Paul Kocialkowski's coding blog

This year's edition of RMLL/LSM, the free software conference that travels in and out of France (with an international aim) just ended. Time to take a step back and look at what happened during the 4/5 days I was there.

Thankfully, I get to travel to such conferences using money from the Replicant fund, so I will be refunded both my train tickets and my stay this time again. It makes it much easier (and to be honest, possible at all) for me to attend such conferences. This way, I don't have to worry about finding a summer job and can instead focus on what I do best, reverse engineering proprietary stuff and writing (free) replacement code.

Monday

This time, I arrived on Monday afternoon and could attend a first talk after a quick chat with the lovely people from the information booth. The talk, that was part of the security track, was presented by Lunar (Tor and Debian developer) and reported the current state of the art of reproducible builds for Debian (and more). It was really nice to see such overwhelming progress accomplished, after I attended the initial talk during which he announced the reproducible builds initiative a year and a half back, at FOSDEM. Lunar's talk answered most of the questions I had regarding how to make software reproducible. I am especially interested in making the U-Boot bootloader reproducible. I had that idea at the back of my head for some time now and decided to jump in after seeing a contribution in that direction on the U-Boot mailing list. Eventually, we managed to get some of that work done (right) later in the week. The rest of the afternoon was filled with chatting around in the village. In the evening, I met people from the event at a local bar, were free music was being played. It was a nice atmosphere and we had some interesting technical discussions (and let's be honest, many trolls as well)! I was thrilled to see that people were not only aware of Replicant, but also had a lot of interest in it.

Tuesday

On Tuesday, it was time to get to the workshop I was supposed to co-host. The whole day was filled with various activities around different kinds of embedded devices (some were about scientific measurements, some about Arduino, etc). In addition, most of these were built with education in mind. When the first one ended, it was time for me to leave in order to reach the room where I was to present my first talk. The video recording seemed to be done right and hopefully, the video of the whole thing will be available eventually. Not that many people showed up, but the ones that were there seemed really interested. I got to meet and talk with a few people after my presentation, some of whom decided to come to RMLL only to have a chat with me. What a surprise! The afternoon went on and I attended a few talks, including a round table around the concept of civilian re-appropriation. It was presented by Veronique Bonnet, who's a philosopher and a member of April, one of the French associations that take a stand for freedom on digital devices (and actually get it right). Richard Stallman (RMS) was also there, even though he apparently didn't quite understand the wording of the subject in French. Still, some interesting things were said and RMS displayed his usual sense of humour here and there, sometimes making the audience burst into laughter. Once it was over, we got to chat a bit, in a very friendly environment, which was very nice. A free music concert was organized near the event, so a few youngsters (including myself) decided to go before calling it a day.

Wednesday

Wednesday was the occasion for me to be around the workshop more often, but very few people showed up because it was missing from the printed schedule, something I only came around to realize once it was too late, a week before the event or so. Despite some paper indications and the addition of the workshop to the online program, the place remained rather quiet, which wasn't so much of a problem given my aggravating state of sleep deprivation. Before lunch, I gave my other talk about Replicant, a longer and much more technical one. To my surprise, many more people showed up (perhaps the result of meeting a few people during the first few days). The talk itself went well and everything fit on schedule. For the record, the content of both talks (which summed up to 1 hour and 40 minutes, mostly excluding questions) was what I had planned on delivering during my (50-minute long) talk at FOSDEM this year: no wonder I had to stop half-way back then! Afterwards, I was lucky to get help for making U-Boot reproducible from Lunar, whose efficiency, vivacity and kindness really made the task painless. There are still bits and pieces to bring together to craft a proper patch, but I'll get around doing it sooner or later. After alternating between the workshop and talking to great people at the village, I ended up meeting back lots of interesting people at a Harry Potter-themed bar, le Chaudron Baveur (not that the owner deserves any particular good word about it, given that he wasn't exactly pleasant).

Thursday

The next day went on pretty much similarly, except that I had no talk left to give, and thus no particular pressure or place to be at (except for the workshop, that remained desperately empty). Just like any other day at RMLL, I met tons of incredible people and had lots of interesting talks. In the afternoon, the main “political” event of the week took place, with a round table regarding interoperability and DRMs. The speakers were a high-ranking official from HADOPI and Marie Duponchelle, who conducted a thesis on the very subject. Overall, it was very strange, mostly because the nature of the debate soon revealed to be astonishingly stupid and a pure waste of time. The main question was how to allow the entertainment industry to use DRMs while maintaining interoperability. The answer is plain and simple: it can't be done. Despite that very clear statement, that was introduced eventually by Marie Duponchelle (in spite of the situation Videolan was in), the debate went on and the HADOPI representative produced vague statements with apparently no ties to the technical reality one after the other. At some point, the audience got pissed off and started expressing our community's point of view in very clear ways, such as encouraging everyone to share culture in the most efficient ways: torrent, VPNs and Tor. All that followed by rounds of applause, naturally. More serious questions were raised, such as the existence of public domain in practice when only copies of an piece of art exist with DRMs. The HADOPI representative answered that any piece of art is itself distinct from the media it is distributed on, which may be a fair point, but doesn't solve anything. She also suggested that the BNF could receive non-protected copies of it, but this is neither its mission nor a reliable solution for people who will find a DRM-tainted copy decades later, unable to read it despite the fact it is in public domain. The talk ended with François Revol (Haiku developer) handing over a big coin of 1 Hadopi to the representative, a way to show our community's support for this organism at a time of budget cuts. Bottomline: this was purely a waste a time (despite providing some form of entertainment). No wonder some decided to master the fine art of origami during the talk instead of listening to that whole mess. Hopefully, the main political talk will prove to be more interesting next year. In any case, it probably cannot sink much lower. Later that day was the repas du libre, the traditional classy-ish dinner where we all meet together and look back at the week (everybody knows Friday is mostly for getting over the hangover induced by the previous night's drinking and also for packing). I didn't plan on attending at first, since the food wasn't really worth it last year, but changed my mind given some pretty solid arguments. Or maybe just pretty at all. In any case, I got to formally meet Benjamin Bayart (some fine blood forensics can probably assess for that) who not only showed interest in Replicant (and other things I'm doing these days) but offered me his help in every way possible. That evening is probably the time I had the most fun at RMLL, thanks to Benjamin, Fabien, Frédéric, jfefe and plenty others. Kudos to them for their support in times of great needs, that was a relief. Thankfully, my LG Optimus Black (P970) booted just fine, so in the end, it's fair to say that the various issues encountered were accounted for and that the whole thing provided a working result, that will certainly become a base for future developments, now that the initial trouble is behind us.

Friday

Friday was a bit less fun than the other days, in part for reasons of a physical nature. I still managed to reach the event in time to be reminded that Trinity does use nmap and it's fair to say that it's the coolest thing. Sadly, some people had to leave early and I couldn't conclude some of the ongoing arguments that had developed throughout the week. Hopefully, there will be other occasions to meet (and certainly closer than Beauvais), but that's ultimately not really up to me, despite my best intentions.