All right, well, thank you very much everybody for coming. It's phenomenal, it's fascinating for me to be back here. Still somewhat envious of people who did hop onto the particle physics journey, especially now at such an exciting time when we hopefully are going to see a flood of interesting data and a flood of interesting insight over the next decade or so. I guess what attracted me to particle physics back when I was a teenager was this sense of profound change, this idea that it's possible in your life to be part of something which represents a complete change in the way people think about the world. And particle physics in a very real sense defines what we think reality is all about. And so I guess that's been a common theme in a lot of the things that I've pursued. It's been trying to find projects which represent a tipping point or a definitive change in the world, and just to see what new possibilities they create. And I have this theory that change happens at a very constant rate, right? Innovation insights happen at a constant rate. They happen over coffee, they happen over a glass of red wine, they happen on a bus. People have interesting ideas at a constant rate, but those ideas kind of like traffic on a highway, they tend to sort of block up and get wedged, and then move in great big floods. And so it's very interesting for me to see opportunities or times in history when there's this sort of great release or surge in creativity around a particular area.
I guess the first in my career, after giving up on physics, the big opportunity that I saw happening in the 1990s was something that also started right here, which was the web. I can remember very clearly, I don't know how many of you can remember that moment that you first saw a web browser. And if before that you'd been using kind of text-based forms of community building and exchange on the internet, when you suddenly saw this two-dimensional view on the knowledge of the world, it just was one of those defining moments when you felt like everything is going to change. This is going to sweep through every industry. And so for a period of a couple of years I really pursued that change. I looked for opportunities to sort of be at the cutting edge of that, which was interesting given that I was kind of in a small suburb at the far tip of Africa. And even though we were talking about the most powerful expression of globalization ever, it hadn't necessarily reached the far tip of Africa. So I was trying to find things that would be cutting edge for the web without really having a lot of bandwidth available or venture capital or any of those sorts of things. But it's always possible to find a way to sort of be part of a big change like that.
After that wave had sort of swept through, that tsunami had kind of swept through leaving everyone a little bit shaken, I then was really interested in space. And it seemed to me that because of the changes that were happening in Russia, there was just again a unique opportunity to be part of a change in the way people feel about space, in the way we sort of connect to it. And I think that's a change that hasn't really yet fully reached its conclusion. I think, you know, in the next 10, 15 years we'll see space becoming something that everybody feels personally connected to. That almost people will start to have members of their family who have been to space and experienced that and had their thinking changed by the experience.
Anyway, the current project that I'm focused on, that most of my time goes into, is Ubuntu. I don't know how many folks here are familiar with free software and open source in general. Okay, right. How many folks here have used Ubuntu? Okay, so you'll understand what I mean about sort of trying to be part of something which represents a fundamental change, right? Like a complete change in the way people think about things. And it seems to me that we have this opportunity with free software to fundamentally change the way that whole industry works. I have no interest whatsoever in trying to replace essentially a proprietary way of doing things in the proprietary world with a similarly proprietary way of doing things in the free software world. I think that the opportunity is there if we want to create it to build something that is completely different, completely new, which really changes the way people think about software and use software, and which changes economics in a way that means that being at the tip of Africa or down in Ushuaia or somewhere in Indonesia is not putting you at a disadvantage effectively when it comes to access to technology, access to thinking, access to the platforms which define what you can do in the world.
And that's a kind of thinking that I think resonates here. When I look at the work that's been done at CERN to make sure that institutions around the world are able to participate, they're able to tap into that flow of data, they're able to be part of this voyage of discovery. You know, at the lunch table we had, I think, what, six, seven people and seven countries represented. I'm guessing here in this room we have 25, maybe 30 countries represented. And so we can all, I think, resonate strongly with the idea that interesting thinking and great ideas and great potential spring up equally in every corner of the globe. And to me Ubuntu is about making absolutely sure that everybody has access to the next way of thinking. And so in a very real sense it's kind of an expression of what free software is really all about.
Anyway, so this talk is one that I think I first put together for the guys at ApacheCon, and essentially it's kind of a checkpoint on the free software world and what we're trying to achieve and what the sort of near-term humps in the road, speed bumps, are that we have to kind of get over. Because in a very real sense it's easy to try and declare victory, right? I mean, in a very real sense free software has come to define big chunks of the computing landscape. If you're into supercomputing, you know this very, very clearly, right? You wouldn't consider doing supercomputing or anything that wasn't intrinsically, deeply built on the free software stack that we all know and trust. The same is true for large-scale web infrastructure. Right, there are just big chunks of computing today that free software has come to dominate. But that's not true of the computing experience that, you know, my grandmother would have when she sits down at a computer. It's not true of the computing experience that a kid sitting down in the average school has. And so this is really focused on sort of figuring out what are the big challenges, what are the things we need to, well, passwords is one of them.
One of the big things we need to unlock effectively if we're going to really come to redefine the computing platform for everybody — not just for supercomputing guys, not just for physicists, not just for web host engineers, because they're a very special breed, right? — for everybody. So this is kind of number 13 on my list, and that is that we have to make this environment something that's attractive to work in. I was kind of thrilled walking around the ATLAS control room to see that this is very clearly, probably definitely a Unix and probably a Linux-based environment. But let's be honest, not necessarily a very pretty environment, right? Not necessarily built for functionality, not necessarily for comfort. We have to kind of elevate our thinking. And this is a very challenging thing to talk about with software engineers, particularly software engineers who are motivated by solving problems for themselves, because once it works for me, sort of by definition almost I've lost interest in taking it any further.
And so this is one of, socially, one of the biggest challenges for us in the free software world, is figuring out how we can actually inspire software engineers to go that extra, to do the extra work required to make something really easy to use, really attractive to use for everybody else. I think it takes almost an order of magnitude more work to produce something which can be widely used and is widely considered easy to use and well polished than it is to produce something that just works for yourself. And so this is kind of, this is a social challenge that we face within the free software community. It's not just about art — there's some incredible free software-based art and eye candy — but it's about the intrinsic beauty of the applications and the interfaces to them.
This is an interesting one. If you happen to be in the business of producing distributions, it's probably not that interesting to you, except in the sense that many of you may have grown frustrated by internal friction and inefficiencies between different groups who've chosen different platforms, all within the same free software space, but which now run into, you know, what in Windows would call DLL hell, but in the Linux world is really just this problem of software packaging and distribution, right? Does it make any sense whatsoever for someone who's running infrastructure based on one distro not to be able to pass software over the fence to someone who's running it in a different distro and not have it just work? It seems to me that 10 years ago the question of packaging was interesting, there was really interesting R&D being done and fundamental decisions being made, but we have basically solved all of those problems. And so solving this problem is really a question of doing the work to bring communities together and recognizing that there's a tremendous amount of value to all of us in solving this problem.
I would like to see us get to the point where, for every free software project and upstream out there, that packaging is just implicit in what they do, and that packaging works across FreeBSD, works across OpenSolaris, works across all the flavors of Linux, and if necessary works in sort of the Windows environment through compatibility layers and so on. We have to play to our strengths essentially in the software game. What we don't have as strength is commercial marketing muscle. But what we do have as a strength is this absence of artificial barriers, right? Free software projects don't compete with each other in the same way that vendors do, and so we shouldn't create artificial barriers where none exist. And so this is quite a big point for me in terms of really leveraging the power of the free software space.
So this is an interesting one. How many of you guys are familiar with the Creative Commons and the work of the Creative Commons? Okay, interesting. So Creative Commons came up from kind of the cultural side of the free software movement, people wanting to try and create the same sorts of benefits for content that we now have through the free software movement for code. The idea being essentially that content, just like code, is really useful if it gets reused and redeployed. And it's really beautiful when it gets reused and redeployed. Wouldn't it be great if content behaved the same way? And there's some tricky cultural issues there, right? I've been involved with projects, for example, to produce textbooks for schools, and even in cases where whole countries make all of their content, their textbook content, freely available, even when it's in the same language, you know, South Africans don't necessarily want to use Australian textbooks. And so culturally some things don't translate in the same way that code does.
But fundamentally what the Creative Commons guys were saying is let's look at what's happened in the free software world and try and achieve the same stuff with content. And they did something I think really smart. They recognized that there are just different camps out there that want slightly different things, and that rather than fighting viciously for one corner of that landscape, effectively the best strategy would be to basically mark out the territory and provide a framework where everybody could say this is where I live and this is where this content lives, and so it's either compatible with you or it isn't. And so the Creative Commons guys basically drew up a matrix of, you know, can this content be used commercially or can't it? Does this content require you to share your modifications or doesn't it? Are you allowed to, must you give attribution for this content or don't you have to do that? Basically the major sorts of axes. And that's resulted in a really clean, clear landscape effectively for creating a commons of content.
We don't have that in software. It's kind of a legacy from the fact that the free software movement grew up out of lots of different camps effectively. And this results not just in differences, right? I totally understand that there are going to be differences and incompatibilities. But it results in a level of friction and complexity that makes it sometimes really hard to know whether two pieces of software are actually legally allowed to be used together. So I'd really like to see this cleaned up.
So this is something that's very desktop-y, pervasive presence. How many you guys are familiar with the concept of presence? Cool, it's getting more interesting. So presence is all about what becomes possible in a world where we do genuinely have pervasive bandwidth everywhere. So right now I'm guessing that there's two or three Wi-Fi — if I did a scan there'd be, what, two, three Wi-Fi networks. CERN isn't one of those institutions that bans Wi-Fi or anything scary, is it? Good. So I'm guessing there's a whole bunch of Wi-Fi networks around here, some of which would allow me to get on, and it's probably possible to sort of get onto the internet. We're headed to a world where it's going to be really hard not to be on the internet. It's quite hard now to go on safari in Africa and not have a cell phone connection. You actually have to turn it off yourself rather than just having sort of geography dictate that to you. And so we're entering a world where you've got to assume everybody is in some way connected all the time.
And so it becomes really interesting to start to be able to think of having everybody accessible to you all the time, and you want to start to know really interesting things about where people are, how do they want to be contacted, and so on. So this is one of the areas where I think the desktop experience is going to change radically over the next 10 years. And the big thing for me is about trying to find areas where the free software desktop can start to be the cutting edge of innovation. Many of you will be familiar with the accusation from big proprietary, traditional proprietary software companies that free software is really just about copying what's been done before, that it's really just about removing intellectual property rather than actually creating new innovation.
I don't believe that's true at all. I believe that in fact the collaborative approach is the richest model for stimulating innovation that we have out there. And this is something that's been true in academia for centuries, right? Publishing your work and getting other people to build on it accelerates innovation. And so I often spend a lot of time looking for areas where we can start to demonstrate that the free software environment is actually at the cutting edge of innovation rather than simply catching up. I do think it's true that as long as there is a reference point out there that we haven't yet attained, we tend to spend a lot of our energy in catching up. But once we get to that point you get this tremendous explosion of innovation. And one of the best examples of that is Firefox. I'm guessing Firefox is very heavily used here. And probably the biggest reason for that, other than the ideological, is that once Firefox reached the point where it had a similar level of functionality to the competition, it was this open platform where anybody could express their interesting ideas about what made for a cool browser. And so you suddenly saw this explosion of innovation around Firefox, people coming up with new concepts about what the web could be like and what a browser could be like. And as a result it just became this real focal point of innovation. There's far more innovation going on around Firefox than there is around the proprietary alternatives. Right, so presence is going to be one of those big areas.
So another big thing that we have to figure out is this question of support. What does it mean? And to me the big question here is kind of a philosophical one. What does it mean when you say to someone this is a supported platform? Because we all know that there's plenty of support available for Linux and for free software, right? It's not as though if you want support you can't get it. For any major distribution there is a phone number that you can call to speak in your own language to someone who will help you solve a problem. We all sort of know this. And yet at the same time we all still consider the free software platform sort of intrinsically unsupported. And I think that this is really a social thing. We need to get to the point where the guy at the corner shop which sells computer components, sticks, you know, essentially attests to the fact that they will provide free support for the free software platform. So this is again kind of a social challenge that we need to figure out. How do we get the whole industry to converge around saying, okay, this Linux thing is something that we genuinely want to consider supported, so that your grandmother has no reservations whatsoever about whether Linux is going to be supported if it's something that she chooses to use.
How many Russians do we have in the house? I'm guessing quite a few. So this is one of the big potential strengths — translation. Do you speak Russian? This is one of the great strengths of free software, right? Is our ability to take it into parts of the world that it wouldn't otherwise — that it makes no commercial sense effectively to take the whole traditional software stack into. And so one of the areas where I spend quite a lot of time is in figuring out how we build infrastructure, kind of Wikipedia-like infrastructure, to translate software into languages that — can I get a web connection here? Sorry, I need to get credentials.
Okay, so basically what I would take you to is a page which shows sort of 250 languages and how well translated free software is into those languages. And it turns out that there are 350 languages which have more than a million speakers in the world, which seems like a kind of a serious number of speakers. But free software is only translated more than 50% into about 20 of those languages. So there's a tremendous amount of work still to be done if we want this platform to become really pervasive. The good news is that it's actually a hell of a lot more translated than the proprietary alternative. This is one of those interesting things when you go into rural communities in the world, people have — there's a sort of expectation that in order to become computer literate, or in order to gain that level of access effectively to the 21st century, to the digital world, that you have to learn another language. And that seems to me to be fundamentally broken.
One of the big challenges, for example cultural challenges, is that once people have gone to all the trouble of learning, typically English, it's hard to get them to invest a lot of energy and resources in creating content for their traditional mother tongue. Why? Because they suddenly have access to this vast repository of content in a language which they now have access to. So it's just far more interesting for them to spend large amounts of time tapping into that existing network effect than it is to create content for their original community, effectively. Some great work was done in Senegal recently where they created an internet, but created an internet effectively between local villages, and for a long time didn't hook it up to the rest of the internet because they wanted to create a critical mass of local content and processes — so people exchanging information kind of bulletin board style stuff between rural communities in the local language — before they hooked it up to the internet.
So, great gadgets. I think this is going to be over the next three years, this is going to be a huge story for Linux, right? That we're seeing a wave of new smart gadgets emerging, typically from countries like Korea, to a certain extent Taiwan, China, and just an enormous number of these gadgets are powered by Linux, right? Powered by free software. And so this is another interesting area where we're seeing a lot of innovation happen. If we can create standards in that kind of environment, if we can get it to the point where the cost of innovating effectively can get really, really low, then I think we're just going to see a phenomenal explosion in the quality of devices. How many guys have a smartphone here today? Okay, relatively few. There's about 100 million smartphones sold every year now, and that number is going up at, I think, 40, 50% annualized growth rate. And Linux is the fastest growing platform in that market, and now I think has overtaken, sort of Symbian, which is one of the big heavy hitters in the early days of smartphones.
So kind of the gadget world — smartphones, PDAs, GPS, internet tablets, mobile internet devices, things like the iPhone — are going to be a big area where there's the potential for free software to have an enormous impact.
Sensory immersion. Do you guys do a lot of virtual reality type stuff here? I guess theoretical physics is kind of virtual reality. Okay. So I had a really interesting lunch with a guy called Joi Ito, who's this amazing Japanese guy — he'd be a very interesting speaker as well — and he was telling me about his fascination with World of Warcraft. And this guy has the savviest nose for the next big thing of anybody I've ever met. And he's just a nice Japanese guy, but he has consistently invested in startups that just catch the right idea at the right time, which is a remarkable gift. I don't know how he does it. So I was really interested in what he had to say. And he was telling me about his fascination with World of Warcraft, not so much the execution of it, but how it was changing the way he would do stuff.
So World of Warcraft is this massively multiplayer game basically, but for some odd reason it's kind of captured people's imagination. And so he was talking about how people are starting to blur the lines between the gaming world and their own world, but not in a sort of twisted psychological sense, in a real world reality sense. So he said, for example, he doesn't — there's always something going on, right? He has a lot of friends, they're from all these different time zones, and they're always doing something in this virtual reality. So while he can't devote his time to being there all the time, it's still interesting to be able to sort of tap into that. So he's wired up one room in his house where the audio system there is effectively piped in from World of Warcraft, which means that whenever he's near that room, or if he's in that room even while he's doing something else, he's listening in the background to what's going on in that other world.
How many of you guys have played with Second Life? Anybody played Second Life? Okay. Second Life is kind of like an adult version of World of Warcraft. It's an attempt to create a genuine sort of virtual world where you create your own character, your avatar, and they sell property. Right, so there's a world and every now and then they create more world, which is great business to be in. I'd love to do that. Imagine, more Swiss real estate on the lakefront, yeah.
So this is a whole kind of blurring of the lines of what's real and what's virtual. And I can envisage us getting to the point where we want to be part of that to a degree, we want to be part of that all the time. So if you combine that with the pervasive presence, this idea that you could be walking down the street, your cell phone is wired, so you are effectively wired, something happens in a virtual world and you want to know about it — which is a very weird concept, right? It's no longer like TV where you're not watching it and then you are watching it and then you're not watching it and never watch it. But it's become something that really genuinely impinges on your reality in interesting sorts of ways. So from a desktop software point of view, how do we take advantage of that? How do we move beyond just point and click? How do we take advantage of the other senses effectively is a really interesting question. How do we convey more information without interrupting the chain of thought, right?
Bill was telling me about how ATLAS has to do all of this filtering, right? Throwing away information that is not considered interesting or relevant for that particular experiment. Our brains are doing that all the time, and we're very, very bad at switching contexts. So how can we continue to get more information about this richer virtual world out there without basically interrupting our flow of concentration?
Okay, this is a bit of an obscure point, and again it really talks about the free software community. There's a really interesting question: like, how do we view the free software community? Do we view it as — you go to SourceForge, it's what, 100,000 different efforts — or do we really view it as one cohesive software engineering effort, right? And clearly it's neither of those things. Clearly there's sufficient obvious interdependencies between all these different pieces that it does have some sort of glue. But clearly also it's not very well glued together, because all of these different components show up in different versions, in different forms, at different times, and sort of somewhat unpredictably and chaotically. How can we actually bind that all together? And the kind of example that I would give here when I'm talking to free software developers is: think of your competition, right? Sitting up in Redmond in Washington in the US are a bunch of engineers who are working on some little GUI application, and one of them may well trigger a bug in a completely different part of the infrastructure.
Just from looking at that line of code, by typing a single command and clicking a couple of times, he can figure out the phone number extension of the guy who wrote that line of code, right? He knows exactly which bug tracker to put that information into. He knows exactly how to interact with that part of the community effectively. And we just don't have that in the free software world, because our tools and everything are really built for collaboration internally within a project, but not built for collaboration across projects. We don't have this cohesive view of the free software development ecosystem right now.
I'm not at all suggesting that anybody's going to impose sort of order on what is essentially a very liberal, libertarian, loosely affiliated process. But can we create emergent order? Can we essentially get people to the point where the tools themselves make it really easy for that kind of efficient collaboration to happen? Think how much effort gets wasted. You know, Eric Raymond's sort of famous statement that given sufficient eyeballs all bugs are shallow, which is true, except that the fact that most of those eyeballs don't speak to each other on a regular basis. Right, you're an Apache guy or an Ubuntu guy or a Red Hat guy or a Solaris guy or a CentOS guy, and you may well run into a...
Bug somewhere else, but the friction involved in starting that conversation often prevents people from doing anything about it. They may fix it, they may create a patch that works for them, but the friction involved in distributing that knowledge to the place where it could have the biggest impact is such that it doesn't happen. If we can get rid of that, if we could get it together in a really efficient way, we would really accelerate the pace of innovation in free software. So I need to just cheat a bit.
So another area where I think we're going to see phenomenal innovation around the desktop—I've got these two bullet points the wrong way around, but another area where we're going to see the opportunity to really pave the way is this concept of real-time collaboration. So let's talk about different kinds of collaboration. Everybody here uses email and has been using email for, I'm guessing, 15 years, right? So that means that you're used to the idea of, without thinking of where someone is or what time zone they're in, being able to throw some stuff at them and then get a response. So that's kind of like an asynchronous collaboration framework, right? And it works really well for certain kinds of problems. Now, how many folks here are thoroughly immersed in kind of real-time chat and real-time? Right, so you're used to having colleagues that are only really defined by their affiliation with a particular forum, right? That's the only thing that you know about them in many cases, is they're in, you know, #bazaar or #ubuntu-devel or, you know, #whatever and #hash. And you're able to interact with them and have a sort of a real level of interaction.
Now separately, look at things like the problem of exchanging documents. How many of you guys have used, like, revision control infrastructure? Okay, so a lot of coders are in the room, so you know how important it is to be able to keep track when you've got lots of people trying to work on something, how important it is to be able to keep track of who changed what when, right? And why they did it and whether or not a particular set of changes have been merged in. When you tie all of these sorts of disparate threads together, what you get, I think, is sort of a big set of arrows that all converge on the same thing, which is that the next step in collaboration is real-time in the way that IRC is real-time compared to email, revision-controlled in the sense that it's all about being able to collaborate with confidence, right? The great thing about revision control systems for me is that I can open them up to anybody, right? Because I can always know what they changed, why they changed it, and if I don't like it, I can revert it. Look at Wikipedia, for example. Wikipedia is in a very real sense real-time because changes are reflected immediately, has revision control in place in the sense that you can always see who changed what when they changed it, what comments are associated, what the thread of the conversation was, and you can revert it effectively. So I think that kind of the next generation of applications are all going to have these ideas built deeply into them. Has anyone here seen a demo of something called Croquet? It's really worth checking that out. So it's written in Smalltalk, so it's a little bit obscure, but it's a beautiful piece of work.
And essentially, it's a 3D immersive environment where, much like a Second Life, where people with avatars effectively move around and can interact with one another. But what they've started to do is they've started to build applications in this kind of environment. So the classic example is you'll go into a room, and there's a spreadsheet hanging in the air, right? And there's a bunch of people around the spreadsheet, and they're all working on the spreadsheet, and you can see visually, you can see who's working where. And so as this person is changing content, I can see that they changed this content, and we start to have to develop new visual metaphors effectively for information presentation. It becomes really important to know, you know, who changed this line and how long ago they changed it. So you start to see spreadsheets where the newer stuff is glowing, and glowing different colors depending on who worked on it. We started to use this stuff for planning Ubuntu, for actually building Ubuntu. Has anybody here used something called Gobby? Oh, cool, you absolutely have to try this out. Or how many Mac users do you have here? Quite a few. Are you familiar with SubEthaEdit? Okay, same sort of idea. Mac guys are always just a little bit ahead. So if you're a Linux guy, get Gobby and play with it.
Essentially, what it does is it gives you a shared text editor. And so you create a document, and then you say, you know, I'm editing this document, and anybody can connect to your machine, or you can have a server which hosts the document. And when you connect to the server, you'll see all the documents; you can connect to it, and you can see all the different cursors of the people who are editing that document in real-time. So the way we use this is we have a six-month release schedule, and in the first or second week of that six-month release schedule, we bring all of our core developers together, or as many of them as we can, in one place, and we have this really intense week where we map out maybe a hundred different things that are going to go into the next release of Ubuntu. And the big challenge for us, of course, is that there's this sort of first-class and second-class thing where, you know, we can't afford to sponsor everybody who's interested into those conferences, and people who are personally interested in coming, who may well have something to contribute, can't necessarily afford to get there. So we're trying to sort of eliminate those first-class, second-class issues, and Gobby allows us to do this. When we're having a conversation around a table, and the document that we're producing is essentially being published in real-time on the internet, and it doesn't matter from an editorial point of view whether you're in the room or not in the room, you are editing the same document. We also use voice over IP, so on the table in that room is a conference phone, and that conversation is being streamed out over the internet. So in theory and in many cases in practice, we have people who are participating in that conversation even though they're on the other side of the planet. They're listening to the voice, they can speak, and they can edit the document in exactly the same way that they would if they were sitting at the table. They don't get to drink beer with us afterwards, but fundamentally, from a sort of collaboration point of view, it's real-time, it's revision-controlled, and it's just really, really tight. Now, imagine if we could do that with spreadsheets, with word processing documents, with every kind of piece of information that you have to manipulate on a regular basis, right? And so there's going to be, I think, a whole wave of rewriting of the tools that we all use every day to take this into account, to factor this in.
Okay, how many guys have played with Vista? Excellent, I confess I had a look. It's really interesting that Vista incorporates a whole bunch of this stuff over here, this idea of changing, of moving beyond a two-dimensional presentation, starting to ask the question what happens when we move towards a three-dimensional view of both reality but also of information, right? And Vista and to a certain extent the Mac OS have been touching on this for a little while now, but I think there's the opportunity to go a lot further, to really start to give depth to our information presentation. This is similar to kind of the sensory immersion idea earlier, right? How do we start to use the fact that our brains are wired for 3D? Now, true 3D interfaces, I don't believe they work. We're going to have to find something which is a hybrid between reality and information space. And so this is an area where I think the free software community is going to be able to innovate very, very quickly.
It was very interesting for me, for example, when I got to the space station, to notice that even though there is absolutely no concept of up, down, left, right, right? It's a relativistic experiment of note, right? I mean, there really is no frame of reference, right? Up, down just do not exist. Yet all of the astronauts would align themselves in the same way, and by and large, if it was even slightly obvious where Earth was, people would put their feet in that direction. And it's not at all clear to me why that is, except that the fact that our brain, you know, has spent millions and millions of years evolving to deal with certain kinds of inputs, and they're not necessarily entirely rational, right? The brain can't reconfigure itself in a rational way. And so a lot of this is about figuring out how we use the irrational corner cases in the wiring of our brain to maximize our ability to interface with it, to be useful, to be productive.
Okay, so this is almost the most important thing, most difficult thing, I think, that is between us and the widespread, pervasive adoption of free software, and that is that there's a peripherals gap, there's this sense that you want to know that the next thing you get will be compatible with what you've currently got. And so Granny's new camera is kind of the classic example. When Granny buys a new camera, will she have to worry about whether or not it's going to work with her PC? I think the interesting thing here is that the correlation between the gadgets focus area and this area, the convergence there is very strong. Most new gadgets now have operating systems running on them, and in a large percentage of cases, that's Linux. So if you buy a digital camera today, there's a chance that it's actually running Linux. If you buy a smartphone, there's a very good chance that it's actually running Linux. So the potential is there to start to create these synergies where things just work in a way that we've never really been able to achieve in the past.
So my hope is that we can actually not just achieve parity with the proprietary software world, that we can actually really leapfrog it, where things that should be easy just really are easy, right? I mean, I shouldn't have to synchronize my cell phone with my PC when I'm sitting within Bluetooth range of it all the time, right? It should just work. I shouldn't have to worry about whether I've done something right; the things should just take care of that kind of stuff. And I think the only way we're going to achieve that is by having free software stacks on both sides of that fence. And this is what I see as kind of the number one challenge facing us, because it's not a technical challenge, it's not a social challenge, it's kind of a willpower challenge, right? Do we actually want to create something that looks fundamentally different from the past, or do we want to essentially just recreate the past in a different wrapper? And the good news here is I think, you know, there's a natural pendulum swing, there's a natural evolution is such that great ideas will always emerge. So if it is possible for us to create something that profoundly changes the world, then someone somewhere will do it, and it will gain momentum, it will gain strength.
Classically, whenever a profoundly new way of doing things enters into society, it takes two separate sorts of waves. If you think of the web, right, the first wave of the web, the first sort of five, eight years of it, commercial explosion, a lot of energy was spent on trying to transfer traditional media thinking into the web or traditional content thinking into the web, and on trying to create, in many cases, quite artificially similar economics to what had gone before. We see exactly the same thing now with DRM, for example. The content owners, record companies, and movie companies would love to be able to enforce the same economics on bits as they used to enjoy on vinyl, right? But it just doesn't work that way, right? It is a fundamentally new environment, and so it takes a succession of new generations, but eventually people figure out that there are actually just better ways to use the new technology or the new thinking. With the web, for example, we went through large numbers of directories before people figured out that, you know, it doesn't make sense to organize the information, just turn the tree on its head and search for it, and so Google represents kind of the second wave of our understanding about what's possible with the internet. And so my sense here is that free software will go through two waves: that there will be a first wave where it essentially is most successful when it looks just like what went before, and we see that now, right? And with many kinds of Linux, today you can buy them just like you can buy Unix, and they are sold as replacements for Unix that have the same economics, the same terms and conditions, just a better price. But I think the really powerful wave is the one that is yet to come, which is about fundamentally changing the way people think about things.
So that's everything I had to say about free software. I'm really interested to hear what you guys are doing with it and what you see as the big challenges for adoption within the fields that you consider important. I've also got—I don't know how many of you guys are interested in space, maybe I should have talked about that. So I'm going to put up some pictures of the experience of basically what it's like to get certified, train, and fly as a cosmonaut in Russia, or at least what it was like in 2002. And I'll just let that run in the background, actually, hold on a sec, okay.
