So good, I’m so proud of the LoCo project. I helped co-ordinate some of it but it’s really been the good work of the people involved in the different LoCo teams. We have over 200 LoCo teams all over the world. People get together and they’re passionate about Ubuntu and they spread the word and they organise booths and organise shows and all kinds of stuff. I’m really proud of the efforts there and it’s continuing to grow, I mean it’s continuing to grow all over the world, we’ve got LoCo teams in pretty much every populated part of the world right now.

DD: Is the main thing LoCo teams do translate?

JB: No the main thing they really do is advocate.

DD: So like street teams in media.

JB: Yeah, they go out and they give out flyers and CDs and they encourage people to go and try Ubuntu. A lot of LoCo teams do translations and that is definitely a core part of it but advocacy is definitely the main thing that people are attracted to.

DD: This seems to be one thing that Ubuntu are really on the ball on in terms of Linux distros, in terms of really connecting to people. They’ve got the, and I hate to use the term, the marketing side down to a tee, and they’ve got – what we need to connect it to people, in order to connect Linux to human beings. I suppose you’re partially if not fully responsible for that.

JB: I’d definitely err on the side of partially. The Ubuntu movement is a big movement. The thing about open-source is a lot of it is top-down. You find inspiring characters who inspire other inspiring characters who inspire other inspiring characters, and every step of that layer is very important. You could say at the top of that layer is someone like Mark Shuttleworth who is the inspiring character of the Ubuntu world, but I think it cascades in many ways. I mean, every day I meet people and I talk to people who just inspire me. There’s people in different LoCo teams and different projects, in Ubuntu and outside Ubuntu that are the glue that holds everything together. It’s very tempting for us in the Ubuntu camp to be proud of what we’ve done and kind of get a little bit self-congratulatory, but if it wasn’t for X and it wasn’t for FireFox and it wasn’t for OpenOffice and it wasn’t for the Gnome project and the KDE project and BinUtils and all these.

DD: Okay but in fairness this is what every distro does, you could say the same about Fedora, you could say the same thing about Slackware, Gentoo, right? So how does Ubuntu set itself apart from these? I ready know the answer but…

JB: I think why Ubuntu is so successful can been a commitment to the ethos which has been it ‘Just Works’. Right at the beginning of the project, I remember when I first heard of Ubuntu I heard random South African dude was interesting in making an operating system that used Debian at the core and build on top of it to make a really easy to use operating system. I’d been talking for about two or three years that I felt this was the way forward.

DD: We all have, everyone who uses Debian has.

JB: It wasn’t because I was insightful, it was because it just made sense. I wasn’t the only voice, but this guy made it happen and I have a huge amount respect for that. It’s the integration and the commitment to integration and detail, and ease of use, across the products, across the server and desktop, UnR, I think that’s what’s made it happen.

DD: Is there much, I suppose, tight knitting planned between Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server? Let’s take a wild example in the closed-source world, the likes of Exchange Server/Outlook inter-knit. Is there that kind of knit planned for Ubuntu Server/Ubuntu Desktop? Is there an advantage for me to install Ubuntu Server on my server if I have it on my desktop?

JB: I think so, if you’re familiar with Ubuntu Desktop then Ubuntu Server is going to be easy for you.

DD: Over Debian Server?

JB: I’d say so. I mean there’s slight changes in Ubuntu that are going to be in Ubuntu Server. I don’t think there’s a huge difference, I think Ubuntu Server is going to be useful for anyone coming from an open-source background. It’s a really great product, it’s a really powerful product. I don’t think there’s necessarily any particular benefit from installing it if you’ve got a Ubuntu background, just a lot of elements of it are going to be free, the feel of it will be very familiar.

DD: Moving on a little bit, you recently published a book, or at least it went to the printers, what, last week?

JB: Yeah, about two days ago in fact it went to the printers. I got an email saying they said “Yep, it’s gone, it’s done.”, which on one side is really exciting cos it’s like it’s gone to the printers, it’s done, no more book, and on the other side it’s like, oh my god, no more opportunity for changes and edits.

DD: Did Leo write the foreword for it?

JB: Yup, Leo wrote the foreword, Leo Laporte, founder of the Twit network.

DD: Yeah, and we’ve been seeing you on FLOSS recently, quite a bit.

JB: FLOSS weekly’s been a lot of fun, I went on there about three or four months back.

DD: Have you been itching to get back into podcasting and live media?

JB: I have to admit, yeah, I’ve been excited about it. LUGRadio was a lot of fun and I miss it. I’m really proud of what we achieved in four years. You know, Aq, Adam and Chris and Sparks.

DD: Are you purposefully ignoring Ade?

JB: Ade’s got nothing to do with it. Ade was just a hanger on. How could I ignore Ade. And Ade. We had a lot of presenters. I’ve been drinking a bit tonight, that’s probably why… I’m proud of the achievements we made and I’ve kind of been itching to do some podcasting again.

DD: It probably doesn’t hurt to get the word out about Ubuntu.

JB: Yeah. FLOSS has been good, it’s a different beast though. It’s fun, but it’s way more formal.

DD: It’s American.

JB: It’s American yeah, it doesn’t have that Monty Python kind of LUGRadio humour. I mean that fact we were making jokes about Richard Stallman buying a kipper, I mean kind of sums it up.

DD: Rather than making jokes about Miguel de Icaza.

JB: There were a few jokes about Miguel, but he’s a good guy, he took it in good stead. I mean, making jokes about wearing his skin is, ah…

DD: Excellent. So you released Art of Community under Creative Commons license. What does that mean for people who want to get an e-book of it, people who want to get it off Amazon?

JB: The reason why we did it, was when I was interested in writing a book about community management and community building, I though it was really important the community had access to that book. When the book is complete and it’s ready and it’s proofed and complete, we need to provide people with access to the information. Saying the only way you can get access to this information is if you pay $36 or $39, seemed unreasonable. It’s not within the spirit of community, you should provide people with access to the information. What we should also provide people with is the ability to support the project, the ability to to step forward and say “I’m going to stick my $39 down on the table to support the idea of a creative commons book.” so that’s basically what we did. And O’Reilly were very, very, very open to it, and credit to them.

DD: O’Reilly are a very forward-thinking House. The other creative commons project you worked on recently was Severed Fifth. Explain Severed Fifth in a nutshell.

JB: So Severed Fifth in a nutshell was, I was hearing all this talk about Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails and how they’ve embraced Creative Commons and how this was changing music and all the rest of it.

DD: Was Radiohead creative commons with In Rainbows? I thought it was just free. I know Year Zero was CC but not In Rainbows.

JB: I thought it was CC, I may be wrong. I was hearing about some established artists who were talking about how they were licensing music under a free license. It’s very easy for them to say that because they’ve built their reputation on the traditional music industry. I was thinking, what happens if you’re a completely unknown artist like I am. My idea was to write an album and to see how far we can push it, when I’m completely unknown. So I bascially wrote ‘Denied by Reign’ which is the first Severed Fifth album. I wrote the songs and then recorded them in my home studio, all the guitars, the drums, the bass, the vocals, did it all myself and then basically released it under the creative commons license, the idea was then to push it hard and see how far I could push it. The problem is that just as that project had kicked off, that’s when the book came along, and I couldn’t turn the book down. So Severed Fifth was sacrificed a little bit in order to write the book, but the book’s done now, and I’ve just started writing the second album.

DD: I don’t mean to insult your musical prowess, but how much is a producer needed in the process of creating an album? How much is it necessary for any genre of musician to have a producer, and therefore that follow on is, is it necessary for them to have a record label?

JB: I think it’s really important to have someone who can produce a great album, so you really want to have a good producer. You hear some free music and it’s just crap, and some that’s really good. With Severed Fifth, I produced it myself just because I knew I could get a reasonable result and I didn’t have to invest money in a producer. But yeah, if you’re going to release an album, make sure it sounds good, and that might mean paying going an paying someone $250 a day to record it, or €250 or £250 or whatever.

DD: Sure sure sure. Are you personally going to be touring with the album?

JB: The plan was to with the first one, but with the second one I’d like to. I don’t know how far. Because I wrote it at a solo album, it’s very difficult to play everything at once, live.

DD: Maybe you can do it at book signings.

JB: Yeah! The plan is to put together a band and start playing some gigs. I starting playing about three or four weeks back with a guy locally, Phil, on guitar, and he was learning a bunch of the songs, it sounded great.

DD: Brilliant. Definitely looking forward to it. To finish up, I’ve heard rumours that Mr.Shuttleworth is fond of roofs in hotels.

JB: Fond of what?

DD: Roofs in hotels.

JB: Roofs?

DD: Roofs, as in, get on the roof.

JB: Okay.

DD: I’m not asking you to confirm or deny this, but do you have a similar perchant for getting on the roof of a building, when you’re somewhere new?

JB: Getting on the roof?

DD: Yeah! Is this a Canonical thing?

JB: A, I have no idea about Mark getting on roofs.

DD: I’m not asking if you do.

JB: He may do, he may not, that’s news to me, but it terms of me… it’s a roof. I don’t have any particular affiliation with a roof I mean I’ve never really intended to get on a roof. I like to get on a roof if there’s a nice view or if it’s warm outside, but no. So where did you hear this? Where did you hear this rumour?

DD: Someone drunk in the pub last night, some drunken Texan. I’m not going to reveal names.

JB: Some drunken Texan? Does he work an Canonical?

DD: Yes.

JB: He works at Canonical. So I know who that person is. And he says he’s got a thing about roofs?

DD: Yeah, apparently. He was chatting about how “Mark’s gonna kick my ass if I come in drunk tomorrow.” and I was like “Oh, what’s Mark like?” and he says “That guy, all he talks about when we get to a new hotel is ‘I’ve got to get on the roof, have you been on the roof yet? Have you seen the roof of this place?’” and apparently, very third-hand at this stage, Mark is a fan of the roof.

JB: Well, good to know, I had no idea, that’s news to me.

DD: Thank you very much, and I’m sure I’ll chat to you again.

JB: No worries, thanks.

IT Freely, Episode 5 : Open Source Software & VoIP, featured a brief snippet of an interview with Patrick Collison (homepage, twitter, Facebook) and has a chat about Tech start-ups in Ireland (based on his Irish Times article) and iPhone App School (homepage, twitter).. If you want to hear more, the full interview is available for your auditory delectation here. Check it out.

Transcription was provided by Niall Campbell.

The full interview is available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 3.0) license.

DD: Hello, I’m chatting to Patrick Collison who’s back in the country for, what, only a week?

PC: Yeah, a week, heading back to San Francisco on Monday.

DD: Okay, it’s a terrible life.

PC: *laughs*

DD: I suppose you’ve hit the press recently a few times. One of the things was an article that you publishing the Irish Times in respect to Startups in Ireland. One of the things that it highlighted, one of the things that stood out to me, was that the government should take fifty million and give it to each of fifty startups. Do you think that’s actually a viable thing that they would actually go ahead and do?

PC: I have no idea is the honest answer. I mean it’s worth pointing out in this idea that it’s not actually mine originally. Having said that, I certainly think if done, it would work, it would almost have to work. It seems there isn’t too much doubt that if you offered it, startups would take it, and you know once fifty or whatever number of startups did take up the offer you really would be one of the bigger startup hubs in the world. As to whether the government would do it? I certainly think they should. Ultimately in the context of the governments finances, despite the recession it’s not a huge amount of money, especially compared to the benefit it would bring, I mean you only need one of these companies to do fairly well for them to make their money back. There was a report that came out yesterday that was suggesting €5.7bn in cuts I want to say. And €50m out of that is only a percent.

DD: Yeah yeah, of course, but people are always going to shout and say venture capitalists are risky and can we really trust out tax-payers money to risky startups?

PC: I think we have to, and I think a big part of the problem with investment as it’s done in Ireland today is that it’s NOT trusted to risky ventures and I’ve heard [investors] say one of the things they’re most afraid of is investing in companies that fail. That’s just a really bad mindset, I mean as an investor if you don’t invest in risky companies you’re going to miss out on the really successful ones. It’s important to remember that both Facebook and Google could not raise venture capital the first time they tried to raise it. I mean, they were seen as so risky they could only get danger money. And so, if our own state bodies are having a lower threshold than [Venture Capital companies], they’re almost guaranteed to miss out on the good companies.

DD: Both Facebook and Google started in Universities and a lot can be said for the academic sheltering that they had in their first early days. Google have the stories where they’re working the IT department, robbing a PC once a week saying “Yeah, yeah we’ll image that for you.” and using that as the initial Google search engine. Might it be a better route to approach to say we’ll put money into creating spin-off companies in Universities, take the talent from the University and create a spin-off from it. Would that be another route to take?

PC: I certainly think it’s a decent idea, I mean obviously an awful lot of successful technology companies have come from the Universities in the States. In Facebook’s case I think it was arguably incidental, certainly I don’t think the academic community in the university had much of a role to play, perhaps the social cache of those it was exposed to. I don’t know, I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on Universities to be honest. Like I said, there have been many succesful ones, I don’t know what Universities can do to encourage it. I don’t know of anywhere that has made some kind of explicit decision to change things, which makes sense.

DD: So, along those lines, what else do you think would be needed to create a really sustainable startup culture within the country?

PC: I guess at a broad level the most important thing we have to do is firsty recognise that the goal of having startups here is a valuable one and really focusing on it, and once people accept it as important and once we can agree on the sort of startups to encourage I think a lot will automatically follow from that. I think another thing that is easy to miss, is we tend to focus on the Irish aspect of it and we tend to focus on Irish startups and Irish entrepreneurs, and all the rest, which I think is entirely the wrong approach. I’m all for encouraging Irish people and Irish startups, but if we solely focus our attention on that aspect of it, we’re not going to do too well. It’s important to bear in mind that very, very few of the founders, in fact almost none of the founders of the successful Silicon Valley technology companies actually came from Silicon Valley. If you think of Silicon Valley is around the same population size of Ireland, and if Silicon Valley had only encouraged people native to the Valley to be successful, we’d never have heard of it. All of the successes came from people who moved to the Valley. I think Ireland needs to concentrate on becoming the kind of place that people from France or Germany, India or China or wherever want to come to set up their companies. Of course, Silicon Valley hold a very dominant position here and it’s not going to be easy for anyone to compete, but we need to recognize we’ll have to succeed their to have any success to building anything comparable to the Valley.

DD: Okay, I mean we’ve already done this with the Shannon Free Zone. I mean, the Shannon Free Zone attracted the likes of Intel, the likes of Analog Devices to start their European arms of their tech companies in the country, and the main thing was non-taxes. Do you think non-monetary incentives might be another way. For example, if we take an incubator type thing, have you been keeping tabs on Evert Bopp’s GreenHouse Incubator?

PC: I have, yeah. Personally I’m not a huge believer in incubators. Lots of people have tried, not many have succeeded.

DD: I think the angle I’m trying to take is, except money, what else can we do to attract people?

PC: I think a really important one, and I mentioned this in the article, is immigration law. It’s hard to overstate just how much harm US immigration laws are doing to the country right now. I know countless people who’ve had to leave the country due to being unable to get a visa and have become sucessfully employed elsewhere or started their own companies employing tens or hundreds of people. I guess a local example is Liam Casey who couldn’t obtain a visa into the US and moved to China and now employs eighteen hundred people out there. It’s almost crazy how much the US is shooting itself in the foot here and Ireland to absolutely capitalise on this and not just give a visa, but give a passport to anyone to people who look like they might set up things here.

DD: Does that go for tech companies or does that go across the board? I mean the first criticism you’re going to get is that suddenly the wave of Nigerians we had back in 2000/2001 are going to turn up on our doorstep again if we start offering free visas and free passports.

PC: I think people worry a bit too much about that.

DD: Haha, the health board would say otherwise, with them paying the rent and all.

PC: Of course there are, quote, “risks” here, and I’m not advocating blinding giving out passports or visas or anything like that. But, to give a counter-example here, Ireland used to have a reasonably good name in, I don’t know how you want to define it, the English language 3rd Level education sector, say Britian, the US, Australia, New Zealand etc. Back a couple of years ago we had a 1% market share globally of non-English speaking students coming to English-speaking universities, students from India, China and all the rest, and this figure is actually declining. A big reason for that is the perceived and real difficulty for a student wanting to obtain an Irish visa, and actually the approval rate is something like 60% as compared to something like 94% or 95% in the UK. This is just crazy, these students are profitable for us, they’re generally hard working people, because of the selection bias these are people who want to go abroad, are willing to live abroad, learn another language, study another language, etc. These are almost guaranteed to be good people and yet Ireland is turning them away in large numbers and most importantly creating this perception of Ireland not being a country welcoming to these hard-working, industrious people.

DD: Saint and Scholars and all that, yeah.

PC: Right now we’re committing the same mistakes the US is making, except the US, because of their dominant position, can afford to make them, we can’t.

DD: Okay. I mean it’s something we could really capitalise on here. I suppose one or two bullet points to slap in front of a minister would be really useful. Like you said, fifty million, one to each startup would be one. I think I can imagine a large amount of criticism that’s going to be levelled will be along the lines of administrative and you know, is it worth the amount of effort we put in. If we’re essentially employing 20, 30, 40 civil servants to keep tabs on this hub of innovation, are we going to see enough returns to pay those salaries, in order to actually sustain the effort that goes into it. You can’t say yes or no, it’s very, very likely but it’s probably going to require probably one or two bright sparks like yourself to hand-pick and say “Look, these companies are great, these guys have got real good vision, motivation and direction.” and go with that.

PC: It’s important to remember that even if the initial 50 companies did not produce profit for the government, that doesn’t mean the programme would be a failure. The point of doing this is only partially to bring these particular companies to Ireland, the real point is to turn Ireland into the kind of place where other people would like to come. The real value for Ireland would not be in the first fifty companies we bring, the value would be in the other thousand companies that come because there is this cluster of fifty companies in Ireland.

DD: You’ve lived in San Francisco, and I’m sure there’s an awful lot of auxiliary, social, nerdy type things which we don’t have here. I’ve visited briefly, but I noticed stuff like, on the most simple level, an Apple Store, we don’t have one here, but there they’re all over the place.

PC: *laughs* Compu-B might beg to differ, but I know what you’re saying.

DD: Are there other things like that? I mean, you’ve got a variety of sctreaming alternative music stations in San Francisco, you’ve got a variety of lifestyle things to back up a tech startup culture. What along those lines could be developed and built on here if we want to draw young startup types here and say “We’re [as good socially] as Silicon Valley.”.

PC: It’s a good question for sure, and the honest answer is I don’t know, but it’s certainly important. I guess what I wonder is whether it’s necessary in the beginning or will it just naturally follow if we do all the other things right, and I think it might be the latter. Silicon Valley, when it started out, wasn’t any hive of youthful creative activity, it was a fairly sleepy little place. It’s easier for Silicon Valley to grow organically, something else is going to have to grow a bit and Silicon Valley has all these advantages already. The one thing I would say, is I think it’s really important in attracting people to have really good universities. I don’t have too much to say on the whole fees debate except that there’s very little evidence that you can have both world class universities and free education. We should at least be realistic that the choice is between one or the other. Maybe we decide that we don’t want world-class universities, that we’d rather have free education than the best colleges in the world, and maybe that’s where we want to be but we should at least be honest with ourselves that this is the choice we’re making.

DD: Yeah. Agreed, that’s a good point to make and one that I’ve never really fully considered myself but it’s a good one to make. Moving away from that a bit, I’m sure we’re going to have long discussions about it in the future, one of the things you’ve been involved in recently has been the iPhone App School. How’s that going, when’s that starting?

PC: That’s starting on Monday in the Castleknock Hotel in Dublin.

DD: Brilliant.

PC: It’s an outgrowth of work I was doing in iPhone applications myself and just generally seeing how well it can work out, not for big companies, but for a guy who can afford to spend a few hours a day spending on something. Especially in the current economic situation in Ireland, something that people might really appreciate.

DD: I’m going to have to challenge you on this one. You’ve just thrown in the words “Individual” and “Current economic situation”, and yet you’re charged €1500 a pop for the course. It doesn’t compute with me. Personally I’m interested in developing for the iPhone, but I don’t have a Mac, I’m going to have to shell out a grand for a Mac.

PC: App School provides rental for €100.

DD: If I wanted to develop myself on this in the future, realistically if I going to want to continue developing for this if I’m going to get use out of my investment, I’m going to have to shell out for a Mac.

PC: And an iPhone or an iPod touch.

DD: And an iPhone which I don’t have. So it’s a total investment of about three grand. Where’s your average developer going to come up with that cash?

PC: I agree it’s a problem that people have to spend money and it’d be much nicer if they didn’t have to. Ultimately it still costs us to run App School and we can’t provide it for much less. What I will say it’s that it’s still an awful lot cheaper that almost any other secondary income stream that you might want to create, you know if you might want to set up some sort of website where you take subscription payments or whatever it is, you’re going to have to pay for servers and probably a designer and merchant bank accounts and blah, blah, blah.

DD: I agree to all this, the area I disagree on would be, would it not make more sense to target this at corporations and say, look, you guys can put down the three grand investment and now easily develop an in-house application for your payrolling, you can develop an in-house application for getting out news updates to your sales team, every time there’s a sales update, push that out.

PC: You know, you might be right, but we’re not approaching App School as a way for ourselves to make money, or certainly much, it’d be nice of it made some. It’s more to help people like us. I would have loved to go on this course back when I started doing iPhone Application development, and really this came out of “How can we get people like Daniel and myself up to speed quickly with iPhone applications?” It may not be the theoretically optimal solution to how to do iPhone training in Ireland, and maybe someone, or maybe even us will decide to focus on that a little more.

DD: Okay, on that, if you’re planning courses in future are you limiting yourself to iPhone or are you planning to go towards Android, Symbian, Blackberry?

PC: Again, we’re kind of playing it by ear at this stage, the first course still hasn’t run and we’re interested in seeing how the reception ends up being, and we have a second one planned in Limerick in about two and a half weeks time now and we’ll see how those go and after that we’ll make some decisions in regard to what’ll happen in the future.

DD: Brilliant. One final thing on that, is there has been some controversy recently in regard to lack of freedoms of applications on the App Store. For example there was a podcaster App which was taken down because it duplicated functionality, there was a Nine Inch Nails application which was taken down because it distributed songs for free.

PC: It was announced yesterday that any application which embeds a browser or provides unfiltered access to user-generated content will have to receive an 17+ rating on the store and you will not be able to distribute promotional codes for it.

DD: Right, I mean what would you say to people planning to go on this store if they have an idea and it falls into one of these categories?

PC: There’s not a whole lot I can say I guess. I think it’s utterly stupid. You keep thinking there couldn’t be yet another ‘what the fuck’ moment and then another one comes along. I guess the only consolation, maybe, is that I don’t know of many applications where the developer went and built something and they were not eventually able to get it into the store. In all the famous cases that attracted publicity that I know of, the applications did eventually end up in the store, perhaps with some modifications or a different rating or whatever. So even though it’s stupid I don’t think that the problem is actually that significant. It’s more morally repugnant than actually commercially harmful.

DD: Sure sure. It sounds like a fantastic idea. It’s yourself, Daniel and Damien Mulley behind it, yeah?

PC: That’s right, and SQT Training is kind of our training back-end.

DD: Brilliant, brilliant. Best of luck, and I’m very much looking forward to the both of them, and I’m sure there’ll be nifty stuff coming out of there. Thank you very much and we’ll chat to your again at some point in the future!

PC: Thank you.

We had a chat about reverse engineering legalities and some decent metal.

The audio (MP3, OGG, FLAC) and text of this interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (CC-BY-NC).

Transcription was provided by Niall Campbell.

Rob Savoye: So basically I started up a non-profit last year called Open Media Now and we bascially fund raise for a bunch of projects that use patent-free codecs like Gnash flash player also streams Theora and Ogg Vorbis and things like that. I just wrote a clone of the Adobe media server, we do a bunch of stuff like that, and we’re doing a lot of work around legal issues fall from that and codecs and stuff.

David Dolphin: Cool, to go into the reverse engineering a bit more, how did you get into reverse engineering, was it purely you had an itch you wanted to scratch or did you build up to it?

RS: Actually I kind of fell into it backwards, I had a tendancy to work at small startups that had insufficient staff for a lot of things and often cut too many corners, and one person debugging another persons hardware or software could be reverse engineering. I think I kind of got into this stuff literally as a survival skill cos I was always like the systems guy, you’d support packages and you’d find bugs in drivers and you’d have to figure out how it really worked you know, and sometimes observation is better than reality and junk like that. And then I wound up working on the GNU debugger, GDB, I had like the world record in GDB back-ends, and pretty much designer two of the three remote debugging protocols and all that, so I spent a lot more time debugging hardware and weird protocols, I mean, the current one I talked about yesterday is almost my two dozenth, I’m not even sure anymore. I just think it’s really fun, so, and it conveniently turns other people need reverse engineering so I’ve done a lot of reverse engineering for people on contract and it’s kind of amusing.

DD: Is that in terms of community work or commercial work?

RS: Commercial work actually, I used to work for NASA, so I used do to reverse engineering for NASA funnily enough, y’know, taking old code and porting it to Linux, and basically spent a couple of years porting everything they had to Linux for them, and in the process had to reverse engineer a lot of weird stuff like you’re porting some network code and there’s no byte swapping in it because it was running on a big-endian machine so porting it to Linux meant like lots of byte-swapping and data structures that, the documentation was 30 years old, and whoever wrote it is like, y’know, tired, or dead from old age and I spent all this time reverse engineering a lot of really obscure network protocols.

DD: Speaking of reverse engineering I remember hearing a story that Alan Cox, who worked on the Linux Kernel had, where he wanted to get information on a certain bit of code and he was told to talk to his manager, to talk to some other manager, to talk to a global manager, down the chain, and he said ‘Nah, that’s going to take me two days.’ and he rang the guy up in Australia and got an answer in five minutes, and was almost fired, because he didn’t observe and do you see that aswell, that you have you follow procedures and does that bog you down?

RS: Well I don’t work for a big company, so I don’t really have that kind of problem I guess, basically you know, I’m self employed doing whatever the hell I can raise money for but at the same time I mean Alan did is to be honest how you’re supposed to solve your problems, I mean sometimes reverse engineering is like, they talk about hacking, well sometimes it’s more social engineering than it’s actually technical, and often that’s the beauty to be honest these days, of the sort of development community and international conversations and email and all that is you can often talk to the right person who can give you something in five minutes so in a sense blowing off too much process is almost usually a good thing.

DD: Cool, so you’ve worked on the Adobe stuff, have Adobe seen what you’ve done? Have they taken into account, have you been contacted?

RS: I’ve actually been to Adobe. When I first started the Gnash project a bunch of years ago they had concerns, at the same time this was before Adobe had really gotten into open source and so we basically went out there with kind of a dual-pronged focus I guess, one they wanted to ask me some questions and figure out if basically I’d been doing illegal reverse engineering which I was, and it was pretty easy to prove more or less, and at the same time they were kind of curious what it would take to be an active participant in the open source world and much of the problems with flash and the legal licensing they inherited when they bought it from Macromedia. I mean, Adobe used to be customers of mine when I was at Cygnus Support and they’re usually a pretty decent company I mean PDF is open, postscript is open, and part of my pitch to them a couple of years ago was like, just be like Adobe, just make all the specifications for free, I don’t even care if they release their flash player for free I wrote Gnash who cares about their code base, but I want specifications out there so I know what target I’m working to. They’ve been slowly getting around there but they wouldn’t reverse RTMP so I bascially had to reverse engineer that.

DD: Right, and is that mostly a profit thing for themselves? Do they sell servers which support RTMP and they don’t want…

RS: They make a huge amount of money on their servers. In a month I release my clone of the Adobe Media Server.

DD: Very good!

RS: I spent the last six months doing it, the whole reason I reverse engineered RTMP was actually to do this server side flash support since I have a flash virtual machine, as well as client side, and the idea is now we’re working on full flash-based video conferencing support and stuff which is very popular in the professional world, but we’ll be able to use patent free codecs because we’ll have both ends of the network connection. Part of my plan, especially with Open Media Now is to increase adoption of patent-free codecs by building more software infrastructure that actually uses them seamlessly so that you don’t really care.

DD: Of course. Yeah, if someone is creating a site such as Youtube, Google video, whatever, are there ways that they can write their code that it can work under Gnash and Adobe Flash Player?

RS: Oh yeah totally, we actually work a huge amount on compatibility. It’s kind of odd because none of us can run the Adobe tools because of licensing problems, so our sort of volunteer community, it’s kind of their wonderful contribution to Gnash is a lot of them can’t work on Gnash because they’ve signed the license agreement yet they can basically run both on their computer and often our bug reporters and people who hang in there for days on end asking them tedious questions, is incredibly useful I mean it’s one of the fun things about free software is developing in an open space where the community can see when you need help and like ‘oh yeah well the border of this line is three pixels on three sides and two pixels on one side’ and like ‘how do you tell the difference?’ and ‘oh, with a magnifying glass, they look different.’ We get a lot of really funny bug reports like that. So we actually work really hard on even bug for bug compatibility, I mean there are tons and tons of bugs in the Adobe Flash Player, I mean we have test cases that Gnash passes that will crash the Adobe Player left and right. They do a lot of really ugly stuff too that we actually have to emulate because we try to do it, uh, our joke is we’re not bascially cloning Adobe technology, we’re re-implementing your technology, better. I tell my engineers all the time, or guys working on our project, just cos it’s free software doesn’t mean we can’t do REALLY good software.

DD: It sounds a lot like IE6 CSS support type of stuff, like there’s some horrible hacks you have to do, in order to get stuff working properly in both.

RS: Yeah, so for instance you take somebody using a Flash 9 based media player, we do the youtube support fine, dailymotion, a bunch of different people, nowadays really the only trick with Gnash is testing with Gnash, and a lot of people don’t but if they test with Gnash we often find we get contacted by people that actually did the flash movie, it’s usually a one line change in their flash application to work correctly in Gnash and then we’ll usually fix the bug anyway.

DD: Are there things that you would say to Flash developers to avoid using, would you say ‘don’t do this it won’t work with ours yet‘?

RS: A lot of the really ugly stuff is below the level that when you’re programming in Flash and ActionScript you have any control over, some of the uglyness is really stupid, like how they do function calls, and how they lay parameters on the stack, a lot of obscure gunk and in flash it’s just really really ugly. I think the main thing I would say for developers is try stuff with Gnash, and if they find out that ti’s got a bug, we love bug reports from people that are actually flash developers. One of our biggest problems is we don’t have access to professional flash developers at all, they hate Gnash, they think we’re going to destroy the world. The HTML wars of the early 90s or whatever and ‘you got to do the compatible thing’, well no actually we implement the bugs in Adobe Flash player even when their stupid, we put warning messages, “don’t do this”

DD: Is it possible to interface Gnash with development tools, IDEs, is it Dreamweaver that’s used for…?

RS: It’s Flex, actually, we actually maintain the Ming project which is a flash compiler, typically the problem with Ming is it’s mostly original developed for websites so you actually do flash programming in more like C, PHP or C++ and stuff, and we would love to actually see a GUI for our compiler and if we had extra money we probably would hire somebody to do it but nobody’s pitched in the money or volunteered to do this for the hell of it and it’d be a great project really for someone into user interfaces, what we’d want to do is design something simple, a lot of the educational machines using Gnash because of licensing and we run on weird processers that Adobe doesn’t and junk and so we really see that there’s a big need for free flash believe it or not, for educational software. Gnash is really really popular in most of the big Linux distributions, in Spain and stuff, they always have client networks, and Adobe player hangs their entire network pretty often and it turns out that Gnash doesn’t.

DD: Moving away from Adobe a little bit, to reverse engineering in general, what are they big differences say between reverse engineering file formats, reverse engineering network protocols, are their major differences or is there collaboration?

RS: I think there’s huge differences, now I haven’t done file system reverse engineering, most of my background is networking stuff, I think the advantage of networking is that because it’s a network streaming type protocol usually, it’s more limited in the way that you could do it. You make it too complicated and your performance goes to hell basically. Most headers for network protocols are actually very short and simple, typically a handful of fields, some of the gunk I worked on at NASA was like 50 fields and a giant structure and pretty huge. But I actually had documentation and that kind of helped a little.even though the documentation was wrong, but you know, when you know what three quarters of it is, the rest will be easy to figure out. Far from that, look at ODF, OOXML and stuff, some of these things, while I know you could reverse engineer them from scratch, I think it would be much more of a bigger problem, much more complicated, I mean Open Office is still working on weird microsoft compatibility bugs and they are pretty good at it. There’s still a lot of weird stuff, I still get documents all the time in Open Office 3 from Word that don’t look quite right.

DD: For example, one that springs to mind that I’ve come up personally against is symbian phones can take an archive of the entire C: drive, however the archive that it’s in is not a documented format and they only extractor for it is on the phones and the problem being that you can’t unzip it on another phone so if you make an archive of your device you lose your device, you have all your backups but you can’t recover your data unless you get the exact same model again. So it would be ideal to take these archives and have some desktop application to just unzip them.

RS: Archive formats are usually pretty simple, I’ve written lots of packaging code over the years for all sorts of stupid operating systems and packaging schemes, and a lot of times just straight archive backup stuff is very simple, more or less a list of files and it’s usually compressed, and once you figure out what it’s compressed with it’s not that hard, I mean a lot of people are using Zip.

DD: Are there things that make it easy to get into reverse engineering? If someone was going for it what would you point them towards?

RS: Getting a good collection of good, loud music. When it gets really hard, sometimes you just have to turn up the volume. I think, funnily enough, you have to do it in a very low-distraction atmosphere, or distracting yourself in appropriate ways, sometimes when I turn up the music really loud it makes me really focus. It’s kind of hard to get into it’s like learning sculpting or something it can be disappointing and every time you make something you go ‘ugh, this is crap’ and reverse engineering is often that way. You get into something and you go, ‘ugh, I’ll never figure this out.’, that’s really common.

DD: Do you find there’s a fear of reverse engineering? It can be used for constructive things like yourself but also on the other side incredibly illicit things such as cracking applications. Is it viewed in a generally negative light?

RS: I think it slightly depends, most people assume that reverse engineering is violating the law, they don’t realise it’s entirely legal even in the US, and the trick is you have to more or less follow a set of rules, so to speak and to be honest some of those are kind of obscure and it’s not simple, like ‘don’t disassemble someone’s executable.’ that’s not good, that’s bascially what people cracking applications do, and to me there’s no sense of style in that anyway so why would you want to do it that way?

DD: You kind of find yourself tarred with the same brush though. Like the hacking community being seen as people to target banks.

RS: Most of the reverse engineering I’ve been doing lately has been in the flash player, so people actually appreciate it because it makes it work better and they know reverse engineering is the only way to get it there. Most of the people I’ve actually done programming consulting work for reverse engineering it’s bascially been the same way they’re just really glad to find someone willing to do this. It’s sounds funny but sometimes they say ‘you actually like this kind of work?’ and I charge a lot of money for it.

DD: What’s next for you? What’s next on the horizon?

RS: Well the big thing now is I’m about to release my Adobe Media Server project which has been almost a years worth of work, much of it is very slow reverse engineering in the beginning, down to basically writing a server, mimicing how their network works, complete with all the weird timing errors and packet fragmentation, basically getting all that stuff to work. That’s pretty fun it already speaks several network protocols, it does HTTP, it does RTPT is which ActionScript encoded objects using post in HTTP, which is basically what YouTube does and everything else, because it’s cheap, and also there’s RTMP which is the protocol that Adobe uses for their server which costs many many thousands of dollars.

DD: Very good, best of luck to you, hopefully we’ll see you again, are you going to be at any conferences in the next while?

RS: Actually I’ve been to so many conferences in the last few months I’m actually hoping not to go to some for a little while. I was just at LinuxConf and before that I was at Open Source world Spain, EduDebian, I’ve been moving around a little too much lately.

DD: Hopefully after some time off we’ll see you again. Thanks very much.

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He covered a variety of physics topics, such as the No-Cloning Theorm, Qubits and Photon Polarization. I also queried him on the real world use of quantum cryptography systems.

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John explained how the CTF tournament worked. Eight team’s are provided with a server each which they must defend. All severs contain the same custom services. Teams are also give a disk containing an image of their server, allowing them to disassemble the executables which are running on their server.

A larger number of points are awarded for breakthroughs, where a team discover a new vulnerability and exploit it on other servers. Teams must also maintain a service level, to ensure their services are accessible to others. This models the real world, where unavailable services result in lost revenue.

John explained that the Capture the Flag contest kept his commercial skills sharp, as he was learning at the cutting edge. He also explained that DEFCON was an important networking and social ground, with a “group of highly intelligent people”.

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Jason is a technology Historian, and archives websites. He discussed legal restrictions on archiving, such as the Lanham Act, and mentioned Wikipedia’s attitude to archiving.

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Rockbox is a replacement 3^rd-party firmware for digital audio players which has been ported to a wide range of devices, it offers more codec options than many commercial firmwares and is one of the ways you can get Doom running on your iPod.

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