Jeff Moe is a 37 year old self-employed father. Better known as jebba, he is the main developer behind the 100% Free distribution BLAG (for BLAG Linux And GNU). He is also leading a couple of other Free software projects. He kindly agreed to give Blue GNU an interview by Jabber.

Jeff Moe's Background

Magic Banana: How did you come to use and get involved with Free Softwares?

jebba: Well, the short version is: I started an ISP in 1995 based on Red Hat & Slackware.

Magic Banana: What about the long version? :)

jebba: I had an Apple ][e way back when, then went through the Mac thing for HS/College (using a Mac I stopped learning about computers)... I occassionally used Unix at the university, but mostly for things like mailing lists and FTP. Then I decided to look back into the whole PC world (post-college), and decided the best way to learn about PCs was to build one. So i did: I got hired at some place that refurbished junk PCs by the pallet, so i cleaned up lots of PCs. I made a website "How to Build Your Own PC" which I think was the first of its kind on the Internet (included photos even--wow). Anyway, I never used Windows and never liked it, so I got a book with Slackware in the back of it and installed that thing from 40+ floppies because my CD player wasn't supported.

Magic Banana: When did you start developing softwares?

jebba: Months later I had set up name servers, Web servers, mail servers, Usenet, etc. on a couple boxes. I got some modems and, *shebang*, I was working with Free software every day. I sold the ISP in 2000, then kicked around the world for a bit, landing in Brixton London for an extended period. There I was hanging out at another place that recycled computers (communitytechnology.org.uk). So I pieced together a one CD "distro" that we could install on machines, based on what the others there requested. So that's basically how BLAG came about. We wound up putting it up for FTP and such. It's more like sysadmin than programming...

BLAG Linux And GNU

Magic Banana: As far as I know you have been the only developer of BLAG until recently. Right?

jebba: Well, there have been other people that have popped by for a bit (e.g., some developer in China did a Chinese version until he got a girlfriend iirc ;). stevo32 has always helped out and maintains packages here and there. jayeola and weyasey, the same guys that we started it with, are always there helping with the development by testing and telling me what's up. iron_chef has been helping recently, but has been MIA about a month now.

Magic Banana: OK. However, it mainly remains a one-person distro, right?

jebba: Mmm.

Magic Banana: I mean one-developer! Not one-user! :D

jebba: Haha! No. Both of them use it. ;) But yes, pretty much one dev wouldn't be too inaccurate. ;)

Magic Banana: Compared to most other distributions (including Fedora which BLAG is based on), BLAG does provide out of the box support for patent-encumbered technologies such as audio and video codecs. For some misinformed users, this may look suprising in a Freedom-pure distro. Could you tell more about this choice?

jebba:

$ rpm -qp --queryformat "%{LICENSE}\n" lame-3.97-6.lvn8.i386.rpm

Maybe the people can point to the violating lines instead of just asserting it (à la SCO). Then those lines could be rewritten (if it was true). But the patent thing could apply to basically anything on the computer. Didn't someone patent double-clicking? the wheel? ;)

Magic Banana: The last stable version of BLAG is based on Fedora 7. Fedora 9 is out since May 13th. Do you plan to skip BLAG 80000 and directly focus on BLAG 90000?

jebba: A few people were running 80k despite it never being "stable". The repository worked fine. I just never completed a good install CD. But you could install it by jumping through a couple hoops or just dist-upgrading/yumming up to it. Anyway, just this weekend I put rawhide/development on my main laptop and have set up a BLAG repository which tracks various upstream repositories and grabs just their FSF-Free packages. It's called BLAGHEAD. So from now on we'll *always* have BLAGHEAD and it will always be the most bleeding edge version.

Magic Banana: Can this be called the "Arch-way"?

jebba: Traditionally I've always pushed out an "alpha" within a few days of Fedora/Red Hat releases. This is enough to get people up and going with it and start using the repository. Honestly, I'm not that familiar with Arch, though i did install it once. So yes, 90k will likely be out before any 80k, though 80k is kind of there anyway. I just call it "stable" when it's sooper easy to upgrade from one stable to the next.

Magic Banana: Can you enumerate what will be, according to you, the main advantages in using BLAG 90000 instead of Fedora 9?

jebba: 1) FSF-Free

2) Always a bigger repository :) (BLAG had apt-getable repositories before Fedora/Red Hat, by the way)

3) Tuned for more normal machines than "enterprise" (e.g., small speedups in various configs, a big one being SELinux disabled)

4) Just on one CD, but Fedora is doing that now (???), maybe just for their Live CD

5) Better default package set. Basically you get up and running with a good workstation and basic applications more quickly

You may find this helpful if you haven't seen it before: https://wiki.blagblagblag.org/Roadmap

linux-libre

Magic Banana: That is a great list of advantages! To enforce the first one (FSF-Free), you spend much time removing proprietary blobs from the linux kernel. What are these blobs?

jebba: There's a list in this file.

Magic Banana: A user having an ATI graphic card may be afraid to be unable to run BLAG. What are, concretely, the consequences of the removal of this driver from the kernel?

jebba: It affects things like 3D, but won't affect using Firefox and such.

Magic Banana: What do you think of the attitude of the Linux developers w.r.t. these blobs, and, more generally with the Free Software ethics?

jebba: Well, the attitude of linux developers wrt blobs is all over the map. Did you see the kernel-libre thread on fedora-devel? Huge thread. Flamewar. That will give you an idea of the *Fedora* developers, at least.

Magic Banana: Fedora is quite respectfull to Free Software principles, no?

jebba: In general they are, or they have come to be, perhaps. Though about kernel blobs and firmware, they sure aren't.

Magic Banana: gNewSense has just released a new version based on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. They chose to replace Ubuntu's kernel with linux-libre. Has any other distribution (Ututo maybe?) shown interest in using your kernel?

jebba: Well, Alexandre Oliva (Red Hat compiler engineer) has shown interest in getting it into Fedora, which is that thread i gave you above. I'm not sure what's up with Ututo. I don't keep in good touch with them (the main guy used to live here in Buenos Aires, but is now in Spain). dyne:bolic will almost certainly use it in their next main release. I talked to jaromil from dyne:bolic & bbrazil from gNewSense frequently.

Magic Banana: Do you think linux-libre may end up in Fedora?

jebba: So I've actually been talking to Oliva about this a bit. He's got a package set going with his own scripts (based on mine) and tarballs and such. We're talking about getting on the same page. Well, it would be called kernel-libre, but it will likely just be maintained outside the main Fedora repository. One reason is the Fedora developers went a bit insane trying to maintain kernel-xen and such and don't want to be burned again. It's easier for them to just maintain one src rpm, basically.

Magic Banana: Maybe a spin for freedom-pureness in the future?

jebba: Yes, well, I dont really know what's in the future for them, but maybe they'd do that. But again, it doesn't look like they'll have a FSF-Free kernel in Fedora repository anytime soon.

... and the Rest!

Magic Banana: Mark Shuttleworth proposed to merge Gobuntu and gNewSense (in favor of the latter). Any thought to share with us on that?

jebba: I did read his message. I follow gNewSense with one eye, but I haven't looked into Gobuntu at all so I don't have much to say there... Though, at a glance, a merge makes sense.

Magic Banana: Would you, yourself imagine to merge BLAG with, let say, a future FSF-pure Fedora spin which would have gained more developers than BLAG? (I know: that is science fiction)

jebba: Sure. They can do it for me, that would roolz. ;)

Magic Banana: If you have anything you would like to add...

jebba: oh, I can give you a few more things I wouldn't mind mentioning.

1) kinderBLAG. This roolz. That's a Live CD based on Fedora (147M). Or even better, based on OpenBSD (304M). Check out the OpenBSD kinderBLAG and then give it to someone that has kids. Live CD. It doesn't touch the harddrive. It won't mess up anything (e.g., kids can't delete your work). It can run on a Windows box cause it's a Live CD. That's basically a GCompris Live CD.

2) I've been poking away at the Eee, in hopes of being able to support ALL hardware (including BIOS) running Free software: http://www.blagblagblag.org/pub/BLAG/developers/jebba/eee/

jebba: Oh, and Git is my new favorite program.

Magic Banana: Much work on Linux creates that I guess! :D

jebba: :) Git is the greatest.

Magic Banana: Even when you are the only one touching the source? Isn't it overkilling?

jebba: Well, I use it for directories of scripts, for example. Sort of "automatic backups". Basically you can track anything with it. Nice logs and such. Grab a `git` archive like:

git-clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git

Then `cd` in there and run `git-log`, `git-status`, `git-blame drivers/net/tg3.c`, etc. So coool. The .git repository for the kernel is around 500M. Hopefully git will displace svn quickly.

Magic Banana: Well, thank you again for your work with Free softwares!

jebba: Eh, no problem, thank you. :)

Updates: The 90000 repository is roughly in place and some of the first patches related to linux-libre have hit LKML (by David Woodhouse).