Debian Donates 10,000 Euros to Fund Free and Decentralized Livestreaming (debian.org) 20
PeerTube (developed by Framasoft) is "the free and decentralized alternative to video platforms, providing you over 400,000 videos published by 60,000 users and viewed over 15 million times," according to its web site. But now they're exploring livestreaming, writes Debian developer Phil Hands (Slashdot reader #2,365):
Holding DebConf20 online this year highlighted the effort involved in setting up Live Streaming using Free Software — something that is beyond the reach of many smaller events which is where PeerTube with Live Streaming should be a perfect fit.
In June PeerTube had posted a roadmap with a humble request for donations in lieu of a crowdfunding campaign: At a time when no one knows what the future holds, we deem it inappropriate to start a crowdfunding campaign and threaten not to do our best on PeerTube if we don't get the necessary funds. We believe in the public utility of PeerTube, so much so that we commit to working on it for six months to make this v3 happen, even if we must do it with our own funds (which we had already done for v2).
We still hope that by sharing this roadmap as widely as possible, some of you will support us in our approach with a donation that will allow us to fund this project.
And this week PeerTube's official Twitter feed announced that "Thanks to Debian's €10,000 donation we've just reached the 4th step of our PeerTube fundraising" — livestreaming. "Many thanks to all those who donated. And it's not too late to contribute."
"We hope this unconventional gesture from the Debian project will help us make this year somewhat less terrible," added the Debian blog, "and give us, and thus humanity, better Free Software tooling to approach the future." It describes their donation as "a strong sign of recognition from an international project — one of the pillars of the Free Software world — towards a small French association which offers tools to liberate users from the clutches of the web's giant monopolies."
And secondly, "it's a substantial amount of help in these difficult times, supporting the development of a tool which equally belongs to and is useful to everyone. The strength of Debian's gesture proves, once again, that solidarity, mutual aid and collaboration are values which allow our communities to create tools to help us strive towards Utopia."
In June PeerTube had posted a roadmap with a humble request for donations in lieu of a crowdfunding campaign: At a time when no one knows what the future holds, we deem it inappropriate to start a crowdfunding campaign and threaten not to do our best on PeerTube if we don't get the necessary funds. We believe in the public utility of PeerTube, so much so that we commit to working on it for six months to make this v3 happen, even if we must do it with our own funds (which we had already done for v2).
We still hope that by sharing this roadmap as widely as possible, some of you will support us in our approach with a donation that will allow us to fund this project.
And this week PeerTube's official Twitter feed announced that "Thanks to Debian's €10,000 donation we've just reached the 4th step of our PeerTube fundraising" — livestreaming. "Many thanks to all those who donated. And it's not too late to contribute."
"We hope this unconventional gesture from the Debian project will help us make this year somewhat less terrible," added the Debian blog, "and give us, and thus humanity, better Free Software tooling to approach the future." It describes their donation as "a strong sign of recognition from an international project — one of the pillars of the Free Software world — towards a small French association which offers tools to liberate users from the clutches of the web's giant monopolies."
And secondly, "it's a substantial amount of help in these difficult times, supporting the development of a tool which equally belongs to and is useful to everyone. The strength of Debian's gesture proves, once again, that solidarity, mutual aid and collaboration are values which allow our communities to create tools to help us strive towards Utopia."
Debian has that kind of money? (Score:3)
I thought debian had only a minimal amount of money and funneled the bulk thru software in the public interest (spi) or is the articles just lacking detail?
Re: Debian has that kind of money? (Score:1)
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As I said afaik they keep as much money as possible outside debian and the idea is to deter litigation, there should be nothing to take and they could just start over with a new name. They've set up spi to hold any assets, if the money came from spi I wouldn't be surprised one bit.
Re: Debian has that kind of money? (Score:1)
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Originally SPI was created because Debian doesn't really have a legal existence in its own right. (In many ways it's just a bunch of mailing lists, and the contents of some servers etc. so it doesn't get to do things like open a bank account).
SPI could easily have been called something like The Debian Foundation, but rather than having something that was exclusively for Debian, it made more sense to allow other Free Software projects to also take advantage of the admin services it offers.
That being the case
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Thanks!
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> I thought debian had only a minimal amount of money
If Debian had an office, $10K would barely cover rent for one month.
It's not enough to cover bandwidth costs nor enough to attract sharks. Perhaps they shed excesses with grants as available to maintain that balance .
Reality is... (Score:3)
... we data that is distributed and whose directory and link structure is constnatly moving so it's not found on a fixed website.
I've thought about this for a while where everyone has an app that is constantly streaming "bits" and you can de-encrypt the bits you have a key for and it displays links. When files are distributed it means there is no central hub for authorities or governments to attack since links aren't hosted by static web pages on a website that need updating. Since the directory is a stream of files that is constantly being updated and distributed.
You can see something like this:
https://radicle.xyz/ [radicle.xyz]
For those of you interested I've been wanting to develop some apps on my own time to see if we can't crowdfund some small apps on a permanent basis email me if you support the idea and would be willing to throw a few bucks a month at it, just throwing this out here. Just send an email if you'd be willing to support idea of crowd funded apps (just doing some basic poll).
To email take the last third after plusplus and put it at the front
plusplusblah at protonmail.com
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Isn't that what the first iteration of Freenet did? You had encrypted data stored on your node, but you could plausibly deny knowing what its significance was.
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They can't hold their conference physically for obvious reason so to sponsor free software distributed streaming seems perfectly apt.
Re:what a waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Since Debian folk hold quite a lot of small, local events, this _will_ directly benefit people within Debian (especially in times of Covid-19) -- the idea was greeted with overwhelming support from within Debian.
Debian doesn't actually have that many things to spend money on, and despite not really soliciting donations, generally accumulates more than we spend year on year. A lot of the things you might expect Debian to spend money on get donated, and thus cost us nothing, and end up being something where spending money in that area runs the risk of upsetting our existing sponsors (since we'd likely be paying their competition for something they are currently donating to us) and thus doing so might actually result in reducing the relevant resource available to the project.
In short, your assumptions about how Debian works are faulty. Hardly surpriing though really: Debian is clearly impossible ;-)
Multicast (Score:2)
I recall the day when a woman was running an unencrypted stream with no hop limit from her apartment so she could keep an eye on her cat who had had surgery (mostly it slept). Al Gore was also on doin
But why? (Score:3)
It is trivial to start sending out a stream with several different F/OSS applications (VLC is a prime example). The issue isn't software.
The issue is bandwidth and related infrastructure to act as repeaters and spread the load and rebroadcast it out to the world. Something peer to peer like torrent where each watcher is also a repeater could work, but the effectiveness of that will depend on the various multitudes of connection possibilities each client would have.
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(Well, except for the illegal part. But that's why we have movie theaters!
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It seems to work like mastodon, you setup your own sever with complete control and choose what to aggregate (someone else could skim thru the doc more than the 30s i gave or perhaps already know).
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This could take off... but (Score:2)
I like the idea and concept, but like Mastodon, you're a raindrop in the ocean unless there's an efficient way to collaborate and share. The "Federation" feature makes sense but the details of how that's done will really determine how useful the system really is.
I think one feature that would put PeerTube on the map, is an integrated way to stream directly to Smart TVs. If a content creator could roll out their own channel on Chromecast or Roku easily (keyword: easily) then they would have an angle that w
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roku and peertube seems to give a couple of relevant search results, can't tell you more than that.
Current state of FOSS conferences (Score:2)
If you want to know the current state of FOSS conferences and PeerTube software check out the Conf.Tube [conf.tube] instance.
Tons of interesting content on there. Better than Netflix IMHO.