This week the Gang of Four is down to three as Stuart is off on holiday with his daughter in New York City. The episode runs 82 minutes long and I’m seeing a trend that the shorter episodes happen when Jeremy is out. I think it is because he clutters up the whole show with facts and reasoning.

The first segment asked the question “Are we in another tech bubble, and if so, what shape is it?” Of course we are in another tech bubble, as Jeremy so deftly demonstrates by comparing a number of start ups with over a billion dollars in valuation to real companies such as General Electric. They talk about a number of reasons for it, but I think they left an important one out: egos.

Look, growing up as a geek in the late 1970s early 1980s, we didn’t get much respect. Now with the various tech bubbles and widespread adoption of technology by the masses, geeks can at least be wealthy if not popular. But I think we still harbor, deep down, a resentment of the jocks and popular kids that results in problems with self-esteem. Take Marc Andreessen as an example. By most measures he’s successful, but take a look at him. He is not a pretty man, even though that male pattern baldness does suggest a big wee-wee. I think he still has something to prove which is why he dumps money into impossible things like uBeam which has something like a $500MM valuation. I think a lot of the big names in Silicon Valley have such a huge fear of missing out that they drive up valuations on companies without a business model and no hope of making a profit, much less a product.

But then Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2B so what do I know.

Well, I do know the shape of the tech bubble: it’s a pear.

In the next segment the guys almost spooge all over themselves talking about the Pixel C tablet. I’ve never been a tablet guy. I have a six-inch … smart phone and it works fine for all of my mobile stuff. If I need anything bigger, I use a Dell XPS laptop running Mint. I do own a Nexus 10 but only use it to read eBooks that come in PDF format.

But all three of them really like it, meaning that if I decide to get a new tablet I’ll seriously consider it. Bryan did mention a couple of apps I was unfamiliar with, so I’ll have to check them out.

The first is called Termux and it provides a terminal emulator (already got one) but it adds a Linux environment as well. Could be cool. The other is DroidEdit which is a text editor for Android with lots of features, similar to vim or gedit on steroids. Bryan used these during his ill-fated attempt to live in the Linux shell for 30 days.

Apparently the Pixel C is magnetic, with magnets so strong you can hang it on your fridge. Add a webcam and I won’t need one of these.

The third segment was on Nextcloud. I’ll give the Nextcloud guys some props for getting press. This is something like the third in-depth interview I’ve listened to in the past three weeks. If you’ve been living under a rock and don’t know that Nextcloud is a fork of OwnCloud, start here. They interviewed Frank Karlitschek and Jan-Christoph Borchardt about the split and their plans.

I was hoping for more details on what caused the fork (because I’m a nosy bastard) but Jono starting off with something like a 90 second leading question to Frank that pretty much handed him an explanation. I was screaming “Objection! Leading the witness!” but it didn’t help. I guess it really doesn’t matter.

I do think I’d really enjoy meeting Frank. They are dedicated to keeping Nextcloud 100% open source (like good ol’ OpenNMS). They also brought up a point that is very hard to make with large, complex open source projects. Everyone will ask “How do you compare with OwnCloud” when the better question is “How do you compare to Dropbox”? At OpenNMS we are always getting the “How are you different from Nagios” when the better question is “How do you compare to Tivoli or OpenView”?

The fourth segment was on the XPrize Global Learning Project. The main takeaway I got from it was that the very nature of the XPrize doesn’t lend itself to the Open Source Way. The prize amount is so high it doesn’t encourage sharing. Still, a couple of projects are trying it so I wish them all the luck.

The final “segment” is the outro where the guys usually just shoot the breeze. They mentioned Stuart, visiting the US, getting slammed with Brexit questions, and I do find that amusing having traveled to the UK numerous times and been peppered with questions about stupid US politics. It’s one of the reasons I hope Donald Trump doesn’t get elected – I’m not ready to go back to claiming to be Canadian when I travel.

They also talked about fast food restaurants. I’m surprised In-N-Out Burger didn’t get a mention. From the moment a new one opens it is usually slammed at all hours. They did mention Chick-Fil-A, which I used to love until I boycotted them over their political activism. There is a pretty cool article on five incredible fast food chains you shouldn’t eat at (including Chick-Fil-A) and one you should but probably can’t (In-N-Out).

Overall I thought it was a solid show, although it needed more ginger. Good to see the guys getting back into form.

So the Gang of Four decided to actually produce a regular episode of Bad Voltage for the first time in, like, a month, so I decided to resurrect this little column making fun of them.

I am actually supposed to be on vacation this week, but for me vacation means working around the farm. I was working outside when the heat index hit 108.5F so while I was recovering from heat stroke I decided to give this week’s show a listen.

Clocking in at a healthy 75 minutes, give or take, it was an okay show, although the last fifteen minutes kind of wandered (much like most of this review).

The first segment concerned the creation of NextCloud as a fork of OwnCloud. I’ve already presented my thoughts on it from Bryan’s Youtube interview with the founders of NextCloud, and not much new was covered here. But it was a chance for all four of them to discuss it. One of the touted benefits of the new project is the lack of a contributor agreement. I don’t find this a good thing. Note that while I whole heartedly agree that many contributor agreements are evil, that doesn’t make them all evil. Take the OpenNMS contributor agreement. It’s pretty simple, and it protects both the contributor and the project. The most important feature, to me, is that the contributor states that they have a right to contribute the code to the project. I think that’s important, although if it were lacking or the contributor lied, the results would be the same (the infringing code would be removed from the application). It at least makes people think just a bit before sending in code.

Bryan made an offhand mention about trademarks in the same discussion, and I wasn’t sure what he meant by it. Does it mean NextCloud won’t enforce trademarks, or that there is an easy process that allows people to freely use them? I think enforcing trademarks is extremely important for open source companies. Otherwise, someone could take your code, crap all over it, and then ship it out under the same name. At OpenNMS we had issues with this back in 2005 but luckily since then it has been pretty quiet.

While there was even more speculation, no one really knows why the NextCloud fork happened. Some say it was that Frank Karlitschek was friends with Niels Mache of Spreed.me and wanted a partnership, but OwnCloud was against it. I think we’ll never know. Another suggestion that was been made is that it had to deal with the community of OwnCloud vs. the investors. Jono made the statement that VCs don’t take an active role in the community, but I have to disagree. My interactions with 90% of VCs have been an episode of Silicon Valley, and while they may not take an active role, you can expect them to say things like “These features over here will be part of our ‘enterprise’ version and not open, and make sure to hobble the ‘community’ version to drive sales, but other than that, run your community the way you want.”

One new point that was brought up was the business perception of the company. I think everyone who self identifies as an open source fan who is using OwnCloud will most likely switch to NextCloud since that is where the developers went, but will businesses be cautious about investing in NextCloud? The argument can be made that “who knows what will set Frank off next?” and the threat of NextNextCloud might worry some. I am not expecting this to happen (once bitten, twice shy, I bet Frank has learned a lot about what he wants out of his project) but it is a concern.

It is similar to Libreoffice. I don’t know anyone in the open source world using OpenOffice, but it is still huge outside of that world (I did a ride along with a friend who is police and was pleasantly surprised to see him bring up OpenOffice on his patrol car’s laptop).

It kind of reminds me when Google killed Reader and then announced Keep – seemed a bit ironic at the time. If a company can radically change or even remove a service you have come to rely on, will you trust them in the future?

The segment ended with a discussion of the early days of Ubuntu. Bryan made the claim that Ubuntu was made as an easier to use version Debian which Jono vehemently denied. He claimed the goal was to create a free, powerful desktop operating system. All I remember from those days were those kids from the United Colors of Bennetton ads on the covers of the free CDs.

The next piece was Bryan reviewing the latest Dell XPS 13 laptop. My last two laptops have been XPS 13 models and I love them. They ship with Linux (which I want to encourage) and I find they provide a great Linux desktop experience.

I got my newest one last year, and the main issue I’ve had is with the trackpad. Later kernels seem to have addressed most of my problems. I also dumped the Ubuntu 14.04 that shipped with it in exchange for Linux Mint, but I’m still running mainline kernels (4.6 at the moment). I’m eager for Mint 18 to release to see if the (rumoured) 4.4 kernel will work well (they keep backporting device driver changes) but outside of that I’ve had few problems.

Battery life is great, and the HiDPI screen is a big improvement over my old XPS 13. The main weirdness, for my model, is the location of the camera. In order to make the InfinityEdge display, they moved it to the bottom left of the screen so that the top bezel could be as thin as possible. It means people end up looking at the flabby underside of my chin instead of my face at times, but I use it so little that it doesn’t bother me much.

The third segment was about funding open source projects. It’s an eternal question: how do you pay for developers to work on free software? The guys didn’t really address it, focusing for the most part on programs that would provide some compensation for, say, travel to a conference, versus paying someone enough to make their mortgage. Stuart finally brought up that point but no real answers were offered.

The last fifteen minutes was the gang just shooting the breeze. Bryan used the term “duck fart” which apparently is a cocktail (sounds nasty, so don’t expect it on the cocktail blog). There is also, apparently, a science fiction novel called Bad Voltage that is not supposed to be that great, and the suggestion was made that the four of them should write their own version, but in the form of an “exquisite corpse” (my term, not theirs) where each would right their section independently and see what happens when it gets combined.

All in all, not a horrible show but not great, either. It is nice to have them all back together.

I’m eager to see how Bryan manages the next one, since he is spending 30 days solely in the Linux shell. How will Google Hangouts (which is what they use to make the show) work?

Curious minds want to know.