For those who are unable to watch Open Source educator/evangelist and OptDyn CEO Jon “maddog” Hall’s “The Grand Slam for Latin America” keynote at Latinoware 2017 https://youtu.be/P4GTwfg_1c4 , below is the full transcript:
I apologize that we don’t have any slides for you to see but there isn’t too much to see on the slides anyway so I will paint the picture for you to see in your mind. Sometimes that’s better anyway.
I am Jon “maddog” Hall. I am Chief Executive Officer of a company called OptDyn. I’ve been in the free software space a very long time.
Down there, aiming the camera, is my Chief Technical Officer, Alex Karasulu: “wardog@optdyn.com”
Beside being Chief Executive Officer for OptDyn, I am also the Board Chairman of the Linux Professional Institute, of which Cesar, who has been entertaining you, is the Director of Operations here in Latin America. I am also the President of Project Cauã, which is a project to help university students make money and start their own company while they are in university.
And finally, I am an old man with a long white beard who goes around giving free software. Ho ho ho…
I first came to Brazil in 1996 and I saw the University of São Paolo and I experienced the power of the Brazilian people. The University of São Paolo is ranked #1 of many universities here in Brazil and is one of the top universities in all of Latin America. They were using free and open source software (FOSS).
In 1999 I joined the Linux Professional Institute. We do certification so that people can study about free software any way they want to and hopefully get a job by receiving their certification.
In 2005 I started Project Cauã with the main goal of creating millions of jobs in Latin America. And while some of those goals and processes have changed, the main goal is still there.
And in 2011 we started a project called Caninos Loucos –“crazy canines”– to reduce the cost of single board computers and computers here in Brazil in general.
And you’ll hear more about all of these later on.
In the United States we have a game called baseball. And in baseball you have 3 bases, and as you go up to hit the ball sometimes you get on the base and then you go to the second base and then the third base. And when all three bases have someone standing on them and your best hitter goes up to bat they hit what is called the “Grand Slam”: the home run which brings all four runners home.
We are about to create the Grand Slam because we have a piece of software called Subutai.
Now there are problems with the cloud software as you know it today. The Clouds are owned by Amazon, owned by Google, owned by large corporations in the United States. The Internet was actually created to be distributed. So in case of hurricane or earthquake or fire or something else that the Internet can reconfigure itself to bring communications. The Clouds, being centralized, destroys that.
If a major Cloud goes down, thousands upon thousands of people lose their ability to do work. You always pay with these clouds: either in money or you pay by them scanning your data looking for marketing information to market back to you.
You cannot sell the cloud providers anything –there’s nothing that you have that they want. So you’re always paying in one way or another. You have no guaranteed privacy: sure they have privacy letters and privacy policies. But as we found out about a year ago, the NSA was spying on President Dilma when she was writing emails. And they can be spying on you. Because even if these cloud companies have the best of all purposes they are still loyal US citizens and if our government goes to them with what’s called a subpoena –a letter from a judge saying they have to cooperate– then they have to cooperate. But you have no choice, you have no control over that because you’re Brazilian, and you can’t vote for our president, you can’t vote for our lawmakers, you cannot vote for our judges.
The Internet of Things is lost in what we call the fog: most clouds work with applications talking to them. And that leaves out this thing: this tiny little thing here, this tiny little thing there, because the applications talk to the things and then the applications talk to the cloud. The cloud doesn’t allow applications to talk to things by themselves. You have no control over the cloud because the control is taken away from you.
At many times when I talk about free software I say that people lose the concept of freedom because freedom is a hard thing to understand. But they do understand the concept of slavery, where you’re told where to go, what to do, who to marry, when to have children. And in software slavery you’re told when to retire your system, when to update it, and … when to retire your system, for example, Windows XP.
So now we have slides. Thank you very much.
And just in time, because this slide says that “Subutai is the answer”, because we want to choose it all. We want to have control over everything: our hardware, our software, our applications, and our cloud.
Subutai is a peer-to-peer cloud. You start with your computer and you set up Subutai on your computer and then you can connect with other computers running Subutai, directly. You don’t have to go to any central source; nobody else has to know that you’re setting up that cloud. You can contact another computer and say, “I’d like to use some of your resources”; “I’d like to use your CPU”; “I’d like to store data on your disk”; “I’d like to use some specialized feature that you have, and I will pay you for it, or I will barter you for it: I’ll give you some of my CPU if you’ll give me some of your storage.”
It is secure. It is authenticated and encrypted. It is a private network that you set up.
This is Subutai. It allows you to sell, barter, or donate resources. The resources are CPU power, disk, network, and other types of resources that you might have. It uses cloud containers, just like Google and Amazon do, in order to give you easy creation of programs.
It uses what we call “blueprints” to allow you to take your application and set it up in this little cloud that you have. I say “little cloud” but it could be huge –it could be many thousands of systems which you set up to be in your cloud. Or it could be only two or three. It’s up to you.
They also run Google App Engine’s applications without change, so anything which is in the Google store will run Subutai without change, and allows this environment, this cloud which you set up, to follow you any place you go. So if you leave your house and you go to your university, you still have access to all of the things in the cloud that you set up in your house. Or if your university sets up a cloud you have access to everything that they set up in that cloud.
We have a second piece of software –oh, before I go on, I should tell you that everything about Subutai is Open Source. Of course. I would not be standing up here if that was not true. So every piece of code for Subutai is up on GitHub and you can bring it down yourself and compile it and use it or you can use the free-from distributions.
Subutai Bazaar is a marketplace. Now, you can set up directly your cloud with other people you know about –but what happens if there are people you don’t know about? People who have resources who would be happy to sell those to you but you simply don’t know about them: you can go to the Subutai Bazaar and you can find those resources that are close to you, maybe they are less expensive than others, maybe they are more dependable than others, but that’s up to you to decide. Because you have control.
And as people create these applications to better use Subutai, they can list those applications in the Bazaar so that other people can use them or perhaps even buy them.
We also have an optional piece of hardware called the Subutai Router. The Subutai Router is optional: you do not need it in order to work Subutai, but it does make it more efficient to use it. It has hardwired ethernet on it, it also has wi-fi, and a configurable RAID so you can have RAID of different types for your disk but after it’s configured, the hardware does the RAID, not the software.
This is version 1.0 of the Router which we did, and we now have a version 2.0 that’s even more powerful that’s available off of GitHub: the design is also Open Source. In addition to all the things I mentioned in the version 1 Router, the version 2 Router has two unique features: number one, it has the same interfaces that the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino have, so if you build a shield for the Arduino or you build a circuitry for the Raspberry Pi, you can drive them from the Subutai Router version 2.0. There’s one other function that you might like –it can also mine and store cryptocurrency: it has MPGAs on the board which will allow you to mine cryptocurrency while your router is running.
And so for the people that seem to have been left out of the cryptocurrency market, this will be a way that you to get into the cryptocurrency market without having to spend a lot of money, and without having to waste a lot of electrical power because your router is on all the time anyway.
The router is designed and ready for manufacture. We are targeting January to have it in mass quantities, but it could be sooner, because we are working with the Caninos Loucos project in order to manufacture this router in Brazil, using Brazilian people to manufacture this, generating Brazilian jobs, and lowering the cost of the router because we are not paying ridiculously high import taxes. As I mentioned before, it Open Source and its design is on GitHub.
As I stated before, I’ve been coming to Brazil ever since 1996, and people say to me, “why did you pick Brazil to launch Subutai? Why wouldn’t you launch in the united states or europe or some other place? And I chose Brazil because of the long usage of free and open source software and hardware. The enthusiasm of people like you to be able to bring free software forward. Also, Subutai has to work around the world. So even though we have a main engineering group in a city called Bishkek in Asia, we want to have another development facility and support facility in Brazil, and we’re currently looking for cities to host this. Brazil is what we call “timezone friendly” –that in these different time zones, we can have different people from the community helping us to make Subutai successful.
And Brazil is part of the Mercosul Agreement so that people in Argentina, Uruguay, and other countries will be able to take advantage of the hardware we’re producing, as well as the software.
There are many of these projects coming together at the same time, which is why I started this talk saying “the Grand Slam”. I’d like to talk just a few minutes about each one of them:
I mentioned Caninos Loucos several times. We want to produce inexpensive, single-board computers like this one inside of Brazil. This is part –I’ve been working with this project for 5 years, last March we produced 100 of these computers as a test; this January, we hope to produce another 100,000 of these computers. This one is called a Labrador. It is a mid-range computer much like the Raspberry Pi, but much better than the Raspberry Pi: it has twice the RAM, it has USB3, which is 10 times faster than the USB on the Raspberry Pi, and it runs applications at least as fast as the Raspberry Pi, often 2 or 3 times faster. We hope to have this at a reasonable cost in Brazil, probably about 70 US Dollars/201 Reals and we want to take these and distribute them at Campus Party in January. There are two other computers that we are making as part of Caninos Loucos: one of course is the Subutai Router v2, and a very very very small sensor computer called the Flea. This is being done at the University of São Paulo on the facilities of LSI Tec, a non-profit organization. We will be distributing these computers at cost to people who need them. And this brings in a lot of the IoT applications, like home automation and security and control of the electric grid and a lot of other things. The University of São Paulo and Caninos Loucos has been designated by the Brazilian government as being the platform for the Internet of Things program for Brazil, and received a 1.4M USD/4.2M RBL grant from the government to get this started.
Project Cauã, which is designed to allow poor students to attend university by giving them the ability to earn the money for their apartments, their Internet communications, their books and everything else, is now able to sell software on top of the Labrador to small businesses and to homeowners. We want to put Kodi on here as a home entertainment system and first connection to the Internet for the people of digital inclusion. We want to put ODOO on here as a point-of-sale system and an open ERP system for small business people. And we hope to distribute tens of thousands of these inside of Ubatuba, our pilot city, at first, and then throughout the rest of Brazil as we take our pilot project and bring it throughout the cities of Brazil, and later the cities of Latin America.
And of course we’ll be using free and open source software and hardware to create new products that people can deliver here in Brazil and Latin America and utilize everybody’s ability to contribute. So at Campus Party in São Paulo we would like to be able to give away 8,000 of these first Labrador computers and we wish to do that by finding sponsors who will pay for these so that the people who attend Campus Party would have to pay a minimal amount of money, perhaps 33 Reals for the computer. We have talks underway to get Subutai certified by the Linux Professional Institute so that you will be able to learn about it, to get your certification, and to be able to make money helping people put their applications onto Subutai and helping them set up their networks as they wish.
And we are in discussions with the 4Linux Corporation: they are the largest training and support organization in São Paulo to create educational courses about Subutai to allow you to get your certification.
Here at Latinoware, we have a series of things going on: Alex and I will be at the PTI booth in the vendor area today and Friday and you can see the Labrador computer: you can see Subutai running. You can get stickers for your laptop and tattoos for your arm (temporary tattoos so that your mothers and fathers won’t hate me), and of course, pictures with maddog, so you won’t have to run all over to get your pictures –you can just come to the booth.
In the open hardware track tomorrow, I’ll be going in a deep discussion about the Caninos Loucos project, that’s at 1700 hours/5PM, so if you’d like to see that, please come to the free hardware track.
And we’re going to have some LPI certification tests here. I was told you have 2 more days to register, and we’re going to have 2 Raspberry Pis that we are giving away at that registration, so people will be able to get into a contest to win a Raspberry Pi.
With that, I thank you very much, but I have only one more thing to show you. Subutai was a general for Genghis Khan. He was the first general not to be awarded because of his loyalty, because of his family; he was the first general to be awarded such because he was good. Won merit. He was a slave at first, and then he became free. He was one of the greatest generals of all time, and that’s why we have named this cloud software Subutai: because of this general.
And so … I want you to do me a favor. I want you to say “Subutai”! Louder: “Subutai”!! Louder! Stand up! Say “Subutai”! Freedom! Yes! Thank you very much.
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