Launching the Libre Tech Shop!

Sat, 12 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0530

Why?

Lets assume that you’ve been a GNU+Linux and Free Software user for a very long time. Maybe 15 years. Maybe even more.

What is the first thing that occurs to you when you encounter a problem? Or something breaks down? You search, you discuss on mailing lists, you read source code. Basically, you use all the resources you have the liberty to use. What you don’t do is accept the problem or dynfunction or break-down as a norm and build your life around it.

However, there are also those things that we use on a daily basis and which don’t provide us this respectful liberty to learn or fix or extend things. These “things” could be hardware or software or services or systems. Often, given our constraints of time or patience and so on, we just cover up these things with a “SEP Field” and go on with our lives.

“SEP Fields”

Now the “SEP Field” is a fantastic device to use. It enables us to create blindspots where we would otherwise see problems. By eliminating the awareness of the problems, we also do away with the itch to solve them.

What’s an SEP Field? It was invented by Douglas Adams in the book Life, the Universe and Everything as a sort of “cloaking device”:

An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot.

More details on the H2GT2G Fandom Page.

What if?

But what if we did not have to compromise in this manner? What if we could access products that respected our liberty to hack by default? What if “someone else” could take away the risk and expense (time + money + patience) involved with experimenting and arriving at the required answers?

Its not that we don’t wish we didn’t have to compromise. Its just that all the resources (time + opportunity + patience + funds) do not line up together at the same time.

That is reasoning I’ve had behind building the “Libre Tech Shop”. A shop for technology products that are free in the sense of their license and also free in terms of the opportunity the provide to learn, hack and do things on our own terms.

Such products would ship with free software, would not track you and would not force non-self-hostable and non-free/libre software backend ecosystems on you. Most importantly, in the spirit of the community, they would ship with documentation that aims at equiping users to repair, extend and fix things on their own.

So - what does it take?

1. The Mostly Harmless website

How do I launch a shop without a product website describing the products and the work and company behind them?

I spent about 9 months building the mostlyharmless.io website. This time I chose to write HTML using jekyll instead of using wordpress. And was very happy with the control and exactness I was able to deliver!

2. The Libre Tech Shop

The center piece - https://libretech.shop.

There are many things I’ve tried to achieve with this website:

100% LibreJS Compliance

Additionally - the functionality works fine with Javascript disabled (and in IceCat!) Doesn’t work with lynx yet… but it just might, one day.

While I do have a payment gateway that I can trivially connect to Woocommerce and put into action, I have deliberately not enabled it since it requires proprietary Javascript to work. Instead, for now, I’ll manually send out payment links to customers who want to use a payment for payments. Otherwise, direct bank transfers are a good and respectful option by default.

Prominent product properties:

product details
source code
documentation
discussion & help

And finally - the “Freedom Quotient”

3. Documentation for Libre Products

What’s the point of offering Libre Products without sufficient documentation? Documentation is the significant half of the ecosystem of Libre products since it helps create true ownership by way of access to tools, knowledge and details. It is also a good mark of how repairable a product is.

https://docs.libretech.shop/ is where you will find instructions and documentation for products sold on the Libre Tech Shop.

4. Source code hosting

Source code is hosted using Gitea customised to look prettier. https://sovran.dev/ is now the new source code host for all Mostly Harmless and personal projects.

5. Discussions and Support

How does a community of libre product owners connect? Where do they go to ask questions before making purchasing discussions? How do I address problems and make the solutions self-documenting?

I settled on using Discourse for this. I was able to customise Discourse extensively.

Check out the result at: https://ask.libre.support/

ask.libre.support is a pun. People often used to ask “if the software is free (ie. gratis), why do you charge for support?!” Well, lets not say “free support” anymore. Let say “Libre Support” - ie. Support for Libre Products offered in the spirit of the free software movement - to enable you to acquire greater competency and deeper ownership over the products you “own”.

6. The Matrix Channel

Finally, I setup Synapse for mostlyharmless.io to build a secure and self-hosted group chat room.

You can join in to ask quick questions (and more) via text chat:

https://matrix.to/#/#guide:mostlyharmless.io

7. The Request Tracker

After more than 10 years, I learnt to use RT (Request Tracker) once again. It is very nice to come back to Perl once again!

RT tracks emails sent to guide@mostlyharmless.io, emails generated by form submissions on the websites and orders generated via Woocommerce.

Now I won’t misplace incoming emails and I will answer them promptly. ;)

Challenges… and mishaps.

I feel that if what I’m seeking to achieve here is awareness, it would be grossly incomplete without a listing of the failures. It took me close to 3 years to actually launch the Libre Tech Shop. These were some of my challenges:

1. Lack of precedent

The lazy me will always search for a precedent so that I don’t have to do all the thinking and all the “doing”. There is a certain comfort in being a consumer rather a creator.

When I was searching for a LibreJS compliant shopping website, I found a few implementations but no guide on how to achieve it. Of course shop.fsf.org is a great example of Drupal-based e-commerce that is both elegant and ethical. But - alas! - they’ve not released that piece of code… (I wonder why?!)

I did realise (repeatedly) that I will finally have to put in the hard work. But many times, the scale of the work involved is such a daunting task in itself. When is there an easy way out?

2. Elegance

There are so many e-commerce tools that are free/libre software. Some are complex, some are ugly, some are simple, some are too tied to hosted and proprietary backends, some have licensing issues, some are aimed at large teams and some just require too much work!

How does one choose? Why does one experiment so much? When I knew that Wordpress + Woocommerce is “good enough” why was I searching for an answer with other platforms? Yes - its fun to explore and understand. But its also frustrating and a non-starter.

When I look back now, Wordpress + Woocommerce was “just right”. I could’ve saved so much anguish if I’d understood and appreciated its strengths early on - instead of taking such a expensive trip to realise it finally.

3. Working alone & staying motivated

Mostly Harmless is an OPC (one-person company) - legally and literally. One of my biggest flaws is that I don’t know how to delegate or work too well with others. Often working with others is more frustrating and so I work alone.

But when you’ve got no one to hold you accountable and there is no (apparent) cost for delays or for doing / not-doing something, its tough to remain motivated.

Will anyone care that the shopping website can work with LibreJS enable and even with Javascript disabled? What’s the point of putting in so much effort anyway? What if no one visits or buys a product?

As I keep telling myself – even if its not worth it, lets just do it and get it out of the way.

Otherwise what would be there to show for so much wasted time?

4. Building an ecosystem - not just a shopping site

By the time the libretech.shop website was ready, I realised that I needed a forum, a email tracker and a group chat… not to mention self-hosted source code and of course, documentation. Each of these (as evident above) was a mini project in itself.

I realise now that that a shopping site without such an ecosystem would be worthless - since it wouldn’t live up to its purpose of offering “ethical and hackable products with convenience”.

The more one wants to offer, the more that one has to do. Trying to deliver elegance and delight is tough!

5. Mishaps and server failures…

Finally - what do you do, when a careless server issue wipes your all your work and “production” source code? And you didn’t have backups? (Backups are for novices, anyway. And “real” developers code in production!)

Well - you start again from scratch. One more time. With “worn-out tools”.

I’m glad I didn’t give up. I’m still worried I will.

Credits

I’m thankful to a lot of people who have contributed in multiple ways to help launch all of these websites:

Navdeep Singh - who built the first LibreJS compliant prototype for wordpress + woocommerce and then also learnt enough Ruby to build a Rails + Solidus prototype! His research and contribution was invaluable.
Amit, Nishant, Prayas, Nandan and Rohit - for supporting the effort since its inception, for regular testing and constructive feedback.

Dedication

I am sure Rajeev Karwal sir would’ve been proud to see all of this launched finally. I miss his honest counsel, encouragement and wisdom at this juncture. This effort is dedicated to his memory.

IndieWeb - A Primer

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0530

“We should all own the content we’re creating, rather than just posting to third-party content silos. Publish on your own domain, and syndicate out to silos. This is the basis of the “Indie Web” movement.”

I chanced upon the world of IndieWeb and microformats while trying to search for a system to publish short notes (neuron is something I discovered in this process). Here is a summary of the research:

What is the IndieWeb?

The IndieWeb website and wiki is very thorough and detailed. Though a bit difficult to read at first (its full of outbound links and so requires patience to really get a feel of the while field), it is a great resource.

Steps to get started: (Borrowed from the IndieWeb wiki)

Get a personal domain: Builds identity, makes it easy to search for you.
Find a place to host your content: You can host on a git repo (eg. github, gitlab etc), on a virtual server, a single-board computer or anywhere else.
Set up your home page
- Mainly: Set up web sign-in on your own domain … so that you can use your own identity on the IndieWeb
Add info about yourself: You can use microformats to add information about yourself so that when someone mentions you, they get it all in a structured / standard manner.
Add links to existing social media: So that you can cross-post, hyperlink your posts and most importantly, own and self-host your content and not hold it captive to a 3rd party silo.
Publish content on your domain and add microformats to your content
Syndicate your content: You can now post only to your own domain and have that content reach your existing social media accounts.

Microformats

Microformats are a simple way to add more meaning to your HTML.

http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page

Tools

Implementing these steps is a lot of very tough work. Using tools that do these things makes it simpler.

Transformative

IndieWeb personal website software
written in Ruby
Supports “notes, articles, bookmarks, photos and more”
Developed by Barry Frost

This is one of the best tools I found. You can see it live on the developer’s website. It handles most things for you so you can focus on the content.

Micro.blog

Micro.Blog is unique service that enables you to post to the IndieWeb. MicroBlogs can be mirrored to our own domains and they provide an interface to do the posting.

As an additional feature, MicroBlog supports ActivityPub as well. So while you post using microformats, you can also federate your content via ActivityPub and have people follow you from Mastodon, for example.

They are also writing a book about “microblogging”. Read the drafts here.

Source code: https://github.com/microdotblog

Microblg.pub

Microblog.pub is unique: It serves ActivityPub primarily but supports the IndieWeb equally. It is designed as single-user tool and does not use javascript ANYWHERE (very very unique).

https://a4.io/: The developers’ own MicroBlog.pub instance

https://micropub.rocks/

This website gives you a comparitive report about the status of micropub implementation status on servers and clients. Good way to discover servers & clients that you could use!

Sitewriter

Sitewriter is a tool that helps you add IndieWeb services to your static webite. Check out the documentation, service and source code.

Bridgy

Bridgy is a service (and software) that helps you connect your website to your social media accounts.

Quill

Quill is a simple tool that support IndiaAuth and then lets you compose and make posts to your website.

Wordpress with IndieWeb

Wordpress is said to have one of the best and most mature IndieWeb implementations. If you use Wordpress, check it out.

Source Code

IndieWebify

This website and tool walks you through the process of IndieWeb-enabling your website. Its a great way to not just understand the steps involed but also test out if you have implemented them correctly on your website.

Lets try this out together…

I am yet to try this out myself… but, at least, now I have some clarity on what to do and why and what to expect out of that process. So lets try this out together…

Screenshot above is from the IndieWeb.org webpage.

Why I am a sysadmin

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0530

Foremost - I consider myself to be a sysadmin. More than a “job description”, its an attitude and value system. And today, on SysAdmin Day, as a tribute to sysadmins and hackers everywhere, I thought I must share my perspective about why I am a sysadmin.

Sysadmin first, Programmer next

Why do you program? To solve a problem. Who defines the problem to you?

Being a sysadmin is a process of discovering new problems in new situations. Sometimes, you can solve those problems with quick hacks and creativity. When you can’t, you write a program.

Thinking like (and as) a sysadmin enables me to always first assess existing tools, methods and options. Then when you write code it is to fill in a gap or extend or fix an existing system.

For me, thinking as a sysadmin is a way of generating long-term programming projects. It also enables me to choose more complex programming projects that depend on servers or services or infrastructure being in a specific state.

An opportunity to know things

Often focussing just on programming does not give us sufficient exposure to how things work “under the hood”. A program can also often depend on a variety of services and understanding how those services work and how they interact with each other can be integral to how the program is developed.

But most importantly, intricate knowledge of how things happen at the operating system, network, hardware or service is a very important skill. These insights can help in designing more efficient systems and programs.

Laziness is a virtue!

As a sysadmin (and a programmer) I am lazy. If I set something up and its working, I rarely want to make changes to it. The same holds true for a program as well.

However, the reason such laziness is a virtue is that if you know that you are going to be lazy in future, you can do two things pro-actively:

You can build a process that is not costly (in terms of effort) and which encourages rapid change
You can foresee issues that might come up and compensate for them in advance

Being a sysadmin has taught me a lot about responsibility, accountability and collaboration

When I build and operate and maintain services that others use, there is a lot of responsibility that lies on me. I need to my work responsibly (can’t do a bad job that doesn’t offer the value a user is looking for), carefully (ie. I can’t be careless) and quickly (who wants to wait an inordinate amount of time waiting for a fix).

I should also hold myself accountable if (or when) I make a mistake that affects users. I should also build things in a manner that they are easy to monitor and maintain by others should I be unavailable.

These are all things I repeatedly learn as I perform my sysadmin roles at home, at my workplace and for our customers alike. I don’t think there is a better way to learn these values and practice them on a daily basis.

“Being There” takes a new meaning

Its often said that being a sysadmin is a thankless job. People are quick to point out when you mess up and don’t want to leave you alone till you’ve solved their problem.

Hence, “being there” and available takes a new meaning. There will always be situations where I might need to do things when there are other conflicting priorities to deal with.

The delight of a job well done!

What is the experience of discovering a system that’s been running for 4 years without requiring a reboot, login or maintenance? … which you didn’t even know was still online and working and providing a service to its users?

The sheer delight of making a discovery of this sort is beyond compare. It makes the whole process of administering systems so worth it

Learning, taking risks and building confidence

Doing things, getting my hands “dirty” and seeing them work out is great learning. Doing such thing repeatedly builds confidence and that gives me the ability to take risks, make quick decisions and build bold cross-connections.

All these things are integral to choosing to be a good sysadmin.

I can type fast! :)

It would be painful to have a command in your head and then be limited by your ability to only type so fast to see what would come out of executing it.

I learnt to touch-type because I took up typing in school. And much later on, it only helped me become very productive as a sysadmin. More so with hackable mechanical keyboards.

Hardware development as a sysadmin

I like to think that it is possible to visualise any problem in a “sysadmin manner”. I imagine hardware development that way. Knowledge of how to connect systems together can help build hardware that works and connects in creative ways.

(How about running a web-server on a micro-controller so that Prometheus can scrape its sensors’ values and show them to you on a Grafana dashboard?)

Thinking in pipes

I often think in “pipes”. Pipes are an excellent way to do quick hacks on the command-line. And if you can extend that value system a bit further, you can connect things in disparate ways without having to over-engineer them or re-invent the wheel.

Getting the computer to work for you…

… as compared to us doing something ourselves. Often, our methods of choosing to do things are not optimized for using the power of a computer to our advantage. We do too much manual labour because automating something on a computer is tedious job.

One thing being a sysadmin has taught me is about the power of automation. If I can get the computer to do something and do it again and again, it definitely isn’t going to get fed-up or tired. On the other hand, unless I did that I would be using my own time in the most sub-optimal manner.

Understanding an operating system or a network or a system well enough to use all of its power in our favour is an excellent sysadmin skill. And I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to examine this value the hard way – by making mistakes. Very tedious ones at times!

My powerpack: GNU + Debian + vim + SSH + Bash + Ansible + Docker

I don’t like monolithic systems because they go against the “unix” philosophy of one little tool doing one thing well. (I’m talking about systemd here, of course!)

A combination of GNU utilities, Debian, vim, ssh and bash form the most important tools that I can ever need to get work done. And now ansible and docker complete the power-pack to provide the elements I’d been missing. I believe that knowing just these tools well is sufficient to handle any sysadmin task effectively. Just these.

Its a practice - it needs practice

“The Practice of System and Network Administration” is an iconic book that I discovered quite some time back. When I discovered it and read it, I realised that it contained every bit of information and set of practices that a sysadmin would ever need. Not just technical skills, but the book could also teach us so many non-technical skills that are essential in our sysadmin lives.

Among most bits of advice that stood out, three things stood out for me:

the authors chose to look at sysadmin work as a practice - like what a doctor would do!
their advice on fixing each problem just once is my personal ethic for building automation and productising sysadmin work
their chapter on time-management was a gem - being to “get things done” and remaining productive are essential traits and time-management plays no small part in that

Like with all other practices (badminton or medicine, for example), the practice of being a sysadmin also needs practice. Its not a designation one earns solely out of getting hired or promoted or delegated. Being a practicioner is what matters - without practical, actionable skills and knowledge, I couldn’t have been a sysadmin at all.

With the detachment of a doctor and the empathy of a nurse…

Finally, I feel, being a sysadmin has helped me develop greater empathy for users of any system I build. Excelling at building systems that people like to use and which solve their problems is great fun. However, at the same time one can not sacrifice stoic objectivity and pragmatism.

Being a sysadmin is a healthy mix of both.

Strength of a community and aspiring to contribute back…

I can not do justice to a subject as critical as system administration without talking about what it means to be a part of a community. I am glad that sysadmins love to share what they build. And when sysadmins write software to solve problems, its fascinating to learn about how to build little bits that do a significant job.

Unless everyone could share and collaborate and help each other, it would be impossible to learn. I learn not just from forum posts where someone might have got a solution for exactly the same error I’m facing. When sysadmins write documentation or books, create automation tools, package software or get it to inter-operate, there are many more ways to learn from.

Building smart hardware that respects users' freedom

Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0530

Talk Slides

The PDF slides that I used for my talk are available for download. Or you can preview them online as well.

Or you can also view these as a JPEG slideshow of images.

Tutorial Slides

I also presented a tutorial and live demo of a how to build an IoT solution without using proprietary software. You can either download the slides or view them in your browser itself.

Or, you can view them as a JPEG slideshow of images.

More to come!

I will add some more commentry on this topic in a few days time. Please do visit again.

What should you do after attending a talk by RMS?

Fri, 18 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0530

In my personal opinion, it is meaningless if we attend an inspiring talk by Dr Richard Stallman today and are not able to reflect on his message and act on it.

Here is a small set of things that you can do. There is no timeline. But please see which of them are relevant to you.

A few months back, I wrote about how we can personalise and deepen our involvement with free software. Consider those points in addition to what I’ve outlined below.

Write about it

The first thing to do would be write about the experience, what you learnt, what you agree with or disagree with (and why) and so on.

Writing about this will enable you to record your opinions and also share them with others. Later, if your perspectives change, you can revisit this writing and reflect on what has changed and why.

Ask questions & Seek help

If you did not ask questions after the talk or didn’t get a chance to, then you can still ask questions. There are multiple forums where you can ask these questions.

Similarly, if there is a conceptual, philosophical, technical or social issue that you feel you need to seek help about, then do reach out.

Audit and review your own software usage

An easy thing to act upon and do is to audit and review your software and technology usage and then change it based on learning that you’ve drawn from Dr Stallman’s talk.

Desktop and Laptop

The quickest and most impactful thing you can do is use Free Software and GNU/Linux on your desktop or laptop computer. A good way to do that would be to install Debian GNU/Linux or PureOS on your computer.

Servers

Do you know about what software you run on your servers? What if the operating system and software you ran on your servers was GNU/Linux? What if you could power the services that you run on your server with Free Software?

Services

All the software that affects our lives does not run on computers within our control. Much of it runs on other people’s computers (often termed as “cloud”) while some of it is only accessible as a service.

Service offered as a Software Substitute (SaSS) is a way for proprietary software developers to offer the value of the software but not the software itself. This is just another form of proprietary software that robs you of your essential freedom to use, study, change and redistribute the software.

Review your use of such services and see how you can substitute them with self-hosted and free software services.

Mobile Devices

Operating systems on mobile devices are another form of proprietary software. As are the applications which run on these operating systems.

These proprietary software applications are more invasive since the mobile phones are with us all the time and they have multiple types of sensors that can track our location among other things.

Using free software on mobile devices is not only a way to have your freedom but also protect your privacy.

Proprietary Software on GNU/Linux

It is possible to run proprietary software on GNU/Linux as well. Many times we don’t even realise that we are using proprietary software on GNU/Linux.

Check if there are any such cases in your daily software usage and then replace them so that you can have more consistency between your beliefs and your actual technology usage.

Tell at least 3 others about it

If you learnt something useful and valuable in the talk, why not tell at least 3 others about it? And then point them to other resources where they can learn a lot more?

You can contribute further!

Release software

Are you a programmer? Do you build software?

Consider releasing it under a free software license - preferably a strong copyleft license like the GPLv3.

Participate

Help others discover, adopt and appreciate free software
Write or translate documentation
Write tutorials about something you’ve done or figured out
Give talks
Build a local community and free software user’s group

Support & Donate

Many volunteer free software projects accept donations today. See if the free software project you love accepts donations. Then donate to the project or to individual developers who contribute to it.
Donate to the Free Software Foundation - your contributions are the most important manner in which FSF finances its operations, pays staff salaries and continues to advocate for software freedom.
Donate to other non-profit organisations such as the Software Freedom Conservancy as a way of indirectly supporting some of the biggest free software projects they help and contribute to.

Reach out

I would personally be glad to help you in your journey to use, promote, release and support free software. Please feel free to get in touch.

Photo credit: Prof Renuka Prasad B from RV College of Engineering.

Student Projects - January 2019

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0530

Overview

Here are some free software projects that students can work on. I expect that multiple students will work on the same project but with different approaches.

Some of these project are research and documentation projects (tagged: research) while others are development and documentation projects (tagged: development).

Modalities

These projects are only meaningful if we do them in the right way. Here are some modalities for these projects if you choose to work on them with me:

The projects should only be done on a GNU/Linux operating system and without the use any proprietary software
All projects will require regular reporting so that we can review work on time and ensure that you are progressing in the right direction.
You should be ready to learn a lot - I will help you define the learning goals and the research, documentation, note-taking and outlining techniques that could be useful.
The version control system we will use is git. This will be backed by a private and self-hosted project management system, bug tracking system, CI system and wiki.
Documentation would need to be written using markdown and will also use git as a storage and collaboration backend.
You can chat with me via Matrix/Riot.im in case you need to use instant messaging. Otherwise, email and the project management system should be sufficient for discussions.
Any mobile applications that we develop for Free-Android will not depend on any proprietary software or service and will also be licensed as free software. Study the requirements for publishing software in the F-Droid repository and use that while building your software.

Web Applications

Themes for Starli

About

Shaarli is a self-hosted bookmarking tool. It helps you store your bookmarks on your own server and annotate and share them publicly (if you wish).

Why?

The default and available themes by the Shaarli community are not minimal enough!

What? & How?

We need to build two sorts of CSS themes for Shaarli:

A minimal theme - similar to the way emails are listed in a mail client
A dark theme - which uses white text on a dark background - again listing the links in a manner similar to how mails are listed in a mail client

Simple CI system for gitea

About

Gitea is a web-based git version control system.

Why?

Unlike full-blown version control systems like Gitlab, Gitea does not have an integrated Continuous Integration (CI) system. It however has support for other third-party systems such as Drone CI and others.

What?

Here is what we will do as a part of this project:

Understand how webhooks work with Gitea
Integrate a CI system with Gitea that will run a CI pipeline on every git push
Document how to integrate a CI system with Gitea
Package and release a set of Docker containers that can be deployed and shared easily

Patch for gitea to customise front page

What?

Gitea has a default front page that explains its features.

As a part of this project, we will develop a patch for Gitea that will enable a Gitea admin to replace this front-page with a statically generated website pointed to by a configuration line.

Static site hosting for gitea

What?

Make it possible to use Gitea along with a CI system to deploy static websites on git push.

Wordpress-libre development

About

Wordpress is a very popular content management system (CMS) and blogging engine.

Why?

There are multiple problems with Wordpress and its plugin ecosystem today. Primary among them is the way Javasript code is loaded and used across a website.

What?

We will modify the Wordpress source code and that of major and useful plugins to achieve the following:

All javascript and CSS should be loaded locally and not from a CDN.
All non-trivial javascript should be LibreJs compliant.
It should be possible to take stock of the licensing of all the components that affect a single Wordpress instance.

Jekyll - Rails shopping cart integration

About

Jekyll is a static site generator written in Ruby.

What?

Make it possible to integrate a static Jekyll website with a (Ruby on) Rails shopping cart engine. Specifically, we are looking at integrating the Solidus shopping cart with Jekyll.

How?

The final result should enable a developer (or user) to put in some simple Liquid tags onto any jekyll page to connect and embed a shopping cart with it.

Jekyll podcast framework

It should be trivial to use Jekyll to publish a podcast, make sure the podcast website can be viewed without using javascript, to customise the looks of the website and finally, to publish it RSS feed.

OSEM conference management system

Package and document the OSEM conference management system so that it is easy to use and effective for running the cPf for a conference related to free software.

Self-hosted audio conferencing, recording and interview system

How does one use self-hosted free software to interview someone over the Internet and also record the conversation? What if there are multiple people in an audio conference?

Setup, document and package an effective way of doing this.

Build a framework to build an embeddable email sign-up form that can work standalone or with a static website. It should be possible to code the form using a simple text based definition language and without having to write custom HTML or configure or customize a database.

Build a Jekyll-based newsletter submission system that can be used to send a newsletter to an email list by just writing and publishing a new jekyll post.

Coreboot

Skulls-derived Coreboot distribution for X220 and X200

Build, test, package, document and release a Skulls-based or like Coreboot distribution for the X220, X200 and X201 Thinkpad laptops.

Custom logo integration into coreboot

Build, test, package, document and release a set of scripts (+ docker container) to embed a custom image or graphic for use with Coreboot during the boot phase of the computer.

X200T Libreboot flashing success

The X200T uses a very different type of BIOS chip which makes it very challenging to flash coreboot onto it. Document and package the process of running Libreboot and Coreboot on the X200T laptop.

Heads integration, validation and documentation with X230

While Heads works well on the X230, documentation and packaging are required so that users can use it easily and effectively.

Chromebook Coreboot distribution

Many Intel-based chromebooks (our development efforts will revolve around falco) can run Coreboot by default. Build, package, document and release a Coreboot distribution for the falco chromebook.

Hardware Boards and IoT

Documentation for Bus Pirate v2 and v3

About

The Bus Pirate is a mult-tool that talks to electronic stuff. One great use for the Bus Pirate is to flash BIOS chips on a motherboard over the SPI bus.

What?

We need to test and release documentation that will enable anyone to use the Bus Pirate to (at least) flash BIOS chips with Coreboot.

Testing and documentation for Numato Opsis

The Numato Opsis is a HDMI2USB board that can be used to mix, capture and stream video from multiple sources.

We need to test and document simple, yet reliable ways of using the Numato Opsis to (primarily) record and stream free software events and conferences. This will take the guesswork and complexity out of using the Opsis board and it will become a default way to do such recording and streaming.

Rock64 u-boot network boot

The Rock64 SBC from Pine64 has a SPI flash which runs u-boot. This is a unique feature of this board and because of this we can get it run in a diskless manner and boot off the network.

Test, package, document and release a reliable method to boot the rock64 off the network.

vim-arduino IDE

Build a vim plugin to enable vim to act as an Arduino IDE to program microcontrollers.

vim-micropython IDE

Build a vim plugin to enable vim to act as a micropython IDE for rapid development.

Documentation for PADI

PADI is an inexpensive wireless microcontroller from Pine64. It can run FreeRTOS among other firmware.

Write documentation and examples on how to use PADI for common tasks in place of other wireless microcontrollers.

PADI with relay + RGB LED + MQTT client support

Use the PADI microcontroller to build a wifi power switch.

FreeRTOS + micropython packaging

Package a custom distribution of FreeRTOS with micropython for various microcontrollers.

FreeRTOS + esp32

Package a toolchain and development environment to run FreeRTOS on the ESP32 microcontroller.

Document proprietary software in each SBC OS distribution

The operating system images of almost all single-board computers contain proprietary software. Study the OS images of the Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Odroid, Rock64 and Nano Pi boards to document which parts of these images are proprietary software.

Application Software & Solutions

Webinar demo and documentation using openmeetings

Evaluate if it is possible to use Apache OpenMeetings for Webinars. This will ensure that people don’t have to use proprietary software for running their webinars.

Self-hosted video streaming

How do we stream a talk or lecture to the Internet using commodity hardware? Build, document and package a self-hosted solution for doing that.

Jitsi Meet is a very useful free software tool for video conferencing and desktop sharing. However, the default way it is packaged is a “demo” and it allows anyone to use it publicly.

We need to build a wrapper application around Jitsi Meet so that it can be self-hosted easily and used for video conferencing and desktop sharing securely and privately.

Telecom & VoIP

Container distribution for compiling FreePBX dependencies

Compiling and getting FreePBX to run can be very frustrating because it not only does it have complex (and many times, undocumented) dependencies but also multiple steps that have to be executed carefully.

By building a container distribution for FreePBX, we can compile wanpipe, freetdm, dahdi and freepbx in a simple and reproducible manner.

Desktop Applications

Basic web-browser using Gecko / Quantum

It should be possible to use the Firefox engine to build mini web-browsers. This project will explain, document and automate this process of build Gecko / Quantum based web-browsers.

Electron-like desktop apps using Gecko / Quantum

Similarly, desktop applications which are browser-based should NOT only be powered by Webkit or chromium. We should be able to build such frameworks and application using Gecko and Quantum as well.

Mobile Applications

Mobile application for OpenWRT

Build a free software mobile application for Free-Android that can be used to control an OpenWRT device over RPC.

Mobile application for OpenHAB & home-assistant

While both OpenHAB and Home Assistant have very easy-to-use and free software mobile applications, it would be good to build a custom application which exposes a limited set of features and makes these systems more usable.

Mobile application for MQTT native

Build a mobile application that can natively talk to a MQTT server for managing a self-hosted IoT installation.

System Software

DNSSEC with tinydns

Build documentation and package software to get tinydns to work with DNSSEC.

Git Push-based tinydns management

Build a text-based database format to version control DNS records over git and publish them via tinydns.

Extend tinydns.in management app to latest Rails and REST API

We have a rather old Rails application to manage DNS records for tinydns. It should be re-written using the latest release of Rails and so that it also exposes a REST API

Test out, package and document dovecot full text search (fts)

Dovecot is an IMAP server that can also act as a deliver agent among other things. In conjugation with a search engine, it can index a mailbox and enable full text search for it.

Build, document and package the full text search capabilities of Dovecot.

Integrate, document and package Kerberos with OpenLDAP

Integrate, document and package Kerberos so that it can be used along with Append for single sign-on in a GNU/Linux network.

OSFY - Open Journey: Software Freedom can lead to self-reliance!

Thu, 10 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0530

I thought, instead of just mentioning about the coverage, if I could offer some more details and clarification and share the experience, maybe that might be of greater value.

Open Source For You (OSFY) - January 2019 issue

Here is a link to the ToC of the Jan 2019 issue of the OSFY magazine. I will link to the actual article once it is posted on the main website - maybe in a month or so.

Please do purchase the issue if you want to read this article. If you are not able to find a copy easily, do mail me and I will find a copy and courier it to you.

Linux v/s GNU/Linux

The company is called “DeepRoot Linux” because in the year 2000 when it was setup, it seemed like an excellent hack. I think it was in 2006 when RMS asked me for the first time why it wasn’t called “DeepRoot GNU/Linux” and I explained how changing the company’s name is a very complex and costly process. I had added that apart from the name of the company, I generally use GNU/Linux to refer the operating system.

That excuse seemed sufficient for many years, until a few months back, I got asked the same question again by RMS:

Founder & hacker-in-charge, DeepRoot Linux

Why is the name “DeepRoot Linux”? That name promotes the name “Linux” at the expense of GNU.

And then I realised that nothing stops me from calling the company “DeepRoot GNU/Linux” irrespective of the company’s legal name. And so, after 18+ years, I updated the logo to indicate this oversight:

Our logo now includes "GNU" before "Linux"!

The only reason I’m reciting this story here is because the article mentions “DeepRoot Linux” and I thought it is important to explain why.

FOSS v/s Free Software v/s Open Source

If I have to talk about software that provides freedom and is distributed under licenses that provide + protect such freedoms for users and developers, I use the term “free software”.

Many people use the term “Open Source”. Or a compromise term: “Free / Open Source Software”. Or even “Free / Libre / Open Source Software”.

I feel that saying “free software” is sufficient and provides us with an occassion to explain the importance and significance of freedom in software.

Most places in the article I use the term “free software” itself. But as I read it again now, I realise that some place the article also uses “FOSS”. Right now I am very upset about this negligence on my part and how I didn’t realise this while reviewing the content on multiple occassions.

Being consistent is very important and I am sorry I was not consistent enough in my usage of my preffered term: “free software”.

Image Credits

The photo used in the article was probably taken by a student at NIT Durgapur in Feb, 2018 when I was there to an interaction with the students. Thank you - I am glad to use your photo in most places where I need to use a photo. I owe you for this!

The importance of editing

After I wrote close to 5000 words for this interview, I realised how some of the statements were very open-ended and did not serve to make any point. But I had spent too much time interating over the draft. The editorial team at EFY helped a lot and their edits were very useful.

However, I felt that maybe if I re-wrote the first 40% of the content, I could’ve written it better. At many places, it wasn’t clear enough, it didn’t have enough facts and it didn’t really make a conclusive point. :(

Thanks EFY Editorial Team!

The editorial team at EFY was very patient and helpful. Thank you Rahul, Niraj, Shweta and Aashima! An additional thanks to Rahul Chopra (Editorial Director, EFY Group) for suggesting this and supporting.

Links to resources mentioned in the article

Books

‘Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution’ by Stephen Levy (Wikipedia)
Source code, documentation and sytems written and designed by D. J. Bernstein - https://cr.yp.to
‘Coders at work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming’ by Peter Seibel (Wikipedia)

Essays

Presentations

Some pointers on why freedom matters even for students and what it means to be a hacker - https://abhas.io/students-hackers/
For those who have teaching roles in academic institutions (especially faculty members in engineering colleges), Abhas offers a roadmap on why it is important to choose free software to optimise for freedom and learning.
https://abhas.io/for-teachers
For entrepreneurs who want to consider building a business around free software
https://freesoftware.business
In this presentation (extracted from a talk at Swatantra 2017), I explain the problem of ‘black boxes’ and how we can get rid of them using free software and self-hosting. - https://abhas.io/no-black-boxes

Why should we talk even when no one is listening?

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0530

Recently, while having a discussion with a friend on how to handle a major technical issue in their college, I mentioned some collaboration opportunities that would have come up if they had chosen to use free software in the first place. When he said that “no one in the college will listen”, that got me thinking.

Do we only talk about something we consider useful if we feel that someone is listening to us? What do we loose by talking even when no one is listening to us? What if they started listening and we were not there to talk? Then that is our loss as well as theirs’!

Since we can’t know when (or whether) they are listening to us, one thing we can do is to keep talking!

Hence, if we want to talk about free software, it shouldn’t matter to us if those we are talking to don’t listen to us. I am confident that, over different points of time, different people will listen. If we can motivate ourselves to keep talking plainly, it will matter.

The next question is - how do we talk in an efficient manner? I believe recording thoughts in a publishable form is a good way to refer to them or share them later on. If we can write about whatever we want to talk about, it becomes “reproducible”. And the next time, we can re-use it to make a similar point.

So to summarize - (at least) in the context of free software, don’t stop talking just because you feel that no one is listening. They will listen sooner or later.

Advice to students for hackathons

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0530

Background

Many students participate in over-night programming events dubbed “hackathons”. Such events provide a good opportunity for students to try their hand at solving one problem over a 24 to 36 hour period. However, in a bid to provide a working solution to the problems they have chosen to work on, students often resort to using a rather unfair mix of proprietary software, framework and non-free cloud services. While this does enable them to build something “novel” very quickly (ie. in the 24 to 36 hour time period reserved for the hackathon), it does not do much in terms of challenging them or creating deeper learning opportunities.

At the same time, the rules and constraints of the hackathons themselves are very broad and generic. The organisers tend to focus more on the encouraging students to build “seemingly novel” solutions to the problems they are working on. Focus on using Free Software or GNU/Linux is completely absent as is any focus on self-hosting the software and hardware infrastructure required to build the solution. The absence of such a focus means that a valuable opportunity to convey the value of software freedom to students is lost.

In this essay, I try to examine why students make the sort of technology choices they make and how, by optimising for convenience and ease-of-use, students miss out on building better capability and appreciating issues related to online privacy and software freedom.

A student hackathon in progress at SIT Tumkur

What is a “hackathon”?

I am not sure why such programming and problem-solving contests are called “hackathons”, but they are. They are organised by engineering colleges to encourage students to solve problems and build solutions over a focused 24 to 36 hour time period. Students are required to choose a theme they would be working on and then provide an abstract of what they are trying to achieve. They then use the hackathon to actually build a working solution and demonstrate it.

The problem with “hackathons”

The focus of various hackathons is usually “vertical” in nature - ie. they focus on specific technology domains or sectors in which students can pitch their projects. These verticals, such as IoT, machine-learning, socially relevant solutions and so on don’t offer any constraints or guidelines about how the problems must be solved. Hence, students are free to choose the software, the architecture, the technology stack, the operating system and so on.

This, I feel, is the loss of a great opportunity. In my view, it is not just enough to come up with novel and innovative solutions to problems. It is not the “what” that is as important, as the “how” and “why”. (In other words, “what” problem a student chooses to solve is not as important to me, as “how” they choose to solve it and “why”, ie. their reasons for choosing to solve it.)

While the “what” part of the problem-solving might focus on selecting which problem to solve such that it could be a commendable achievement and which could be attempted in the 24 to 36 hour time slot, the “how” part of the solution would look at the issues related to the ideology, architecture, licensing, freedom, privacy and the self-hosted nature of the solution.

Hence, if I am optimising for freedom, learning and control, the “how” aspect is more important for me than the “what” aspect. The world is full of extremely novel and innovative products. But very few of them are built to respect the freedom of their users.

What is there to gain by creating more solutions that only add to the body of proprietary software, hardware and network services that already exist?

Why do students participate in a “hackathon”?

My observation is that students participate in hackathons for some or all of the following reasons:

They really care about the problems they are proposing to solve and feel that the environment of a hackathon will actually enable and motivate them to build the solution they want to build
They get credit for participating in such events and it would look good on their resumes
They seek to compete and achieve something in front of their peers
They want to test themselves to see if they can build something working in a sprint and with limited time
The prize money is something to aim for as well!

Dear student, the way I look at it, these goals above don’t provide enough long-term value to a student. It is not enough to focus on the outcomes, ie. achieving the goals of the project or showing that you are capable of building such-and-such thing. A hackathon is one of the best opportunities to learn and challenge yourself. The 24-hours that you spend with complete focus, all amenities and no distractions can help you learn a lot.

Hence, think beyond just building whatever you’ve set out to build. Aim for finishing the hackathon with a lot more insight, exposure, awareness and inspiration than what you came in with. I have some tips how can do exactly this and more.

Advice for students participating in hackathons

Dear Student,

If you are participating in an upcoming hackathon, please consider the following points. They might enable you to carve an extremely valuable learning experience out of the hackathon. Making some (or all) of these choices will only affect “how” you build your project - not what you set out to build. As a side-effect, you will have chosen a more ethical means of building a solution - one that does not force the users of that solution to sacrifice their freedom, choice, control or privacy.

Hack (verb)

Hackathon is a word derived from the verb, to hack. So if you’re participating in a hackathon, the first choice you could make is to hack. A hacker hacks. You are participating in a hackathon - imbibe the spirit of the hacker ethic in your work.

Who is a “hacker”?

Hacker: noun

A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary

A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.

One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.

What is the “hacker ethic”?

As Stephen Levy summarized in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

Hackers are doers.

They care about doing things.

They care about access & freedom of information, and improvement to quality of life.

If you can understand the hacker ethic and how it has influenced the free software movement, you will be able to understand and adopt the same values into your work and life.

Can you use the hackathon as an opportunity to examine, understand, validate and adopt the hacker ethic?

Don’t focus on convenience!

This advice might seem absurd at first. But let me explain.

While observing the choices that students make during hackathons, I concluded that most of the choices are aimed at cutting down on the amount of work that they need to do. This is a strange choice! Why would you, as a student, want to save work for yourself? Doesn’t doing something enable you to understand it better? By eliminating the need to do even very simple and basic things, are you also not forgoing the opportunity to learn so much?

For example, at a hackathon I observed that almost 90% of the students chose to use a cloud-hosted and proprietary database software called “Firebase” for their database needs! When queried about the reasons, they pointed out how simple it was to program it from a mobile application or a web application alike. They did not consider the fact that they were forcing their users’ data to be stored on “somebody else’s computer” (ie. the cloud) and the software that was being used to store this data (ie. the firebase database) was proprietary and out of their control.

The other 10% of the students used MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB and SQLite for their database needs and went about setting up and maintaining these databases by themselves.

Focus on “doing things yourself”

The problem here is simply that of an excessive focus on “convenience”. Using firebase, for example, might be extremely simple and maybe you integrate it into your project quickly. But what is it that you learn by using it? How to consume an API to use proprietary software to store simple data?

Think again. Are you participating in the hackathon to have convenience? Are you going to stay awake for 20 hours (or more) at a stretch just so that you can take such short-cuts?

When you do things yourself, you learn so much more and you have so much more in your control. Plus you don’t impose your choice of using proprietary software onto your users.

Choose self-hosting

The corollary to rejecting convenience is to choose self-hosting. You choose self-hosting when you build and maintain all aspects of your project yourself. You host these “aspects” on your own hardware - laptops, single-board computers, micro-controllers, servers, virtual machines etc.

Choosing to self-host is a required condition to choosing free software to power your project. If you can not self-host a tool, how do you know if that tool is free/open source software?

What can you self-host?

There is always a way to host everything you need yourself. It could be that you are not aware of such tools or ways of doing things. Can you use the hackathon to discover ways of self-hosting everything?

You should be able to be build everything you need and hence, control whatever you have. This includes databases, network services (DNS, DHCP, email, NTP etc), file services (object storage, block storage, shared file-systems), application servers, containers, virtual machines, time-series databases, monitoring systems, wireless networks and so much more.

Self-hosting in the context of IoT

Usually, an IoT solution consists of the following “layers”. You should have complete control on all these aspects of your solution. The reason I single out IoT here is because I feel that there is not enough information out there about how one can build 100% of one’s network, cloud-backend and firmware infrastructure using Free and Open Source Software exclusively.

Consider the following points:

Your hardware and physical setup

This includes your micro-controllers, single-board computers, circuits, PCBs, serial and network cabling etc.

Choose your hardware such that you retain the freedom and flexibility you require to build your project.
Firmware, programs, source code, network connectivity

Any hardware you choose should offer two basic freedoms to you:
- (a) The freedom to program the hardware using GNU/Linux
- (b) The freedom to compile and execute your programs using a compiler or interpreter licensed under a Free/Open Source Software license
Choose your networking setup such that:
- (a) you can run the wireless and wired network using your own access point to aid control and debugging (extra points for you if you can run this access point using a free software operating system such an OpenWRT or LibreCMC)
- (b) you don’t have to blame someone else when your program does not work
Metrics storage, analysis and alerts

Often tutorials or books that talk about IoT introduce and use proprietary software hosted on the public cloud to storage sensor data and metrics. Functions related to analysis and alerts, then, are also handled by the same set of proprietary software running on the cloud.

Instead of this, can you choose to use Free Software tools such as InfluxDB, Prometheus and OpenHAB to store your sensor data? Can you use a simple instance of Grafana to graph and analyse this data? Can you send out alerts and detect anomalies using the various features offered by the tools mentioned above?

These are very capable, comprehensive and easy-to-use tools. Don’t choose to use proprietary software just because that is all that you are aware of. At any juncture when you have to make a choice of what software to use for a purpose, search and evaluate how you can do it yourself using free software tools.
Remote access and control

Most IoT solutions that connect to a network (wired or wireless) need the ability to remotely access and control the device. Often, the simplest way of doing this is to use protocols such as MQTT. The significant value-add that is provided by cloud-hosted IoT backends is an effortless way to use MQTT.

However, if you spent some time understanding how MQTT works, you could do the entire setup yourself. Using tools such as OpenHAB or Home Assistant, you can get ease-of-use while still being able to use free/open source software and self-hosting it on a single-board computer (eg. Raspberry Pi) or your laptop.

Can you optimise for learning, instead of delivery?

In my view, the reason students take so many short-cuts during hackathons is because they are optimising to deliver what they have committed on as the deliverable for their project. There is nothing wrong in focusing on this - however, if this focus forces you to take short-cuts and does not create enough learning opportunities for you, then you are not capturing enough value from the hackathon!

Instead, my advice is to focus on learning. Whatever you do as a part of building your project, evaluate how not doing what something “conventionally” can provide greater learning opportunities to you. Often this learning will emerge because you use to self-host a Free Software tool for your project or because you choose to do something yourself.

By focusing on learning, there is a good chance that you will be proud of your achievement at the end of the hackathon. And this still does not change your ability to actually deliver on your intended goal - it might just change the way you deliver it.

Use a Free Operating System!

I would have thought that in 2018 it would be obvious that students (and developers) would use GNU/Linux. But my observations suggest the contrary.

When all aspects of your work are actually free software tools, why run them on a proprietary and non-free operating system? Programming languages such as Python, Ruby and NodeJS are all licensed under various free software licenses. Databases that you use, such as MongoDB, SQLite, MariaDB/MySQL and PostgresQL are also free software tools. Your programming IDEs such as vim, Atom or even the Arduino IDE are all licensed and available under free software licenses to you. Arduino libraries and MicroPython (to name a few of the embedded IoT toolkits) are also free software.

There is a lot more value to derive from these when you run them on GNU/Linux. While almost all of them are cross-platform and can run easily on Windows or macOS, I don’t see how doing that provides your a better learning opportunity or an opportunity to get better at doing whatever you’re doing.

So use Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu or Fedora on your laptops and run all the tools that you require seamlessly. No need to use virtual machines to run GNU/Linux just because you want to use Docker to run something in a container.

Can you choose to build free software?

While it might be too early to think about releasing and sharing your software publicly, I would actively encourage you to do that. Doing this is not only an ethical choice to make, but also provides unprecedented learning opportunities.

If you need help to figure out how you can release your project under a Free Software license and which license you should choose, I would be glad to help you out.

Choose free-software on the cloud, not software-as-a-service

This is another way of talking about a point I made earlier. Consuming and using software offered as a service (eg. database as a service, MQTT as a service, analytics as a service etc.) is a covert way to use proprietary software. Most of the times the software that is used to power such services is not available to you to study, setup, modify or self-host. Additionally, your data is stored on (and locked-in to) such software-as-a-service offerings and once you use them for some time, it might be difficult or impossible to leave the platform and choose something else.

When you have to use software that does not run on your computer (ie. software which is hosted on the “cloud”), ensure that it is free software. This will give you the freedom and choice that you need in future. Don’t choose to use a software-as-a-service offering just because it is accessible, popular, free-of-charge or convenient. Making these choices neither offers learning opportunities to you, nor freedom, privacy and control.

Don’t make short-term choices that will remain with you in the long run.

Reject APIs that deliver convenience at the cost of control and freedom

Using APIs that are backed by proprietary software offered as a service is another way you compromise on your freedom and learning opportunity. Often an API is just an easy way to do something that requires no setup and gets you “productive quickly” and by doing “lesser work”.

Thing about this: Is it essential to use an API to build whatever you’re building? Can you do 2% more work and eliminate the API? Can you self-host a tool and use the API on a network and with software that you have complete control on?

How about substituting the API with a protocol? Eg. A popular way to send an email is to use a web API offered by a service provider. Instead of using a proprietary API, can you build a SMTP server on your own to achieve the same goal? It would be a wonderful excuse to learn how to setup mail services!

APIs are conveniences that can cost us our freedom if we are not careful and vigilant. Don’t make these choices now to deliver something quickly which might limit what you can do in the future.

Take the hard way!

Convenience does not facilitate learning, it eliminates it. You should optimise for learning. You should welcome problems and challenges because they present a learning opportunity to you.

“There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.”

Richard Bach, “Illusions”

Take the hard way. Don’t avoid problems because you perceive them to be difficult and an impediment in achieving whatever you’ve set out to. Problems that we face when we build something are essential to helping us learn and become more effective at what we do. All problems - technical, personal, time-management, collaboration etc - are just indicators of what more we need to learn.

When you eliminate the problem, you also eliminate the possible lesson associated with solving it. Is that why you are participating in a hackathon?

The “gift” of a problem is the learning and capability that emerges from attempting to solve it. The problem is not permanent, the learning is.

Keep a work diary

Maintain a simple “work diary” to record what you need to work on, what problems you faced, solutions you considered when trying to solve the problem and finally, how you solved it. Use this diary to also note down questions that came to your mind but which you could not answer conclusively right then. If you take an inventory of such questions, challenges and problems, you can re-visit them again after the hackathon and continue your learning and study.

Maintaining a work diary is also a good way to reflect upon what you did. It is not always possible to recollect how we did something or why. A diary would be a good way to record these things while we are doing them and while they are fresh in our minds.

Later, you can use this diary to publish an article or a blog-post about “how you built X”!

Get in touch!

I am always reachable via email: abhas@deeproot.in. Please feel free to write to me in case I can add value to your work or help you become more effective in creating learning opportunities.

All the best if you’re participating in a hackathon in the near future and I hope that you find the advice above useful and actionable.

Why "Open Source" still misses the point!

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0530

Background

It is disheartening to see well-meaning people using the term “open source” for just about everything. In my view, the term “open source” carries no meaning anymore. Not only does it miss the point and essence of why software freedom matters (and is the real concern) but it creates so much ambiguity and confusion that very few people really know what “open source” really means. I wish we could all stop using it unless we could use it to mean what it should.

Many years back, FSF published an essay called “Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software”. It is an extremely detailed explanation of what’s wrong. I intend to illustrate how that discussion is even more relevant now, than ever.

What does “Open Source” really mean?

Here is what I found when I searched the website of TED for the term “open source”:

Multiple types of topics and content are tagged as “open-source” even when it has no relevance to that concept. What I’m trying to illustrate with this simple example is that people tend to use the term “open source” to refer to “sharing information”, “access to education”, “collaboration”, “personalised biology”, “access to information”, “governance”, “collaborative security” and more.

The term “Open Source” as defined by the Open Source Initiative has a specific meaning and is qualified by the terms of the Open Source Definition. These terms are very clear and they provide a framework that can tell us if something is “open source” or not. If everyone used the term “open source” to imply what the OSD spells out, there wouldn’t be too many “transmission losses”. But the unfortunate truth is that the “marketing effort for Free Software” has grown into a complete misappropiation of the very values, goals and intents of both the Free Software and Open Source Software movements.

How “Open Source” was born and where it got us!

Over the past 20 years of the Open Source Initiative, they have succeeded massively in popularising the term “open source”. Initially it was probably used in the same context as the Open Source Definition. But over time, it came to mean many other things. And maybe, this happenned because people thought that the term “open source” was a loose approximation of whatever they were trying to convery.

Motivation behind “open source” …

The motivation behind coming up with the term “open source” was that the de facto and accepted term, “free software”, was considered ambiguous and unacceptable to “corporate types”. In 1998, this “marketing effort” was a clever ploy to get a greater diversity of people to consider the option of free software.

However, over the next few years after it was released, the term “open source” came be to be known for its “development and collaboration model” than for software freedom. What gained precedence was the “open” nature of things - an “open community”, “open / public discussions and communication”, “open documentation”, “over-the-internet and open collaboration” etc. Amidst all this noise, the essence of software freedom got further diluted as “over-zealous pragmatism” took over. (I call it “over-zealous pragmatism” because it was considered okay to compromise on the value that free software offered if it made it easier to sell someone the concept of “open source”.)

… and where it got us!

In hindsight, I feel this has only proved to be counter-productive. As other communities and initiaves have picked up this word play on the word “open”, the term “open source” has lost complete connection to its roots. This is why I said that the term “open source” doesn’t really mean anything specific anymore. Not only does it mean different things to different people, but it doesn’t even mean anything specific to the one who’s using that term. Each person who uses the term “open source” to describe something other than what is defined in the Open Source Definition, is doing so because somehow this loose approximation suits their purpose and lets them imply “something”.

Finally, it only results in “a whole sort of general mish-mash”. Imagine a world where no word has any specific meaning, or where the meaning of many words have lost their literal and technical meaning. Isn’t this what Orwell cautioned us about when he described Newspeak in 1984?

We should stop using the term “Open Source” altogether!

It would have been okay if those who choose to use the term “open source” used it in a manner defined by the Open Source Definition and to refer to free/open source software in particular. The problem arises when there are unintended and damaging consequences to how people use it.

At the same time, if you understand the wide-ranging and damaging side-effects of using the word “open source” when referring to “free software”, then why not use the term “free software” and use the opportunity you have to explain the value and essence of software freedom too.

“Open Source Innovation”?

Consider what the phrase “open source innovation” might mean. Does it refer to “innovation” who’s output is work licensed under the terms of the Open Source Definition? Or does it refer to a “collaborative method of problem solving” which might or might not yield a truly “open source artifact” (software, hardware, writing, music etc.). If that were the intention, then why not use a more accurate phrase itself? Why borrow a well-defined and narrow term for an unrelated usage? Either the understanding about what “open source” really means is flawed. Or the intentional misuse is a trick.

“Open Source Ideas”?

Similarly, consider the phrase “open source ideas”. It is a complete misnomer. The very basis of the Open Source Definition (and of the free software definition) is the Copyright Law. Copyrights cover “expression of ideas” - software, music, writing etc are all considered expressions and hence, are covered by copyrights. Patents, on the other hand, protect inventions. (In most jurisdictions, even India, it is not possible to patent software because software is equated to mathematics and not considered an “invention”.)

But ideas are neither concrete expressions nor are they inventions. Hence, if neither the copyright or patent law is applicable to an idea, what does the term “open source idea” really mean? Does it mean that if you have an idea, you share it widely and openly within a community while retaining the right to be identified as its originator? If that is the intention, then I am sure it is possible to come up with an alternate name. Just sharing something “openly” does not make it “open source”.

“Open Source” is a damaging term

The usage illustrated above not just dilutes the term “open source”, but also extends its scope and purpose - all without the permission of the Open Source Initiative which actually owns a trademark on the term “open source”. In that sense, it is very damaging to the “open source movement” and the people involved in it.

It is also damaging because it dilutes and eliminates all discussion about software freedom - without which it is difficult to imagine how or why the free/open source software movement would be relevant.

Free, Libre, Open Source Software (FLOSS) is a good compromise term

I would definitely recommend that we avoid using the term “open source” for completely unrelated topics. Instead, it will benefit us to find better and more accurate terms and maybe, in the long run, “open source” can regain its value and actually mean something.

A good compromise term is FLOSS which stands for Free / Libre / Open Source Source Software and tries to bring the conversation and focus back to freedom. You might then ask a more basic question - why is it important to care about or focus on software freedom at all? I attempt to answer that next.

At the same time, since the “open source” is so misused and misunderstood, should we even it in places where its meaning might actually be clear?

“You should say what you mean!”

March Hare: you should say what you mean...
From Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Let me conclude by quoting a passage from “Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll. March Hare has a bit of wise advice for us. If we are capable of being accurate about what we are trying to say, then why wouldn’t we say what we mean? Why be ambiguous when it is so easy to be accurate?

Personalising your involvement with Free Software

Sat, 29 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0530

Background

Dr Richard Stallman (RMS), founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, would be visiting India in January 2019. How do we make his visit to India more meaningful? How do we take this opportunity to generate activity around concepts of Software Freedom? What can you do as an individual or school or college or company? How could culminate into a deliverable three months hence? How could whatever effort you you put in help you a life-long user, developer and supporter of Free Software?

Or if you already care about software freedom, how could you create a track of vibrant activity that could evolve into a long term festival of free software? How could you get everyone around you to appreciate free software or contribute to the movement in a meaningful manner?

The Problem

While there is a lot of general awareness about technology and the “open source nature” of Free Software, awareness about software freedom, the ideology and philosophy of the free software movement is not common place. If one considers the major problems that rob us of our essential freedoms in technology, the challenge (in terms of developing ethical and useful technology) is actually very high.

How can we create greater sensitivity about software freedom issues?

We can enable more people to appreciate the problem of free software (and have greater sensitivity to software freedom issues) by explaining and illustrating what happens when we don’t choose or build hardware or software by mindfully considering its impact on our freedom. A very good way to do so is assimilating these values into our own dealings so that not only can we help others but others can look up to us for help and guidance.

Once a person can understand this impact, they can also find ways of making different choices. Buying and owning this problem is a sustainable way to solving it in the long run.

How can we get started?

Let us start by reviewing and auditing our own software usage and reflecting on how we can choose Free Software in places where we don’t. Let’s start by being a user.

As Users: Review and audit software usage

To start with, you could review and audit all the software and technology that you use (personally, in the labs, in teaching, in our communities, in the institute, at work etc.) and then check which of them provide (and preserve) software freedom and which don’t. Also rate each of these things that we use on whether apart from being proprietary software, they also make us participants in the “social media / tracking” ecosystem.

As Users: Defective by Design - DRM-encrypted content

Review your use of DRM-encrypted content - books, videos, music, games etc. To understand the dangers of DRM, the following website is an exhaustive resource:

https://www.defectivebydesign.org/

Make a plan by which you can minimize or eliminate DRM-encrypted content from your life.

As Users: Use / review free software operating system practices

Use a truly free operating system - eliminate proprietary software and proprietary binary drivers from your GNU/Linux operating system. Its not an easy thing to do especially when it means that we need to change the hardware we use.

The thing to understand is that our laptop or desktop computer could have hardware components that can not be used without non-free drivers or binary-only (proprietary) firmware. If you list out such instances, then it would be possible to figure out how they could be eliminated.

Using FSF-endorsed GNU/Linux distributions like PureOS is a good way to determine if you have have been using proprietary software unconsciously on your computer.

As Users: Use / promote privacy respecting hardware

The X200 laptop is one of the most affordable and truly free laptops - it run a free software BIOS (LibreBoot), it run Debian Main (no non-free software or drivers) and it can use an Atheros wireless-card which works without proprietary firmware. FSF endorses this computing platform as a RYF (respects your freedom) hardware:

https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom

The idea behind such a certification is not to promote the use of old, outdated or limiting hardware. The idea is to provide a reference for how to build hardware that can respect your freedom. Using such hardware can give us some insight into some aspects of how to support free software.

As Technical People: Propose Free Software replacements

Make a list of free software, self-hosted and federated replacements for every piece of software that you use. Today there is more hardware with software in it. For example, if you are able to switch on a light using your mobile phone, then the “smart plug” also has software in it and if we can’t access its source code or re-compile or modify or share it, then it is not free software.

Hence, when you make a list of what proprietary software we might be using, we should also include such things and then seek free software replacements for the same. Its alright even if we can’t come up with competent free software replacements - in that case it becomes an important and challenging project to undertake and work on in the next few years.

As Technical People: Create resources to support adoption

Build documentation and training videos on how to use these common and already available free sofware solutions. Offer support to others who might be ready to start using these tools right away.

As Developers: The JavaScript Trap

Read the following web-pages:

The first link above is an essay that outlines how we run proprietary software on our computers (often unknowingly and without our consent) when we agree to let a websites or web-application run complex javascript in the web-browser.

Next, here is what we can do:

Review how using the librejs plugin changes your Internet usage experience. This will give us an example of how much proprietary javascript we might be running on our computers.
If you are web-developer, consider your usage of complex javascript, how you’re packaging it and how you might be forcing your users to use proprietary software. To fix this problem, read the LibreJS manual and follow its guidelines for compliance.
Aim for LibreJS compliance in whichever software or websites you develop. That will ensure that as more and more people choose to eliminate proprietary javascript from their Internet experience, they will welcome and appreciate your work and efforts.

As Developers: Contribute to FSF high-priority Projects

Review the following list of high priority free sofware projects published by the FSF:

https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/

Understand the importance of these projects and why they are high-priority and long term projects and worth working on. Next, choose one (or two or as many) of these projects and suggest what you want to do to contribute to them. Then build a plan and get started.

As Developers: Volunteer Vacanies in GNU Projects

Check this list of volunteer vacancies with various GNU projects:

https://savannah.gnu.org/people/?type_id=1

It might be a good idea to volunteer to one of them.

As Writers: Translations

An important aspect of spreading the message of free software is also to do it in other languages. Knowledge of English need not be essential to participating in a free software project or for choosing software freedom.

Consider this posting:

https://savannah.gnu.org/people/viewjob.php?group_id=1533&job_id=655

It says:

In spite of Hindi being one of our priority languages, we have never had a single page translated in that language.

In order to do this job, you need a perfect understanding of the philosophy behind the GNU project, a good command of Hindi and a decent knowledge of English.

This posting has been open since 2015. There may be many such ones on the gnu.org website and elsewhere. I think a part of the gnu.org and fsf.org websites are translated into Hindi but that effort is not complete. We could translate the gnu.org website into Hindi, Bengali, Kannada and other languages.

As Writers: Free Software, Free Society - Essays by RMS

This is a set of essays by RMS called “Free Software, Free Society”:

Printed copy: https://shop.fsf.org/books-docs/free-software-free-society-selected-essays-richard-m-stallman-3rd-edition
Digital copy: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf

It might be a great idea to translate these into various Indian languages and launch it during an event with RMS.

There could many such localisation opportunities that we can pursue.

A three-month long hackathon!

Pursuing one or some of these exercises would be a great idea for a three-month long hackathon. It would be valuable to write about our experience so that it can serve as a guide for others.

What do you do when things are going well?

Sun, 20 May 2018 00:00:00 +0530

Background

Here is what I have been thinking about a lot recently: There is a huge gap between our thought process when things are going well versus when things are bad. My observation is that we don’t put in enough effort to build skills or acquire tools when things are going well… and when things are bad, we desperately crave for these same tools that we didn’t spend time acquiring. Let me explain…

Over the past two months, I have seen repeated examples of crises that have stemmed from, what I now regard as, a neglect to being prepared. I have also observed that we usually don’t spend enough effort building our competency and polishing our tools during times of peace.

What questions do you ask when you are unprepared to handle a situation?

When faced with a dire situation where I feel I am unable to cope or figure out a solution, a question I ask myself is: “What skills, knowledge, tools or awareness do I wish I had that would’ve helped me cope with the current situation better”? The problem is, even when I arrive at an answer to the above question, I am not in a position to use that answer right away. It takes time and peace and patience and practise to learn something and to acquire new tools and when I’m in the middle of a tough situation, that is hardly the time to put in effort to prepare.

If now now, then, when is the next best time to invest energy into learning? The next moment you have some peace - no matter how temporary. I really can’t stress how important this is. I feel very sad when I observe people struggle with coping up and figuring out what to do, but who won’t put in the effort to bring about some change in the way they view or do thing or feel about them. There are no instant solutions and most learning takes time and effort and that can’t be put in overnight.

Hence, if we are only motivated to put effort into learning, or expanding our thoughts and horizons when things go bad, then we will never be prepared! We will always struggle to cope. We will not learn new lessons. We will not make new mistakes. We will not be able to avoid repeating past mistakes.

Whether its your website that got cracked or server which went down or friend who let you down or customer who did something unfair… there is still something we can do about each of these situations. While the situation (and the outcome) itself might not be of our choosing or in our control, how we treat it, learn from it, handle it or feel about it is completely our choice.

And so the tools and skills that I’m talking about are not just those specific things that we can do to pre-empt situations and avoid failures. I am also talking about learning that enables us to handle unforeseen and undesirable outcomes in a graceful manner that might enable us to have more tranquillity in our lives.

The next time you have peace in your life…

So the next time, you have a some peace in your life when you are not fire fighting or handling a failure or a challenge, think about the last 3 difficult situations where you wish you had the ability and tools to handle it better (based on your own assessment of “better” - no one else’s). And then do whatever it takes to build those skills, acquire those tools and absorb the learning.

How?

Discover / read essays and books, listen to podcasts and talk shows, expose yourself to contrasting views that provoke you to think and make decisions and judgements for yourself. None of these will require you to take permission from anyone else. None of these are expensive or require you to be somewhere you can’t be. Most of these options don’t involve depending on others. Hence, they are simple to get started with.

There are no right ways to doing anything. There is no universal prescription or formula that I or anyone else can give you that will work in every situation. The sad thing will be if we are not able to / ready to invest into our own well-being and take charge of how we feel about something or deal with something.

Conversely, it would be wonderful to have a feeling of greater control. It would be wonderful to feel equipped to handle seemingly tough situations with poise. It would be quite an achievement if we can realise how we can invest into our own personal, technical and spiritual growth all the time.

Self-Hosted Email Newsletters

Thu, 03 May 2018 09:12:15 +0530

Recently, at DeepRoot Linux, we started a newsletter that we send to our past and present customers, ie. a select group of people we have worked with and who have contributed to our business. Listed here are the choices that I made to design and send this newsletter and steps that you can follow to do so yourself.

There are many ways of doing this right and of ensuring that an email you send will reach users’ mailboxes. However, I wanted to ensure that we don’t use a hosted service and that every component of the newsletter delivery process is setup using Free Software and is controlled by us. This an excellent way to demonstrate that self-hosted services are not just possible, but also preferrable. And that we shouldn’t choose a hosted service by default.

Anyone faced with the problem of sending out an email newsletter is faced with the following challenges:

A: Subscriber management

Any email newsletter activity starts with this import decision of whom to address the emails to. Think about the following questions:

How and where does one store the list of recipients?
What attributes does one store for each subscriber?
How does one allow recipients of the email list to unsubscribe themselves?
How does one use a subscriber’s attribute to limit who to send emails to?

B: Building content

Once the audience has been identified, the next major decision is, of course, the content of the emails. We need to ask ourselves the following questions while building content:

Should the email content be formatted as HTML or plain text? Or both?
If HTML is used, should the images be linked to the email from a remote server? Or should they be attached?
What should be the ideal size of the mailer?
Should we use a visual tool to create the email content and layout? Or should we build it using plain HTML?
How do we test what the content will look like on various email services, mail clients and devices? How do we ensure that the email is responsive?

All of these are very important questions to answer. Unless the content is easy to read and follow and looks good and is clear, it might not create the intended outcome.

C: Send emails & Ensuring Deliverability

The next big question is how to send the emails out:

Should we use our regular mail server? Or a separate email service?
If we use our regular mail server and the newsletter / mailer volume is high, will it affect the speed and deliverability of regular emails? What if the regular mail server limits how many emails we can send out in a day?
How do we predict that, once sent out, the emails will reach the users’ Inbox?
How much are we willing to spend to ensure the deliverability of these emails?

D: Tracking and Analytics

Is it possible to know when (or if) people see your emails? Or click the links inside it? Getting details of whether emails were delivered (or bounced), how many recipients opened them and which links (if any) they clicked on is important to guage the success of the email campaign.

How do people usually solve this “problem”?

The most common and popular method of solving the problems above is use a hosted email service to send out the newsletter. A hosted service solves all the problems listed above without bothering you with how they are solved. Choosing a hosted service, is hence, a very low hanging fruit which helps one to get started quickly. Specifically, a hosted service provides the following:

A way to manage the recipient subscriber database
A method to embed a subscription box on your blog or webpage
Free (and paid) email templates that you can use to write your content
Email delivery infrastructure that does its best to ensure delivery of emails to recipients
Extensive reporting and analytics features that enable you to guage the reach and success of your email campaign

Why self-hosting?

As with using any hosted service, there are, however, some downsides of hosted services as well:

You need to share your email database with a third-party
You don’t have control over your own email subscriber database
The service (most probably) uses proprietary software to help you compose and deliver emails to the users’ mailboxes
The email bounces go to the service provider (and not to your email address)
Since it is a hosted (and paid) service, there is an automatic lock-in - since you use their software and infrastructure to build and store your email subscriber databse, you have to keep using their service unless you are ready to export it out for use elsewhere.
The open and click tracking information also goes to the hosted service provider and usually such reports are difficult (even impossible) to export when you shift service providers.

From my perspective, the single thing that pricks the most is the fact that I would be forced to use proprietary software to handle all aspects of the workflow. Having built mail servers for more than 18 years now, its somewhat of an embarassment to use a hosted service to send out our company’s email newsletter!

Hence, a self-hosted newsletter delivery process is what I chose. Making this choice also enables me to write about it and help others to adopt a similar workflow as well.

The “solution” and the process

Here are the components that I deployed to build and send the email newsletter.

A mail server that does its best to deliver emails

Of course, we already had a mail server. And it worked real well. For a few years now, we have had to use one of our colocated cloud servers to relay our emails out since most of the IP addresses that broadband ISPs give us don’t have good reputations. Plus, just having a nice, clean and well-behaved IP address is not enough these days to ensure that your email will reach its recipient’s Inbox. One needs to do a variety of exercises to encourage large email providers to accept the email. These include:

Having a proper reverse-DNS (PTR) record for the outgoing IP of the mail server. (And if the reverse-DNS record matches the forward-lookup, nothing like it!)
Publishing SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records via DNS that declare the conclusive and exhaustive list of IPs and sources from where you intend to send emails
Digitally signing¹ emails using a technique called DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail).

While not exhaustive and conclusive in themselves, these three techniques build up the reputation of the IP and domain sending emails and that, over time, improves the delivery of emails.

We use a combination of qmail and Haraka to send out, receive and deliver emails. The Haraka SMTP server takes care of adding DKIM signatures to outgoing emails apart from scanning incoming emails for spam and virus. Our instance of Haraka is hosted on a VM at the Digital Ocean data center in Bangalore.

A subscriber management system

The subscriber management system is the user-interface for all newsletter-related activities. We use Mailtrain to manage the email recipient database and send out the mailers. We import our email contacts via CSV files into separate “email lists” in Mailtrain.

Using Mailtrain required us to do two things:

Setup and secure a server on which Mailtrain would be hosted, and
Configure and run the Mailtrain service on this server

This is an inevitable part of self-hosting. Making the choice to self-host also implies putting in effort to setup, configure and maintain the corresponding services (Haraka and Mailtrain, in our case here). I don’t consider this an overhead - Once you setup the services properly, they will just run.

Mailtrain also has many advanced features wherein it can handle bounces, filter email lists for non-existant email IDs (via domain verification), send out email campaigns based on certain triggers (like a blog post being published) and much more.

An email template and Content

Another thing that Mailtrain excels at is the ability to build email templates with ease. It includes a three different visual HTML builders: Mosaico, GrapeJS and Summernote. Apart from these, you can also upload your custom HTML code or text.

I started to use the visual editors to build the email template. Mosaico is good and has a lot of components and blocks that be inserted. However, after much experimentation with all the email template builders, I decided to instead build the email template using simple HTML.

To do this, I used a HTML template that was licensed under a Free Software license. This template looked good and had clean HTML that I was able to modify easily. The template also included default CSS code to provide a consistent and responsive layout across devices and mail clients.

The newsletter included a text part as well. The intention was that those who choose to read the text version of emails or use a text-only mail client should still be able to read and appreciate the content of the newsletter. Once the HTML template was designed and the content was ready, I opened the HTML file with lynx (a command-line browser) and saved the output as a text file. I then cleaned this up added it in the text part of Mailtrain’s template.

Handling Images

The most common way of linking images from an email newsletter is to load them off a remote server. The advantage of doing this is that it lowers the size of an email while still enabling it to look good. However, it imposes a further constraint on the recipeint, namely: the recipient’s mail client should be configured to load images from the Internet.

As a protection against spam emails and email tracking, most mail clients and service providers don’t look images from a remote server by default. They will generally show you a warning to this effect - so that you are aware of the fact that the mail client noticed that the email had images linked from a remote server, and as per the mail client’s security policy it was not displaying the image.

So now, the problem is this: how do you make your email newsletter look good without loading images off a remote server? The answer is: attach the images! This can greatly increase the size of an email and hence, multiple precautions need to be taken to keep the sizes low.

The only image I wanted to include and display in the newsletter was our logo. And so I came up with a hack: Instead of attaching the image, I encoded it using the base64 algorithm and embedded this base64-encoded file into the HTML source itself. This technique ensured that the logo would show up even in cases where a mail client was not configured to load images off the Internet.

Sending Emails

Finally, the emails were sent out using the “Campaigns” feature of Mailtrain. Mailtrain has a feature by which it can embed custom, personalised text and URLs into each email it sends out. These can be used to greet a recipient personally and include a custom and direct unsubscribe link. When you create a campaign, you specify the “email list” and “email template”. Running the campaign just sends the email template (after variable substitution) to the email recipients one-by-one.

Mailtrain tries to throttle its email sending. It tries to make sure that it does not send too many emails to too many people in a very short period of time. If it did so, it might look like an act of a spammer!

Tracking opens and clicks

Lastly, Mailtrain tracks email opens and clicks using a simple technique:

Email email is embedded with a unique 1-pixel image. Whenever someone who reads the email loads this image, an “open” is recorded. (Of course, for this to work, the recipient’s mail client has to support loading images off the Internet.)
Each link in the email is uniquely encoded to first go to Mailtrain and then get redirected to the actual link.

This way, it is possible to know how many people opened your email and which links they clicked on.

Summary

As you can see, it is not difficult to setup a toolchain and process to send out email newsletters. It is also possible to do so without using proprietary software and hosted services.

When your outgoing mail server signs an email this way, it computes a hash using specific parts of the email body + headers and then signs the hash using the private key corresponding to the sending domain.

The recipient’s server extracts this information from the headers, queries the domain’s public key as published via DNS and then tries to cryptographically verify if the two match. Apart from being used to calculate the sender’s reputation, this method is also used to confirm that the message has not been modified in transit. ↩

Public DNS servers and Privacy

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 10:30:05 +0530

Recently, CloudFare launched a public DNS service that they position as a “privacy-first Consumer DNS service”. And that got me thinking about how much information and data we are leaking through DNS queries and what that does to our privacy.

What are DNS resolvers?

DNS resolvers are network services that convert domain names into IP addresses. When you visit a website or send an email, all these applications need to map the name you use to its corresponding IP address. The operating system hands over this job to a DNS resolver which in turn uses other DNS servers to help do this mapping as quickly as possible.

In most home network settings, the DNS resolver is usually provided by the Internet Service Provider. Your phone or laptop or any other network device at home will use this ISP DNS resolver to map names to IP addresses. Most organisational networks have local resolvers that then contact ISP or public DNS servers on the Internet.

In all cases, another function that DNS resolvers perform is that of caching the DNS name to IP mapping. By doing this, it can respond to DNS queries faster the next time the same resolution is requested by a machine on the network.

Self-hosted DNS Resolvers

One of the earliest things I did (as did many other people) was to host the DNS resolver locally on a network. In fact, for many years, I used to run a DNS resolver on my own laptop and used it to resolve (and cache) names to IP mappings locally. I also always ran a DNS resolver on the network (in our office, for example) for use by other network clients.

The primary reason for doing this was to control the process of DNS resolution and also place this resolver very close to the user to provide the best possible DNS resolution and caching performance. Another reason was that ISP DNS servers were not always reliable and could also perform badly under load. Additionally, if there were a lot of machines on the local network, then sending all this traffic over to the ISP would actually add a delay to the DNS resolution process (and hence to the users’ Internet usage experience).

The DNS resolver that we used to setup (and still do in so many cases) is called dnscache. Written by Dan Bernstein, it is extremely secure, simple, lightweight yet powerful toolset that do almost everything related to DNS serving and resolution.

Using Google DNS

Sometime in 2009, Google launched a public DNS service called Google Public DNS. Their idea was to offer a fast, reliable and secure DNS service that all sorts of consumers could use for DNS resolution. Hence, if users chose to use Google Public DNS, then they wouldn’t have to setup a local DNS or use their ISP’s. All DNS requests would go to Google’s servers and Google would route the requests from the user to a resolver/cache closest to the user.

According to Wikipedia, Google Public DNS is one of the most widely used and popular DNS server on the Internet handling billions of requests each day from all over the world.

The reason people started to use Google DNS (in my opinion) is that it was an easy to remember IP address (8.8.8.8), it worked reliably from all ISPs and most importantly, they no longer needed to setup and maintain an DNS server of their own anymore. In other words, it delivered a significant convenience over existing methods of running or configuring a DNS resolver. Since Google setup their DNS servers all over the world, as a part of their “Google Edge Network” (essentially a Content Delivery Network - CDN), these servers responded really fast and there was not much loss of latency from using a DNS resolver/cache on the local network.

Today the use of Google Public DNS has really proliferated. So much so that most people are not even mindful of the possibility of running their own local DNS resolver & cache! Most young system admins today (as well as ISP technicians who come and setup your new broadband connection) even configure Google DNS by default in their routers and hence, that is what users in a home or small office (or even large office) scenario end up using. And this usage is not out of deliberate choice or careful decision making - but simply because this is something that works well, is known to work well and hence, there is no need to consider other alternatives.

This is how we have ended up loosing control over DNS. Let us now explore the dark side of using Google DNS.

Problems with using Google DNS

You might question the need for all this discussion. After all, there is a little bit of Google in everyone’s life! What difference is a simple DNS resolver going to make? Lets examine this.

Google is essentially a company which offers to organise the world’s information in a manner that is usable and useful to you. It does so by indexing websites and content of all sorts and then wrapping this index with a search engine so that you can locate relevant information quickly. How does Google know something is relevant or useful or popular? It tracks what people click on (in search results) or watch (on Youtube, for example). It rates content based on a variety of parameters (not just content) and then presents it to you in a way it thinks would be most relevant to you.

How does Google make its search results more relevant to us?

When you’re searching for the phone number for a coffee shop in your city or locality, it won’t return the details of a similarly named coffee shop in another city or country…. and it can do this because it knows where you are (based on your IP address or the wireless network you’re connected to or your GPS location), what type of device you are using to make this query (mobile v/s desktop) and how you might want to use this information (to make a phone call or to visit a website or see a rating and so on).

In a way, Google is manipulating the information it feels is most useful to you and usually, that works just fine for most of us.

The key to all this help that Google offers us is, however, its ability (and need) to track what we do on the Internet. This tracking includes its ability to record your search queries (and tie them in to your name, email address, gender, employer, location, operating system etc) and your internet visits (which websites you visit, how often, in which sequence etc). Which each application / website you use on the Internet might use its own log and tracker, Google is pervasive enough to know at least some details.

Google DNS, tracking and Ad serving

Hence, if you use Google DNS at home or at work, Google can capture details about which domain names are popular, which domains send out (or receive) most email, which domain names are more frequently visited (or queried) from a certain location (or city, or country) and so on. By offering this free-of-charge and extremely convenient service, Google can now track the world’s Internet usage and further use this information to organise, classify and present content to you using its search engine.

This is not problematic in itself, of course. Why wouldn’t we expect Google to do such a thing (given that they are essentially a company who’s business model is that of serving ads)? How is it Google’s use of this information different from another ISPs? Is this an established way of life now - where we trade privacy for some convenience?

Google DNS and Email

Think of another aspect. Lets say a computer is infected with a virus and is trying to access a bunch of websites on the Internet. In such cases, two types of information can be captured by Google DNS – the source of the virus (at least the network or ISP or location) and the details of the DNS queries that the virus is trying to make. These details can then go into the Google Gmail product for further strengthening their anti-virus and anti-spam system – enabling them to deliver a cleaner mailbox to you.

While this might be a positive outcome of the fact that Google runs the mail service, the DNS service and the search service, it also offers them the ability to do such spam classification based on IP addresses and domain names at an unprecedented level! Who else can match the extent of information that they can track and record?

Google’s DNS Privacy Policy

No matter what your perspective might be, the truth is that some details about you are definitely going to be permanently stored with Google for, at least, some time whenever you use Google DNS to resolve a name. Check out their Public DNS privacy policy on this aspect for more details. Here is a summary of the relevant parts:

Are we really ready to trade our privacy for saving the 300 seconds that it might take for us to setup a local, private and self-hosted DNS server?

This is something that we must think about and decide for ourselves. Do you want our Internet usage to provide inputs to Google in its all too-important mission to organise, index and serve the world’s information?

Enter CloudFare’s DNS Service</h3>

A lot of these thoughts were triggered by Cloudfare’s launch of what they call their “privacy-focussed public DNS” service. They questioned the status quo and launched an equally convenient service that seeks to offer more privacy and improved performance as well. (Cloudfare is, after all, a CDN as well! Rolling out such a service globally would be easier for them.) They say that they don’t log any user IP addresses, that they anonymise any information that they might store (for telemetry and performance measurements, for example) and they don’t share this information by any third parties (apart from APNIC - who they’ve partnered with to launch this service).

The difference between Cloudfare and Google DNS would that be that even if Google did not share its DNS related tracking information with third parties, it could (would?) share it with its own search engine. The search engine is no third party for Google.

So should we all shift to use 1.1.1.1 as our default DNS servers now? Is the Cloudfare approach the best thing to have? Can we trust Cloudfare to live up to its “social contract” forever in future? I really don’t know. But if you are now more aware of these concerns, I have a pair of suggestions to offer.

What is the best solution?

The absolute best thing to do would be to self-host your own DNS resolver. These are extremely simple services to deploy, host and secure. They don’t need power servers either. A simple Rs 800 (US$ 11) wireless router is powerful enough to do this job for a small network. Or you could even use a desktop computer or a Raspberry Pi or server.

There are a variety of Free Software tools that enable you to do this. dnscache is one of them. Another one is called dnsmasq and it is extremely simple to configure and deploy. A more heavy weight solution is to use named (BIND). Almost all GNU/Linux distributions ship with these tools by default.

If you can not deploy an additional device to serve local DNS for your network, then the next best option might be to use a public DNS system that promises some privacy. Cloudfare’s offering might be one of the options available. I am sure there are many more that you can find and use.

Should we all stop using Google DNS then?

Sure. If you can do that, that’s a good first step to opt-out of being tracked. It is not a very complex choice to make. If you are responsible for making such choices, please do that. If you know someone who is authorized to make these choices, encourage them to understand these issues and then make a smart choice.

On what basis do I make these claims?

The claims and explanations above are based completely on my inference and not on facts that I am personally aware of. The conclusions that I arrive at above should be true given the premises and assumptions that I have based them upon. But then again, I do not possess factual information about this.

However, it is definitely not going to hurt you to self-host your DNS resolver and cache.

Choosing Freedom & Privacy on your Android phone

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 19:29:10 +0530

Background

I have been using an Android phone for about 6 years now. I have been using GNU/Linux exclusively since 1998. Hence, the desire to have a phone that provided me with the same freedom and flexibility has been very strong.

Unfortunately, a few months back I realised how I had accepted a life where I could have complete freedom and privacy on my computer but was content with having almost none on my phone. I was surprised at how I was ready to tolerate proprietary software (and evil practices) on my phone when I would never install or use such software on my computer.

This is an account of that introspection and my reasons to take various steps to have more freedom and privacy while still using Android on my phone.

The Realisation

For about 9 months now, one thing that was nagging me repeatedly was how easy it was for proprietary software to make its way into my life - getting past my most stringent checks and standards. I would download applications from the Google Play store, I would even pay to use some of them so that I could get rid of ads or get additional functionality and I would get blinded by how easy these apps made my life sometimes. Somehow, I found it okay to accept the proprietary nature of these software applications. For some reason, I did not subject them to the same standards that I subjected software on my laptop and servers.

Proprietary software on my old Android phone

And then I realised that this was purely a convenience! I was blinded by this convenience and was sacrificing my privacy (and more). I was using proprietary software to make utility bill payments, to store notes and memos, to listen to music, to talk to acquaintances, to send pictures to family members and friends and so much more. Even though I was aware of free software replacements of these tools, at times, I would still not choose it because they, seemingly, weren’t good enough!

Would I take similar decisions had it been my laptop? Or a server? I don’t think so. Then why was I allowing myself to be sold? What was the reason for this apparent contradiction? How could I consider my value system to be consistent, if I made both these choices and accepted both of them? Or then, these must not be choices based on a common value system? I was, supposedly, holding myself to different standards in different situations!

The Technology

So what was it so unique about Android that it made it possible for me to do things that I really wouldn’t have wanted to do? How is that Android made it so simple to access and run proprietary software? Why was it so easy to forsake a mindful choice of using free software for the convenience that had other costs (loss of freedom and privacy) associated with it? To understand this, let me try to explain how Android phones are built.

What is Android really?

Android, essentially, runs the Linux kernel. It is not the standard, mainstream kernel, however. The Android system forks and independently maintains this forks of the Linux kernel so that it is suitable to run on handsets, tablets and so on. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is the parent project where all the development happens. AOSP includes a framework into which a device manufacturer can plug-in their device-specific code so that Android can work well with the features, limitations and hardware facilities available in the device.

Android Architecture

There are certain parts of Android that are (almost) always implemented using proprietary software by device manufacturers. These parts include “the baseband” (a software system that controls all the communication components of a phone - the wireless, mobile radio, bluetooth, gps and so on), “some Linux kernel modules / drivers” (the AOSP-derived kernel with device-specific proprietary extensions) and “application software” (the launcher, the Google Play framework and services, location services, “useful” application software and so on).

How do you put Android on a phone?

When you buy an Android-powered phone, you receive a well-integrated software package that is aware of and customised / tuned for the hardware it is running on. The device manufacturer then provides you updates for this software. Since, we purchase the phone as a special-purpose device (who’s function is to make calls, provide Internet access, run application software etc.), we don’t treat it as a combination of hardware and software.

When we purchase or use a computer, we are very aware of this separation and distinction. On a computer, we know where our hardware ends and where the operating system (such as Debian GNU/Linux) starts. We are also, generally, aware of the fact that we can get the operating system to work in a similar manner on most other computers irrespective of the underlying hardware differences.

Android is also the same thing - its just our perception that is different. A phone manufacturer takes the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) source code (Google publishes it publicly whenever they make a new Android release), adds their device specific drivers and software and then put on a skin to make it look different or unique - an attempt to entice users with its “coolness” factor and functionality. This promotes the notion that the hardware and software are uniquely combined and welded together. And that to get the software functionality, you need to purchase the hardware as well. But that is not true at all.

Your own, custom Android OS?

It is possible to take the AOSP source code and recompile it yourself by adding the proprietary components from the device manufacturer. This would give you a “standard” or “vanilla” Android feel. Google’s devices usually have this feel since they are built directly from the corresponding standard AOSP source code. As long as the device you own allows you to install your own Android compilation (ie. it can be unlocked), you can completely remove all software that is provided to you by the device manufacturer and instead run your own custom-compiled Android version.

Once you are able to do that, you can realise how clear the separation between the hardware and software on a phone is. You will also understand that hardware itself is only half the story – the hardware is useless unless it is driven by the right software. (So if there is no free software component available to drive a particular hardware on the phone - perhaps a dual-camera or a sensor - you will not be able to use it in your custom-compiled Android unless you also use the device manufacturer’s supplied proprietary software.)

There are many projects that seek to do exactly this. They take the AOSP source code and the proprietary device-specific code for a specific phone and pre-compile and package it so that you can install and use it, if you choose to. The LineageOS project is the most prominent and comprehensive project that aims to support a wide variety of devices. Most other projects such AOKP, Resurrection Remix, Paranoid Android etc either use LineageOS as a base or AOSP directly. All of these provide you with pre-compiled, easy-to-install and immediately usable Android images that you can flash on a variety of devices. They also publish the corresponding source code on Github or elsewhere so that you can rebuild the same Android image yourself.

How does a custom ROM like LineageOS help?

By using LineageOS (and other such distributions) on your phone, you achieve consistency in the user experience across devices. If you install LineageOS on three different devices, the end result will be similar - you will get the same AOSP-based user interface with a mix of add-on apps developed by the LineageOS team to make the end-result more usable.

Just like installing Debian across computers of different hardware configuration and architectures provides the same consistent user experience, so does LineageOS (and other such distributions). You no longer need to put up with bloatware and user interface skins provided by your device manufacturer. If you device is supported by LineageOS, you can simply install Lineage on it and feel comfortable with its user experience. No matter which device you use, you will find the same set of settings options and the same default apps.

After that, if you want, you can still install and use Google services and make your phone function like a phone that is a part of the “standard” and “default” Android ecosystem.

What had I been doing wrong all these years?

Ever since I owned a Google Nexus 4 device some 5 years back, I had been using LineageOS (then called Cyanogenmod) on my phone. I would choose my phone based on its ability to run an unofficial, community developed and packaged Android distribution. I would then proceed to remove the default Android OS and install this “unofficial” distribution to make my phone usable.

The mistake I was making for all these years was to then install a special GApps package to get the functionality of the Google ecosystem on my phone. (LineageOS can not ship with this proprietary Google Play functionality because of licensing restrictions. It has to be downloaded and installed separately.) This gave my phone the ability to use Google Play services and install software from the Google Play store. And that is where the road to proprietary software and tracking starts!

The problem with using Android and the Google Play ecosystem

While there are quite a few applications in the Google application catalog that are free software, a bulk of the applications are not. Chances are that almost everything that you use regularly is proprietary. In other words,

It does not ship with source code,
The developer is the only one who knows how it works or what it does,
It probably relies on Google Play services to send notifications or integrate with other apps,
It possibly uploads your data to the developer's (or a third party's) server for backup / analytics / data-mining / sending alerts etc, and
it might use file formats that might be proprietary in nature.

So if you use the application a lot and use it to manage a lot of data, you will probably need to continue using it to access your data. If you delete the app from your phone, that does not automatically scrub your data from their servers. If you re-install the app, you can access your data again. Effectively, you become locked-in to the app and its functionality. What might have begun as a convenience, is now a compulsion.

What if you have real money stored inside the app? Or your coffee shop rewards points? Or your favourite taxi operator’s routes? They are all accessible only if you use that app. You would completely loose access to them if you stopped using the app.

And this is the problem with the Google Play ecosystem. It pushes proprietary software to you, it enables application developers to lock you in by using proprietary data storage and access techniques, it tracks what you do on your phone (so that it can offer better suggestions / advice / notifications to you) and its cripples your ability to be in control of the technology you use for managing your day-to-day life.

While I was aware of all these issues, I ignored these dangers. While I would passionately talk about the value of choosing software freedom everywhere, somehow, I was okay with how this mobile operating system was snatching away what I valued most – my freedom and privacy.

The Action

This January, I purchased a new phone that could be unlocked and on which I could run Lineage OS without issues. I decided to choose a phone that had official LineageOS support so that I could continue to get updates. I also wanted to make sure that the source code for the device I was going to choose was available and updated. Hence, I chose the Samsung Galaxy S7 phone. It was good enough for my needs and for what I was planning to experiment with.

Samsung Galaxy S7 page on the LineageOS Wiki

Step 1: Choosing the software ecosystem

I then unlocked the phone and installed LineageOS on it. Of course, this time, I had no intention of installing Google Play services or any other proprietary tools. Instead, I have chosen to only install software that is distributed via the F-Droid repository or independently as a package built from published source code.

The F-Droid Application Repository

This is not a very difficult challenge, actually. Today, there are a lot of very high-quality free software applications for Android. You can find applications for all your needs on F-Droid. When you install an app from the F-Droid repository, it is guaranteed that the application is free software in the purest sense of the definition. They specifically list and classify applications in case they have any of the following anti-features:

the application contain Ads
the application tracks you (by default)
the application uses or promotes non-free network services
the application has or promotes non-free addons
the application has non-free dependencies
the application is derived from a non-free upstream application and is specifically patched for f-droid compatibility
the application has some known vulnerability,
the application uses a disabled algorithm

If you still choose to use the application, you will do so with the awareness that it possesses one or more of these anti-features.

Step 2: Choosing the degree of freedom and privacy you want

In spite of everything I have discussed above, it is still possible to install and use proprietary Android apps on your LineageOS phone - without even having to install Google play services. But choosing to do that defeats the very purpose of this whole exercise. There are three things you might need to consider when you’re challenged with a proprietary Android app:

Are you choosing to install a non-free software application on LineageOS - ie. is it an application who’s source code is not available and is not licensed under a Free / Open Source Software license?
Are you choosing to install a free software application that consumes or promotes a non-free network service? (Eg. F-Droid has “Telegram” in its repository and this Telegram client is built using the source code published by the Telegram team. However, even though the software is free, it still forces you to use a non-free / non-self-hosted network service. Another example of this might be a file-sharing or sync system. Or a music streaming service.)
Are you choosing to install a proprietary app which depends on a proprietary network service? … and you’re choosing to do so because, in the interim, you can’t leave that “network” overnight. Or avoid using that service altogether. (Eg. Installing or using WhatsApp is an example of this. Or using a video streaming service.)

Each of these compromises make dent into your freedom and desire for greater privacy. If you are going to make any of these choices, then it would be useful to make them mindfully so that you are also aware of their side-effects and hence, can take requisite precautions to protect yourself from the undesirable ones.

Step 3: Biting the bullet!

Finally - you will just have to decide, one day, that you’re going to do this exercise mainstream. I did that after I had carefully installed and configured the most useful applications required. I still had my old phone which still had proprietary apps but I decided not to use that phone or only use it for messaging till I could encourage everyone who needed to communicate with me to use alternate channels.

I did not face any major inconvenience. Surprisingly, it was a great learning experience. (Surprisingly because I thought I knew whatever there was to know about LineageOS + Android since I’d been using it for many years.) Its only when you do an exercise like this, that you realise how many important aspects of your life actually rely on non-free and proprietary software.

But I was happy with the choices I was making. It was refreshing to not use proprietary apps on my phone. It was good to be in sync with my value system again. I was proud to tell everyone (not that most people care, but still…) that I was not using proprietary software on my phone any more.

Free Software Android apps on my phone

The Consequences

Let discuss the after-effects of my shift:

1. Since my preferred method of communication was not what most people liked to communicate on, it took some effort to encourage others to use free platforms for communication. I prefer email, Riot/Matrix, SMS and calls (in that order). But I can’t impose these choices on others.

2. I gradually stopped using proprietary and tracking-heavy chat platforms such as WhatsApp and Google Hangouts completely. Since I never checked messages there, people were forced to seek me out using other means and that’s a definite plus. I think I can delete my accounts now.

3. As a compromise, I chose to be present on a few other communication platforms that at least (a) had free software client apps and (b) were known to be privacy respecting systems.

4. Since I was already using a personal Nextcloud instance to sync my data and manage other aspects of technology (where proprietary cloud apps usually come in), I simply continued to use those practices seamlessly on my new phone. I did not have any data (files, photos, emails, contacts) on any other network service.

5. I further extended my self-hosted tool-set to include a ebook library, a bookmarking system, a read-it-later system and a RSS-based news reader.

6. Since none of the taxi services or banking, payments and wallet services are free software, I just stopped using them. I also realised that some of them won’t even let me delete my account and so I have started bugging their customer support teams to do it for me.

After using this ecosystem for about 4 months now, I can confidently say that I have no regrets and I don’t face any loss of productivity in any way. If I feel inconvenienced or limited, I remind myself of how I did not give up on GNU/Linux twenty years back.

Maps with OSMand + OpenStreet Map

Is this for you?

I expected at least a few people to ask me if they should do this as well. But over the past 4 months, no one has asked me this question, yet! But let me answer it anyway.

This is definitely an option for you. At the same time, you also have to understand that you will invite some inconvenience along the way and when you do, you should be ready to wade through it and keep going forward. There is no difference to make and there is no critical mass to reach if we give up easily instead of trying to find alternate solutions.

Making the set of choices I have made can be tough initially. If you care enough, you will find it easy to make these decisions and I am here to help you out. Finally, making these choices and retaining them boils down to how important it is for you to use Free Software on your computing and communication devices. If that is not something that you want to compromise on, then you’re all set. I am confident that you will make these choices and stay on course.

Here is a further FAQ to guide you.

A Small FAQ

Q: Have you really stopped using all proprietary apps on your phone?

A: Yes. My primary phone no longer has any proprietary software on it. Any non-free network services that I use are fueled by apps released a free software.

Q: So there is no proprietary software at all on your phone?

A: Its not possible to have a phone made-up of free software entirely. Due to the nature of the phone hardware industry, the firmware that drives the baseband (ie. the networking components of the phone) is implemented as proprietary software. There is also other microcode and firmware that is required to use the SoC (System-on-a-Chip), to use the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and so on.

The Librem 5 phone will change much of this when it launches. Keep checking their progress to see how they’re faring.

Q: Are there any other GNU/Linux-based operating systems for mobile devices?

A: SailfishOS is a promising mobile operating system that works and is available for use right away. It is possible to use KDE Plasma on some phones. The Ubuntu Touch project was aimed at build a converged Ubuntu-based mobile operating system.

For a truly free re-implementation of Android, that is mostly blob-free, check out the Replicant project.

Q: If you cheat by using App ‘D’, how can you say that your choices are consistent with your stated value system?

A: This is how I look at it: I have have been able to eliminate all aspects of proprietary software that affect my work, productivity or life in any way. I don’t store any data on a proprietary network or cloud service and I self-host everything that I need. If I am using any proprietary software, I have it on my old phone.

On that phone, I have removed everything other than some entertainment apps. Then - are these apps my weakness? Am I going to justify my choice of using them by saying that they are just entertainment and not connected to my work or life? No - I wouldn’t say that. I, myself, am a work in progress. My choices are changing rapidly as well. I have no dependency on proprietary software or network services to lead my life. Each day, I draw the circle closer.

Q: How do you do ‘X’ now? What is the free software replacement for ‘Y’?

A: That is a very good question. I intend to write a follow-up article on all the apps I find useful and how I have replaced this “X” and “Y”.

Please feel free to write to me if you made a similar choice or need help in making it.