The internet should be a public good - NixOS/Clevis

“This project was fueled by the idea that we should be less dependent on proprietary software. We don’t have control over software managed by companies that can access, analyze and sell our private data. It was a journey to own our software again”, says Julien Malka. He and Camille Mondon have implemented Clevis in NixOS to make it possible to remotely reboot servers with full disk encryption. The project was extended to port the Proxmox Hypervisor on NixOS. In this podcast episode they explain their project and talk about self-hosting as an antidote to the centralization of the internet.

Links:
NixOS/Clevis repo
NixOS
NixOS/Clevis NGI Zero project page

Self-hosting for everyone - SelfPrivacy

“There would be no room for conflict if everyone in the world could exchange ideas without being watched”, says Kirill Zholnay founder of SelfPrivacy. SelfPrivacy aims to make self-hosting accessible to non-technical users. Born out of a dream to enable every person on the internet to live free of Big Tech surveillance, it provides a simple solution to set up and manage your own server. We spoke to Kirill Zholnay and lead full-stack engineer Inex Code about the need for user autonomy, their crush on Deltachat, NixOS, the joy of receiving positive feedback and how SelfPrivacy is financed.

Links:
SelfPrivacy
SelfPrivacy NGI0 project page
NGI Zero support services

S01E05 Tauri - Daniel Thompson-Yvetot

“The only thing that’s going to solve the mental health crisis in software engineering is more compassion, more collaboration, more attention to the people that you spend time with”, says Daniel Thompson-Yvetot, co-founder of Tauri Apps and CEO of CrabNebula. He also speaks about how the Cyber Resilience Act can be a watershed moment for open source. And how today’s internet is designed for autocrats and corporations and that the projects he works on like Tauri, Verso and Servo, all aim to help us regain our digital autonomy.

Links:
Tauri Apps
CrabNebula
Servo
Verso
Projects funded by NGI Zero:
Tauri Apps
Servo improvements for Tauri
Webview library with Verso for Tauri
Servo Webview for Tauri
Other organizations mentioned: Commons Conservancy

The VoIP revolution - Blink

Adrian Georgescu was part of the Voice over IP revolution and in this episode you’ll learn much about that history and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). With his company AG Projects, Adrian created Blink, a SIP client developed in parallel with the creation of SIP by the IETF. After Blink and SIP hit their limits, he created Sylk Suite which combines SIP with WebRTC to enable multi-party video conferencing.
He also talks about what it’s like to run a FOSS company and having to compete with Big Tech offering services for free and much more.

"Technology is not neutral" - Libervia

It is important to be able to communicate freely, says Jérôme Poisson a.k.a. Goffi. He is the main developer of Libervia, a communication ecosystem based on XMPP. XMPP is mostly associated with chat but Libervia offers many more features such as blogs, fora, calendars and file & photo sharing. It has gateways to other open protocols like ActivityPub and email.

Jérôme identifies multiple problems in digital communications such as Big Tech monopolies and public debates taking place on proprietary platforms. Libervia can’t address all of these problems, because many of them are societal. But it does address some of them with a platform that is decentralized, based on Free Software and open standards. The project has strong ethics in its DNA, written down in a social contract.

Erratum: The security audit for Libervia was done by NGI Zero partner Radically Open Security not by NLnet.

Links:
Libervia website
repos
Libervia explainer video’s
Libervia chat channel
Libervia project at the NLnet website
XMPP software foundation
Podcast mentioned by Jérôme with Lwenn from NLnet

ActiviyPub:
@Goffi@mastodon.social
@xmpp@fosstodon.org
@NGIZero@mastodon.xyz
@nlnet@nlnet.nl

Let's get rid of all the binary blobs - GNU Mes

“Can you really speak of a program being free software if you cannot bootstrap it?”, says our guest Janneke. He is the founder of GNU Mes, a project addressing the security concerns that arise from bootstrapping an operating system using large, unauditable binary blobs.
GNU Mes helped to reduce the number and size of binary seeds that were used in the bootstrap of GNU Guix 1.0 by a factor ten from ~250 to ~25 MiB.
Janneke talks about working on GNU Mes, its community, NGI Zero funding and calls for a fifth freedom: Freedom Four. The freedom to build a program totally from source.
Links:
GNU Mes website
GNU Mes NGI Zero project page
GNU Mes RISC-V NGI Zero project page
GNU Lilypond

Four freedoms of Free Software
Ken Thompson: Reflections on Trusting Trust
DOE040 the democratic school in Eindhoven

Other projects mentioned:
Stage0
Guix
Gash
live bootstrap with lfs

Blog posts on GNU Mes:
Janneke and Ludovic Courtès - April 26, 2023 The Full-Source Bootstrap: Building from source all the way down
Janneke — June 15, 2020 Guix Further Reduces Bootstrap Seed to 25%
Janneke - October 8, 2019 Guix Reduces Bootstrap Seed by 50%

Joep Meindertsma - Atomic Data

One of the issues with today’s internet is that a lot of data is siloed. Consequently, users are locked into Big Tech ecosystems and its hard to reuse data. Joep Meindertsma, CEO of Ontola.io, talks about how his project Atomic Data addresses this problem with LinkedData. The free and open source project is a modular specification for sharing, modifying and modeling data. It uses links to connect pieces of data which makes it easier to connect datasets - even when these datasets exist on separate machines.

Inspired by Tim Berners-Lee, Joep works on an iteration of the semantic web that enforces JSON compatibility and type safety.

He also talks about the effect of NGI Zero funding on Atomic Tables and has some advice for people who are considering to apply for an NGI Zero grant.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Atomic Data
• Ontola.io
• W3C Atomic Data Community Group
• Solid Search (NGI0 link)
• Atomic Data (NGI0 link)
• AtomicTables (NGI0 link)
• NGI Zero support services