My name is Shana Kemp and I'm the Executive Editor of DataVersity. We would like to thank you for joining June's Installments of the DataVersity Webinar Series, Real World Data Governance with Bob Siner. Today we'll be discussing the Data Governance Roadshow from DGIQ, our Data Governance and Information Quality Conference, and Bob is going to be interviewing the thought leaders from the conference today. Just a couple of points to get us started due to the large number of people that attend these sessions. You will be using this during the webinar. For questions, we will be collecting them via the Q&A section in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. Or if you'd like to tweet, we encourage you to share highlights or questions via Twitter using hashtag RWDG, Real World Data Governance. As always, we will send a follow-up email within two business days containing links to the slides, the recording of this session, and any additional information requested throughout the webinar. Now, I'd like to introduce our sponsor for today, ASG, and Ian Rollins is going to give us a quick little talk about ASG, and then we'll get to the webinar started. Ian, hello, and welcome. Hi, Janet. Thanks. First, I'd like to say actually how flaky I am to be in such distinguished companies this morning. It's actually kind of a privilege for ASG to sponsor this kind of thing. I'm going to cheat a bit today, too, and share something that we're very excited about. Sit next to me around this kind of sit-around table this morning. Dan Christians from Calibra, and ASG in Calibra took the opportunity of the show to announce a relationship that we've formed to integrate our technologies so that we can combine Calibra's uppercase governance with ASG's technology that I think of as kind of a lowercase, very detailed, functional governance capabilities. There's some logic behind that that I'd like to talk about a bit in terms of what that reflects about our understanding of what's happening in data governance at the moment. So I slide to advance, which hopefully is what I just used those terms, uppercase and lowercase governance. And I have to say that this follows out from a sense I have that the governance discipline is still really being defined. So it's an odd notion. I was making a presentation yesterday here at the event, and I kind of threw out the question to the people I was talking to about how long we really thought data governance had been a discipline. And nobody was really able to make a case for it going back further than about 2000. So here we are with the discipline that's maybe 10, 15 years old at best, and it's really not surprising that it's still in a lot of ways in the process of being defined. Some of the things that really come to the fore in my mind is the notion that you can think of two parts or two layers to governance. One I'm starting to call uppercase governance, which is a framework in which governance roles and actions and rules are defined and implemented by implemented. This is the place where you keep track of issues. This is where you manage your metrics. This is the point of communication, if you like, between IT and business and the management. And then there is what I think of as lowercase governance, which is the mechanisms by which data is organized and processed for the identification and remediation of governance anomalies. So that's things like data profiling and data quality and master management and all of those things tied together by the enterprise metadata repository. And one of the things that's been absent really in the industry so far is any kind of linkage between that concept of uppercase and lowercase governance. So we want ASG and Calibra are putting together as we integrate our technologies, is exactly that linkage between uppercase and lowercase governance. So that's the thing that's going on. I think the governance discipline is still being defined and ASG is committed to putting an active part in that, helping to build an ecosystem, if you like. And that flows from a sense that NOAA really has a one-size-fits-all, universal solution to all the problems and solution to all the peace parts of governance. And so we see multiple players bringing value to the table and part of what we think our job as the glue is is to kind of tie together all of those shambles that are leaning over my shoulder, which makes me feel that you're not seeing my slide. So this is the first time that we've done this, just by the way. So this is the first live session, at least that I've been involved in. So what you've missed were my snappy definitions of uppercase governance and fear not, because we will be sharing these slides afterwards, so you don't need to worry that you haven't got them. The next thing I want to kind of touch on is a sense that data governance is changing in scope. And really this is happening as that focus on uppercase governance is becoming more prominent. And I really think of this as a timeline when we started doing governance stuff. It really was very much about fixing fairly low granularity. It wasn't really getting into all of the extreme detail of how data flowed and interacted. And it was also very much a technical focus. The interesting thing to me is that two kinds of things are going on. There's a shift from a technical focus to a business focus or an integrated technical and business focus. But there's also a desire to get a much deeper level of granularity or higher level of granularity, which is kind of emphasizing, in a way, the technical aspect of the whole thing. And so we see this increasing dichotomy between upper and lower case and an increasing need to somehow bridge that gap. That's what we see as a very oversimplistic view of how the technical challenges, if you like, of governance are changing over a special period of time. So from a technology point of view, the way that Kaliber and ASG are seeing this, absolutely need an uppercase governance control center because there has to be that communication control center where with technical people can communicate the issues and status and the value of governance to the business organization and to those that are paying for it. And at the same time, there absolutely needs to be that lower case, very detailed governance made to support the time everything together. And frankly, we'll be extending this too as we reach out to incorporate this lower case governance tools of the nature of data quality and data profiling and things like that. And you can kind of see me here trailing something else which is in the works but isn't quite cooked yet, so I can't quite talk about it. But let's say I'm very excited about that too. So I've kind of had my ten minutes in the sun as it were as a vendor sponsor representative. I want to turn this back over to Bob now and we'll get into the panel discussion when I'll just become one of the selected participants. Thank you very much everybody for attending this session as always. The session as Shannon had shared with us is interviews with thought leaders. We thought we would do this live at the conference rather than the third Thursday of the month. It's the third one today. And we appreciate your dialing in at this time. So I wanted to share with you a couple of things before we get started here. And we'll talk a little bit about the upcoming webinars that we have. They're not showing on my screen. Are they able to see them? I'm going to talk about them. I'm sorry to share with you. The upcoming webinars in the next couple of months are going to be in July. We're going to talk about government data. In August we're going to talk about Good Data Governance to Great Data Governance which is a presentation I gave at the Enterprise Data World Conference just a few weeks ago here in San Diego. We're going to talk in September about governing customer data and is there a difference between governing customer data and any other types of data within our organization? In October, managing governance metadata for mass consumption in November, governing data data, we can talk about data governance from what we've done in the past and everybody's used to hearing live from New York in Saturday night. Well, this is live from San Diego. It's Wednesday morning. So again, glad to have you with us. And with this illustrious panel that we have here with us, we're going to walk real quickly with these colleagues when he's trying to do things differently. So just bear with us one quick second. So there's going to be an abstract for this session. I'm just asking people to come and join us and listen to these great, this great group of people that I have brought together to talk about primarily about what's next in this great Ian Rollins from ASG. So he can, instead of reading, we'll tell you that ASG is glad to have him here, one of who Ian just spoke about. He's the co-founder and operational director at Cleveland Systems. He's a principal consultant with Alabama A&E Systems. And he's one of my good friends, Danette McGilvery from Grand Falls Consulting. So again, thank you all for being here with me today. I've got a lot of slides to go through in this presentation. Just kind of a list of the topics that we're going to talk about. And it's really easy. I think you guys are sitting in the order that always makes things easier for the presenter.  People are getting, you and other people are receiving from this event of over 400 people, I understand. Yeah, over 100 people. And that's actually a really good starting point. And that's a primary value in itself. The ability to talk to so many people who are dealing with roughly the same issues that we're all dealing with. A lot of different angles, a lot of different ways of looking at things, but at least you're talking about people that are interested in the same things. Other things that I'm noticing, and I don't want to be too controversial, but there's a couple of demographic points that I'm noticing. Used to be this was a very IT focused activity. I think I'm seeing about 50-50 business IT participation here at the moment. Yesterday in my session I did a little poll and it was kind of scary because all the IT people were sitting on the left-hand side of the room and all the business people were sitting on the right-hand side of the room and I couldn't decide if that was a left-brain, right-brain sort of thing. And this is where I might pull in a note of controversy. Although it's exactly reflected in the room that I'm in today is a lot of the IT and technically related conferences that I go to. And I have to say that speaking as an old male chauvinist pig, I think that's a terribly healthy thing. It's really good to see that. The other thing that I'm seeing, a lot of what people were talking about was what is data governance and why should we be doing it? Most people seem to be past that now. There's still a lot of discussion about what is data governance, but it's a more in-depth discussion. And the focus is not so much on why, but on how. How should we be pulling this off? And I've seen several interesting proposals for frameworks, and I think that we will start to see the emergence of a standardized industry framework for data governance. And I think that's really cool. That's your sense? Okay, very good. Well, I said the left-brain, right-brain, left-room, right-room, and this kind of reminds me of the K-Stances where it's got one side girls. On the other side, hopefully, we're kind of going to be bringing someone together, bringing the technical and the business people together quite a bit. I see a lot of that happening at this conference. So I'm going to ask the same question and what are your impressions of the conference? So far, what are you learning? What are you seeing other people learning? What are you sharing with people? Well, thank you, Bob. And a lot of the points Ian is making, I actually agree with. So the business IT participation, you see that definitely. You see people from the business accompanied with their architects. That's a very important trend because IT actually has to learn, in some cases, how they can support the business and their business challenges better. That's a very important point for IT, for the direction of IT, where they have to go and how they have to focus on the business. Ian mentioned it in his slide deck, the focus of data governance going business-wise, going more granularly. So that I definitely recognize. Second, more women. I can only agree. It's something that I've always seen and there's only good things to say about that. Third point that Ian was making was the maturity. I definitely agree with that. We've been in this space for a long time. Data governance is what we are, is what we breathe. And we've been seeing the same trend from what data governance to how we're actually supposed to do it and that we're doing it, we have these problems. So how can we convince management? How should we focus on metrics, for example? So you see people are actually being challenged with showing how it works, what's being done. People actually management expects things to be done. They expect to be able to see results and to be measured. And that's definitely a good thing. The last thing I can say is that the interest in technology, you could say, you've got to try to know people's process and technology. You can definitely say that the interest in technology is growing. So people, because of the fact that they need to do things, need to show things, that combination of people, process and technology has definitely established themselves. Thanks, Dan. I appreciate your answer. Dan, I'm going to hit you with the same exact question. What are you learning from the conference? What are you seeing? What changes have you seen even over the years? So first of all, Bob, thanks for inviting me to participate in this. I really appreciate that. And sharing with such a great panel of colleagues here. So one of the things I'm liking about the conference here is I am seeing a range of people whereas I agree that we have more maturity in the field itself. One thing I'm really liking is we have people who are here at this conference who have programs that are seven, eight years old and they're still coming and they're sharing their knowledge and they're still coming to learn. There are also people here that this is their very first time coming to the conference. They are just starting and they are learning. And what pleases me is that we have this combination because as a field, as an industry, as a profession, this whole idea of the data quality and the government's piece, that's how we continue to do continuous improvement. We preach continuous improvement and I think that we're actually modeling the behavior that we're trying to put forth in our companies and I'm really liking that kind of interaction and how we can help each other continue to grow. So that's something that's really struck me. Thank you. Okay, all right, good. And Marie, we're going to continue with the same exact question. What are you seeing? What are you seeing changing? I know you've been involved in a lot of these events. Share with us your feedback. Well, I'm going to echo what all my colleagues have said. First, thank you for letting me do part of this. God, this sounds like a repetition. Second, it hasn't been involved in the first conference where it was very small, very focused on how do we define data governance? Is there a definition we can even apply to this practice? And would anybody care for now where we have an excess of 400 people? As Inet just pointed out, the variety from people who have been coming for seven, eight years to people that I just met this morning who didn't know that data governance was even a practice until two months ago. That variety is truly exciting because it shows the growth potential of not only the practice, but of all the data management because we can help people grow not just in data governance and in information quality, but in the other areas. The convergence of master data management as an enabler for data governance and information quality and for both data governance and information quality to support things such as data warehousing and business intelligence and the other aspects of data management that have a part in the governance are all here at this conference in one way, shape, or form now where we couldn't have that at the first conference. And then there's an audience that variety as well as the depth are all things that strike me here and that I hope to see in the future as well. It's not surprising to me that there's a lot of consistency between the answers that people have given to that question about what are they seeing and it is amazing how the conference has grown. I think to Inet's point and to Ea's point and to everybody's point basically, when you see a conference like this and you wonder whether or not there's a whole lot to get out of it I think it kind of answers the question for these data governance that when you go to these events you're going to meet that wide spectrum of people.  If there are new people that you want to talk to that have been established in the programs and what's going to happen next, those people are there. The vendors are here. The people that are going to be presentations and their types of... I encourage you to attend these events. They continue to grow. I would guess that next year's event would be probably a little bit bigger than this one because they continue to grow. Just like the webinar audiences have continued to grow. Once you start bringing something out there that people are finding interesting, it's great to have all of you participate. All right, let's move on to the next question and I'm going to start with Stan. Are you ready for this one? Always, Bob. Let me take a stab at that, Bob. Thanks. This conference represents the strong connection between data governance and data quality. We've always been a data governance company. We've always seen that there are different areas of entry. You've got people who start metadata. You've got people who start out of MBM. You've got people who start out of data quality. There are other areas as well such as BI. What we've identified over the years is that the trend of the combination between data governance and data quality has been constant. It's been high. People who do data governance often have data quality challenges and the other way around. The two sort of go hand in hand. I think that will continue, but it will expand. MBM and data governance will continue to get closer together. Although I would say that the MBM vendors are, let's say, not doing their part in making sure that data governance is clearly defined, rather it becomes obfuscated in marketing messages oftentimes. We've done around this as we've always executed on this kind of different entry points. Witness of that is our recent announcement with Trillium. Another witness of that is very moment on this very day is the fact that here in ASG and now from Colibra are here to represent another part of the technology world and the lines that we see, the direction that we see going. How will it continue? I don't know. I think in the same way that it's been going. The dimensions that I explained, can I see slow and steady continuation of this? This is not a market where you see a big hype cycle and everybody jumping on the bandwagon. This is a slow and steady market. Just like data governance or stewardship project, which needs slow and steady progress and Marie mentioned earlier, continuous improvement. How many of these projects go? Try to shortcut it in any way. It's not going to work. Danette, I know that you're heavily involved in both the data governance and the information quality industries and have involvement with several different types of organization. What are your impressions of the industry, where it's come from, where it is now, what we can expect even in the next short period of time? I might say the answer to the question on what's next for our question number four. That's okay. What I am seeing is great interest across all industries. I think this continues to gain visibility. It continues to gain importance. Of course, it's going to. I think that the more people understand that there are fundamental things that happen in not just our businesses but in our lives. Being able to drop the election results. You know what is a data quality issue? Who gets to count the votes? How are we going to do it? How are we going to bring them together? How do we train the people who are watching over the ballot boxes? This is all about information life cycle. It's all about governance. It's all about quality. What's exciting to me is that the more people, and these are people who know nothing about data, they don't even think about data in their life, the more they become aware of information. They become aware of data. They become aware of some of these principles that information has a life cycle and there are things that we need to make decisions about and we need to coordinate on that and things we need to take care of. Once you learn these things, you cannot see them again. You see them everywhere in your life. I mean, if you're in Las Vegas, I must not walk into a casino.  My $20 that I allow myself to gamble goes pretty fast. Yeah, I'm a big vendor. You know, watch out for me, right? But I walk in there and what I'm seeing is how is that money flowing? How's the information about that flowing? How are people making decisions about what's happening on the floor? So I cannot not see that anymore. But the beauty of this is when there are people who are not data people who see that and they can start to understand that what we bring to the plate actually really, really makes a difference to them. And as I said, from elections to, you know, if you go on entertainment and you're gambling, to the very, very important things we do from our business, from healthcare, from government, government, I should say government. We've got too many of those. Government. So that is the part that I see really that we have an opportunity, not just where there are companies now, but in every aspect of our life to seriously, I think profoundly affect things that are going on in the world around us. And I think that's very exciting to me. And along the lines of what you were talking about, the impression that I'm getting here and you're hearing almost every one of the speakers talk about it is organizations, government organizations, organizations in all sorts of industries are really starting to view data as an asset. And we've been, us in the data management industry for all these years, we've been talking about data as an asset for years. And it's just now I think that people are starting that senior management and that executives and organizations that are creating CDO positions and things like that are really starting to view data as an asset, kind of the thing that I heard you say, and then turn it over to Henry and that's your impressions of the industries, where they are, where they're going. Falling around the table is possibly the exception of stand. I've been in this business for quite some time because I've been friends with you all for quite some time. There's a lot of room for maturity. We all know that. What I've been seeing is that as we mature in this field, seeing that businesses are beginning to recognize finally that data does have value. But there are also people asking for people to assist them in the development of governance activities who are not traditionally associated with anything in data management. A lot of organizations are asking people such as business analysts to perform a lot of activities that we practitioners in data governance and information quality would traditionally as our purpose. And I see that becoming more of a trend. I have also an opportunity for us in the field to bring these business analysts into our field and teach them the right ways to do things. So it's not the right way to do things wrong, which means we have to go back and correct them later. It's a big field. That's a big opportunity, I see. Because we have capability that a lot of companies are trying to do things possibly the right way, but with fewer resources. Since a lot of business analysts are our own staff, we recognize now the fact that data might be valuable as an asset. As Donets said, they have started to come to the realization that data might be actually useful to them in making decisions. Business analysts into more valuable quantities for commodities for data oriented activities is something that I see as an opportunity for us to get more involved with. Anything else to share? I think we're struggling with the balance in certain areas of data management. Where sometimes people wonder where the opportunity for governance activities stops and information quality starts. We have to work more on teaching people what things are coefficient oriented. I'm bridging the gap. I kind of want to allude to that Donets had given a keynote presentation yesterday. I'm bridging the gap. I've followed myself using it. If you're interested, you guys out there in listener land are interested in seeing copies of the presentation or those types of things. I think there's ways through data diversity. You get copies of all the presentations from this wonderful event, including the wonderful keynote presentation from yesterday. I don't know exactly how to do that, but certainly contact Shannon and see if there's ways to be able to do that.  You're the last one. I'm going to come from where are we going? Where are we from? Where are we now and where are we going? I'm only one who's beginning to get the sense of Bob as the garrison keeler of data governance. Cultural reference for those of you who listened to the Steam Radio a lot. The second thing is, did Anne Marie just say a lot of people around this table had been doing this for a long time and were therefore old but needed to get some maturity? I don't know. I just think I heard that. What are my impressions of the industries in general and where they're going and all those good things? Let me talk first about what I think of as the industries. I think of the industries as the collective of those of us who have technologies, those of us who are day-to-day involved in actually getting stuff done, and those of us who are involved in framing and trying to identify processes and methods and methodologies. I think we are a collective and it's a good thing if we're aware of that. As to where this is going, excitement and some fear. My excitement is about the fact that data governance properly applied enables businesses and other enterprises to be much more flexible and agile in the way that they do the things that they do. Let's work hard at getting people to understand that data governance is not about restricting people's ability to do things but enabling their ability to be successful with information but putting in place the proper boundaries. What we have is that we are an immature discipline. We are developing rapidly. We're developing in a context in which all the world is watching and if we are not careful, we may be over-regulated to death before we have the opportunity to be truly successful in making businesses what they could be. I'm a little concerned, as it were, from a social aspect of what might happen if we are not very concerned and very sensitive about what our activities do to the whole variety of stakeholders that can be affected by that following in the casino or out in the theme parks or as we walk around. We really need to be very sensitive to all of that.  I have a couple off-topic statements to say. First of all, I know the name Garrison Keeler but I don't know who it is. I share with people who know who is Garrison Keeler and how the heck am I like Garrison Keeler? How can you not be aware of the lugubrious poet prophet of the late world begun? We need to take you on one side and work on your graph. We'll do that later. I mean, very quickly after this session, Google who he is, somebody responded, Bob is Garrison Keeler, that's hilarious. Somehow it's still making a connection with me. Another thing that you said, I think is really, really relevant is that people think of governance as being something that's going to get in the way rather than being in a neighbor. So governance, people view government as being restrictive and all of those types of things. If that's the approach that you take to governance in your organization, that's the way that you sell it into your organization. That's what people's impressions are going to be. So if you take that and you've got to kind of tame that whole idea, that's why people hear me talk about non-invasive data governance. If we feel like it's invasive, it's going to interfere with what they're doing, then they're not going to want to participate. But if we can convince them that to some degree this is already taking place and we've got tools and techniques that are improving quality, improving the way that we manage the data, I think that's a good direction that the industry will take. So hopefully, people will get over the fact that they think that governance is like government. I'm going to go to the next question here real quickly. I'm going to start with you, Jeanette, if that's okay. I'm not sure if that was my original order or not, but maybe you can share with us some information. There's a lot of people that are not at the conference. But everybody's out there. What are the ways that they can get involved in the industry, things that they can do to expand their boundaries about information quality, about data governance? You know, share with us your impressions on that. Well, of course, with the social media, there's ways to get involved online, reading the blogs, being involved in Twitter, et cetera. Reading Garrison Keefer? Yeah, absolutely. For anyone who knows me, this answer will not surprise them, but I think what we do a lot about is we have to make the connections between people. So if the way you connect with someone is through Twitter, that's great. If you connect through reading blogs, well, you know, take it a step further and get in contact with the person who wrote the blog. I am all about showing up, which is why I really love the conferences and I really appreciate, like, Dataversity and Depth Tech and those people who create these venues for interaction. That's what governance does for people in a company. That's what these kinds of companies do for us. They create a place where we get to come together. And when people make the connection, that's when things really happen. So I'm all about showing up. Be there. Be there. Show up. Do the same thing at your company. Get online. I think you'll get some good references by the books. Keep up. There are a lot of new books coming out in our field right now. John Ladley's got his Enterprise Information Management. He had his data governance book last year. My book has been out for a little while, but people are still finding useful. Laura, what's the name of your book today? Executing Data Quality Project. I can't accept quality data and trusted information. Laura Sebastian Coleman has a new book. That talks about measuring and monitoring data on an ongoing basis. So it really goes into some detail about that aspect of data quality that people think are important. So there's a lot of good information that is coming out there. The more books that we have that supplement the kind of social media conversation that's going on, those are really good references for people that they can go back to time and again. As they're building their program. Okay. I guess the risk that I took by asking this question is that one person could cover everything. The first person I asked the question to could cover the whole answer. Ann Marie, is there anything that you can add to that? We know data diversity. I'm going to do a quick plug here for T. Dan. You should go up to T. Dan. There's been articles out there for 17 years. Every article since day one. Some of them may be a little bit outdated because things change. People spot problems. I don't mind that. Processes change dramatically over the years, but there's a lot of resources out there. Ann Marie, I don't know if you were going to talk a lot about T. Dan, but I had to kind of throw that plug out there. There's a lot of information to be had. Ann Marie? I'm not going to mention T. Dan because I thought that Bob might want to mention T. Dan, although he happens to be the editor and publisher. But the data administration newsletter is a great resource. And thanks to Bob for developing that idea 17 years ago. It was the first online journal for practitioners in the field of data management. And that's kind of about showing up. It is so important because there's only a way to learn interaction. And I think that's really important to learn interaction. And I'm going to make a point of suggesting that people reach out and look for DAMA organization that provides excellent educational resources. The annual conference run very ably by friends at Dataversity Literature Conferences at Data World is a larger version of this conference. And local DAMA chapters are a great source of very personalized education. So I invite practitioners and most of the people around this table have spoken remotely at DAMA chapters worldwide. The internet said showing up, meeting people who have done what you're doing, sharing expectations, sharing successes, sharing failures is so important. And reading about what has been successful and thinking about challenges is also just as important. If you read something that someone wrote that resonates with you, as Dinette said, contact a person. Who knows what they have found out since you read what they wrote. You might discover an even broader reason than you could ever have imagined. And they might have learned from you. The people that you contact are very interested in learning from you, but don't only just reach out to them if you agree with something. Reach out to them if you disagree with something. I can't tell you how many times that has started a dialogue with myself and somebody else because they didn't agree. The one thing I wanted to add to this is that it's not just DAMA. DAMA is a fantastic organization. As she said, the EDW conference and the diversity is very heavily involved in that with DAMA. There's also organizations like IAIDQ. There's other types of organizations. There's blogs and websites and things that you can go to to cause some of these conversations to happen. Without that, Ian, if I'm not taking your thunder here. I wanted to take this a bit in another direction because so far we've sort of talked about expanding your boundaries and getting involved in the industry of data governance. But I want to talk about expanding your boundaries inside your own organization and getting involved in data governance. There's a lot of people that get pigeonholed either in their IT functions or their business functions. We have a great contribution to make in the business of governance as it were as well as the governance of business. I think it's incredibly useful sometimes just to kind of go talk to somebody inside your own organization that you might not normally talk to about data issues and maybe try and figure out if there are some internal collaborations and some internal channels that you might build almost an internal collective to address the issues of the ways information and data are affecting what you do. So that's kind of making it very personal on applying it to yourself as well as getting involved in the big wide world. And I sort of agree that you should be involved in these industry bodies and you should be creating all the good stuff that folks at this table have put together like other things. That's what keeps us fabulous and happy. So you know, you can read our books, buy our books and read our blogs and things like that. But you need in the end to be applying it to your own daily activities. Otherwise it's kind of just actual exercise and not practical value. Very good. Stay where you have to at to all this great information. Okay. There's a lot of information out there and because of the fact that there's a lot of information out there, sometimes it gets confusing and overwhelming for people, especially if you're just getting started. I can't count the number of times that I've given an explanation to somebody or an introduction on what we do and they actually said, well, we're not just getting started or we're not mature enough for this. I think in that sense there's a bit of because of the overload of information, some people get scared also because I feel we're not at the right level of maturity and then that causes inaction. So if anything I could recommend at this point in time, data governance, we talked about it earlier, is in a niche action and don't let yourself be scared by the maturity level you have. Actually, get about maturity levels. Inaction, make progress, show results and then you can, whatever your entry point is, there's a lot of information out there so pick one. Pick one. That's what I would say. It's interesting just to build on what you said and maybe this is what Garrison does. I don't know. Yeah. To build on what you said. I'm working on a client right now that's talking about the business process improvement, data quality improvement, data governance, technology, following an FDLC a little bit closer and all of those types of things and they're being hit from all sides as to all these different disciplines. I actually have one of the individuals that I met with that a client recently call it noise. I think it might hold true for the information that's out there about data governance but it's out there. It's out there for you to find so all you really need to do is search for it and with that I'm going to move on to the last topic that I have on the list of topics and since we only have a couple minutes and I have received a couple questions that I want to address at the end of the session as well but I want to talk about what's next for the field to be a government and a little bit in the last, two questions ago basically of where are we coming from? Where are we now? Where are we going? Industry even as Ann Marie alluded to earlier on this conference was small. We were reminding the industry back then. Now people want to know how to make this active, make this work for them and if you take advantage of all those resources we just talked about and that's something that you can do but Ann Marie I'm going to hit you first with this question. What's next for the field to be a government? I might be. We've got to go, we've got to be a little bit quicker. Yes, I like being first. Okay, two minutes. More business involvement. I see more involvement by the business. That's what's next. Okay maybe elaborate quickly. Oh quick collaboration. The activities in the business are going to drive the majority of data governance and information quality. As business demands a rapid understanding of their view of data governance and the view of information quality are going to be required to be more mature to provide those results to the business to meet the business goals so the business is going to get more involved in meeting those needs of data quality and data governance. Have you ever been in evolution of that already? To a certain extent yes in certain clients. Yes I have. Very cool. Danette I know you're chomping at the bit to answer this question. I mean it's a really important question. So where do you see the industry go? What's next for the field of data governance? So we're just going to list a few things real quickly we won't be able to go into depth but really have this vision for data quality and governance that at some point in time people would never it would right now think of it this way people would never say you don't need an accountant to run my part of my company you mean I need a controller you mean I need a CEO oh you mean I need somebody to manage my human resources you mean an HR department nobody questions that they know that that's just part of what is needed to run their organization my vision is that at some point in time we are going to be just like that of course we need data professionals of course we need governance of course we need quality of course we take care of our metadata it will never be a question it's just of course we understand that that's my long-term vision that it just becomes such a part of the fabric I see in order to get there there's a couple of things coming up that I think are really important for us that you can consider in your list of things to do out there that are listening whether this is a priority for you in order to get people to grasp governance and quality I think we as data professionals need to become more versed ourselves in organizational change management and if you need to bring people in to help you through that because everything we do with governance and quality triggers change and people are resistant to change so how do we deal with that? So I think the better we are at that the better it will become part of the fabric of our organization but I think we need help in learning how to do that because that's not part of our data background I think the other really quickly is getting data governance and quality integrated into your SDLC your projects have a big impact on your data that is one of the big prevention activities that you can do and there will be some information that Shannon sends out I have an article along with my co-author Masha Bison that we work for Cutter Consortium that talks about data quality and governance in projects there's another book coming out by Larissa Moss later this year about how to do that in a more agile environment so I think those are two big things that we can do I'm sorry one other thing internationally you know what all of our colleagues across the world I've been doing courses and talking to people in the Middle East and Italy most recently South Africa Brazil Australia guess what their questions, comments everything is the same I was joking yesterday that we may get to world peace because data people are actually the ones across the world we can talk to each other if we had that impact on the world it would be real world data governance I thought you and I would be building governance in the SDLC I always talk about things in terms of proactive data governance and reactive data governance proactive data governance is building it into what we do doesn't mean that you need to redefine the SDLC you probably have one you probably already have other processes in your organization for information security information quality your SDLC those types of things and to get the type of statement in the approach the idea is to apply governance to these things rather than defining these things from scratch because it's really unnecessary so I think we're going to see more of that happening in organizations in fact I even joke to the point that you don't even know what you do and you don't even think about it in terms of being a data governance activity you want a data governance game you should have a data governance game show I think that would be a great one in the future you win the data governance game if all of a sudden it just becomes second nature to your organization people know who to talk to and when to talk to them and when to get them involved in those types of things so stay to the next step what's next for the field of data governance I agree of course with many of the points that were already made I'd like to add a few so with respect to what the net said this is true so business as usual this is the case data there's ever more data there's ever more complex data it's ever more needed in being competitive building out new products etc etc so organizations who want to succeed in the future and lead will actually have to consider this as business as usual and we see it in our client base people are actually taking this perspective make business as usual nobody questions the fact that owners and stewards need to be there it's just a given just like for us as a software company there's a few business processes that you run you do product management you do sales and marketing you do R&D and support it's natural so there's a large organization dealing with data data products you do data governance you do data quality it's a given if you don't do it you will get behind it other people will get in front of you so the next point that we are not there yet it's very much true currently we're being faced with early companies early adopters who understand this understand this vision not just by the data people themselves who get it they know what is right but also by their executives who get this same vision and decide to act on that so if they decide to act on that we as data people as data stewards need to be ready so we need to be ready to roll up our sleeves and take action and show progress so there's a time of conferencing management good flight and it's the right thing to do is over because they understand that it's the right thing to do because they understand that their business needs it to be competitive they understand that something needs to be done and they want it done so what we have to do is do it so I think two more points that I want to add there in the near future for data governance as a message to the audience it's very simple roll up your sleeves and second the governance it's don't call it you're governing the data governance it's data governance is about people that interact with the data it's about making people do the right thing with data keep that in mind and just roll up your sleeves very good and I guess we're kind of right where we started from and big sensitive to time let me address this very quickly I want to add a one word answer it's consolidation disciplines are too fragmented at the moment we talk about too many different things we talk about data governance data management data profiling data quality master data management metadata management there's a whole lot more that could be thrown in there we need to consolidate the discipline it really in the end is all about the same thing and in the same sense we need to consolidate the number of tools and technologies and techniques it's too complicated people shouldn't have to learn half a dozen different tools and technologies to do data governance very good one more thing I want to say and I'm going to get to two questions really quickly first of all I want to thank you for sponsoring the webinar I also wanted to mention a research paper through the university that ASG also sponsored that I wrote a friend of mine Charlie Rowe out on the west coast and it's called Navigating the Data Governance Landscapes and it's actually that's the name of it that's the name of it but it's really focusing on a survey that we did for organizations on how they're getting started with data governance it's a fascinating fascinating paper and all attendees get a free copy and all of these of the session of the there you go so you're going to be receiving the Navigating the Data Governance Landscapes so we've got a couple minutes just very few minutes left but I'm going to address some of the questions that we received one question that we received and I'm just going to throw it out there to whoever wants to answer hopefully you guys will answer because then I won't have to but what kind of books and training do you recommend for business people who want to learn more about data governance and how it communicated to both senior leaders and people in the field? This is Anne-Marie I started with the Data Governance Chapter in the Damon's Inbox it's written for business professionals at the start the Data Governance Chapter is definitely a good business overview of data governance one of the reviewers to that chapter is our moderator today Bob from a perspective I think it does give a good overview for business professionals there are a couple other books for more in-depth treatments of the Data Governance one of them is the Data Governance Imperative by Steve Sarsfield and another is John Ladly's book on Data Governance for real practitioners of Data Governance I would not recommend that for business people a book that's Sunil Sores who spoke at this event as well it was called Information Governance for the Executives or something like that I forgot about this take a look out there if you need information about that book look it up under Sunil Sores his last name is A-R-E-S but I'm sure there's some good information anybody else want to address this question about field management and how we get them to understand go ahead I was going to say just once you get you get the books with the information look in your company some of the best success I had is when I had all my data words and it content and I went and talked to some marketing folks and people who really had to put a message together and they could distill that message into their words and that was some of the most successful presentations I had is because I got somebody who was expert in that field and put it in their view and it's been great okay great idea actually I think I'm with Stan on this it's Nike time just do it the best way to convince senior executives is with results I've got a couple of things to add so Sunil's book is called Selling Information Governance to the Business that was one that was the next question what were the names of the last two books yeah so that's the book you talked about was a source field these source fields the data governance imperative okay so hoping that you guys out there got that after this webinar let's put together a bibliography the Shannon I'll send it out to Ali so that is definitely a good book to help you promote it internally all the books you've mentioned all the thought leaders out there you can find them on dataversity there's a lot of good books out there to tell you how to do it I sort of disagree with the rest of the panel members at this point in terms of what books you should give to the executives so I didn't say but no read them okay I'm going to put my own thing forward so if you look at a data company everybody knows and which has a lot of potential at Google you know the data is there blood now there's a book out there by the chief economist who is at Google some of them that's Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian information a strategic guide to the network economy that's actually a strategic executive level book that shows how a product as an asset is fundamentally different from any material product or asset in the fact the production is more expensive but the covering and distribution of it is completely different so executives I would recommend that book so I think we've used all of our time here maybe even an extra minute or two we it's not surprising given the group of people we have in the room here to discuss the last subject I hope you all got a lot out of it thank you again for attending the real-world data governance webinar and I hope that you will attend next month's webinar which will be on the third Thursday of the month it's going to be governance for master data Shannon anything else? yeah I will just reiterate that I will get a collection of everybody on all the reference material and resources and I will include that in the follow up Friday and also a big thanks to everyone here Bob thank you for another great presentation and to our esteemed panelists it was a great conversation and of course T.E.N. and HASG for sponsoring the webinar in addition to the webinar sponsorship ASG has sponsored two papers that will send out to all the attendees for sending a one-white paper called using metadata as well as the data governance research paper that Bob just mentioned so we'll get that out to all the attendees as well and thanks for attending again hope everyone has a great day and we will see you next month thank you very much bye


Welcome to another edition of Unfettered Freedom, your weekly Gadoo Slash Lennox News video podcast. Packing so much freedom into each episode, it ought to be illegal. There's so much freedom packed into this podcast, some might say it's bloated, I just think it needs to be refactored. On this episode of Unfettered Freedom, we're gonna talk about web browsers that are based on Chromium, but are not open source software, they're in fact proprietary software. Because there's this misconception out there that things like Chrome, Edge, and Vivaldi are open source, when they're actually not. I was recently contacted by a viewer asking me to recommend him a more free, as in freedom, Gadoo Slash Lennox Distribution than Ubuntu, he currently uses Ubuntu, and wants to know is there a freer distribution out there, we're gonna discuss that. Lessons from a patent troll incident, we're gonna talk about what the Ganon Project recently learned dealing with their patent troll. Clem LaFave, the creator of Lennox Mint, he recently sat down to do an interview, he doesn't do these very often, this is a rare event when Clem doesn't interview, but he recently sat down with the folks over at Fossbytes, and he had quite a lot of interesting things to say. We're gonna talk about the Lennox Foundation and some of their recent fiascos, we're gonna talk about the Free Software Foundation versus the Free Software Foundation Europe, and the upcoming Free Software Foundation awards and nominations. All this and more on Episode 6 of Unfettered Freedom. I am your host, Derek Taylor, also known as DT or DistroTube over on YouTube and on Library. This podcast, as well as all of the video content on the DistroTube channel, it's community-sponsored. Because of the community support that I receive, there are no corporate sponsors or product shilling of any kind in these episodes. I can thank as I please and say the things that I want to say and the things that need to be said. In short, I can be independent. If you'd like to support my work, please consider doing so. I'd greatly appreciate it. Please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. And our first topic is one that I know confuses a lot of people, because I have dealt with this so many times in the course of doing the YouTube channel and doing videos on Library and doing the podcast is I often call proprietary software, proprietary garbage. It's usually my nickname for all proprietary software.  And then I've had people defend all three of those web browsers coming to me like definitively saying, hey, no, Chrome is open source. Edge is open source. Vivaldi is open source. You can go find the source code here and, you know, whatever. And I understand why people are confused by this. So I don't get angry at these people. These people are not purposely trying to spread misinformation about these browsers and their licensing. These people really believe that Chrome and Edge and Vivaldi are open source software because of the way the marketing teams behind those browsers market themselves. What they do is they come out and say, hey, we are Microsoft Edge and we are built upon the open source Chromium engine. Vivaldi does the same thing. Hey, we're Vivaldi and we are built upon open source using Chromium as the back end. Same thing with Google Chrome, of course, is built on the Chromium engine. But none of those are actually licensed under a free and open source license. None of them are licensed under a license that qualifies as either open source or free software because to qualify as open source, there are 10 criteria that you have to meet as defined by the open source initiative. To qualify as free software, you have to meet the four essential freedoms. And Edge, Vivaldi, and Chrome do not have a license that is compatible with either the open source definition or the free software definition. So what prompted me to want to discuss this this evening is because a few days ago, I made a video talking about some of the software, the free and open source software that's available on Linux. That's also available to people that are stuck on Windows.  And I had people just come out of the woodwork saying Microsoft Edge is open source. You're calling it proprietary and it's not. Well, it's in fact proprietary software. I didn't want to get angry at these people because, again, I know why they're confused about this. Microsoft purposely confuses people in their marketing of Edge. The same thing with Vivaldi. Vivaldi purposely kind of makes people think it's open source. Even though the Vivaldi guys, if you straight up ask them, they will say it's not open source. Same thing with the Edge, guys. Now, Microsoft Edge has a subreddit over on Reddit. If you go and post, hey, is Microsoft Edge open source? You're going to get an immediate answer from somebody and it's going to be no. Just one word, no. But if you go to the Microsoft website, you know, all the marketing stuff talks about all of the open source stuff. And like I said, I can't get mad at people for being duped by shady marketing, really. I mean, it's almost dishonest. Some of the things that Microsoft and the Vivaldi team and quite frankly, Google with Chrome put out there. You know, they make you think that it's free and open source software and it's not. And how do you check? Well, one of the things is I went ahead and pinned a comment on that video I did the other day because I was getting so many people confused about this. Because I think you guys need to know how to check if something is free and open source software. Typically, if you use a search engine, any of the big search engines, but especially Google, if you just Google name of program and then the word license, the very first search result will actually just tell you what the license is. Google will actually tell you if it's one of the free licenses and if it's a proprietary license of any kind, it will just say proprietary software like those two words will come up in the search result. You know, so if you type Microsoft Edge license, the very first result in Google is it's just going to answer you proprietary software. And if you were even more confused than that, you want a more free solution as far as a free service to go check on that Wikipedia. You know, you can go read the Wikipedia page for any big software projects such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi. And it will tell you the license on the Wikipedia page, all three of them the license reads as proprietary software. Now, some people wanted to debate me further when I told them that, well, Google can be wrong and Wikipedia can be wrong. Anybody can edit Wikipedia. Okay, so maybe both Google and Wikipedia get it wrong. Go download the source code for that project. And that's what I did because so many people wanted to debate facts. Even though I know Microsoft Edge is proprietary software, I was like, okay, let me go download the source code. I went to the Microsoft website. And if you go to the Microsoft website, if you're on Linux like I am, it's going to say not supported for Linux. So there's no download link. But if you click the drop down, you can choose a different operating system I chose Windows 10. And I downloaded the source code. And I had to really look through the source code to find the license. But if I did a search for terms, I think somewhere in the 3.6 gigabyte zip file that I downloaded for the latest version of Edge, you find the Microsoft Edge software license terms. And it is not the MIT license. Like people were telling me that Edge is licensed under the MIT license. No, this is not the MIT license. The MIT license is like one paragraph. This thing is a page. It's basically a Microsoft end user license agreement. It's a EULA. And it talks about all the restrictions as far as you, the user, you know, you can't really share this with anybody and do anything you want. Can't modify, you know, this is not, again, it doesn't qualify as open source in any way. It doesn't qualify as free software in any way. Now, this is the second time I've had to address something like this on camera a few months back. I actually made a video about Vivaldi because I was getting so many people telling me Vivaldi was free and open source software that I made a video. It's titled I think Vivaldi is in fact proprietary garbage. That's the thumbnail. And yes, it's over the top. It's clickbait, but I wanted it to be clickbait because I think not enough people understood this about Vivaldi. Yes, it's built on open source chromium. But the stuff that Vivaldi puts on that nice user interface that everybody loves to talk about with Vivaldi, all of that stuff is proprietary. That's all licensed under a proprietary license. They have an end user license agreement, again, that restricts your freedoms in a lot of ways. It doesn't qualify, again, as either open source or free software under the standard definitions of those terms. And I really don't want to just keep beating a dead horse, but it's so prevalent in the Linux community right now in the open source and free software communities, because you see people all the time try to tell people that Chrome, Vivaldi and Edge are open source and they're not. Some of these people, again, are just confused. The marketing makes it confusing. I know that some of these people probably also use those browsers and I think they're trying to defend their use of those browsers a little bit. I think a lot of people that use things like Chrome know it's not really open source software. Vivaldi the same way, Edge the same way. They know it's not really open source, but if I can, you know, fudge the facts a little bit because in their marketing, they're fudging the facts. So if they say they're open source, I'm going to go along with them and say it's open source too. And if I tell enough people, other people might believe it's open source and then I won't feel as bad about using this browser that I know is proprietary software. Guys, if you like Chrome or Vivaldi or Edge, use it.  I choose to use free and open source software where possible. If you guys make a different choice, that's totally fine. It's up to you. Make that decision. Live with your decision. But we don't need to be spreading misinformation or sometimes outright lies about things. When you lie about the licensing of these web browsers, you're really doing the community a disservice. You're really harming the open source community because you're lying about what open source really is. You're also giving Google and Vivaldi and Microsoft a pass on these browsers by saying, yeah, I know you're not really open source. But, you know, for now we're just going to say it's okay. No, no, hold their feet to the fire. None of these browsers are completely open sourced. Make them open source their browsers, right? You've got to hold to your convictions. If you believe in the free software movement and you believe in the open source movement, you don't compromise. You don't say, well, you know what, they're halfway to being open source. That's good enough for me. No, you're either open source or you're not. And the next topic I want to discuss is I had a comment from a viewer of the channel the other day. He wrote to me and I'll just read it very briefly here. Quote, after playing around with and having Ubuntu as my daily driver for about a year now, I'm starting to look into some other distros that are more free as in freedom. Since I've heard that Ubuntu, which is owned by Canonical, isn't fully free as in freedom. Any good recommendations? I've been seeing if vanilla Debian might be a good change, or maybe I should try another flavor. I've also looked into Arch, but I'm hesitant to have that as my full daily driver. All right, so he is a newer Linux user probably says he's been using Ubuntu for about a year. Ubuntu is actually a very good GNU slash Linux distribution. Now, when he talks about looking for a freer Linux distribution, this is where it gets weird because how free do you want to go? And that would be my question to him is you really have to understand why Ubuntu and 99% of most desktop Linux distributions include some proprietary software. They are not including usually proprietary web browsers or office suites, proprietary text editors. They're not installing that all of your daily applications are going to be free and open source software on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch, I mean on Arch, all your desktop applications are the ones you installed. So there's proprietary software there, you installed it. No, but all of them do have proprietary software as part of the core packages they install. It's because you're going to need proprietary drivers for some of your hardware. Most hardware out there is going to need proprietary drivers. There's no open source solutions sometimes, for example. Many laptops have Wi-Fi chips that don't have an open source driver. So if you're going to put a Linux distribution on it, you need the proprietary driver. So there's no other option. So if you try to go 100% free software, you know, one of the free software foundation approved for Linux distributions. That's 100% free. If you have certain Wi-Fi chips on that laptop, you'll never have Wi-Fi working. If you have a desktop or a workstation that has an Nvidia card, maybe you bought one of these really expensive Nvidia cards, like the 2080 Ti that costs like $1,200 or whatever the heck the thing costs, you know, because you do serious work with video editing, 3D modeling, maybe you do a lot of stuff and things like Blender, and you need maximum performance out of that card. And the only way to get that is to install the proprietary driver. There's an open source driver for the Nvidia cards, but it sucks really bad. It's horrible. It's almost unusable. Nobody buys an Nvidia card and then tries to run the open source Nuvo drivers. They just don't do it. You have to. And I would do the same. If I paid for a very expensive Nvidia card, I'm going to use the proprietary drivers. I just am. And I'm a free software zealot, but I'm telling you right now I would never use the open source Nvidia driver. So all of the GNU slash Linux distributions that you know of as far as desktop distributions, so Ubuntu, Fedora, Sousa, Debian, Arch, Gen2, Mint, Elementary, you know, Manjaro, all of them are free and open source for the most part. There are proprietary bits in all of those distributions, but it's stuff. There those proprietary bits are there because you really need them. If I'm being honest, you need the proprietary drivers. Some of the proprietary blobs in the kernel, you need that for hardware support. Can you go completely 100% free? Well, if you are absolutely dead set on trying to be 100% free, you can go to the Free Software Foundation or actually go over to GNU.org. They have a list of free GNU slash Linux distributions 100% free. There's not very many of these things. They list about 10 or 12 of them. Some of them like they're not very active. There's three or four that look like they're pretty active. Geeks is one that I've talked about a little bit on the YouTube channel. It sees pretty active development. That's a tough one to get into though. You mentioned you've only been on Linux for a year and been using Ubuntu for a year. Geeks is probably not what you want to try. Parabola is an Arch-based Linux distribution that's 100% free isn't freedom. That's another one that may be a little tough to get into. Triscoll, you know what that might be one to try. It's Ubuntu based, so you're already used to the Ubuntu ecosystem. Maybe try out Triscoll. I click on the logo here. Those of you watching the video version, you can go to triscoll.info. Now, again, it's a distribution you could try, but you're going to have to check with your hardware. If you have an Nvidia card, are you going to run the open source driver? If you have an Nvidia card, I would just suggest not even trying this to be honest. You're going to want the proprietary driver. If you're going to put this on a laptop, check the Wi-Fi chip and make sure it's compatible with the Linux Libre kernel. By the way, the reason all of these distributions are 100% free isn't freedom and why GNU and the Free Software Foundation endorses them is they run the Linux Libre kernel. That is a Linux kernel that has been stripped of all proprietary blobs and modules. It's 100% free isn't freedom. That kernel can be kind of limiting on some hardware. You can do it. You can definitely go 100% free isn't freedom for your Linux distribution. You just have to know that there are going to be some pain points and if you have certain hardware, it's either not going to be possible to run these distributions or you're going to have to change that hardware. One thing that did kind of stick out to me with this guy's question is he mentioned that he had been hearing that Ubuntu wasn't that free. Well, Ubuntu is as free as again 99.9% of the other distributions out there. So I think some people like to hate on Ubuntu and he's probably one of those Ubuntu noobs, right? People love to call everybody that runs Ubuntu a noob and hey, you need to get off that. You need to go to Debian. You need to go to Arch. You need to go to Gen2 because Ubuntu is it's evil because it's made by a corporation and all the software that's installed by default on Ubuntu again, other than some low level stuff, it's all open source. There's no proprietary bits in it really. So I would just ignore those people you got to understand. Unfortunately, there is a certain level of toxicity in our community, especially when you bring up certain topics.  Now, one thing I will mention because we're talking about Ubuntu snaps, there are snap packages installed by default on the latest versions of Ubuntu and the back end to snaps is proprietary, the server, but the software that's installed as snaps on Ubuntu by default, it's all open source software. So the proprietary back end as far as dealing with snaps, if that bothers you, you could just not use snaps if that bothers you or you could switch your distribution to one that maybe doesn't have snaps enabled by default, but as far as I know of, all the snaps that Ubuntu pre-installs for you anyway. It's all open source software. There's no proprietary software there. And the next topic is lessons from a patent troll incident and this is from one of the GNOME guys talking about lessons learned from dealing with Rothschild patent imaging, which is a patent troll that came after the GNOME project and GNOME was very successful at fending off Rothschild. And this blog post is written by James Bottomley and I will link to the blog post in the show description for those watching the video version on YouTube or library. James goes on to write that the Rothschild modus operandi is to obtain a fairly bogus patent. So just obtain any random patent. It could be something very generic, not very specific at all. You know, and then you just sue as many companies as you can with vaguely related businesses for infringement. So you have this patent and you just find people to sue even if they really have very little to do with your patent. It doesn't matter for the most part. The main thing with a patent troll is you scare people. You come after them with this patent and hey, you know what? I could take you to court and I'd probably win. I could get millions from you. But you know what? If you give me $50,000 right now, we'll settle and I'll go away. And these patent trolls unfortunately are very successful with this tactic. That's why so many of them exist. One of the problems with these patent trolls is they get these patents and anybody can get a patent. And you get your patent through the U.S. patent office here in the U.S. And any court has to presume that that patent is valid. You know, they just can't make a decision.  It's ridiculous. They have to assume that anybody that comes to court with a claim as far as a patent is legit. So you have to go to court and you have to fight it. It's expensive. You have to hire lawyers. Most corporations, most organizations and most individuals don't have that kind of money to mount that kind of defense. Now one interesting thing in this GNOME case is Rothschild was suing a specific GNOME project, Shotwill. And Shotwill actually predated the filing of Rothschild's patent by several years. So whatever they were suing Shotwill for, Shotwill had been doing for years, many years before Rothschild ever obtained that patent. So it was pretty obvious that Rothschild was just a patent troll and probably would never have won in court if somebody wanted to take this to court. Now thankfully the GNOME project, it's a rather large organization and they did put up a fight. And one of the things that James writes in this blog post is that if the target of the patent troll, in this case GNOME, if they put up any kind of fight, any fight at all, Rothschild or any patent troll, they know that they have very little as far as merits to their lawsuit. They're not going to win if a judge actually hears this thing. So they immediately start trying to settle. And that's kind of how GNOME played it.  One of the great things about the open source community is when GNOME put it out there that they're under attack by this patent troll, that the community really came to the rescue and GNOME also received some pro bono representation from some lawyers Sherman and Sterling. I'm not familiar with that particular law firm, but they got some lawyers that were willing to fight for GNOME pro bono. Now the legal representation for GNOME, one of the first things they did when they took the case is they filed a counter claim against Rothschild, alleging exceptional practices and bringing this claim, basically saying, hey, this is a bogus claim. So we're going to counter sue you for even trying to sue us. And it was great because it worked. Basically Rothschild started trying to settle, you know, the price gets lower. Hey, we'll go away for this amount. But GNOME, one of the cool things that GNOME did here is they made it very clear that any agreement that they came to had to involve Rothschild agreeing to get rid of these patents, basically to make sure that Rothschild could never sue any other open source project over these particular patents that was trying to sue GNOME over. Near the end of this particular blog post, James writes that there were really four lessons that people need to take away. The first lesson is that if you're on the receiving end of a patent troll attack, tell everyone about it, right? Put it out there. Tell everyone that will listen that you're being attacked because the great thing about the free and open source software community, we are generous and we will gladly give somebody money to fight a fight that's worth fighting and defending yourself against a patent troll. Yeah, I'll open up my checkbook and write a check to that cause any day. The second lesson is that the community will rally behind you. And again, that's kind of goes with the first lesson. Yeah, tell everybody. And when you tell everybody, the second lesson is the community as a whole is just going to come together and get behind you. The third lesson is to always file a counter claim. This gives you significant leverage over the troll and settlement negotiations because when they know you're not going to go away and that you're filing a counter suit, you might win the counter suit, right? And not only will they not get money from you, it may actually cost them money. They are really going to try to settle at all costs even if they get no money from you. And the fact that they won't lose money from you at that point may be a win for the patent troll. The fourth lesson is to always refuse to settle less than the neutralization of the threat to the entirety of the open source community. So GNOME didn't just want to make Rothschild go away. They wanted to make sure that Rothschild could never sue another open source project over what they were trying to sue GNOME over, right? They wanted to eliminate that threat completely. And I think job well done, GNOME project. And the next topic is Clem LaFave, who is the creator of Linux Mint. He recently set down to do a rare interview because Clem does not like doing public interviews. You will never find Clem doing a video interview. He's very much sticks to just being the lead dev of Linux Mint. He doesn't do any kind of community interaction, right? He's not, you know, most Linux distributions, especially big Linux distributions, Linux Mint has a lot of users. You know, the person that is the lead dev, you know, the lead maintainer of that distribution is usually out in front, you know, promoting that product. And, you know, Clem has never been that kind of guy. And Linux Mint has been around for like 14, 15 years, so it's not a new project. But Clem, again, it's very rare he sits down and answers questions from anyone. But he sat down with a journalist over at Fossbytes for an interview. And I will link to the full interview in the show description for those of you watching on YouTube and Library. But the interviewer asked some good questions here Of course, he gave him some softballs here at the beginning asking, hey, how is COVID-19 affected Mint development? And Clem said that the pandemic and the shutdown really didn't affect the development of Linux Mint at all. He also goes on to ask how Clem got into Linux and developing open source software. And Clem gives a little bit of his back story. He went to college in the 90s, late 90s. He finds Linux. He discovers the free software movement and what he calls free software principles. And he installs Lackware as his first Linux distribution. He also goes on to make this comparison from the late 90s to today, quote, nowadays the Linux community is completely different. It's much bigger, more mainstream, less passionate to a certain extent. I would agree. I would completely agree. Somebody that's been in the Linux community for a long time, right, it's much bigger. There's much more of a community. But it does seem like it is less passionate, especially when it comes to principles and ideals as far as free software and open source software. The interviewer asked Clem, why did he choose to base off of Ubuntu instead of Debian or Red Hat or any other distribution at the time? For those of you not familiar with some of the history here, Ubuntu started in October 2004. So Ubuntu 4.10 was the first release of Ubuntu. I believe that was Warty Warthog. That could be wrong about the code name. But late 2004, Ubuntu starts. In 2006, Linux Mint begins. So two years later. So really Linux Mint has been around almost as long as Ubuntu. Clem tells the interviewer that they based off Ubuntu because Ubuntu had done such a good job of pushing the bar as far as a new user-friendly Linux distribution that anybody could install. Because running Linux on the desktop was not normal in 2004 when Ubuntu started. And really very quickly, Ubuntu became very popular very fast. And it really did the most as far as getting people to seriously consider Linux as a desktop operating system. Because before, it was strictly for servers. But Ubuntu changed all that. So that was why Linux Mint had so many other Linux distributions based off Ubuntu. He also gave credit for Mandrieva back in the day also being very new user-friendly. And those two particular distributions really pushed the bar in the early 2000s. Clem was asked about the Linux Mint Debian edition. And Linux Mint is interesting because they have two different bases. They have your standard Linux Mint and the three flavors, Cinnamon, XFC, Monte. All of those are based off of Ubuntu. And that's really what they want you to install. They want you to go install the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint because that's the real Linux Mint. But they have a Linux Mint Debian edition. And Clem is very straightforward on this. It's really Plan B is what he calls it. Plan B in case we need to switch our base one day. So if Ubuntu ever goes crazy or Microsoft ever buys Ubuntu or Ubuntu just goes away or the Linux Mint guys just no longer can work with the Ubuntu base anymore. They have this side project that they've been maintaining. Linux Mint Debian edition. And they know they can make that work if need be. So that's why it's there. It's just a Plan B for them. They don't really want people to install the Debian edition. At least that's the impression I get with Clem. It's really if you're confused about what you should be installing for Linux Mint the one you need to install is the Ubuntu edition. Clem is asked about some of the tools that are involved as far as developing Linux Mint as far as the development team. What do they use? Of course they use some of the standard stuff like GitHub. They use Slack I guess for communicating. Now Slack is proprietary software but we really can't fault any open source project for using something like Slack or even Discord. So many open source software projects if you go try to get support. Many times one of their official support channels is actually a Discord channel and usually that's the best one to get support for. It's one of the reasons why I have a Discord account is because there are many software projects that sometimes I want to go get support for that are on Discord and free and open source projects even. I don't fault these people for doing that because at the end of the day you want as many people to be exposed to your piece of free and open source software as possible. It's kind of like me doing video content about free and open source software. I am on free platforms like Library and Library platforms like YouTube. Why? Most of the people that are going to watch my content are going to come across it on the big YouTube platform and those are the people that need to know about free and open source software the most. So that's why I post to both. Same thing with these open source projects these software projects is where are most people at as far as a chat platform? Discord is one of the largest ones so that's really where you need to be. I had mentioned earlier that Linux Mint comes in three official flavors Cinnamon, Monte, XFCE they used to have a KDE edition I think I know they used to have a Fluxbox edition way back in the day like in the very early days of Linux Mint they had a Fluxbox edition because I had installed the thing and it was fantastic. But these days they just support three desktops Cinnamon, Monte, XFCE and Clems says right now that's all they want to support that's all they're doing is those three desktop editions they have no plans to ever expand that. The interviewer did ask Clem about the controversial decision to remove snaps from Linux Mint 20 and Clem answers that with quote if snap was fully optional like it was in the past we wouldn't disable it. If snap was open and it could point to multiple servers and anyone could make a snap store we'd probably support that like we do with Flatpak so he has a problem with I guess the back end of snap being proprietary and canonical owns the store and I can understand him having a problem with that but I have no problem with snaps not being installed or enabled on Linux Mint. The way Clem and the Linux Mint team went about this was completely the wrong way they wanted to make it harder for people to get snaps working on Linux Mint. That is something you never do even on an open source project free and open source Linux distribution you never go out of your way to make anything harder to install even if it's proprietary software I don't know of any Linux distribution that goes out of its way to prevent users from installing proprietary software you just don't do that and this is kind of what they're doing with the snaps they want to prevent people from even getting snaps installed on the thing they want to make sure people have to really jump through some hoops to get snap D installed I don't like that I think that is a rather petty thing to do and I really hope they change that in the future. You don't have to ship with snaps already installed or even have snap D installed but if somebody wants to do a pseudo apt install snap D that should be all they need to do. They shouldn't have to go edit some plain text file and the slash Etsy directory or something to be able to get the snaps that they want installed. Now the fifth and final topic I want to talk about is actually a combination of a bunch of topics but most of this discussion stems from a video I did about a week ago on the YouTube channel and on library I did a video about the Linux foundation and the Linux foundation is publishing reports on the Linux foundation website those reports if you check the metadata of these PDFs they were created on Macintosh computers using Adobe InDesign which is of course proprietary software Mac OS is proprietary where the Mac OS doesn't even use the Linux kernel is just strange choices and in that video I completely trashed the Linux foundation because I called them a bunch of hypocrites and a bunch of frauds because Jim Zimlin the head of the Linux foundation has been seen many times more than once using Mac books and iPads and iPhones sometimes in public even in public presentations like he's at a conference and he's presenting something for the Linux foundation and he's doing it on an iPad so I felt like I needed to clarify some stuff because there were some people that didn't know some of the back story like I mentioned Jim Zimlin using a Mac to do these presentations and stuff people were like is that really true he's been spotted many times doing this I found an article all the way back in 2017 Linux foundation president uses Apple OS and in this article this article was published three years ago they said that Jim Zimlin was spotted twice in the last four years and this was in 2017 using a Mac to present stuff you know for the Linux foundation everybody knows he has an iPhone he's presented stuff on iPads before this is just common knowledge that the president of the Linux foundation is an Apple fanboy and all of his devices are Apple devices but one of the things that I mentioned in that video is the Free Software Foundation Europe said that the Linux foundation is dominated by corporate interest and I also said that I was surprised that the Free Software Foundation Europe is also dominated by corporate interest because if you go to their site here you know Google is their top donor which is very weird it says Google accounts for more than 10% of their yearly budget for the Free Software Foundation Europe and if you know anything about the Free Software Foundation like the official Free Software Foundation f.org you know they're not going to be so beholden to some company like Google or Microsoft they never take their money and they certainly you know wouldn't proudly say hey you know more than 10% of our money comes from Google we love Google it was strange but and I actually thought the Free Software Foundation Europe was officially part of the Free Software Foundation it turns out they are not because after I made that video Dr. Roy Shestowich who I follow on Mastodon and I think he also follows me on Mastodon he sent me a post or a toot over on Mastodon it's like hey stop calling the Free Software Foundation Europe the Free Software Foundation there's no direct connection and he's right if you look it up the Free Software Foundation Europe does actually state they have no connection at all with the Free Software Foundation the Free Software Foundation does not endorse the Free Software Foundation Europe apparently they have had arguments over using the name Free Software Foundation Europe and it doesn't look like the Free Software Foundation Europe really is much of anything anyway when you look at their donor page I mean if you look at all the donors for for example the Linux Foundation there's a million donors and you look Free Software Foundation Europe they have about 8 or 10 corporate sponsors and then the bronze donors which are usually just individuals 40 maybe 50 people that's not very many donors so I don't think too many people are giving this organization money and I can understand why now is probably most people understand that it's not actually connected to the Free Software Foundation I didn't I just assumed because of the name but that was my fault I should have done more research I am glad that Dr. Roy here did let me know about this because it is strange why would you use that name it's just like they're purposely misleading people the only reason the FSFE even uses the term Free Software Foundation is to do people into donating money and especially corporations that could never donate money to the official Free Software Foundation because I don't think the Free Software Foundation just knowing those guys I don't think they would want to be associated with Google and certainly not Microsoft I know the Free Software Foundation would never want to be associated with Microsoft so I should have done a better job of spotting that fraud but I'm afraid I didn't I do apologize about that getting back to some of the clarifications about the Linux Foundation from that video you know people were like well maybe it's a one-time thing that they made that document using a MacBook and using Adobe InDesign no because what is today I am recording this podcast on September 9th on September 8th yesterday they posted this report why open source matters to your enterprise it is a PDF and if I downloaded it and check the metadata which I've already done it is created on a Macintosh using Adobe InDesign and the title of it is why open source matters to your enterprise they created that on a proprietary operating system using proprietary software one thing I did not mention on that Linux Foundation video from a few days ago and I should have but most of you guys probably know this has been known for a while is that individual donors to the Linux Foundation where does that money go now the corporate donors you know if you donate $500,000 or more a year you get a seat on the board of directors at the Linux Foundation and that's what people are interested in that's what Microsoft and Facebook and Google and all those companies are doing but what about you you just the individual donor you care about Linux development open source software I want to give the Linux Foundation a few bucks because I want to help support the movement well if you go to donate on the Linux Foundation page you will see right here 100% of donations go toward funding diversity programs so it's a social justice warrior kind of thing I guess your money is going to social causes it's not even going to help develop the Linux kernel that's just weird the Linux Foundation is just a complete and total joke at this point now the free software foundation it's not a joke I'm a member of the free software foundation if you're not a member you should join but right now they're asking the community to nominate people for their awards the free software awards and one of the interesting things about this as far as this year is one of the very first people that somebody nominated if I go to the mailing list here is somebody is nominating Richard Stallman because he's actually eligible for the award now because Richard Stallman is not an official part of the free software foundation anymore now when he was a member when he was the president of the free software foundation you could nominate somebody that's part of the free software foundation for an award it's got to be somebody that's not associated with the FSF I think it also has to be somebody that's not currently associated with the GNU project as well I don't know about Richard's involvement with GNU at the moment and I think that would be a classy move by the free software foundation now that Richard is no longer the head of that organization to give him some kind of recognition a lifetime recognition even just give him the damn award previous winners of the award include names that many of you guys know just looking at some of the list of past winners of this award I see names like Matthew Garrett Theodorat Guido Van Rossum of course Miguel de Acasa and Larry Wall now one thing that may prevent Richard from actually getting a nomination and being able to receive this award somebody did have a question is Richard actually a member of the awards committee is he a part of the selection although I think if somebody wanted to nominate him surely Richard and the committee could let Richard recuse himself from having any kind of say so in the vote one of the comments in this thread that I found hilarious was this one here quote the award is to further push for free software recognition and giving the free software award to RMS it's like giving the Nobel prize to Nobel I completely agree it is a little strange Richard Stallman founded the free software movement he founded the free software foundation he founded the canoe project and giving him the free software award I can understand that's a little weird but quite frankly I think the man deserves it and that is it for this edition of unfettered freedom I try to release unfettered freedom every week typically you can look for it late Wednesday early Thursday depending on time zone and where you are in the world before I go I need to thank a few special people those of you watching the video version of this podcast are going to see a list of names I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Corbinion, Mitchell, Devon, Fran, Art5530, Akami, ChannelChup, Claudio, Donnie, John, George, Caleb, Devil's, Lewis, Paul, Scott and Willie these guys they are my highest tier patrons over on Patreon they are the producers of episode 6 unfettered freedom I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen this very long list of names you're seeing these are all my supporters over on Patreon because again unfettered freedom and the DistroTube channel does not have any corporate sponsors it is just me and you guys the community you'd like to support my work please consider doing so you'll find DistroTube over on Patreon alright guys peace