Everybody wants to rule the world, Amanda Brock (Wuthering Bytes 2019)

so i've done something i never do you have to bear with me a bit to see how this works out i've got a load of slides i never really have many slides and the slides are a bit different because most of them are off of my phone and their personal pictures that i've taken in the last few years um i'm going to try and get through these and have a hell of a lot of slides in half an hour and then leave a good 10 minutes for us all to talk and you're gonna have to bear with me because it's kind of a story that i want to share with you and some of it is actually very personal about my my time in open source so everybody wants to rule the world i assume this audience is old enough to know what i'm talking about 1986 1985 actually the first concert i ever went to first proper concert tears for fears at the glasgow apollo balcony actually jumped up and down with us it closed shortly afterwards so you probably didn't expect me to start with eddie izzard when i'm talking about uh software and it's a very bad picture it was taken last sunday morning at 11 o'clock at the edinburgh festival and it was brilliant eddie was doing a performance of great expectations and he was doing that because he's just done the audiobook of great expectations which is 20 odd hours long and his older brother mark has abridged it to one hour 20. so eddie did 55 minutes of great expectations from this abridged version reading and then 25 minutes where he just performed and it was absolutely amazing and it was an incredible performance but it was also really touching because eddie was fixated by numbers so he was born 150 years to the day that dickens was born and we were sitting in a room called the music room in the assembly halls in glasgow on george edinburgh edinburgh festival on george street um 150 years to the day earlier was the last time that dickens had read in that room from one of his books so clearly eddie had sort of blackmailed the festival people to put this on at the last minute we got tickets a couple of days before which is how it happened and some of what i'm going to talk about is about anniversaries and numbers which is why this really brought things to mind he also read a line that pip said and i also never speak with notes but i've got a couple of quotes which i don't do either and i'll get them wrong so pip says tomorrow was staring me in the face with a stronger gaze than i and i kind of think that's where we are as a society now and it really stuck with me it really resonated it tied into the things i've been thinking about for the last weeks and months with trustable and other projects i'm working on and there was one other thing so this community really sucks we suck at including people from all sorts of diverse backgrounds and it'd be really nice if things change nobody's got a magic wand but i'm sure we're at a point where we're moving into a future where it will but it was lovely being in that room and seeing a man get on stage dressed as he was without the very conservative audience in edinburgh that he was presenting to batting an eyelid so it really meant a lot in a lot of different ways now who else was in this room in january and who can spot my obvious mistake yeah i would imagine a few of you were despite having been told people wouldn't be it's a really up and open source looking around this room i'm guessing you will be so the deliberate mistake is the spelling of john there shouldn't be an h in it uh this is the closing keynote at fosdem everybody know what foster is so that's how i started my year and i start almost every year for stem with 8000 software developers you can usually spot me because i stick out like a sore thumb this room was absolutely rammed full of people there was standing room only what you can't see is behind where i took this photograph from there were lines of people and it was kind of amazing because mad dog was doing the closing keynote and in particular he was talking about anniversaries so he started with a photograph of his godson who's brazilian there was no particular reason that he did it but he did it to share the love so i'm going to introduce you today to ronan who's really pleased to be in my deck ronan is my nephew he's seven he lives in scotland in a place called perth and he does a much better deck than i do who knew kids do powerpoint at seven in school so uh roland's gonna actually feature as we go through my deck a little bit um but what john was talking about what mad dog was talking about with anniversaries and in particular the number 50 because this year it's 50 years since he became a unix developer and he was talking about a lot of other anniversaries including the fact that uh linux version 1.0 was 25 they always sign osi definition of 21. and this gentleman this is probably the worst photograph i have of myself so you're really honored that i'm sharing it with you this gentleman on the left i'm guessing everybody in the room knows linus tervales linus is 50 in december as is not in december but this year um jim zemlin who runs the linux foundation and as am i unfortunately or perhaps unsurprisingly i didn't make mad dogs lists of things that are important in open source and 50 this year really sadly no women did so if we go back 50 years what was happening in 69 so in march we had the the bedding the loving in amsterdam john and yoko that led on through june to one of the things that um mad dog referenced the stonewall riots then the summer of love and woodstock and of course the moon landing now if anybody hasn't seen this exhibition in london at the the science museum it's absolutely fantastic of course that's apollo 10 not 11. but they do they have a whole uh a bunch of stuff around apollo 11 that's brilliant too so 50 years ago all of this was going on but other stuff was going on and this is my co-director open uk and fran stewart's uh stuart mcintosh's screen that i took a picture of does anybody know what that is so it's from 1969 as i'm sure you can spot all over the place and it actually starts in april i focused on august because it's one of my birthdays and it's a discussion on rfc which effectively started the the internet um everything that's discussed in this chat later went on to become what we know today is the internet so effectively it's 50 years old as well of course pre-69 a lot had gone on to get us to that stage and in the 60s we had these massive computers now i'm sure somebody in this room is going to tell me what this is because i'm not good on this front but the the way mad dog described these massive mainframe computers back in brussels was that computers were physically huge and logically small memory measured in kilobytes disk measured megabytes and programs around one at a time not something that would work very well in our world today we move on to the 70s things start to get smaller the 80s we're starting to see home computers the zx spectrums are put away for those of you who are around you might recognize that okay i took it in 2015 not 1985 but uh we started to really look forward in the 80s to what the future was going to bring and to look at lots of technological advancements that maybe we're living with today in my case i got obsessed with pac-man and i was told by the the male teacher at school who taught me to code that i should avoid computers for the rest of my life um by the 90s i was learning to word process in one of these and then the naughties and the naughties for me was really when things started to change so as laura said i've been a lawyer for 25 years and my legal career really started in the late 90s when i moved in-house with a company called dixons who you probably all know on the high street and i moved into dixon's to work on free serve i was part of a team of 12 that was a management team that set up pre-serve you've probably worked out i like free stuff and the thing with free serve was you stopped having to pay a monthly subscription to go online it was pretty groundbreaking it's time and it was ipo'd it was the first and biggest ipo in the dot-com bubble in europe for between 1.3 and 1.5 billion and uh sold later for 1.6 billion and for me what was important about that was i saw a lot of stuff i was very privileged as a you know sort of not really a fully signed up geek but somebody working on the periphery i got to see a lot of stuff that i thought you could never imagine i went to paris on a business trip we went to the marie and they showed as a fridge and in 2000 this fridge could connect and stock manage your content of your fridge connect to the supermarkets order from the supermarket it could provide you recipes for the food it could make sure that it was all fully nutritious and balanced for you and it could deal with your payments except the problem was that you could put it in people's houses and the internet existed but it was crap it just didn't do anything fast enough so what really has changed for me around the internet is the fact that we have true connectivity now and that's a critical factor where we've got to with technology and where we're going uh this is my phone somebody in the room can probably correct me i think it's from 2003. i know it was before i left dixon's the first phone i ever had was in 1996. 94. i was a trainee solicitor in london and they asked if anyone would like to go to cornwall on a friday so i put my hand up they were going to send me to cornwall and pay for it and what i was going to do was to attach something called an anton pillar order to a spanish trawler and you had to go and hammer it on um so i went because i got a weekend in cornwall by the time i got to cornwall somebody met me because apparently it was terribly dangerous and i was met back up the policeman to do it with me but i had a mobile phone it was about this big and it was the only time anybody had ever let me use one almost 10 years later i had one of these i sometimes switch this on because i've still got the charger just to look up a number because they're all still on there um this obviously is not from 2008 if you look at what the apps are but it's the front screen of my iphone um i probably got hung for admit and i've got one i live by the app if anything happens to my phone my life just is destroyed i cannot cope without the ability to do my banking probably give me too much data and i play pokemon um everything that i do is on this phone now when that was invented in 2008 i worked at canonical and jane silber our ceo went out to buy one and we were fascinated none of us had seen anything like it and that was without apps there was nothing to do on it it wasn't really much more than a phone with internet now can anybody name these three i don't know what to call them so you can identify the people and the dummies separately um these three icons mascots can anybody identify those jelly bean ice cream sandwich honeycomb so this is not 2008 the photo but the first release of android was this is at mountain view and the the sort of campus at google um and of course in 2008 i joined canonical and i this is something i've talked many times about but when i joined i thought i knew what open source meant and i could write you a lawyer's definition of it and i could put warranties and things in contracts about it but i had no clue and i had no clue for a very long time and i'm still in a constant learning curve about it um i think canonical is a seminal company because when we look now at cloud i'm told and i'd need to go and check somehow the starts that the highest instances of um [Music] an os on any cloud provider across all cloud providers is still ubuntu and some of the technology in ubuntu at that time and still today is really groundbreaking the involvement i had with canonical took me into openstack in 2012 i was part of what was called the drafting committee the legal committee that set open stack up and we looked at things like ip and anti-trust and competition policies to allow all these big companies to come together and work together and i i think that's an interesting story maybe but what's more interesting is that one of the things that's really really changed is cloud so if you add up these phones the internet and cloud what you get is the ability for a seven-year-old child to walk into a shop in the center of london pick up a device he's never seen before that isn't his go on and start to tap and someone open a program for him and be able to code in the middle of a retail environment that is just unimaginable but that's today that's what we're living in um i'm not going to go through this in any detail because i've got slightly less time to talk than i was going to and i actually think that this room knows what software is i also think you know what those are and how you get from one to the other and who this guy is so for me software isn't just about the code and the licenses and for lawyers for a long long time what we focused on is things like the osi definition the four freedoms and what that means in terms of licenses being approved as open source or not i think it's about much much more and i think today what it's about is collaboration that's gone from hobbyists people doing stuff in their bedrooms which were potentially world changing to organizations showing huge respect for that and committing massive amounts of funding to ensure that those brilliant developers get to do that brilliant development all over the world and we've taught the world how to collaborate so i and all the other people i know who've been doing this kind of stuff around open source for a long time are being asked constantly by many many sectors if we can tell them and explain to them and show them and give them documents and help them to develop collaboration because they just don't know how to do it and it's not easy for big companies to do it and i think that collaboration is absolutely critical to the future and where we're going so i might not go into the detail on the the coding side but i will go into a little bit of detail on software patterns because i can't resist um this is a very old slide i've used this for about a decade and software patents are a difficult topic a patent is something that protects innovation and is designed to reward innovation it's a monopoly when you've got it it's not like any other ip right intellectual property right it's a way of stopping anybody else using the same idea now i will happily say that my personal view is that software patents shouldn't exist i personally did not study patents as a lawyer in any of the universities i ever studied in because i thought they were irrelevant to anything to do with what we do however they exist and oin the organization i'm going to talk about is absolutely agnostic so i'm not representing their views that monopoly right was given as a reward and to encourage innovation and what's happened is that it's got a very different path and today what we've seen is these large companies that have spent decades using the ability to register software patents to build up armories i first came across i've told you i'm not a patent lawyer i first came across uh patents not through a troll but through a major organization who built up one of those armories around 2000 and they approached a company that i was involved with and they had this big long screed of paper and it was that old-fashioned computer paper that used to perforate and tear not like you'd see today and they just gave me this reams and rims of paper with lists and lists of the patterns we were infringing and then they gave me a letter that told us to cease and desist or pay this much now that was a practicing entity that was a company that actually did stuff in the technology sector and which was charging other organizations a license fee for using those patents a troll is a different thing a troll's a non-practicing entity so a company that only owns the patents so that it can enforce it um this looks more like the troll my dad had in his car in the 60s which i'm rather attached to again another old slide that anybody who's heard me speak about patents and the last 10 years or eight years has probably seen um i think this is from 2011 or 2012. so it's not surprising when you've got companies that have built up these armories seeing disruption come towards them that their response is to use the tools and the weapons that they've got and what they've used as patents because they're sitting there as something that's a really hard stop a patent litigation on average in the us costs 200 million dollars not many people can afford to do that and not many people have the insurance to cover that risk if you were a lawyer like me and you'd be looking at warranties and indemnities around ip for the last decade you would see increasingly that people just won't take on liability for patents if they can avoid it because it is such a high risk um i work for no shame about this i i work for the open invention network and i have since i left canonical in 2013. prior to that i took canonical in to the open invention network as a paying funder a board member and associate board member and we put several million into oin as opposed to registering our own patents and the registration process is slow and it's expensive so we decided to support the community instead i believed very strongly in this so i stayed involved afterwards and what owing does very very simply is at zero cost and whether you hold patents or not anybody any company can sign up it's all online we have no control over who signs and who doesn't everybody signs the same license as non-negotiable no matter what you know how big or small a company you are you sign the same thing or you don't sign and it creates a cross-license where each company says to the rest of that group i won't sue you i won't sue you in relation to any patents that i have that you might infringe to the extent that they're used in open source and read on this definition the definition is a list that started as linux it's now over 2000 packages so 48 hours ago um please i'll google this later microsoft made a commitment around this um last october microsoft signed up to oin so if you go online it takes about 10 minutes and you sign up you will have access to the microsoft patents that read on the open source definition at zero cost the exfat patents which a lot of the microsoft litigation has been around were not covered by that definition and the announcement 48 hours ago is that it will be added this year that anybody who signs up will now also have a free license to the expat patents if you go and read about it you'll see that there's some of the most controversial patents for open source and a lot of the litigation's been around them there are companies like panasonic listed in articles is having to spend huge amounts of money three five years ago to take those licenses so on does a lot of great work and i'd encourage everybody to sign up to it if you haven't please feel free to ask me any questions about it but part of what for me is really important there is its collaboration is open source meeting the world by collaborating so going back to where we've got to today 2019 this is actually another great exhibition this is in dundee at the v a and it's the gaming exhibition which is really fab um my life at least and i think everybody else's is a screen we're looking at blockchain wondering if it's going to be the next web wishing we'd bought cryptocurrency earlier before it went up in price and most of us lived by the app the app has become something useful that we need every day we need to have a device at the same time we're at risk and we're at risk of our data and what we get to see online being controlled by the big tech companies we live in a world where i think this is age 8 plus kids are given boxes that teach them how to code and it's nothing strange it's nothing abnormal so back to ronan in the apple store on regent street um i discovered how competitive my nephew is when he had just coded this little sphere which is a little robot to go around an obstacle course and a boy put his foot in the way and you can imagine that get out of the way response which she was told not to do and to be polite so the next time you get out of the way please he did quite well i was proud of him so that is as it says a future and it's a future that's now i'm hoping that it's beginning to come together that all of these things have created a world that we live in today and they all have software underlying them the future who knows what it's going to be um we're going to find that we have robots we have a.i we're going to have medicine and bionic people rebuilt using electronics we're not going to need to go to shops because a bot will deliver or a drone will drop something to us within an hour or two the vehicles will be driverless whether they're private or they're public this is great so one of the jobs that's not listed for me on this is i'm the chair of an advisory group for the united nations for their um innovation labs and this is a little bus in helsinki that they're about to actually release on the streets but which is out in this campus uh very environmentally friendly and a much better way to be transported than anything we've been doing until now and of course we'll do more and more research using these things perhaps in the future the women in the room won't be such a minority and there won't be a need to even mention it so who knows where this future is going to go very appropriate with all you space guys in the room i didn't know you were going to be here um i believe that there is no doubt today that it's going to be open source so software is eating the world and open source is eating its lunch as they they say in the us um the reality is that the adoption of open source in the last year has just gone through the roof i think it's something i'm not good with numbers but i think it's something like 76 of companies now admit to using open source and over 50 are saying that they're going to set up some sort of governance and open source office um i did this deck before the microsoft announcement but this is my mate steve wally keynoting last year at linux foundation and quoting his ceo asking to be judged by their actions of today and when a company like microsoft is doing that open source is here so briefly because this is where i get technical again trustable is um a project looking at software and what it's looking at is everything i've just talked to you about where all of this stuff is coming together to create a new world that we're all gonna live in the space odyssey is here so all of these devices that are sitting in your homes um i will admit that i have alexa we don't get on very well but i have her she doesn't like scottish people she doesn't understand when i instruct her to do things so i fight with her a lot but i have these kind of devices scattered around my house i'm sure many of you do too this is our future and it is just going to go further and further who knows whether children like ronan are going to have jobs whether there's going to be enough work left for them to do with an autonomous future and the more software that's out there the more we have to trust it and the more we don't know where it's going so i always liken this to a construction dispute of old you get a bunch of builders working on your house so your office or whatever it is and something goes wrong what you will find is it's nobody's fault whether the roof has caved in and killed somebody or the building just isn't watertight everybody points the finger at somebody else and that's where we're going to end up in software the problem is the risks are the same and the risks are growing day by day so what we have is a world where software potentially will cause death it will cause personal injury it will cause doubt administer property loss of income loss of earnings the list goes on but the classic legal liabilities that all of us would look at for anything practical today will move to the software space now i've had the fortune or misfortune to spend 25 years reviewing contracts around that kind of stuff and as the adoption increases so does the liability except these days you're looking at lots of small companies with no resources behind them being asked to sign up to contracts with liabilities five ten million even if it's a couple of million they don't have it and you can't really easily buy insurance around that so this project was set up three years ago by code think i know there's at least one person in the room from code thing i don't know if there are others but i would welcome you very much to talk more about this when we get to questions in a few minutes this project was set up three years ago as an engineering project focusing on what makes software engineering good so one of the problems around liability is if you try to capture software at a moment in time it is a moment in time and 10 minutes later 10 hours later 10 days later you're looking at a different piece of software so the best way to manage liability would be not to look at software but to look at the engineering processes and to try and work out what it is that makes engineering good what is acceptable what state of the art what's good practice and if you look in the gitlab the trustable git lab account you'll see a lot of good work that's been done pulling all of that together i got involved end of last year beginning of this year and brought into the project some work had done in the past thinking around how you can then take that engineering and add to those good engineering practices legal and compliance and find a way to get everybody working around those without creating formal standards so that we have something that's measurable self-certifiable and auditable and the goal is to set that up in a way that we can demonstrate to insurance companies that you're doing the right thing and to make insurance more accessible there's a complexity that is not for a friday afternoon which i think is my thought of genius that's probably the only really smart thought i've ever had which is to get a captive sitting behind all of this and a captive is a kind of insurance company so when you buy insurance the insurers take your money but they don't cover all the risk what they'll do is they'll sell that on down a line of reinsurers underwriters and um that the risk is underwritten by them instead of doing that what you see in many companies and a couple that i've worked for is that they own their own captive insurer so they go out and they buy insurance and it's fronted by an insurance company and then sitting behind it as their own money so if they can manage the upfront risk the risk at the back end is manageable too so i have this mad idea that we should ask the big tech folks to put their money into a pool captive across all of them once we've got to a stage of being able to demonstrate that the engineering is good that our software is reasonable so that they can help support every other company that's working in the software space and i let it be able to buy insurance um it's complicated it's probably a topic that you if you're interested in will want to talk to me offline about or come to something where we're talking about nothing but that but at this stage in a friday afternoon this is what the structure looks like and this is out of focus so um this is off my tea the other day i started drinking these yogi teas that give me messages and i like the messages the ties to the tea bag and it says speak to make yourself happy don't speak to impress others would anybody like to speak make yourself happy no yes maybe okay it's like the friday so i do have a couple more slides i'm happy to have more of a group discussion um i'm probably really not meant to talk about this but we all know what's going on in london at the moment and i've come up from there this morning margaret atwood i think from the handmaid's tale i found it on facebook so somebody's probably manipulating my views it's worrying but on tuesdays the politician's first day back at the house of commons and we are having a party in the house of commons launching an event series for open uk and i have one ticket if anybody in this room would like to go we will take names and pull them out of a hat you've got to get yourself to london there will be food there will be drinks you will be in the building with the politicians some of them might stop by who knows in theory we leave the building at 10 o'clock but somebody's got to run the country and that's it so thank you very much for having me if anybody wants to talk more about any of this stuff i know it's been a bit of a ramble and wide ranging i can pretty much promise you that that's a unique talk and not something i'll be doing again because everybody else is not on a friday afternoon in yorkshire thinking about beer thank you you