“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% NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations providing financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet. You can find us on @NGIZero@mastodon.xyz. NGI Zero is made possible with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative.
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 NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations providing financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet. You can find us on @NGIZero@mastodon.xyz. NGI Zero is made possible with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative.