Hi everybody and welcome to week three of OCTEL and my name's Caroline Guise, I'm Arts Events Manager. It's just to say quickly that if you have any problems with your audio during the session, please first check Tools, Audio and Audio Setup Wizard and if you are still having problems, post in the chat window and I'll try and help. The moment your audio permissions are disabled so you can't turn your mic on. So please post any questions or comments in the chat. As the session goes on, we might put that back on so that you can talk directly to Cable. I'm really looking forward to this session. I'm going to hand over now to the lead tutor for the week, James Kerr to introduce Cable. Have a good session. Thank you Caroline. You would like to welcome everybody to the week three webinar. As you know this week we're examining materials and platforms for learning technology and we've been encouraging everyone to explore tools and resources. OCTEL is about learning, exploring and sharing. Now this week got started a little bit slow but we're now gaining speed. One of the concepts that we want to present and explore this week is the concept of openness. Open educational resources, open tools and the general concept of universal access to research, education and culture. To that end, we invited Cable Green, the Director of Global Learning from the Creative Commons to come speak with us and answer questions about open licensing and the Creative Commons licenses. He graciously agreed. Without further delay, Cable Green. Thanks James and hi everybody. We could go about this several ways. We've got an hour and rather than me just sitting here speaking at you with a bunch of slides which is not my preferred method of communication or interaction, I thought it would be more useful if I maybe gave some brief overviews about what open educational resources is about, what's happening, what some of the highlights are to set the stage and then we can really engage in a conversation. So get your questions ready. I'll be watching the chat. We'll open up the mics so everyone can ask questions as well. But let's have a conversation and this is also for the moderators for my friends James, Caroline and Martin. I'd ask them to throw in the hard questions and their own expertise as well. They too are experts in OER and have a lot to say. So let me first start by saying thank you and my name is Cable Green. I lead education at Creative Commons. Creative Commons, I just dropped a link there in the chat window, we're a nonprofit global organization that provides open copyright licenses and public domain tools to make it easy and simple and legal to share on the web and off the web for that matter. And the idea is that in every country in the world there's this thing called copyright law. And copyright law protects the owner, the author of the work for a period of time before that work goes into the public domain and that's a good thing. It's a good thing for authors to have their rights protected for artists and others who might want to create something and maybe profit from it or might want to license it to someone. There's nothing wrong with that. The question that Creative Commons sought to answer is what if I'm an author, what if I'm an owner of a piece of content, of a movie, of music, a textbook, a course, a simulation, maybe something we use in education, maybe a data set that I'm using to study the cure for cancer. Maybe it's an archive of metadata from my public library in my capital city. Maybe it's all of the government data that's coming out about where the potholes are on the freeway. It could be anything that's traditionally curated. What if I want to share that information, that knowledge, those artifacts with the world at no cost and under the terms and conditions that I choose. And that's what Creative Commons licenses. Let me give you a direct link to the licenses. And I'll just be dropping links throughout our talk here. So there's a direct link to the licenses. If you click on that and scroll down to the bottom, you'll see that there are one of six different open copyright licenses. And essentially they allow the rest of the world to do various things with your work. And we can get into the details of the licenses later if you're interested. But in a nutshell, if you use my work, you have to give me credit. It's called attribution. That's required on all of the licenses. The other three conditions are optional. One is no derivatives. That means you can't make changes to my work in education, especially when we try to stay away from that one. Because of course, one educator is going to want to modify and change what another educator does. And so we try to stay away from the derivatives licenses best we can in education. Another option is called non-commercial. That essentially means you may not make primary commercial use of my work. So you can't take my open textbook that I shared with you, put it on the web and charge 35 pounds for it. That would be against the law. And then the third option is called share-like. And share-like means if you take my work and you modify it, you change it, you make a derivative work, that changed piece, that derivative work that you made from my original must be licensed under the same terms that I licensed my work under. So Wikipedia uses that license. They use an attribution share-like license. So now we're getting to detail into the licenses. The big point of Creative Commons is keep your copyright, keep your ownership, your authorship. Don't give that up. Don't give up your rights. And if you want to share some freedom, some permissions with the public, then you can add a Creative Commons license to your copyrighted work without giving up your copyright. And you're sharing under the terms and conditions that you choose. The best part is it's free. You don't need a lawyer to write some contracts for you. And these licenses are recognized around the world as being legal. And so when people see something under Creative Commons license, they know that they've got the legal rights to use it. And they know specifically what their rights are because the license does make that easy to understand. So that's the nutshell is Creative Commons. We're a global organization. We have teams in 75 countries around the world. I work at Creative Commons headquarters. And as I said, run the education efforts there. But we also have teams in science, legal, policy, culture which would include music and the arts. We've got a sector called GLAM, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, which also tends to be part of our work in culture. And then we've got a technology team that works on this as well. So why does that matter? Big deal. Why do we need Creative Commons? Well, back to open educational resources. Roughly a decade ago, maybe 15 years ago for some of us, we started to work with computers in education. And what we built, what we produced was digital and still is digital. And we started to use programs like this, like Blackboard Collaborate and other communication ways and channels on the net and tools to not only share communication but actually to share educational resources. And what we realized, especially with the advent of cloud computing and the falling cost of computers and disk space, was that when we created something that was digital it cost almost nothing to store that digital thing, to make copies of it, and to distribute it around the world on this cool thing we call the Internet. And so, again, the cost of storage, distribution, and replication essentially have fallen to zero. It's not quite zero but it's really, really close to zero. And because we could do that, we decided that that would be worth thinking about in terms of what are the possibilities around education. So if you think about if you produce a really high quality textbook or a really great course or really great simulation or test bank or interactive assessment or whatever it might be for education. And yes, it's going to cost a lot of money to build it and it'll cost a significant amount of money to maintain that resource and certainly to provide instruction around it and student support, etc. But the object itself, we don't have to keep paying for it over and over and over because once it's digital, we can share it for the marginal cost of zero. And that was a very interesting moment in the world of education because we've never before in history been able to say that. It used to be that we're some paper and we're trying to find some paper. It used to be that we used this stuff, right? Paper. We still do to print books or monographs or other resources for learning and to make a copy of a book is expensive. It costs a fair bit of money. And then to ship copies of that book all around the world is even more expensive. And so the idea of sharing educational resources universally was really a laughable notion prior to things being digital and prior to the Internet. So if you take those two things together, things being digital, the Internet plus Creative Commons licensing, now we live in a world where somebody can build a digital education resource, they can put a Creative Commons license on it, and they can share it not only technically at the marginal cost of zero, but they can share it legally at the cost of zero as well. And now we're in a very interesting space because somebody in the UK could create a textbook and somebody in Saudi Arabia could pick up that book and modify Chapter 2 and then somebody in Slovenia could take that and they could modify it further and maybe translate it into a different language. And then someone in Barcelona can pick it up but you get the idea. So there is hearing is the world that we live in. Maybe one quick definition of OER and then I'll stop it, we'll start talking. For something to be an open educational resource and there are many definitions out there, but they all contain the same structure. So for something to be an OER, it must have two characteristics. One, it must be freely available meaning it's available at no cost or at gratis. Second, you must have the legal rights, the legal rights to do what David Wiley calls the five Rs. So you must legally be able to reuse it, revise, remix, redistribute, and retain. So reuse is I'm going to take your, I'll take Martin's open textbook that he was so kind to share with me and I'm just going to use it as it is. That's a reuse. Revise is I'm going to take Martin's textbook and modify it. I don't like his chapter two. I'm going to take it out. I'm going to rewrite my own chapter two. I don't like the order of it. I'm going to move that around. That's a revision. A remix is when I take Martin's book and I take a little bit of Martin's book and a little bit of that open university, open learn course and oh look I just found a great resource over in Joram. I'm going to take a piece of that. Oh there's a nice part of that physics course at MIT and maybe this Khan Academy video and I'm going to mix it all together into something new. That's a remix. Redistribute is I'm going to take that revision or that remix that I created and I'm going to share it with everybody else and retain means I'm going to keep a copy. You can't take a copy away from me. I get to keep it forever. And so oh thanks for putting that up. So one is it must be free and two you must have the legal rights to do those five Rs. And if you don't, so if you say went to Coursera you're all familiar with MOOCs or you went to a future learner, one of these MOOCs and if it says on the MOOC all rights reserved copyright it might be free and free is good. But if I started if I was at the University of Leicester and I started downloading courses and revising and remixing and reusing and in fact I'm violating copyright law and I could be sued. Well A, I don't want to be sued and B, that's not an OER. So that's a good litmus test. If I'm using, if I'm doing the five Rs on something and I'm potentially violating the law and it could be sued in a court of law then that's not OER. You must have all of those legal rights. So let me stop there and that's maybe a good opening. Certainly lots more we can dive into. We can talk more about open access, publishing, open textbooks, open policies governments and foundations are starting to change their rules on money such that publicly funded resources are open and licensed. Let me come back here to the questions first and we'll begin. Let's see here. Martin says I wonder what the general awareness of CC license is. Okay, good question. Moria says have we gotten to the badge word yet? No, but we'll talk about badges. Good question. So I'll put that on the list here. I need somebody to type it up on the board so we don't forget. Okay, different types of CC, maybe we took a swing at that. We'll come back to badges. Martin says different licenses usually make me think if I release this CC buy can I use it CC buy as a license and pick up your licenses. So Martin do you want to hop on the mic and say more what you need about that? Yeah, it's I'm producing an OER and I know I want to release it as CC buy. Obviously there are different licensing types that I always have in my head but what can I use within this CC buy thing that I want to release? What licenses can I use in that? I think it generally leaves me pondering a bit. I know that there are resources like the Web 2 rights where I can go to get clarification on that. I was just wondering if you had any other sources that were good for just working at. I suppose the license chooser itself on Creative Commons site is a good starting place for that sort of thing. So I just dropped some text in the chat window. What you want to do if you are creating a new work or maybe it's a new collection of works is decide what the predominant license is in that collection. So for example, let's say Martin's creating a new course and everything that he builds will be under a CC buy license as he said or maybe it's a textbook he's building. But as he said, he wants to take parts and he wants to reuse other people's OER that may have different licenses on it. So one of the things that you are able to do with Creative Commons licenses is essentially to create a collection. So I'll grab a shape tool here. So I'm just drawing these little circles here. So imagine this is Martin's course. And this really big circle here is what Martin is producing. And then let me get a tool here and draw a line around. So imagine that's a complete line all the way around. And we'll call this a tool here. We'll call this Martin's textbook on 21st century online learning. We'll move that around. There we go. So imagine that this big piece of content on the bottom here is what Martin has produced. It does look like a mass sell. And that's CC buy. So everything Martin builds is CC buy. And that's the predominant work. He's built 60, 70% of the book. But let's say Martin really likes this piece of, let me grab an arrow here. He really likes this piece of content from MIT OpenCourseWare up here.  Then he likes this other piece of content over here from the Open University. And this has got a buy and see essay license on it. And he likes this article over here. And it's a Wikipedia article here by essay. As long as Martin properly marks these things and their discreet objects inside of his work, he can have different licensed works inside his work. And so that's usually referred to as a collection. Much of the OpenCourseWare around the world are in fact collections just like this. Where people take it a little bit from here and a little bit from over there. And so what Martin would do, let me grab a text tool again here because he would say this Wikipedia article and he would list what the title and author are in the links of the article. But he would also say this is under a CC buy essay license. And then this piece over here, he would say it came from OpenLearn at the Open University and it's got a buy and see essay license on it. And he lists the title and the author and he would link to that work. And that's fine for him to do. And then what Martin would do on the bottom of his footer is he would say unless otherwise noted, everything in this course is under a CC buy 4.0 international license. If that's the license that he chose. And that way all of his work, he doesn't have to market with CC buy because it's already marked by the broad category. And then what he said unless otherwise noted, what he gave himself was the flexibility to otherwise note works that are not CC buy. So that's what he's done. He said this Wikipedia article is biasing. Now the share like clause in say the OpenLearn work or the Wikipedia work, that clause is triggered if Martin makes a derivative work of the article itself in Wikipedia. So if he started with Wikipedia article and then changed that Wikipedia article, his change is required to be biasing. But if he brings that Wikipedia article in and he's bringing in the whole article or a part of the article into his larger work, his course or his textbook, he's not changing the article anymore. Then he can do what I just drew. Martin, is that helpful? Perhaps just to bring one more dimension into this hopefully not overcomplicate it. One of the license types is non-commercial. So how would that fit into your diagram there? Yeah, that's a great question. So let's say, again, Martin has his textbook on 21st century online learning. If Martin intends to make no commercial use of this work, he's just going, he just wants to share it and share it freely, that non-commercial component is fine. Martin can use it with his students. Martin can give it away and the non-commercial clause is not violated. If Martin wants to take this book and sell it to somebody, then yes, that would violate the non-commercial clause. And what he would have to do at that point is remove any component of this course that had an NC license on it. Another question that comes up a lot is, what if Martin's a professor at Cambridge? We just promoted Martin. So Martin's a professor at Cambridge and he takes this book that he's put together and he gives it to the bookstore at Cambridge and he says, please print this for me and make it available to my students. And the bookstore says, happy to do that. The print cost for your book will be about five pounds fifty and we'll sell it to the students. So Martin's question to the bookstore is, is there a profit in that or is that simply cost recovery? If it's cost recovery, then it's not violating the non-commercial clause because the primary use is not for making a profit. It's not for commercial use. If it is making a profit, then it would be violating the NC clause. So good rule of thumb is if you're selling the work for commercial purposes to make a profit, then yes, you're violating the NC clause. But even if you're printing it and selling those printed copies, that's okay to do as long as it's only cost recovery. So the bookstore could not be making a profit on that book. Martin, did we cover that or do you want to dive a little deeper? That's great for me. Alright, let's look at the questions here. So is it an oxymoron to apply CC rights to your blog article? Not at all. So your blog is yours. You are the copyright holder of your blog and even though you're making your blog freely available on the internet, it's still all rights reserved copyright, meaning people can read it. You're sharing it on the web and they certainly can link to it without violating copyright. But if they went into your blog and they highlighted the text and copied the text and put it on their blog, that might be protected under fair dealing or fair use rights, but it might not. It would depend on the circumstance. What if you had a nice image on your blog that you took the picture. So you're the copyright holder of that image and somebody wants to take that image and use it in a commercial textbook. So they couldn't. It's all rights reserved copyright. They would need your permission to do so. And so many people in fact do put a Creative Commons license on their blog and people who want to share their images and use different photo sharing sites, Flickr being one of the big ones, they actually will add CC licenses to their works. And so this is a really great thing for us all to think about is what do we produce? What do we build as educators just as and as human beings that we might want to share some rights with others so that they can do the 5 R's. So they can take our work and use it and change it and modify it to meet their needs. And so you can on platforms on the web like Blackboard, if I'm using Blackboard Collaborate here, you might, I don't know what you use for a learning management system. But most of the learning management systems out there allow you to add a CC license to your work. If you upload a video to YouTube, you can add a CC buy license to your work on YouTube, which not only marks it as CC buy, but it also puts your video into a separate category in YouTube of videos that can be remixed using YouTube's video remix tool, which is kind of cool, if that's your intent. Yes, CC Flickr has options where you can go into quicker settings. And you can tell Flickr from now on when I upload images, any image I wanted under this Creative Commons license. And you can always go back and change that or re-license works later, but you can set that as a default. Let me pause and turn over to our moderators here. I'm sure that they saw some questions that I missed or they might want to ask some questions themselves. So James, Caroline, Martin. Thank you, Cable. A couple of questions come through in the chat. I've been trying to capture them as they scroll by. There was a question, are there Creative Commons types that you can't mix? Can video designs and processes also be licensed with Creative Commons? Yes, a really good question. So yes, there are CC licenses that cannot be remixed with each other. So you saw the example we did with Martin's textbook, the big blog paramecium thing at the bottom of the screen. You can take any CC license and do that. What I just described, you can put together a collection of works. They're really these separate works inside a larger work. And if you properly mark them and they kind of sit by themselves, you can do that. But what if I'm taking a whole bunch of works and I'm really throwing them in to the mix and I'm creating a course out of it? And it becomes very difficult to see if the other one works started and where the other one ended, because I've just mixed them so tightly that it really is a remix and it's a new work. And so what licenses are incompatible? So first, the no derivatives licenses don't allow those works to be modified to be changed. And so you can't take, for example, a BINB license or an NCNB license and start with something else because it's no derivatives. It says, you may not change me. So those licenses are out. And so it's worth pointing out that those two licenses are not OER compatible licenses. Because remember the definition we had with OER, you must be able to change it, modify it, use it how you want to. The no derivatives license violates those conditions. So if you want to use OER, or you want to change your work to be OER, don't put a Creative Commons no derivative license on your work. So what about ShareLike? ShareLike's really the other one that you have to be careful with. ShareLike says if you change me, I'm a ShareLike thing, and you modify me, that modification you made must be into the same license. So you can't take a BISA work, like a Wikipedia article, by NCSA work, like an MIT open coursework course, and mash them together and remix them in a way that they're really intertwined. And the reason is that both ShareLike licenses demand that their terms be the terms on the resulting remixed work, if that makes sense. So I'm taking work A and work B, and both works want to have the same license when work B is created. And you can't do that because they're different licenses. One's by FSA, one's by NCSA. So those are just a couple examples where you have to be careful about what works you're mixing together. And there are tools out there that tell you what you're allowed to do, and I'll share a couple of those in the links. But this is a really important point for us as educators, so knowing this, and knowing that there are different restrictions on different Creative Commons licenses, what do we want to do when we're licensing our work for the rest of the world? So you heard Martin say, when he creates works, he uses ACC by license. And not to put words in his mouth, but I'll try. My guess is the reason Martin uses ACC by license is probably several reasons. But the big one is that Martin realizes that all this remix stuff can get kind of complicated if you're using more restrictive Creative Commons licenses. And Martin has said to himself, you know, if I'm going to share, then I really want to maximize the number of people and the types of reuse that can happen around the world. And I want to extend to others as many degrees of freedom as I can. I want to give as much flexibility as I can to others. And so he goes with an attribution license. He knows he's going to get credit. People are going to have to link back to him. They're going to have to list his name, the title of the work. So that's all good. And he's asking self the other questions. Do I care if somebody makes commercial use of my work? Martin says, ah, I don't really care because gosh, if somebody tries to sell my work, they're going to have to give me attribution and link back to me anyway.  And so he's not too worried about that. And then he asked himself about share alike. And he said, share alike, do I really care if the derivative works that somebody makes up my work or under the same license? Nah, I don't care that much. I'm okay with people making derivative works. But I'd really like to know where those are and what people are doing. And I'd like to connect with those people and have a community around this content so I can learn and talk to them. And then he asked himself the no derivatives option. And he said, you know, do I want to lock this down? Do I think this work is as good as it could ever be? Am I the smartest person on this topic? And he probably said, no, you know, content can always be made better. And I'm an educator and I'm willing to let other people revise and remix my work and hopefully they'll come up with something better than I did. And so he kind of went through that process in his head and ended up with a CC by license. Martin, did I get that about right? How's my guessing? That was pretty good. There is I'm just after the credit at the end of the day. There is one slight variation to all my work. I'm quite happy to be CC by. But a friend of mine, Alec Caruso, he'd taken a video of his son learning to ride a bike and he licensed that video as CC by non-commercial. And a while later, Nokia saw the video and they wanted to use it in an advert. And had that been CC by his video of his son riding a bike, could have been used by Nokia. But because he had the non-commercial aspect, they couldn't write asking him first. So for me, the distinction is my professional work. You can have it for free. But personal family pictures, that sort of thing, there's usually an NC close on that. Yeah, I like that story. That's a great example of Creative Commons has a whole suite of licenses for just this reason. And at different times in different parts of your life with different works, you may choose different licenses for different reasons. And that's perfectly okay. Let me connect to Vicki's question. Looks like she's got one. People are excited about here. Vicki says, what counts as non-commercial? If we use NC licensed OERs to create a resource to help people design distance learning courses that will have an income for the university, does that count as non-commercial or not? Great question, Vicki. So if we use NC licensed OERs to create a resource, you're creating a resource, you're creating a course, a book, a professional development activity, something like that, to help people design distance learning courses. And so they'll have an income for the university. Okay. So Vicki, there's several options here. One would be, are these students of the university and the university's charging tuition etc. And if the answer to that was yes, then even if it's NC licensed content, you're always allowed to use NC licensed content in a course, even if the university's charging tuition, because as long as you're not selling the content. So when you charge tuition, you're not really selling the content in the course, but you're selling access to the facilities, you're selling access mostly to the faculty, to the student services, you're paying for somebody to cut the grass and parking and all sorts of stuff. But typically you're not paying for that content. As you know when you walk into a college class, there's all sorts of content costs, but you have to go to the bookstore and pay for really high book costs. And sometimes those are digital, sometimes they're printed, but they tend to be all rights because they're copyright. They're not usually CC licensed works. So, but if this NC licensed OER was in the course, that would be perfectly okay, even if they were charging tuition. What would not be okay with an MC licensed work is if you, the student showed up at this training opportunity or this course on designing distance learning courses and somebody said, yes, we've charged you tuition and we're charging you an instructional materials fee for this block of content. And if they were specifically charging for the content, then that would be violating NC. The same thing would go if this was staff at the university who were designing distance learning courses to help them learn more about instructional design of online learning or whatever it is. If there was no fee being charged for the services, this is just staff professional development, obviously no problem. Even if it was a certificate that was being provided by the institution, that's really the same as tuition for a typical class. That's okay too. What's not okay would be to say, hey, we got this NC licensed content. We've made some revisions to it and we're selling it. We're putting it on the Web or we're selling it for a profit from the bookstore. You can't sell the content as self. That would be violating NC. So Vicki says, student tuition is okay. Thanks. What about executive education for professionals? Exact education for professionals is probably the same use case as tuition.  It's really, in the eyes of the law, that's really not any different. It really hinges on the use of the work itself and not on the user. A lot of people get confused about this for non-commercial. Imagine if you will, I don't know, Google is a for-profit entity. Let's say Google took that NC licensed work and they wanted to use it inside Google for professional development. Can they do that? The answer is sure. Whether or not the NC licensed is violated or not hinges on the use of the work, not on the user. So whether or not the user is Google or Creative Commons or Cardiff, it just doesn't matter who the user is. It's what they're doing with the work. And if their primary use of the work is commercial, meaning they're selling it somehow, then it violates the NC clause. If they're not, then they're okay. Alright, Tim says, isn't the focus of this on the output produced having been through a course using NC resources? Once someone's been through the course and they produce a distance learning course for the university, is sold, is that okay? Someone's been through the course. Well, so I'm presuming, Tim, that the NC licensed OER that we're talking about was curriculum, instruction, professional development materials, something like that, that's training somebody or teaching somebody to do something, to have a new skill or a new competency. Building distance learning courses, for example. And then that person takes those new skills and goes and gets a job or does consulting or whatever. That's fine. That's a step removed from the resource. The question about whether or not you're violating NC with the resource itself is how you're using the resource itself. And if you're just using it and nobody's charging any money for it, that's fine. Again, charging tuition for a course where the resource is being used, that's okay. You can even sell the resource in the bookstore as long as it's only cost recovery. So I'm printing it, cost five pounds, I charge five pounds for it, that's okay. What's not okay is to take that NC resource and to say to people when they show up to the training center, you have to pay 100 pounds to access this resource. That would be violating NC. Okay, I think we beat that one down. Other questions and if they're good, not confused anymore. Yay! So this is actually a really good point though. You see how much time we spent talking about and asking questions about non-commercial. So this happens all the time. And frankly, this is one of the reasons why a lot of people in education just stay away from non-commercial on educational works is because what we see at Creative Commons is the copyright holder. So if it's my work, if I built it, if I put an NC license on something, the copyright what we see as copyright holders tend to be very permissive in what they're willing to let happen with their NC works. So they give a broad set of permissions at least in their minds. And then what we see on the other end is that users or the licensees of that work are very careful and overly conservative. And so when people see an NC work, a lot of times they say, hey, I'm at a university, my university charge is tuition, I'm not going to touch that with a 10 foot pole. And that's a real shame because when I put the NC work, what I had in mind was I didn't want Pearson or Elsevier or McGraw Hill or somebody to take that work, sell it in their next textbook. But I'm happy to let Martin use it in his new position at Cambridge. And so what we see is there's a big gap between of use that's not being taken advantage of with NC works. And so a lot of educators just say, you know what, if it's that confusing, I'm just going to avoid it all together. And they go the route that Martin went where they said the point of this is sharing and really having people reuse my works to the extent they want to. I'm just going to avoid NC. Okay, other questions? And I might feed this with a new idea. Alright, let's talk about a question earlier about checking during the development phase and the licensing. Is an OER licensed with Creative Commons checked? Whether the components are legally licensed too or is that the author's job? Yeah, good question. So it's always up to you. We don't check the licenses. There's no clearance process with Creative Commons. Creative Commons is not party to the license agreement between the license OER and the licensee. We just provide the licenses that the world uses. So if Martin was creating this big blob of a textbook down at the bottom of the page here, it's Martin's responsibility to ensure that everything is properly marked and it's properly attributed and it's got the right license on it. So for example, excuse me, my cats walk in and out of my office. So Martin would need to say, okay, this Wikipedia article I want to use. What's the license? Who's the author? What's the title? How do I get proper attribution? He needs to properly mark that. For him to include that in his work, those are legal requirements on Martin. Martin shares this new collection with the world and other people can take it as it is and they look at it and say, oh, I can see how everything is marked. And if they want to modify that work further, then they've got a responsibility to make sure that anything they add or revise is properly marked, et cetera. Now if this ever went, let's just say for the sake of argument that Martin made a mistake. So it was an honest mistake. He put this Wikipedia article in and he accidentally marked it CC by.  Well, let me just change it and modify it and then the share alike isn't on it. Well, if Wikipedia ever sued and they could, my guess is they wouldn't, but if they did, way down the road and said, hey, this is not CC by, this is by SA, and all these derivatives needed to be by SA, then, you know, theoretically a judge or a court could trace, you know, go back and look at the chain and eventually see it, you know, came back to Martin and Martin didn't mark it properly, but A, that doesn't happen. If you want to see all the court cases that have ever involved creative commons, just go to Google and type in creative commons case law and you'll see there are only a few cases over the past decade and every time CC licenses have gone to court around the world, they've been upheld by the judge. And things like this, like a small mistake like that that Martin would have made, in the CC license themselves, there's a 30 day cure period, meaning if Martin made that mistake, he has 30 days from the time that he's notified of that mistake by Wikipedia in this case to fix it. And of course Martin's going to say, oh gosh, you know, I'm really sorry, I totally, I know that it's by SA, I just screwed up because I was marking other stuff CC by, I'm really sorry, let me get that fixed right away. That's what actually happens in the world when mistakes are made. The other thing that happens is if Martin screwed up the marking on the Wikipedia article and shared his work out somebody's going to see that, right? There's a lot of people in the world use Wikipedia and they're going to say, hey Martin, that's supposed to be by SA and they're going to alert Martin. So this is the kind of positive community activities that take place when accidents happen. But honestly they don't happen that often. Okay, go ahead Martin. Yes, so Julie has a follow up question there. So I've gone through and I've checked all my materials that are included. Do I then need to keep going back to check that those materials are still correctly licensed as in the the source materials still have the same license that I originally thought they had? This is a good question. Okay, so let's say that let's go back to this example and then Peter we'll get the CC0 next. So let's say that we're looking at this big blob on the screen. Martin produced this collection today. And he releases this collection out to the world and says hey unless otherwise marked everything in this textbook I built is CC by and then he's marked other things appropriately. And let's say that two years from now the open learn course that he is linked to has actually re-licensed. So now it's not by NCSA. Now it's CC by. And Martin's question does he have to go back to that source material? Does he have to constantly go back and look to see if that open learn course he linked to is still under a by NCSA license? And the answer is he doesn't. So this is a good thing. Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable. What that means is that they can never be taken back. So when Martin at the moment in time when Martin took a copy of that Wikipedia article a copy of that open learn course he legally made a copy of those things under the terms of the license at that point in time. So when he took that Wikipedia article it was by SA and I think they're at 4.0 now I'd have to look. When he took the open learn OU course or part of the course it was under a by NCSA license. And he can use those works a copy of those works forever and until they go into the public domain under the terms of the license and nobody can ever take that away from him. So that's a really important thing because as Martin said he doesn't want to every six months go back and check and make sure he's still got permissions to use these. He has permissions to use these forever under the terms of the license. Now what Martin may want to do because he thought this part of this open learn course was really great. It's in Martin's interest to maybe go back and look at that open learn course from time to time because of course the open university is going to continue to improve on it and change it and modify it and Martin might want those new changes and open learn might re-license the course under a different license in the future but that's a different course. That's a different version of the course. And so in the end Martin will make a choice. He'll say well I've got this version of the course under by NCSA which I really like and a new version of the course two years later is under a CC by license. Well that's good. I like CC by better than NCSA. It's less restrictive but that new version of the course, gosh I just don't like it as much and so I'm not going to include it in my book. I'm going to stick with this old version I've got for now and he can do that. He doesn't have to go back and ask permission. Is that all Martin? Yep. Perfect thanks. Go ahead James. I was just going to say we have time for one more slightly large question. Chris had typed in he's not so bothered about creating materials. He wants to be a consumer like most folks I guess I want to hear about using Creative Commons licensed OER materials. Where do we find them and how do we rate them? Good question. Let's take those one at a time. One what if you are producing content and you want to share your content as OER or more simply you want to put a Creative Commons license on it which if it's an educational resource that will make it OER as long as it's not a no-derivance license as we've said. So that's case one. What if I want to share my stuff? How do I share it? Where do I share it? And then point two, how do I find other people's stuff and use it and download it and make copies of it and so on. Grab some websites here and we'll go through these one at a time. Actually I'm just going to screen share if that's okay. And then we'll share some links. Alrighty, let's see here. Okay, so the first link I'm going to give you is just our marking page. So this is a, if you click on that link and we'll go through this step at a time. When we say marking what we mean are you're putting the license mark on something. So either you're marking your work with a CC license or you're marking somebody else's work with the license they chose and giving them proper attribution. So if you look at this page you'll see there's two options. One, mark your work with a CC license that's I'm sharing my stuff. And the second link is provide attribution for works that you're using. So I'm giving proper attribution to somebody else's stuff. So let's do the first. And let me do a screen share here, application sharing. There we go. Can somebody type in the chat window if you see my screen, my marking screen upon collaborate. Yes, good. Alright, so what I'm going to do first is how do we share our stuff? So the easiest thing to do is you go to creativecommons.org and you click on choose a license. So right in the middle of the page you'll see this big green button that says choose a license. So first before I get into this let me say there are many platforms on the web as we've discussed Flickr, YouTube, many, many others where the creative commons license chooser is embedded in the tool itself. So you can just if you go to YouTube you can just add a CC by license to it. If you go to Flickr they've got a license chooser embedded in the tool. Same thing with Blackboard or Desire to Learn or I think Moodle even has that. So different tools that you're using on the web you'll see the option to add a CC license. That's not true universally, but that's part of what we're trying to do is to get CC woven into every technology out there that you might be using. So that you have a choice as the author if you choose to share your work you can do so under the terms and conditions that you choose. Okay, well let's say you've got a blog so we talked about blogs earlier. You want to add a CC license to your blog or this could be your textbook or whatever. So what you do is you come to the chooser and you see that you've got these four quadrants. The upper left quadrant here is going to ask you two questions. Are you going to allow adaptations of your work to be shared? Yes, no, or yes as long as others share a life. You see in the upper right quadrant as I'm answering these different questions the license is changing. The second question is are you going to allow commercial uses of your work? And if I say yes it doesn't have a non-commercial restriction. If I say no it does have non-commercial built into it. So I'm just going to leave these yes and yes and that will give me a CC by license or an attribution license and then the old so that's you saw how simple that was to choose the license you want. And then the only other thing that you'll want to do is in the lower left quadrant is what's the title of your work. So I'm going to call this Martin's, you'll see in the lower right quadrant as I'm typing it's actually putting all this metadata, this information into the license itself. Attribute the work we'll attribute this to Martin, Martin H and the URL, HTTP, I don't know we'll look at the URL, CNN, Martin's big time. And so what you get over here in the lower right quadrant is it says it has all that information Martin's textbook by Martin H and this is linked to of course CNN.com but we wouldn't have really linked to Martin's actual textbook and the URL of that is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution 4.0 international license. And then what you do is you just copy this code and you drop that into your blog.  You can go to YouTube and get the embed text for a video, you can drop it into your learning management system or whatever web thing you're using and it will display the YouTube video. This is exactly the same thing. You just drop the code in and what it'll do is display the license. It'll give this machine-readable Creative Commons license. And the reason all this gobbledygook code is important is it lets machines on the web read the license. The reason that's important is let me just show you if here's one quick example. If you go to Google Advanced Search and I type in, I don't know, Algebra Textbook and then if I scroll the bottom of all these fields, I can filter by Google. You'll see the last one is called Usage Rights and I can actually filter by license. And so what this is doing, what Google is doing, is it's looking for CC license works on the web and things that are in the public domain. And so here's a free linear Algebra Textbook at St. Michael's College and if I click on that sure enough I see that this is under Creative Commons Attribution Share Like license. Okay, so that's how you those are a couple of ways to add a CC license to your work.  That's all you have to do. And by the way, we don't keep a registry on this. This is just a tool. It doesn't log anything. So none of your privacy or anything like that are being violated. We don't collect information from you. There's no cost. We don't ask for personal information as you can see. It's just there. So there you go. That's how you add a license or use a tool that's on the web. So now let's look at how do you find other people's works. So I'll ask Martin and James and others to just start dropping links in. So Martin, maybe you could drop in and just kick that off. And let me share a few links as well. So here's one that I'll demo here. This is called OpenForUs.org. So this is a site that we built for the biggest OER project on the planet right now. It's a $2 billion, that's billion with a B, $2 billion U.S. project from the U.S. Department of Labor to build new academic programs in the United States. And all of the content that's being built must, as a requirement of the grant, be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So this is pretty cool, right? You can take anybody in the world, can take all of this content for free under a CC by license. Anyway, we're working with these folks, all these community colleges in the United States were building all this stuff, and they asked us, gosh, you know, what is OER? And most importantly, how do we find stuff? So make this a little bit bigger here. You'll see on the screen it says, well, what are you looking for? Do you want a general search of OER? Are you looking for photos or images? Do you want video? Do you want audio or music? General education? Is it an open textbook you're looking for? Simulations maybe? And so I say, oh yeah, simulations. I'm in biology, and I want biology simulations. So fine, click on that. You'll take you down and it'll say, oh, if you want the best simulations on the planet, you want to go to FET. This happens to be a project, and I'll go ahead and click through the FET here. This is a project at the University of Colorado Boulder, and if I click on play with the Sims, I said I was in biology, so they've got physics, biology, chemistry, earth science, et cetera. Well, I'm going to go with biology. And I'm going to scroll down here and say, oh, that's exactly what I needed. I need molecule polarity. That's what I'm teaching this week. And you'll see that here's molecule polarity. Now all of the, and these Sims are really great. They've got variables that the students can adjust, and you can run the Sims in real time when they move, and they're all in Java right now. They're rewriting everything in HTML5, so they work on all the latest devices. Really, really cool stuff. These Sims are actually so good that Pearson takes all these Sims and uses them in their textbooks because they're better than what Pearson had been producing themselves. What's great is that all these Sims are dual licensed both under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can take it under the terms of a CCB license, and you can take it under GPL if you want access to the software. And I scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you'll see because these Sims are openly licensed, they're actually being translated. So here they are. This particular Sim is in Arabic, Basque, Bosnian, Brazilian, Portuguese, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian. I mean, it's just awesome, right? You openly license your stuff, and other people will take it and translate it, make it better, et cetera. So that's one website, openforus.org that includes Berlo and OER Commons and Joram. I think we've got Joram on there. And just sites from all around the world in different categories. What we've tried to do is kind of make it a one-stop shop for, hey, if you're looking for OER, here's a good place to come. And then let's go back to the marking page just to wrap this up to see what do we do CC marking. So once you find something, let me go back, I'm going to say provide attribution to works that you use. Let me go ahead and just drop this link in the chat window so you can go directly to it. So everybody click on that link, or you can just look at my screen, that's fine too. So this tells you once I downloaded that FET simulation, or once I took that course from the Open University, or once I took that physics module from MIT, how do I give proper attribution? How does Martin include that in his new course that he's building? So we walk you through it. We say, well, here are the best practices. And we say so. For example, here's an image. This happened to be an image that was taken at the CC 10th birthday party. You make this a little bit bigger. And you can see we say this is an ideal attribution. So Creative Commons 10th birthday celebration in San Francisco, that's the title of the image. It's by T. Volk. Tim Volmer is a guy who works at Creative Commons. He's the author of it. So by him, he's the author, is licensed under CC by 2.0 license. You see these things are hyperlinked. So first if I click on this one that's going to take me to the actual oops, did it take me to the actual image? It should. Let me try that again. Yeah, there we go. So it takes me to the actual image in Flickr. And that's good because to give proper attribution, I need to link back to the original work. Now let me go back again.  I'm going to click on Tim. Well, Tim wants you to go to his main page on Flickr because as you can see Tim likes to cook and make iced coffee and all sorts of cool stuff. And so Tim says, well here if you're using my images, then here's the rest of my images. He puts all his images under CC by. And then the last thing that's linked here is the license itself. And if you click on that, it's going to take you to the human or readable bead of the Creative Commons license. And it says you are free to do these things under the following conditions. So as you can see in that attribution, what we've done and this is the best practice is we've provided title. Whoops, here we go. We've provided title, author, source, or the URL, and what's the license. And if you provide those four things in your attribution you're good to go. We've sought to simplify that even more with Creative Commons 4.0, the new licenses that just came out where somebody can provide proper attribution just by linking back to the work if all of this information is on the work itself. That's sufficient attribution. But best practice and to be safe, we still recommend that you do this. Because what's the title of the work, who's the author, linked to it and what's the license. And you can see very simple to do, doesn't take a lot of time. It also is just respectful. If I'm going to use somebody's work, I need to give proper attribution to them. Tim was kind enough to share his image with us. The Open University was kind enough and generous enough to share their course. CK12 was kind enough to share that textbook. Let me give you one more, Jim, before we leave. I know we're out of time. If you haven't seen OpenStax yet, you'll want to take a look at this. Here's the link. These are textbooks. They are all CC by license and they're designed to be for your highest enrolled courses. If any of you are students and you've had the experience of buying expensive textbooks, you'll want to share OpenStax with your next professors so that maybe they'll use one of those high quality textbooks instead of charging you 150 pounds for your next book. Thank you so much for an extremely engaging session today and thank you for starting your day with us. Most of our participants are in the UK and Europe and they're closing out their work day with the octel session. Everybody if you would please join me in giving Cable a round of virtual applause. If there are any further questions that we didn't get to during today's session, please use the forums, use the communities, use Twitter. We'll try and address all the questions that we get. Just a reminder, we're in the middle of week 3 here on Wednesday. Next week is an off week, a break week, or a catch up week depending on your point of view. Octel week 4 will resume on the week of May 2nd. Once again Cable, thank you so much and for everybody in today's session with Octel. Have a great evening and the rest of your day.


0 Accounting Software 2023 Budgeted Income Statement Data Input Get ready to become an Accounting Hero with 0 2023 Here we are in our custom 0 home page going into the company file We set up in a prior presentation that's Get Great Guitars We're going to duplicate the tabs to put the reports in like we do every time Right-click in the tab up top so we can duplicate it Back to the tab to the middle Accounting drop-down, opening the balance sheet This is a comparative balance sheet if you don't have it Open the standard one Tab into the right, accounting to the drop-down Income to the statement This is a comparative income statement If you don't have it, you can open the standard one there as well In prior presentation We have downloaded information from 0 Basically a trial balance that we can then format into an income statement And then create a budgeted projective income statement in Excel Which we have done here Now what we would like to do is take that budgeted income statement And put it back into 0 using the budgeting tool Which is different than the normal data input process Because of course we're projecting out into the future The reason we want to do that Is because we want to be able to run reports within 0 That can do comparative reports So as time passes, say we budgeted in the past And we budgeted for January and February I can then run reports to compare what we thought was going to happen To what actually happened as time passes That's one of the great tools to have 0 To have to put it back into 0 So that we can have that information Now we have inputted into the 0 system Two months of data input for actual data input For January and February We used that as the baseline to then create our budget And we kind of imagined that this is information from the prior two months December and November of the prior year So that we can budget out project starting in January So the reason we want to do that Is now that I have January and February I'm going to put that into the system as well as all 12 months And we'll be able to run reports Which will show the actual and budget for January and February And then everything going forward from that We don't have any actual data to But in practice of course as time passes We can compare what actually happens to the budget Alright let's go to the first tab And see where the data input for the budget is It's under the accounting dropdown We go into the reports And then we're going to go on down Move on down to the budget manager The budget manager Now you could have multiple budgets if you wanted to This is the overall budget kind of the default budget You can add a new budget If you so choose and simply name the budget here We're just going to use the overall budget And we're going to start it on January So you could have different start dates If you wanted to The common budget is to project out on a 12 month basis But you can do different variations as you choose And then we've got the actuals So this is showing the actual numbers down here Which could be useful if you were trying to construct your budget Within zero But that's not what we recommend doing really And that's not what we did here What we did is we exported to Excel to construct the budget And now I just want to do the data input So what I would like to see is no actuals I'm going to say none And update So now we just have our data input fields down below And then the periods We could have 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, 24 months We're going to add a year's worth of budget So we're going to go for 12 months out And there's our budget information Now zero has a nice tool down here That we could import the budget So if I look at the import option Note that I could download the template here And say give me the template in Excel or CSV file And we could open this and populate it Now you could try to use this template As your budgeting tool Instead of building it like we did here But it would still be a little bit difficult to do Because you'd probably start off with your past data But also it might be a little bit faster If I was to take my data here And just copy and paste it into the template And then import the template So that's just a method that you might want to keep in mind We're not going to do it that way here Because I want to see how to actually put the data input into zero Without the template But that could be a useful tool to save some time So I'm going to go back on over I'm going to go back to the budget manager here And do the data input Down here we've got the import We've got the exporting, saving, and the cancel This is in like the non-wide screen It might be easiest if we go to widescreen Once you're ready to do the data input And that gives you just a little bit more space here So that you can see a little bit further out to the right It kind of locks in the screen Alright so let's just try to do this one line at a time It's a lot easier if you had Like two screens that you could use But we'll work with what we've got here So we've got the sales number Now we've got the account number over here That could be a little bit useful Sales number 29226 So I'm going to say alright Sales 29226 29226 That's account 4350 Now I want to count Hold on a second Make this whole thing green I want to count 4,000 4,000 Yeah 4226 Now if I hit this green button In the middle It gives me my compounding options So I can apply a fixed amount to each month If I want to just copy it across I can adjust by an amount each month Or I can adjust by percentage each month So what I want to do is adjust by that percentage Because that's what we did here We've increased it by 10% So 110% So I'm going to say adjust by percent each month And I'm going to say And I'm not sure if I put 110 or just 10% I'm going to say 10% And see what it does I'm going to say copy it across And so the next month should be 32149 Boom, looks good The total comes out to 624982 So<PHONE_NUMBER>96 Slightly different What happened? Well maybe it's just a rounding difference It looks immaterial Let's keep it rolling I think that's good So we'll go to the next one Service Let's go and highlight this one This is account 4300 4250 So 4300 Back to January Data input 4250 Alright And then This one We increased by just a solid amount of $1,000 So I'm just going to say Let's go to the arrow And I want to adjust by an amount of just $1,000 Bring it up by $1,000 Each time period And apply it out So boom And that comes out to a total of<PHONE_NUMBER>00 Let's see if that Is what we have here Yeah, looks good Moving B to the end Next one Alter of A We're going to say this one Goes up by 5% Rental income Account 4350 1130 Rental income Hold on A second Wait a second I put this one in the wrong box I knew it I knew I did something funny There It should that should be the service Item The whole thing The whole thing is messed up No, it's not stay calm Stay calm What I'll do is I'll put this one here 4250 And then That 4250 Was increased by the 1,000 Okay, I see what I did I see what I did So I'll put the 1,000 here And then Apply So I fixed it to this one And then this one


Hi everyone, thank you for coming to this talk. My name is Brian Fox, I'm a freelance engineer. If you came here hoping to see my more famous namesake in the creative bash, then I'm really sorry to disappoint you, but if you do wanna reach out to me afterwards, then my details on this slide, I'm on the CNCF Slack, I'm more in LinkedIn, if you hunt around, you might find me elsewhere as well. Right, so today I'm here to play in spirit of CDCon and GitOpsCon together, play a little bit of devil's advocate and make the case that perhaps you don't need to GitOps everything. So the title of this talk is Terraforming Argo CD, the GitOps bridge. And whilst I'd love to lay claim to the term the GitOps bridge, I actually stumbled across this in the AWS EKS Blueprints repository where they describe it as follows. In essence, certain AWS resources may still need to be created via Terraform and these resource values will need to be passed from Terraform to Argo CD. Now in the talk, I've referred to both the physical and the metaphorical bridge. The physical bridge is what this quote describes. As the phrase indicates, the approach is not strictly compliant with the GitOps principles. It's a means of bridging the gap between traditional infrastructure as code and a full GitOps implementation. But we can also extend the metaphor. When using the approach, we can abstract the details of Kubernetes, such that teams can deploy to Kubernetes whilst working in a familiar Terraform-based workflow. But before diving into detail, let me give you a little bit of background. At the time I came across this phrase, I was working on a distributed system where the services I was involved with were largely inspired by the self-contained systems approach. There were by and large containerized workloads that ran on ECS and they made heavy use of managed services for things like caching, database or storage in general. Teams were responsible for owning the end-to-end lifecycle of their services and repository served as the boundary and the single source of truth for everything required to build and run the services. We were heavy Terraform users and this meant that app code lived alongside infrastructure code and environmental configuration in the same repository. This pattern worked really well for us, enabled a fairly simple CI CD pipeline. Changes were committed to Git, CI fetched those changes, built and deployed or built and test them. If everything passed, we tagged the repository, published an artifact and kicked off the deployment process. The CD server was simply responsible for orchestrating the rollout of changes across multiple environments where we had agents running in each AWS account that essentially fetched the repository and ran Terraform apply. But we, like many others, were lured by Kubernetes and decided to migrate our workloads off ECS. But as soon as we started that process, questions arose. The first was what to do with our existing Terraform code. Should we be deploying this via Kubernetes operator? Did we need to redo this using a case native solution like cross-plane just to be able to deploy to Kubernetes in a GitOps manner? Rewriting was something that we wanted to avoid and we figured that simply adopting Kubernetes for application workloads was complex enough. So we decided to focus on limiting the scope of a migration and the cognitive load on teams by minimizing tooling overload. So then the question became how do we leverage our existing Terraform code and integrate deploying to Kubernetes into our existing pipelines? But that raised questions like how do I make use of managed services when running on ECS? If I provision a database via Terraform, how do I supply the database configuration to my workload? Or how do I sign my workloads on IAM role or a security group? These are questions that you see coming up over and over again online and there doesn't seem to be a nice answer within the Argo CD ecosystem, particularly if you don't want to write the values out to Git. Finally, there were questions about how to handle common concerns such as how to expose a service, handle secrets, create DNS records and the likes. In essence, how do we configure our common set of operators with resource values coming from Terraform? This brings us to the Terraform provider for Argo CD. Now, this is a standard Terraform provider and see flux people in the audience, which provides a means of provisioning and maintaining resources in Argo CD. It contrasts to flux which goes against the norms and actually bootstraps flux but doesn't provide a way of maintaining anything in flux. It does ultimately what Terraform is great at doing, orchestrating API calls to the Argo CD API and it allows us to create resources in Argo CD without having to write any YAML. From our perspective, this was great. Using the provider meant there was zero impact to our existing pipelines. And as I'll discuss, it enabled us to abstract Kubernetes to a point that we could leverage existing organizational knowledge rather than everyone having to become a Kubernetes expert from day one. So in what way did we make use of the provider? Well, we ended up using it in two ways. The first from a platform perspective in terms of setting up Argo CD and the second was from a service perspective where developers could create and maintain applications in Argo CD. From an Argo CD setup perspective, we ended up with a hub-spoke model where we had Argo CD deployed to a shared instance and services deployed to individual namespaces in environment-specific clusters. The provider in turn facilitated the setup of this deployment topology in that we could use Terraform to provision both the underlying clusters and register them in Argo CD at the same time in the same plan and apply. We could also provision projects, roles, and importantly project role tokens that enabled developers to self-service the maintenance or creation and maintenance of applications in Argo CD. And this approach avoided the security concerns at the time around access to the Argo CD namespace in the shared cluster. But what about applications? Obviously, given that we wanted to limit the cognitive load on teams and integrate into their existing pipelines, making everyone right, Yammel, was out of the question. And so whilst we did end up creating a common Helm chart, using that chart declaratively, wouldn't integrate nicely into our existing pipelines, and we'd still have forced teams to figure out the correct configuration of AWS resources when using the Helm chart. And so we ended up creating a common Terraform module that wrapped the Helm chart. This chart, this module, essentially abstracted away all of these concerns and it was responsible for provisioning the necessary AWS resources and passing the correct set of values to the Helm chart via the Argo CD application resource in Terraform. This essentially made it simple for teams to move workloads to Kubernetes, while slowly introducing them to Kubernetes terms or concepts and the magnitude, like what is an ingress? What is the relationship between a service account and an IAM role? So what does that look like? I'm gonna dive into some code now. I'm in lightning talk here I go. Given that it is a lightning talk, I'm gonna have to rush through all of this, but I do encourage you to check out the repo in your own time. So let's start out by looking at Argo CD. I apologize for the scale of this and the graininess of this. But here I have a simple web app that's been deployed. It has a deployment here. It has a service and we've exposed it via an ingress. And if I go here, I can hopefully see, but we have pod info deployed. From an app team perspective, what would that look like? Is this big enough? Everyone can see, yep. Teams define the service name as well as the project they want to be deployed to. They define a container definition and they define any additional capabilities that they would like. In this case, we want to expose the service via an ingress. Underneath the hood, we have an Argo CD application resource where we can see that this simply defines an application where the source is of type helm and we can see that we can set parameters that are used when templating our helm chart, either individually, as in the case of the replica count here or by YAML encoding a Terraform object for more complex structures. Now, pod info also provides a cache endpoint or an integration with Redis. And at the moment, this is offline. So what would I need to do as an application team to make use of my ElastiCache Redis cluster within my EKS? Firstly, I would need, no, I need. I need to pass the connection string through as an environment variable. I also need to create a security group on my, add a security group to my pod. And I need to enable some security group rules, ingress and egress to allow communication between my pod and my ElastiCache cluster. Now, underneath the hood here, the module's also handling some of the additional complexity that comes around the use of security groups for pods by ensuring that my security group has outbound DNS access and communication from Kubelet on our nodes to the liveness and readiness ports or probes within our pod. So let's try and apply this, will this work? Do I have internet? Yes, okay, things are working. So while that's applying, let's chat quickly about trade-offs or rather where this approach falls short of the GitOps principles. Now, if you were at the keynote this morning, hopefully this should come as no surprise. We can say, is this solution or this approach declarative? It is, is it versioned and immutable? Yes, is it pulled automatically? We could split hairs here, but I'm gonna say yes. The ArgoCD application resource, or ArgoCD is automatically pulling our application workload and the rest of our infrastructure is pulled automatically as part of our CD pipeline. But is it continuously reconciled? And that's to that is no, not everything. Our workload, that's being deployed by ArgoCD is, but our infrastructure and the ArgoCD application itself are not. And this is the common shortcoming that you see when talking about Terraform in the context of GitOps. So let's jump back to our application now. Well, almost done. Yeah, there we go, great. And have a look here. Hopefully, if I click refresh, there we go. We can see that we have an additional resource now. We have the security group policy and we can see that it's being configured with the ID of a security group that we created in Terraform. And if I go to here, hopefully, I get a response from my cash now, which is great. That's awesome. But what about the GitOps principles? Well, we can illustrate the shortcomings of this approach quite easily as well.  Whoop, there it gets recreated. No surprise here. This is standard Kubernetes behavior. This would have happened even if we'd imperatively created our deployment by a cube couple. But if we delete the deployment instead, I should have had that pasted. Again, it now comes back. And this time, it's thanks to Argo CD and the fact that it is continuously reconciling out of claret of state with the live state in Kubernetes. But if I were to delete my application here now, well, then that's not coming back. And therein lies the rub with this approach. But does that really matter? The answer to that's likely gonna depend on you and your use case. But for us, we actually found out that this perhaps bug in our workflow turned out to be a bit of a feature. We found that developers often wanted to be able to play around in lower environments and be able to manually edit applications, leveraging the full power of the Argo CD UI. So here I can disable AutoSync. And because this is not reconciled by Git, we can actually do this. And the fact that we don't have continuous reconciliation in place at the application level, yeah, sorry, allows us to test changes. Knowing that these manual changes would be overwritten on the next time the application was deployed. And this is great because it enables quicker feedback in lower environments. And also, if I go to edit now, enables teams to become comfortable with Kubernetes in a more incremental and controlled manner. For example, here I'm now editing the fully rendered YAML rather than having to learn Helm to be able to do so. If I delete, did I click edit? Backspace, awesome. Now it's important to note that we can also leverage the Argo CD RBAC model here to limit this capability to just develop to the lower environments. So we don't want this happening in prod, and that's great. But by contrast, it's far more onerous to allow this type of behavior if everything is stored in Git. So to conclude, I hope that I've been able to give you a reason to consider that maybe you don't need to get up to everything. Depending on your goals, you can reap a lot of the benefits without having to deal with a lot of the complexity. Perhaps keeping it simple is the best course of action, particularly when starting out and adopting new technologies. And with that, I think I'm actually on time. I'd love to open the floor if anyone has any questions. I can't actually believe I did this on time. Awesome. Yeah. So, you know, I had an additional slide next steps because this is a bridge and it was seen as a stepping stone towards a full yetox implementation. And yes, the next steps involved how we then change this. And there are a number, since we did this work, the ecosystems developed quite a lot and there are a number of new tools out there. There are Terraform controllers from Kubevalla. There's Flamingo plus the flux Terraform provider if you wanted to. We can use as an enterprise solution, we might be able to use Hashicorp's Terraform controller. There are a number of approaches and yeah, we have looked at it. I've since moved on from this team so I don't know if they have, but yeah. I totally didn't think I was gonna compete in time and so I was cutting slides and that was the one that went. Yeah, thanks. Yep. Are you talking about using rollbacks within Argo CD or progressive delivery within Argo CD? Yeah, yeah, the idea of like doing a rollback instead of Argo or just relying entirely on the Terraform state and doing like a redeploy essentially from there. Okay, so we didn't use the features within Argo CD. We went that, I don't even think they had been released at that point in time when we were doing this. Our general approach to rollback was through our CD pipeline. When we initiated deployment, we passed through a specific version and so rolling back for us would either be reapplying the previous version or we would fail forward if it was a quick bug in that way. But we didn't have the advanced use case that you were talking about. Okay. Sorry. Cool. If that's it. Thank you, everyone.


Defenders of the free market are often accused of being apologists for big business and shills for the corporate elite. Is this a fair charge? No and yes. Emphatically no, because corporate power and the free market are actually antithetical. Genuine competition is big business's worst nightmare. But also in all too many cases yes, because although liberty and plutocracy cannot coexist, simultaneous advocacy of both is all too possible. First the no. Corporations tend to fear competition, because competition exerts downward pressure on prices and upward pressure on salaries. Moreover, success on the market comes with no guarantee of permanency, depending as it does on outdoing other firms that correctly figuring out how best to satisfy forever-changing consumer preferences. And that kind of vulnerability to loss is no picnic. It is no surprise then that throughout US history corporations have been overwhelmingly hostile to the free market. Indeed most of the existing regulatory apparatus, including those regulations widely misperceived as restraints on corporate power, were vigorously supported, lobbied for and in some cases even drafted by the corporate elite. Corporate power depends crucially on government intervention in the marketplace. This is obvious enough in the case of more overt forms of government favouritism, such as subsidies, bailouts and other forms of corporate welfare, protectionist tariffs, explicit grants of monopoly privilege and the seizing of private property for corporate use via eminent domain, as in Kilo versus New London. But these direct forms of pro-business intervention are supplemented by a swarm of indirect forms whose impact is arguably greater still. As I have written elsewhere, one especially useful service that the state can render the corporate elite is cartel enforcement. Price fixing agreements are unstable on a free market, since while all parties to the agreement have a collective interest in seeing the agreement generally hold, each has an individual interest in breaking the agreement by underselling the other parties in order to win away their customers. And even if the cartel manages to maintain discipline over its own membership, the oligopolistic prices tend to attract new competitors into the market, hence the advantage to business of state enforced cartelization. Often this is done directly, but there are indirect ways too, such as imposing uniform quality standards that relieve firms from having to compete in quality, and when the quality standards are high, lower quality but cheaper competitors are priced out of the market. The ability of colossal firms to exploit economies of scale is also limited in a free market, since beyond a certain point the benefits of size, e.g. reduced transaction costs, get outweighed by dis-economies of scale, e.g. calculation or chaos stemming from absence of price feedback, unless the state enables them to socialize these costs by immunizing them from competition, e.g. by imposing fees, licensure requirements, capitalization requirements, and other regulatory burdens that disproportionately impact newer, poorer entrants as opposed to richer, more established firms. Nor does the list end there. Tax breaks to favoured corporations represent yet another non-obvious form of government intervention. There is, of course, nothing anti-market about tax breaks per se, quite the contrary. But when a firm is exempted from taxes to which its competitors are subject, it becomes the beneficiary of state coercion directed against others, and to that extent owes its success to government intervention rather than market forces. Intellectual property laws also function to bolster the power of big business. Even those who accept intellectual property as a legitimate form of private property can agree that the ever-expanding temporal horizon of copyright protection, along with disproportionately steep fines for violations, measures for which publishers, recording firms, software companies, and film studios have lobbied so effectively, are excessive from an insensible point of view, stand in tension with the express intent of the Constitution's Patents and Copyrights clause, and have more to do with maximising corporate profits than with securing a fair return to the original creators. Government favouritism also underwrites environmental irresponsibility on the part of big business. Polluters often enjoy protection against lawsuits, for example, despite the pollution status as a violation of private property rights. When timber companies engage in logging on public lands, the access roads are generally tax funded, thus reducing the cost of logging below its market rate. Moreover, since the loggers do not own the forests, they have little incentive to log sustainably. In addition, inflationary monetary policies on the part of central banks also tend to benefit those businesses that receive the inflated money first in the form of loans and investments when they are still facing the old lower prices, while those to whom the new money trickles down later, only after they have already begun facing higher prices, systematically lose out. And of course, corporations have been frequent beneficiaries of US military interventions abroad, from the United Fruit Company in 1950s Guatemala to Halliburton in Iraq today. Vast corporate empires like Walmart are often hailed or condemned, depending on the speaker's perspective, as products of the free market. But not only is Walmart a direct beneficiary of usually local government intervention in the form of such measures as eminent domain and tax breaks, but it also reaps less obvious benefits from policies of wider application. The funding of public highways through tax revenues, for example, constitutes a de facto transportation subsidy, allowing Walmart and similar chains to socialize the costs of shipping, and so enabling them to compete more successfully against local businesses. The low prices we enjoy at Walmart in our capacity as consumers are thus made possible in part by our having already indirectly subsidized Walmart's operating costs in our capacity as taxpayers. Walmart also keeps its costs low by paying low salaries. But what makes those low salaries possible is the absence of more lucrative alternatives for its employees. And that fact in turn owes much to government intervention. The existence of regulations, fees, licensure requirements, etc. does not affect all market participants equally. It's much easier for wealthy, well-established companies to jump through these hoops than it is for new firms just starting up. Hence such regulations both decrease the number of employers bidding for employees services, thus keeping salaries low, and make it harder for the less affluent to start enterprises of their own. Legal restrictions on labor organizing also make it harder for such workers to organize collectively on their own behalf. I don't mean to suggest that Walmart and similar firms owe their success solely to governmental privilege. Genuine entrepreneurial talent has doubtless been involved as well. But given the enormous governmental contribution to that success, it's doubtful that in the absence of government intervention, such firms would be in anything like the position they are today. In a free market firms would be smaller and less hierarchical, more local and more numerous. And many would probably be employee owned. Prices would be lower and wages higher and corporate power would be in shambles. Small wonder that big business, despite often paying lip service to free market ideals, tends to systematically oppose them in practice. So where does this idea come from that advocates of free market libertarianism must be carrying water for big business interests? Whence the pervasive conflation of corporate displeutocracy with libertarian laissez-faire? Who is responsible for promoting this confusion? There are three different groups that must shoulder their share of the blame. Note, in speaking of blame, I'm not necessarily saying that the culprits have deliberately promulgated what they know to be a confusion. In most cases, the failing is rather one of negligence of inadequate attention to inconsistencies in their worldview. And as we'll see, these three groups have systematically reinforced one another's confusions. Culprit one, the left. Across the spectrum from the squishiest mainstream liberal to the bomb-throwingest radical leftist, there is widespread, though not it should be noted universal, agreement that laissez-faire and corporate plutocracy are virtually synonymous. David Cawton, for example, describes advocates of unrestricted markets, private property and individual rights as corporate libertarians, who champion a globalized free market that leaves resource allocation decisions in the hands of giant corporations. As though these giant corporations were creatures of the free market rather than of the state. While Noam Chomsky, though savvy enough to recognise that the corporate elite are terrified of genuine free markets, yet in the same breath will turn around and say that we must at all costs avoid free markets, lest we unduly empower the corporate elite. Culprit two, the right. If libertarians left-wing opponents have conflated free markets with pro-business intervention, libertarians right-wing opponents have done all they can to foster precisely this confusion. For there is a widespread, though again not universal, tendency for conservatives to cloak corporatist policies in free market rhetoric. This is how conservative politicians in their presumptuous Adam Smith neckties have managed to get themselves perceived, perhaps have even managed to perceive themselves, as proponents of tax cuts, spending cuts and unhampered competition, despite endlessly raising taxes, raising spending and promoting government business partnerships. Consider the conservative virtue term privatisation, which has two distinct, indeed opposed, meanings. On the one hand, it can mean returning some service or industry from the monopolistic government sector to the competitive private sector, getting government out of it. This would be the libertarian meaning. On the other hand, it can mean contracting out, i.e. granting to some private firm a monopoly privilege in the provision of some service previously provided by government directly. There is nothing free market about privatisation in this latter sense, since the monopoly power is merely transferred from one set of hands to another. This is corporatism or pro-business intervention, not laissez-faire. To be sure, there may be competition in the bidding for such monopoly contracts, but competition to establish a legal monopoly is no more genuine market competition than voting one last time to establish a dictator is genuine democracy. Of these two meanings, the corporatist meaning may actually be older, dating back to fascist economic policies in Nazi Germany. But it was the libertarian meaning that was primarily intended when the term coined independently as the reverse of nationalisation first received widespread usage in recent decades. Yet conservatives have largely co-opted the term, turning it once again toward the corporatist sense. Similar concerns apply to that other conservative virtue term deregulation. From a libertarian standpoint, deregulating should mean the removal of government directives and interventions from the sphere of voluntary exchange. But when a private entity is granted special governmental privileges, deregulating it amounts instead to an increase, not a decrease, in government intrusion into the economy. To take an example, not exactly at random, if assurances of a tax-funded bailout lead banks to make riskier loans than they otherwise would, then the banks are being made freer to take risks with the money of unconcenting taxpayers. When conservatives advocate this kind of deregulation, they are wrapping redistribution and privilege in the language of economic freedom. When conservatives market their plutocratic schemes as free market policies, can we really blame liberals and leftists for conflating the two? Well, OK, yes we can. Still, it is a mitigating factor. Corporate three, libertarians themselves. Alas, libertarians are not innocent here, which is why the answer to my opening question, as to whether it's fair to charge libertarians with being apologists for big business, was no and yes, rather than a simple no. If libertarians are accused of carrying water for corporate interests, that may be at least in part because, well, they so often sound like that's just what they're doing. Though here, as above, there are plenty of honourable exceptions to this tendency. Consider Libertarian icon Ein Rahn's description of big business as a persecuted minority, or the way libertarians defend our free market health care system against the alternative of socialised medicine, as though the health care system that prevails in the United States were the product of free competition rather than of systematic government intervention on behalf of insurance companies in the medical establishment at the expense of ordinary people. Or again, note the alacrity with which so many libertarians rush to defend Wal-Mart and the like as heroic exemplars of the free market. Among such libertarians, criticisms of corporate power are routinely dismissed as anti-market ideology. Of course, such dismissiveness gets reinforced by the fact that many critics of corporate power are in the grip of anti-market ideology. Thus, when left-wing analysts complain about corporate libertarians, they are not merely confused. They're responding to a genuine tendency, even if they've to some extent misunderstood it. Kevin Carson has coined the term vulgar libertarianism for the tendency to treat the case for the free market as though it justified various unlovely features of actually existing corporate society. I find it preferable to talk of vulgar libertarianism rather than of vulgar libertarians, because very few libertarians are consistently vulgar. Vulgar libertarianism is a tendency that can show up to varying degrees in thinkers who have many strong anti-corporate tendencies also. Likewise, vulgar liberalism is Carson's term for the corresponding tendency to treat the undesirability of those features of actually existing corporate society, as though they constituted an objection to the free market. Both tendencies conflate free markets with corporatism, but draw opposite morals. As Murray Rothbard notes, both left and right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and anti-business. And if many leftists tend to see dubious corporate advocacy in libertarian pronouncements even when it's not there, so likewise many libertarians tend not to see dubious corporate advocacy in libertarian pronouncements even when it is there. There is an obvious tendency for vulgar libertarianism and vulgar liberalism to reinforce each other, as each takes at face value the conflation of plutocracy with free markets assumed by the other. This conflation in turn tends to bolster the power of the political establishment by rendering genuine libertarianism invisible. Those who are attracted to free markets are lured into supporting plutocracy, thus helping to prop up statism's right or corporatist wing. Those who are repelled by plutocracy are lured into opposing free markets, thus helping to prop up statism's left or social democratic wing. But as these two wings have more in common than not, the political establishment wins either way. The perception that libertarians are shills for big business thus has two bad effects. First it tends to make it harder to attract converts to libertarianism and so hinders its success. Second those converts it does attract may end up reinforcing corporate power through their advocacy of a muddled version of the doctrine. In the 19th century it was far more common than it is today for libertarians to see themselves as opponents of big business. The long 20th century alliance of libertarians with conservatives against the common enemy of state socialism probably had much to do with reorienting libertarian thought toward the right. And the brief rapprochement between libertarians and the left during the 1960s founded when the new left imploded. As a result libertarians have been ill placed to combat left wing and right wing conflation of markets with privilege because they have not been entirely free of conflation themselves. Happily the left slash libertarian coalition is now beginning to re-emerge and with it is emerging a new emphasis on the distinction between free markets and prevailing corporatism. In addition many libertarians are beginning to rethink the way they present their views and in particular their use of terminology. Take for example the word capitalism which libertarians during the past century have tended to apply to the system they favour. As I've argued elsewhere this term is somewhat problematic. Some use it to mean free markets, others to mean corporate privilege and still others, perhaps the majority, to mean some confused amalgamation of the two. By capitalism most people mean neither the free market simplicita nor the prevailing neo mercantilist system simplicita. Rather what most people mean by capitalism is this free market system that currently prevails in the western world. In short the term capitalism as generally used conceals an assumption that the prevailing system is a free market. And since the prevailing system is in fact one of government favouritism toward business the ordinary use of the term carries with it the assumption that the free market is government favouritism toward business. Hence clinging to the term capitalism may be one of the factors reinforcing the conflation of libertarianism with corporatist advocacy. In any case if libertarianism advocacy is not to be misperceived or worse yet correctly perceived as pro-corporate apologetics the antithetical relationship between free markets and corporate power must be continually highlighted.