Framasoft is 20 years old! Episode 2: De-google-ify Internet – Pouhiou, P.Y Gosset, C. Masutti

The history of Framasoft, part two

Walid: it’s the return of the episodes on Framasoft. Let’s start the second part of Framasoft’s story. Small disclaimer, if you listen to this episode, first you have to listen to the first part which was released previously, which we come back to with Alexis Kauffmann and Pierre-Yves Gosset, we go back to the first years of Framasoft. If you want to understand this episode, I advise you to listen to the first episode and at the same time, while you’re at it, I also advise you to listen to episode 8 of season 2 that we did with Pouhiou and Booteille on Peertube. There you go, you will also learn other things, which is a very nice episode. And so today, to talk about Framasoft, the second part and the whole De-Google-ify Internet initiative, I have three guests with me. The first one, he was there in the previous episode, is Pierre-Yves.

Pierre-Yves: Hi!

Walid: the second one, he was there… in the episode on Peertube, it’s Pouhiou.

Pouhiou: And happy to see you again, hello.

Walid: And the third, it’s the first time he’s passed, is Christophe (Editor’s note: Masutti). Christophe, welcome to the podcast.

Christophe: Thank you, welcome.

Presentation of the guests

Walid: I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself next, briefly, so that people can know a little bit about what your functions are, what you do at Framasoft. So there you go, if you want to start, Christophe, it’s your honor, since you’re the new kid on the block.

Christophe: It’s nice to be the new kid on the block in Framasoft, it makes me a little younger (laughs). What do I do in Framasoft? I try to apply myself wherever I can, because I don’t always have the technical skills to do other things. Everyone does what they can at Framasoft. I’m here, we’re going to come back to the story, obviously, but I’m applying myself quite a bit to the ex-Framabook, which is to say now, it’s called books in common. I apply myself as much as I do this little on associative life, especially everything that is administrative, for example the Framasoft board of directors. And then I’m part of what we call the bald team. So obviously, the listeners won’t have the images, but I think you realize what it can be like when you reach a certain age and you don’t want to look older than you are. That’s it, so we think about it and we burn a lot of grey matter too.

Walid: It suits me well as a definition of bald. Bald people are very welcome on the podcast (laughs). Pouhiou, do you want to say two words to introduce yourself?

Pouhiou: yes, I’m Pouhiou, it’s been my first name recently because I finally had it legalized, I’m so happy. I joined Framasoft through the Framabook project. I was an author and my novels were published by Framasoft. Then I was a communication volunteer, I was an employee from 2015, hired on communication tasks. And gradually, for almost ten years now, I have been working at Framasoft and today I am co-director of the association, trying to help the association have a direction. And in particular, I’m the Product Owner of the Peertube software, that’s why I was there last time.

Walid: Great.

Walid: Pierre-Yves?

Pierre-Yves: I am a long-standing member of Framasoft, since I joined the association in 2004-2005. I was a secretary at the beginning, as a volunteer. Then, I was general delegate for several years, then director, then co-director with Pouhiou. And today, I am coordinator of digital services, knowing that my position as co-director has been handed over to Thomas Citharel, who is being greeted this evening.

The state of Framasoft before the launch of De-google-ify Internet

Walid: Perfect. The first episode, we talk a little with Alexis and Pierre-Yves about the creation of Framasoft, what was there before the creation of the association, the first years of the association, the first fights, etc. And we stop, in fact, before De-Google-ify Internet, which we mention. very quickly and actually what I’d like you to explain to us is the situation before you start working on De-Google-ify Internet. Where are you in terms of the association, what year are we in and what is happening and what makes you decide to embark on such a project?

Pierre-Yves: At that time, it was 2013. As Alexis said in the previous interview, he had been an excellent president but not necessarily a good employee, I quote. The situation of the association at that time was a little complicated. It’s a little complicated because digital has evolved and free software has evolved too. The two main points in 2013 are first of all the arrival of the smartphone, the arrival of online services. And so, it means that we no longer need to download these software as we did from the FramaLibre directory at the time. We went to Framasoft, we downloaded software, we installed it on our computer.

Now, at that time, from 2013, well even a little before, we use more and more software in our web browser. And it changes the game a lot, a lot. So that’s the first fact that is, let’s say, technical or socio-technical that we have behind it. And the second thing that comes behind it are Edward Snowden’s revelations, where Edward Snowden demonstrates that there is collusion between the American intelligence services and the few companies, in particular the GAFAMs. And so the situation of the association at that time was that financially, we were in shit. I have no other words. It was very complicated for us. There is not much money left in the bank account. At the end of 2013, we had three employees, and Alexis will leave his job in a few weeks. There are two other employees still working at Framasoft, but we don’t have enough money to pay salaries.

Pierre-Yves Gosset

We find ourselves at an event that Christophe may talk about, which is called Vosges Opération Libre. As a result, we find ourselves in the town of Gérardmer, with Christophe and a dozen other members. And we discuss a little bit about the future of Framasoft and what we can do with it. At that point, you have a bit of two options: resign yourself or bounce back. And the proposal that was made at that time, which I put on the table, was to say that we had online services that existed a little before 2013, in particular the date.framasoft.org and pad.framasoft.org, which we offered to the public and which worked well. When I say that it worked well, it means that it had opened new doors, new uses for users of the Framasoft network. And so, we discussed together and we proposed to launch what would become De-google-ify Internet, which at that time was called the PLM, the Plan for the Liberation of the World, because while we’re going to do it, we might as well be…

Pouhiou : modest.

Pierre-Yves : Exactly.

Pouhiou: the modest plan for the liberation of the world.

Pierre-Yves: Very modest even. So the situation we are in is: do we stop? And as a result, we have to fire the other two employees, or do we try a bit of a poker move, and really… I’m going back a little bit to what we said in the first episode, but there’s really a question of opportunity and alignment of planets that makes this decision at that point.

Pouhiou: I allow myself to intervene, pyg, because you said we, we, we. There was a lot of you on this. Really, to depict, at Vosges Opération Libre, which is a great event organized almost exclusively by Christophe, he was the head of the line, we are hosted… how to put it… In a culture shock, that is to say, you imagine geeks, science, all that, computers, hosted by a lady in the mode of chakras, auras, etc. We are housed in the middle of a culture shock, in the evening, having drinks.

And then, pyg tells us, but in fact, it’s simple, it’s May, I think, and pyg tells us: “There, in October, we don’t pay salaries. So, one of two things, either we prepare the redundancies and then we tell people, give us money, Framasoft will die, help. Well, if you want to die, you might as well aim for the moon.” With this famous sentence that you also came out: “What I suggest you do is to climb the north face of the Himalayas in flip-flops. Even if it means dying, let’s come up with something impossible, you never know, it could work.”

Pouhiou Noénaute

I mean, you were the one who came up with a proposal, I’m not going to say that it was already the final proposal, obviously, it was matured afterwards, but already well put together with the association by saying: the association, we’re tired of the last few days, we’re tired financially, we’re tired humanly. In fact, do we resign ourselves or do we aim for the moon? That was really it, I think, the great composition you had at that time.

Walid: Just one thing, when Pouhiou talks about pyg, Pierre-Yves Gosset, it’s just so that people know.

Pierre-Yves : That’s right.

Pouhiou: Thank you, yes.

Walid: Christophe, do you want to add something?

Christophe: Yes, on that point, it was memorable. I think those who were there will remember it for a long time because at that time, I was president of Framasoft.

Pouhiou: I was vice-president!

Christophe: And Pouhiou was vice-president, it’s true. And we weren’t well. Not good because, as he said, we didn’t know if the association would survive, which meant that what we had committed to many people, by the way, might not hold up for long. This Vosges Opération Libre event is an event halfway between free software meetings and meetings more open to the general public for associations from the Grand-Est, let’s say, who were there, present, to present their activities. But not only the Grand-Est, for example, there was Wikimedia, people, I think, from OpenFoodFacts (Editor’s note: find OpenFoodFacts in episode 1 and episode 2), etc. In short, it was quite nice, it was very stimulating.

And when Pierre-Yves proposed that, in fact, what I said to myself: “that’s it, in fact, that’s what we have to do”. So, what needs to be done is why two things. It’s because, as Pierre-Yves explained, if you’re going to lose everything, you might as well go for it, I mean, that’s it. It also has its place in the atmosphere of the moment, talking about both web technology issues and the Snowden revelations. And then, at the same time, I said to myself, there you go, Vosges Opération Libre, it’s an example, but there will be many others that will follow, because in fact, we have to educate people about all this. And perhaps before all this, we hadn’t asked ourselves enough about presenting free software. Well, that’s fine. But in the end, taking it to the next level meant, there you go, proposing this ambition and at the same time, getting the public to question these practices more than to really use this or that free software because it’s better, because these are all these arguments that are already defended by other associations anyway.

Christophe Masutti

The audience envisaged by these new digital services

Walid: At the time you started to draw up this plan, was there the idea of providing this platform to associations instead? Where does it come after? How does it work? Because right now, it’s more platforms that are intended, as we said in the first episode, for associations of… not to startups and not necessarily to companies, but rather to associations. Is it something that was there from the start or is it something that matured and that you refined afterwards?

Pouhiou: I really think it’s matured. Me, which also amazed me from the start, I hope not to rewrite my memoirs, my memories, sorry, but I think that even from the moment Pyg pre-presents us with this plan for the liberation of the world in Gerardmer, which he then tries to test in the LSM So in July, so now we’re in May, in July, he’s doing a conference on it with the librists to see if the librists are hooked and if we’re right to get started on it, it’s because from the start there was this kind of triple plan where it’s not fair, you have to offer alternative services. Oh yes it was the case and it was finally the heart of Framasoft’s work, we were already making keys (Editor’s note: framakey), we were already making pads, docs, etc., but it was this triple plan that was 1. educate. We are at the time, a year after the Snowden revelations, where no one cares. A few months later, John Oliver did something about the Snowden revelations that showed that no one gave a shit, it went by like a letter in the mail. So no one sees the danger, Google is still my friend, go ahead and invite you on Facebook. So first of all, educate, and there have been hundreds and hundreds of conferences given on these issues and many other things. Second thing, to offer, so with it, we identify 30 services, we put 30 software available on the server and over 3 years we release that. And thirdly, decentralisation. At the time, we didn’t really know exactly what form it would take. We already knew that we were going to say, the idea is not to go to Google to come to our platform. And so, we show you how we do it so that you can do it yourself.

But there was already this triptych: educate, propose, decentralize.

Pouhiou Noénaute

Pierre-Yves : The three terms I used, which are still visible in this famous RMLL conference, were to raise awareness, demonstrate and spread. And indeed, there was this triptych from the start.

Google’s place in the ecosystem at the time

Walid : There’s something we talk about in episode 1 that is quite important, it’s the fact that in those years, Google wasn’t the bad guy to begin with. I remember at the time, Google, on everything that was XMPP ( Editor’s note: see Ploum’s excellent article to understand what happened), all that, well, we were like, “yes, it’s so good what they do and everything, they do a lot of open source stuff, it’s great”, it’s after that, a few years later, that we saw the danger finally coming. But at the very beginning, Google wasn’t the bad guy, you know. And in episode 1, what we’re talking about is that at that time, you were still hosted by Google, if I remember correctly.

Pierre-Yves : Absolutely, we were completely accommodated.

Pouhiou : not exacrement.

Pierre-Yves : In 2013, we were still hosted by Google.

Pouhiou, it was precisely from October 2013 to October 2014 that we did this famous campaign throughout the year“Bye bye Google ” and where we degoogled Framasoft before De-google-ify Internet. There is this year of transition.

Pierre-Yves : Absolutely, but everything was done, let’s say, over time. That is to say that we had to set up our own mail servers, we had to get out of the Google services we used, calendars, list software, we also used Google Groups at the time a lot to discuss, etc.

So it was indeed a period when people who were informed or who wanted to be informed became aware, once again thanks to Edward Snowden, whom we can really thank even today, more than ten years later, for the collusion of the risk presented by these companies. And so little by little, we said to ourselves, “ok, actually, we can’t tell people, you have to get out of Google, if we ourselves are completely dependent on Google”.

Pierre-Yves Gosset

Walid : The fact that you came out first, it showed you one, already the problems, and two, it gave you the leads of the solutions, what to start with, how does it work?

Christophe : The things that were clear in Pierre-Yves’ heads were not necessarily clear in our heads. It must be made clear though.

Pierre-Yves is often the case.

Christophe : because well, ok, we used Google, etc. Then we were like, yes, well. But just one example, email. Because it was still on our roadmap. The first roadmap, the first version of the public roadmap, we were still going to offer email to a lot of people. Youkaïdi, Youkaïda, let’s go for the mail. Email is just hell to manage. So, it’s things like that that we also learned. But when I say that it was clear in Pierre-Yves’ head and not necessarily in our heads, it’s because in fact, we didn’t realize certain things. We had services to present to people, but we thought that by demonstrating, it would be obvious, that people would be able to… So when I say people, “hashtag people”, it’s something that people, so we’re going to say people for now, could grab it, install their own server, etc. to be able, how to put it, to have their own service, with their friends, their associations or others. So that’s why all this has started a big maturation process that we’re going to talk about over time in this show.

PLM: a plan for the liberation of the world:)

Walid : I love PLM. It reminds me back in the day of my friends wearing the PLF t-shirts of the Penguin Liberation Front. It reminds me of that time.

Pierre-Yves : And it’s true that there was something bravado, really, to say to ourselves, come on, we’re going to go and free the world. We, a small French-speaking association, which had its audience among the really niche public, people who wanted to use free software and who were either looking for free software or wanted to have, because there was indeed already the publishing house Framabook at that time and the Framablog. We were really on something very niche. And then, we say to ourselves, OK, we’re going to liberate the world with something extremely ambitious. And now, Pouhiou must remember it because it was in these waters that he was hired at Framasoft. That is to say, for three years we released almost ten services per year. I think we have reached a maximum of 38 Framasoft services. And these first three years, 2014-2017, were really a year in which we did a rather monstrous job of putting services online. It had a fairly strong impact on the association because, I remind you, when we discuss the PLM, we are really still in 2013. We tested things a little bit from 2014 onwards. And when, in October 2014, we officially launched the De-google-ify Internet campaign, I think there were three or maybe even four employees, but we didn’t yet have someone who would be a cornerstone for us, who was Luc Didry, who was our adminsys, who I think he would be hired on his first contract, I have him in front of me. in 2016.

And so, we still have to imagine that we decide… with our volunteer skills at the time and a little bit our salaried skills, to say to ourselves, “OK, in fact, we’re going to do this job of releasing 10 services a month with very, very few salaried resources behind it”. Which was a bit crazy and what still burned us out quite a bit. In fact, over those three years, we wore out.

Reactions to the announcement of De-google-ify Internet

Walid : Before we come to that, because I have a lot of questions about it, there’s one thing that interests me, it’s to know when you announce what you want to do, first, one, what is the reaction of the people around Framasoft? And two, what is the reaction of Free Software in general? I’m thinking of people like the FSF, or people who are influential in Free Software. Was there any support? Were people there, like, “yes, that’s cool, but we want to see.” What do you mean…

Pierre-Yves : Well, it depends on the person. That is to say, if you talk about the librists it was rather well seen. I remember, in particular, the LinuxFR site immediately agreed to put up banners for free. Because I remind you that we did all this solely on the basis of donations, with zero subsidies. That’s what we explained in episode 1. So, it was still… More than bravado, to say “let’s go, let’s go”, and we’re going to ask people for money and support. Obviously, the free software community took a little longer, somehow, to follow, because for me, the free software community…

Pouhiou : You mean the non-freehold community took a long time to keep up?

Pierre-Yves :

No, no, for me, the free software community took a little time to get hooked. They thought it was very good that it was free software, but the main argument we had, for us, was more about confidentiality and the dangers of toxicity that GAFAM represented. Now, this discourse touched some of the free software companies, but we really need to reposition ourselves. Today, there is no more discussion. Of course, everyone agrees on that, it was good to do it and in free software, but there was something where we were looked down a little bit, because the free software community, I could say part of the free software community, considered that the smartphone was shit, that software as a service (SaaS), it was crap, and that what mattered was to switch to GNU/Hurd and install GNU/Linux on your computer.

Pierre-Yves Gosset

And so, we were, I’m not going to say a rearguard action, because that would be really lacking in humility, because I was one of those people for a long time, but to say, no, what is needed is Linux on the workstation. And then we’ll see. Now, Framasoft’s position, once again, in episode 1, we were talking about the pedagogical side, because the site came from people who came from the national education system and who were teachers for the most part, and gave us a slightly particular characteristic, which was to work on the pedagogical question.

And on De-google-ify Internet, in the French-speaking free software community, there were groups of hosting providers, there were very technical things that existed, but people who said “No, no, but in fact, today, we have to take care of both making the web and fighting against the toxicity of GAFAM”, which we had analyzed by saying that there is a triple technical domination, economic and political. I don’t think there were necessarily many of us who made this discourse at the time. And so the free software community, they saw us get in there, who knew us well, they saw us get in there saying “yes, that’s good” but I think we mostly got people on board who said “No, but I don’t want Google to know everything about me”. But wait,

Walid : but wait, when you talk to the free software community, do you talk to the French-speaking free software community? Chiefly?

Pierre-Yves : Yes, we have addressed very little, and even today, to non-French speakers, Pouhiou will be able to talk about it, apart from the Peertube project. Today, Framasoft is a French association, and it’s complicated for us, especially for reasons of resources, to go and address the whole world.

Pouhiou : What’s also interesting is that as far as the non-free software community is concerned, we immediately got out of our bubble, since we were doing, we were, well, it’s not that we were doing, we’re still part of this community, that’s not the question, it’s… It’s more that we were in that bubble, a little, not locked in, but you see, well, there you go, restricted, and by carrying this discourse of toxicity, by carrying this discourse of “we need alternatives” and we need alternatives where, basically, Etherpad already existed, except that if you say to someone “well listen, it’s simple, you take your domain name, you take your server, you do sudo apt-get install” and then I lost 99.99% of people, including me, by the way, I don’t know how to do it. And so we opened up to other people and there, it was very interesting because there were two things, two possible reactions. People who understood our tone when they said “we’re going to liberate the world”. Inevitably, it’s a mess. The first article of De-Oglon is “our (modest) plan for the liberation of the world“. Because we know very well that an association against Google is not enough. And it was assumed from the start. But you have a lot of people who take it literally or who read only the title of blog articles, you know, and who go, “but they’re ridiculous, what do they think they’re doing, it’s a drop in the bucket, lali lala.”

So a lot of people who didn’t understand at the beginning, and as a result, we realized, especially throughout this first year, October 2014, October 2015, that there were a whole bunch of preconceptions that we were going to have to break down to get our message across. And I remember in particular, I think it was before the October 2015 campaign or at the time of this campaign, there was Gee who is a comic book author and member of Framasoft, who has already been there for many years, who is releasing a comic book with all the clichés around the De-google-ify Internet campaign and who breaks each of these clichés by giving the counter-arguments. So already, during the first few years, it was necessary to break the clichés of “but an association against Google, what does it want to do?”

Pouhiou Noénaute

Well indeed, we’re bound to be a drop in the bucket, but at the same time, we can count, etc. Basically, by getting out of our bubble and meeting a different audience, than the one we used to address, we also had to learn from people’s preconceptions and to work with them and all that. It was really a real discovery.

Pierre-Yves : And I’ll add something that, for me, is important. It’s also the moment when you, Pouhiou, bring in, because as much as I had the idea, as much as the shaping and narrative side, it’s in part, I want to say in large part, the talent as an author that you have brought. I like it because it seems like we’re congratulating ourselves… We’re going to get out of this. But the fact is, once again, we were talking a lot, well I talk a lot about planet alignment. The alignment of the planet is in fact, we had no choice, we were forced to go all out. I bring this idea of saying, let’s go for it because so far, no one is doing it and it will take us out a little bit on the side of just directory, publishing house, etc., on which we knew that we were not going to keep an association alive for years to come. And Pouhiou is there at that moment and includes for me a story, an imaginary world, etc., which, once projected onto the general public, because clearly with De-google-ify the Internet we have reached the general public, has allowed this idea to take shape and for there to be support in the end, and for there to be adherence behind it and for it to serve as a locomotive. It also happened thanks to other members. You were talking about Gee, the famous Asterix map that we released at the time we were saying, here are the 30 services that Framasoft wants to de-google. So, it was Google, but it was Facebook, it was other tools, etc. behind, Dropbox and others. And we said to ourselves, “OK, that, the little Gallic side that resists the GAFAM Romans”. Well, it’s something that has also allowed the communication dimension, for me, has allowed success. That is to say that the idea was there, that’s good, but there are plenty of people who have good ideas all the time. People who manage to get people to buy into this idea are more complex.

Funding for De-google-ify Internet

Walid : We stop at episode 1, we say, “actually, basically, we have 3-4 months left to pay the salaries, overall, so we’re going to do something”. And then, presto, if we’re going to die, we might as well die in style, let’s get out De-google-ify the Internet. And then, afterwards, we move on, in fact, we release one service, well, we release several services per month, etc. But what you didn’t explain, or very quickly, is how you financed it, actually? Because that’s what’s interesting too. There is the idea, but at some point, you have to find the money to do it.

Pierre-Yves : Well, we financed it by donation, because it was the only thing we knew how to do. That is to say that me, in the years when I was general delegate of the association, or even when I was a volunteer secretary of the association, the fact of going to get subsidies, I realized that it was not worth the candle. First of all, because I perceived a movement that is still going on today, which is generally a reduction in small subsidies to associations. And the second movement I noticed was that when you ask for 5,000 euros in subsidies, in fact, you have 1,000 to 2,500 euros of work to manage this subsidy. And so, in the end, you ask for 5,000, but you only have 2,500 that is put into your project. And so, I said to myself, it’s not possible. We tried with Alexis, we talked about it in episode 1, a campaign called 100 10 1 which aimed to find 1,000 donors to give 10 euros per month for a year. And we said to ourselves, with that, we can make 10,000 euros per month, which allows us to pay 2 or even 3 salaries. And yay, it’s going to work. Obviously, this campaign worked very modestly because it’s complicated to make people pay for a project that we were already running, which was the directory and the publishing house. And so, the first De-Google Internet campaign, once again, I insist on the communication side, when in October 2014, we launched this campaign, so I think there are still 2,000 euros in the bank account. I have absolutely no idea if it will work or not. And so, we worked all summer and the whole association got involved. Really, so we were talking about Gee for the images, Pouhiou, who was a volunteer on the communication-narrative aspects, Luc, on the technical aspects, and really everyone stuck to it. And when we launch the campaign, we say to ourselves, will it work or not? And the first campaign, I don’t have the figure in my head, but I’m going to go and get it, I think we make more than 100,000 euros in the first year. On a project that is just beginning, we sell an idea, let’s be very clear, we have very few projects…

Pouhiou : I’m not sure we’re doing as much, as much. We did a good job for the time. I’m not sure we’re doing as much, but there’s also something else, which is that in fact, this first campaign told us, “ok, we’re saving salaries, we’re saving services”.

Pierre-Yves : Yes, absolutely.

Pouhiou : So there you have it, it made it possible to insure the two people who were employed at that time, and then the waiters could run, the machines, etc. That’s good, it was saved, we gain an extra year. And the idea was to say, we gain an extra year, that’s how we go up. Afterwards, I was hired in 2015, I was hired on a subsidized contract. And already, within the association, there was a big debate because there were a lot of people, and I agree with it, saying that subsidized contracts perpetuate precariousness, it’s also exploitation, it’s also a thing. Except that the association had no other means than to pay via a subsidized contract. And then, I told the association, “it’s simple, I need to have a crust and all that, so either I’m going to be exploited by assholes, or I’ll continue to work for Framasoft and take advantage of a subsidized contract that suits everyone”. But it’s something we did reluctantly because the situation and as soon as we were able to get out of it, we did it.

How does Framasoft receive donations?

Walid : There, you talked about donations. How do you make donations? You did a crowdfunding campaign, something like KissKissBankBank, etc. ? How did you do it? Because the interest, for example, of this kind of thing is that when you do this on this kind of platform, it’s also because you have spin-offs in terms of the press, in terms of images, etc. How did you manage to get these gifts?

Pierre-Yves : The advantage is that we have people who code in Framasoft. And so, very quickly, in fact, we made our own donation platform. Which was not easy. The advantage of me is that at the same time, I had an experience around this question of how to work with banks through a project that I didn’t talk about in episode 1, but which was called En Vente Libre, which was another association created by members of Framasoft, members of Ubuntu-fr and members of other structures, or even die-hard volunteers, I want to say. And over the counter… The association still exists and the site still exists. It’s to sell objects around the free software community. So, it can be t-shirts, Ubuntu USB sticks, mugs, etc. And it also made it possible to make donations to associations. And so, since I was the one who had set up the first version of the En Vente Libre site, I already had a little bit of knowledge on how to create this. And in fact, with others, we were able to create our own donation page, which was particularly ugly at the time, but which had the advantage of working and not passing on 8% or 15% to an intermediary. And so, we saw the money really arrive in the first year with, in any case, I haven’t found the figure yet, but several tens of thousands of euros in a few months. And so, in January 2015, while in October 2014 we had 2,000 euros in the account, in January 2015, we have a cash flow that allows us to see for the whole year to come and including hiring.

Walid : I have the impression on the podcast there is something that comes up all the time, all the people they say that, it’s the people they finance you so that you develop things, the people they don’t finance you so that you maintain things and in fact that’s it!

Pouhiou : it’s not even that yet, so that’s also an experience

Walid : You were saying at the beginning earlier that in fact the initial services no one was going to donate to you, your campaign didn’t work, to do what you were doing now, you had to develop a new thing so that people would give to it.

How to get people to have a role and contribute

Pouhiou : Actually, I had already crowdfunded that before for my books published by Framasoft. In other jobs, I had done it too.

So, I’m starting to have some experience with that. And the idea is to say, basically, we have to make a narrative. So, so, already, one, when I got to communication on Framasoft, I did, we’re going to stop saying people, hashtag people don’t exist. So, who are we specifically addressing? Let’s talk to them. And on the other hand, it’s to say, in fact, we have to bring them into our adventure. And even if you don’t code, even if you’re not going to convert people to use Framadate instead of Doodle, in fact, you can have a role. And the fact of giving 10 balls, 20 balls, it’s not nothing. It’s contributing, it’s participating in that. And even today, today, basically, you have one person who gives to Framasoft for every 250 who benefit from it.

And so, if it’s not a solidarity movement, but indeed, for that, you have to put a narrative and say, in fact, this is what your role is going to be in our collective adventure. And so, include the people in there. And so, for me, it was really this work of communication. And in fact, people don’t even pay you to develop or to do something new. People, they pay you because they trust you. And us, how do they trust me? It is what we present, that is what we have done. And they trust you to achieve a desirable future. This is what we are going to do. And so, that was really it, is to say, but actually, this is where we are here, this is where we want to go. We present this to you, if you like, give and participate in the adventure to help us move towards there.

Pouhiou Noénaute

We’re not saying we’ll succeed, we’re saying that we want to move towards there, that we have a bit of solid balls, we already have a little experience and all that, and then we’ll keep you posted. And there are also times when we messed up, when we came up with things that weren’t right, etc. And where projects have been delayed, services have been taken out in place of others. And each time, we were just honest. But really, the idea is to say that what people give you for, in general, is “I want to believe that a world where your proposal exists is possible”. And so, I want it to happen. And so, I contribute.

Christophe : When I heard Pouhiou speak, I said to myself that the narrative was still something fundamental because Framasoft, at a certain point, found itself in the position of an outsider in the sense that the Snowden revelations we were talking about earlier, they also revealed another thing apart from the issue of data confidentiality. It’s that we could hardly count on institutions, whether public or institutions more generally of digital capitalism, to ensure confidentiality and what we need hashtag people. And that at that moment, there was a kind of atmosphere, I don’t know if you remember, that’s how I felt, of a zombie digital space where there was ultimately no choice. So, what’s the matter? There’s Google for emails, and then what do we do? And then how do we do it? So, for sure there are things that already existed in the United States, for example, I don’t know, things like RiseUp, etc. But I see it from a European point of view, for example, in Germany, there was no space, or very little, except for the Chaos Computer Club, which still released stuff from time to time, but which was reserved for a very special niche, and very separate, in a way. There wasn’t that space that we had opened. That is to say, we did not forbid ourselves from collaborating with institutions, whatever they were. We didn’t rule out including just anyone, because after all, we were opening up services to everyone. And at the same time, we offered a space that was promising. That is to say, people were given what they got their money for, so to speak. You give and then we can create things that promise a better digital future. There you go. So, it wasn’t just a promise because still, we produced stuff. We have produced services. And still, in the donation, there is one thing that counts, whether we like it or not, and that is that when you promise, in addition, when you say, we will do one service per month for X months, you are not only promising, that is to say that in fact, the more you fulfill your promises, the more people believe in you. We could have said, there you go, we promise 30 services over the year and then in the end, we only do 2. No, that really wouldn’t have worked. Here, for once, we were pretty good, that is to say that we held the 90… of our promises, apart from the email.

Walid : It’s the startups that do that, to promise things that you don’t keep or that you do much later.

Christophe : That’s right, absolutely.

Pierre-Yves : I think it was Marcel Mauss, who is an anthropologist, who was talking about gift and counter-gift, and for me, we are completely in it, that is to say that we ask people to make us a donation, the counter-gift is obviously to provide services, so when we come back to ask for a counter-counter-gift, it works, and so on.

Christophe : That is to say, when we offered services, we weren’t offering just anything either. Free services, they also offered, in addition to the service, in addition to the usefulness of the software that was offered online as a service, they also offered commons. Framasphère, for example, is common.

Walid : Framasphère, can you remind you for people who don’t know what Framasphère is?

Pouhiou : what it was.

Christophe : Framasphère was a service based on Diaspora, it’s a social network. And on Framasphere there were also people who shared a lot, it worked after it worked and then I think that Diaspora anyway wasn’t a long-term example either, so we changed. But in any case, we offered this kind of service when we opened Mastodon, Framasoft’s Mastodon instance. But here I’m taking a leap in time, I’m maybe going a little too fast, but when we offered this instance, what I saw was also that, that is to say that we were really offering something common.

What does it mean to offer an online service for Framasoft?

Walid : there’s one thing that’s interesting, it’s that we’re talking about offering services, but can you explain – little spoiler, we’ll do a more technical episode on how you choose and what are the criteria for choosing a tool to make an online service – but is that at first, Can you explain what it means technically to say I’m going to offer such and such an online service in fact?

Pouhiou : I’m going to answer about the para-technique and I’ll leave you the place on the technique, but… Precisely the idea was also not to provide only service, that is to say not to act as if just I don’t know I’m an internet server rental company that allows you to self-install via scripts such and such software and then it behind. That is to say, behind us on our services there was also support, there was documentation, there was support, that is to say that very quickly you have a contact form and you have an email and you can talk to a person to say “Wait, my thing, it doesn’t work, I didn’t understand or I lost my pad”. There are a whole bunch of support tools and explanations around it that really allow… So, opening a service is not just about opening a service. And then sometimes, to open this service, you will have to add things to it. It can be a feature of the code that we’re developing, but it can also be aesthetics, translation, things like that. So, every time, that’s it. But for that, we had to choose the services. And in fact, even if there were… Pyg, you had prepared a list of the 30 services at the beginning of the campaign presentation. In fact, it was done two or three months each time before opening a department. There was a lot of work you were doing.

Pierre-Yves : Absolutely, and I think that what played a lot was to think, finally once again, to know how to seize opportunities. That is to say that there are services that were more cumbersome than others to install, there were services that appeared little by little, there were services that we knew were going to be complicated, I’m thinking in particular of video, we’ll come back to Peertube, but which weren’t ready, which weren’t mature in 2014.

Walid : We talked about it for 1 hour and 20 minutes, so we just have to tell people to go and listen to the right episode!

Pierre-Yves : Exactly, and so when we don’t say to ourselves in 2014 we’re going to release video software, we know that there is a need for it but we don’t know yet which one, we don’t know on what basis, etc. And so again, I think that…

Finally, I want to pay tribute to the whole team, both volunteers and employees of Framasoft, who finally managed to follow up like this. On average, we released one service per month. And so, we had to automate a lot of things. We had to get organized, distribute tasks, etc. And so, it required a strong structuring of the association. This could only be done because we were financially supported, which allowed us to hire and cope with growth in use, etc. And that allowed us to say… as Pouhiou said just now, we don’t just offer you services, we offer you values, at the same time as services. That is to say, we are committed as an association not to commercialize your data, we do not use advertising or any other data for any other purpose. And we are committed, in a way, to staying on a small scale.

Pierre-Yves Gosset

So, it’s been a big debate in Framasoft for the last ten years, the question of the ideal size of a structure like Framasoft. Because I’m convinced that if in 2017, we had gone to see the BPI, I would have gone to ask for 5 million euros, I think they would have given it to us. On the other hand, we had to transform ourselves into a company. So, these are questions, I think Pouhiou and Christophe remember them, but where we regularly asked ourselves the question of the growth of the association or the development of the association. The nuance for me is quite clear: growth is quantitative, development is qualitative.

And we preferred to do qualitative. So the qualitative is subjective, it’s feeling. But we preferred to say to ourselves, in fact, we want to be of service to people who want to get out of the toxicity of GAFAM. We are not necessarily trying to meet the needs of 70 million French people. That’s not what interested us.

Pierre-Yves Gosset

Christophe :

That’s a point that I’ve often had trouble with because it was difficult when I intervened in public, for example, to explain this. For example, we would come in and then say, “Okay, so we offered this service. Besides, if it screws up, don’t come and complain.” Or, “we are not sure to keep all the data because the server can crash. And then, there you go, we’re just volunteers.” So I was like, ok, you come with services. So suddenly, it means that there is indeed something else, whether we like it or not, there is something else that we are giving to people. And that’s the values. That’s what made me, in any case, start to spiral at that time on the popular education plan. That is to say, I said to myself, “This is what we have to do. We have to send the message that popular or digital education is what Framasoft is all about.” That’s what Pierre-Yves said, after all, with his nuance between development and growth. If you want to develop ideas, if you want to develop Framasoft, Framasoft develops with people. It does not develop on its own in a corner by offering services and then charging for them. That doesn’t prevent us from possibly doing a few performances here and there, but that’s not the heart of the matter.

Christophe Masutti

Pouhiou : You also pointed out something, Christophe, that is quite fundamental, which is that in addition to these services, which were a very large part of the work, there was also everything else that we are talking about in this plan for the liberation of the world, in this plan for the De-google-ify Internet, which is awareness and which is spin-off, which is extremely important. And so, when you start saying ok, what does it mean to do popular education? How do we do it? What can we bring as a stone? And in particular the fact of saying ok, we can bring different tools of knowledge to better understand the domination of the GAFAMs, the giants of the web, with both articles that Christophe wrote on the Leviathans, which later became your book Private Affairs at CEF Editions, on the whole system of surveillance capitalism, and so articles that will be very, very specialized, academic, advanced, and then much more popularizing things, and sometimes even comics, etc. And in between, a whole bunch of speeches that ultimately reflect the diversity of the association’s members. So, a whole bunch of tones where we talk about the same thing, but each with their own sensitivities, to also touch different sensibilities in the audiences we meet. That’s it, and so, that’s what’s interesting in this period, is that we’re not…

You were talking about start-ups earlier, start-ups, they focus on their products. This is my product. And for us, the product wasn’t just the services. It was so many conferences. And look, there, we have… This conference was given 50 times by 10 different members. And so here, we have a version that is really well done. We put it online. It’s going to be a whole bunch of awareness-raising tools. And then, a start of work also on spin-offs, saying it’s great to come to Framasoft. We speak it with the size of the association. It’s great to come to Framasoft, but you shouldn’t demonopolize Google to monopolize Framasoft. Otherwise, we continue the problem.

Pouhiou Noénaute

Decentralization and the KITTENS

Pierre-Yves : And that was the beginning of the impetus for the CHATONS project, the CATOS collective, here it’s the same, indeed it was mentioned in a veiled word. So in 2013, at the RMLL, honestly I didn’t know at all that it was going to exist. In 2014, it started to take shape. In 2015, there were already collectives of free hosting providers, but they were doing technical hosting. That is to say, it was, you were going to contact AlternC, you were going to contact Ouvaton, etc. And you said, “I need a space on which I will go and set up my site”. But there was no host of free and ethical services. And so, it was Christophe who had come up with the acronym LEDS, free, ethical, decentralized, solidarity-based services. And so, we have in CHATONS, when I, in 2015, threw a bottle into the sea to fifteen or so hosts to say, “there you go, we would like to launch a new collective and give impetus to a new collective, which will be CHATONS, the collective of alternative, transparent, open, neutral and supportive hosts”. There is a complete crossover between the question of popular education that Christophe was talking about, the values of solidarity that are written in black and white in the charter and in the CHATONS manifesto, and the question of free software. And that space was totally unoccupied, well, or at least, it was occupied by Framasoft, and we said to ourselves, “but in fact, there’s no point in us being alone on this.” And so, CHATONS responded to the idea of saying, in fact, it’s all well and good, we made tutorials to explain how to install our software. We gave paid work time so that our applications could be ported to YunoHost, which is a Linux distribution that allows you to quickly deploy services that you can use online. But all this doesn’t really make sense if there isn’t a large number of people who use these services. Here, I’m echoing episode 1, where really, for me, the question of massification, and I don’t want to say industrialization, because inevitably, we imagine the big factory smoking, but this idea, for me, of saying that we’re capable of having processes, this time, I want to say almost industrial, to say, “If you want to join CHATONS, you have to validate a charter, you have to be able to meet such and such criteria, and your services have to be free. And what does it mean, free? Yes, but as a result, do we have the right to services that are a little less free at CHATONS, etc.” And this whole process that is discussed collectively, for me, and here too, one of the great prides, at least that I have, but I think that the whole association can have, not to have appropriated the work that Framasoft had done, but to have redistributed it behind it by saying “Wait, if you have any questions, we’ll explain to you”. We made a MOOC KITTENS that allows anyone who wants to ask themselves the question of why GAFAM are toxic, to be able to appropriate them in a way other than a top-down conference. If you want to set up your KITTENS, you can get in touch with a local host, and there are nearly a hundred of them in France. If you want, on the other hand, to use free services, and reuse Framadate rather than Doodle or other, that’s a possibility too. And all this, to give a real coherence to the whole project.

Walid : Indeed, it’s interesting to see the discussions that can take place when it starts to work to say what we really want to do. It is indeed a great honesty to say that we do not want to host everything ourselves and we want it to spread, but it goes with what you said at the beginning where from the beginning, there was the notion of decentralization.

Pierre-Yves : It’s that our goal is not to make money, even if we run campaigns and we need money.

Pouhiou : hello, give to Framasoft.

Pierre-Yves : But our goal is not to make money.

Our goal is to ensure that there is a society that is fairer, freer, and in which computing is not alienating, but rather emancipatory as much as possible. So, a vast debate, can we really do emancipatory digital technology? But in any case, that we can get out of the systems of alienation that are proposed to us by the GAFAMs. And so, if that’s our object… necessarily, you start to think in archipelagos, that is to say to work with other people, other structures, I am thinking of La Quadrature du Net, Wikimedia and many others, APRIL obviously, to tell you, in fact, it makes no sense for us to go there and just be the single player or the biggest or the strongest.

Pierre-Yves Gosset

And as Christophe said, we’ve been reproached a lot, a lot over the last ten years, saying, why don’t you shift into second or third gear? Because you have the capacity to do so, you potentially have all the necessary base to go from 10 to 50 employees. And yes, we have that capacity, but we refused to do it because our objective is not to do massification for the sake of massification, it is to mass to show that something else is possible.

How do you choose which service to release over another?

Walid : So there, the services come out as they go along. You have made an initial list of the 30 services. You began by doing, as I understand it, by what was possible. So in fact, basically, what we have to explain is that a service, we want to do that, so we’re going to select a software, we’re going to see how to automate, are we able to offer it to as many people as possible, what does that mean, do we have to make modifications, etc. That’s the thing, in fact, basically, overall.

Pierre-Yves : We really went there, we released these 30 services in an order that wasn’t necessarily very well thought out, or rather it was thought out in relation to our needs. That is to say, this time, we had to deal with constraints, in fact, as in any project. You have to think about your constraints. And our constraints were that in 2014, for example, we didn’t have an employee sys admin. No big skills in salaried sys admin, we have a little bit of it. But suddenly, you’ll have to hire a sys admin. Then when you hire a sys admin and someone, for example, on communication, like Pouhiou, after a while, you say to yourself very quickly, you’re going to have to hire someone to manage a little bit of the secretarial work, payroll, etc. And so, we’re really hitting on all fronts and trying to say, “ok, we’re going to try to release one service per month, we have to structure the association, there’s the CHATONS collective which is growing, etc., all this in parallel”. And when we choose to release the services, quite honestly, we mostly discuss it among ourselves to say, “This one, he seems interesting to us because, hey, Luc, he tells me that he can do it in 10 days and that he is able to do it and that it will require zero more servers because he will build a VM (Editor’s note: virtual machine) on a server corner that is less used than the others”. And so… Our choices are constrained by the pace we have imposed on ourselves, but also and above all by the constraints of human and material resources, days off, etc. So, I’d like to sell the idea that we had a plan that was extremely flawed from the start, but in reality, we question ourselves almost every 3-4 months to say to ourselves, hey, do we release this service rather than another?

Christophe : I have to say something, when you look at the timeline (Editor’s note: timeline) that I’m looking at there a little bit, there are pause services. So, I call it break services, which means that, for example, we release stuff like Framabee. So Framabee, it was a Google-style search service, but how can I put it, it was a kind of interface that it would look for on the others…

Pierre-Yves : a meta-engine.

Christophe : a meta-engine, thank you. Whose other name was Uncle Roger. That’s something that we… After that, we launch Framagames, Framabookin. In fact, all these are small services that, so, when I say the word, don’t get me wrong. It’s easier to release this kind of service than the big one we release right after, Framadrive, which is still an xCloud. In fact, you can also read the timeline like this. That is to say, you say, there you go, “ah, fuck, they came up with their thing”. Mypad, for example, which was the big plus that gave Framapad the possibility of having a place where we have these pad folders so as not to lose them. After that, you have services that are a little easier to get out. Then after that, the big one, you know. You can read it a little bit like this, this timeline, you know.

Pierre-Yves : Yes, that’s right. We got organized. Every year, we said to each other the two or three big departments, these were the ones. We often met with Pouhiou to say, “OK, what are we able to do or not do this year?” And we saw according to that.

Manage high-volume services

Walid : There’s one thing that’s important, it’s when you start to set up, because I’ve read a lot of stuff about it, if I take for example Framalistes, basically, it’s Sympa behind, and in fact, basically, you have almost the biggest instance of Sympa that exists. And I mean, even Nextcloud too, it makes big instances, in fact, right away, it makes big services, and that bring real problems of adminsys.

Pierre-Yves : yes, so, once again, it was an opportunity for me to thank Luc, and to congratulate Luc who is our sys admin. Thank you Luc. For example, Sympa, in fact, he had already worked on Sympa. It turns out that Luc knows Perl well, which is not the case for all sys admins, that Sympa is developed in Perl. And so, when we had to install Framalist, I would never have thought that we would reach framalist.org to 60,000 lists a few years later, to the point that we have reached physical limits of hard disk speed, basically of input-output, that disks can no longer handle because there were so many files to read in Sympa. And so, we are dealing with services that are indeed reaching a size of world renown or capacity. This is the case of Framalistes, this is the case of Mattermost, where we have one of the largest Mattermost bodies in the world. This is the case today, finally, we are deploying NextCloud, we have more than 1,400 NextClouds deployed. Obviously, compared to OVH or Hetzner, it’s not much. But for a small French association, it’s a lot. And so, Framaforms, the alternative to Google Forms, which is also something that I had developed in the equivalent of 15 days, today is one of the main alternatives, at least in France, to Google Forms. And we have, I don’t remember, something like 20,000 forms per month that are created. Inevitably, we reach very important figures because our main criterion was not to put a limit on who we welcome. It means that we don’t look at who we welcome. And so, Pouhiou remembers, we end up with JC Decaux, which is not the small CAC 40 company, which starts using Framaform.

Pouhiou : The best.

Pierre-Yves : That’s it.

Pouhiou : Do you remember when it was the Microsoft Friends Association?

Pierre-Yves : Yes,

Pouhiou : Absolutely. In their slide, they used FramaLinks, so Framasoft URL reconciliations. So, with the Framasoft account, I openly screwed up Microsoft on Twitter at the time, saying Microsoft, can’t you offer them a URL shortener? They use our tool, the darling! And people were angry with us. Oh, Framasoft, we don’t think seriously anymore! No, at some point, you have to stop. We don’t monitor, but when slides make us go up, we laugh.

Pierre-Yves : For me, it’s really an important characteristic. In fact, the Internet allows this kind of magic. That is to say, an ability, at a given moment, to say to oneself “Ok, if we have a service that works well and we are able to… technically to make it work well”, thanks to free software, you can tweak (editor’s note: adjust), you can hack the software. This is what we did with Framalistes. Once again, Luc was for several years one of the main global contributors to Sympa, so the software behind Framalistes, because we simply needed to be able to make it bigger. So we had to fix bugs, and it’s the same thing for Etherpad. The number of contributions to Etherpad that Framasoft has made was made because we had one of the largest Etherpad instances in the world, much bigger than Etherpad.org, and it was the same with Nextcloud, where today, Thomas Citharel, who is co-director of Framasoft, is the main, I believe, volunteer contributor to Nextcloud worldwide.

Walid : That’s what’s interesting, is that people who aren’t necessarily used to it understand that when you do hosting like that, with large volumes, you end up with problems that make you have to contribute and therefore you have to know the software perfectly.

Pierre-Yves : Absolutely.

Walid : Otherwise, right, you can’t rely on the community because the community doesn’t have the same needs as you. You have needs that people don’t have, in fact.

Pouhiou :

As a result, also, something that was difficult to make uninitiated audiences, let’s say, understand digital technology in general, who were rather used to surveillance capitalism, by the web giants, to consume software and services, was to say: then, people said, “Yes, your software, He has a bug here.” So, cool, thank you, this is not our software. We’ll pass on the information to the people who develop it and maybe we’ll contribute to this bug. And that, but in fact, we, in free software, are used to that. It’s something that is totally foreign to a lot of people.

Pouhiou Noénaute

In fact, the software we put on our server, we didn’t do it. We don’t master it from line 1 to line 1,000 of the code, we don’t know it by heart, we didn’t do it. On the other hand, when there is a problem, when there is a need, when there is a thing, we sometimes participate in it. And as much as in the free software community, it’s part of the culture, but it’s something that we had to bring to a whole bunch of other people who didn’t know about this possibility of participating in the software. I also allow myself, a little parenthesis, we often talk to you here, you hear it in the podcast, Framalistes, Framadrive, Frama this, Frama that. If you want to benefit from these services, if they are still online, you add .org to the end of each end of these names and you go to the site or to degooglisons-internet.org and that’s it.

Anecdotes about Framasoft and national education

And another thing that was important to me is that… The fact that Framasoft creates massive online services where people come to them en masse, even if frankly it flayed a speck of Google’s golden castle, let’s agree, it didn’t hurt them at all, it also had other very important consequences. Typically, we remember when the Ministry of Defense signed an open bar contract with Microsoft. When Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, Minister of National Education at the time, accepted 13 million Microsoft products in our schools and brought 13 million euros of Microsoft products into our schools and all that, at the time, there was something like: “Well yes, but what do you want? We’d like to take free software, but you can’t line up, you don’t know how to scale up, you don’t know whatever.” And all of a sudden, there are little pecores, with their association under the 1901 law, which has as many members as a stupid bridge club, sorry for the bridge clubs, but there you go. There are little pecores who arrive and who, with the paperclip budget of the national education, roughly speaking, with, pyg had calculated 89 meters of highway, I had calculated the budget of the Dégooglisons, I had calculated, it was 9 seconds of the last James Bond, No Time to Die, that’s it, and well, with that, we manage to serve millions of people. Hundreds of thousands at first, and then millions. And so, as a result, the ministries can no longer hide. In one fell swoop, in fact, it is technically possible. We need qualified people, we need resources, we need political will. The problem is that many departments already have that.

Christophe : That reminds me of an anecdote (laughs). It was during the Covid period. In fact, the first lockdown, everyone snuggled at home, right? It was still necessary to continue teaching. And the Minister of Higher Education, who was… Vidal at the time, Frédérique Vidal, and her services had thrown out something which was to tell all university teachers that they could take their courses in any case on the great services of a super small association, Framasoft in this case, which had an instance at the time, it was a Jitsi instance that we had as part of Dégooglisons.

Walid : for the video.

Christophe : Yes, for the video.

Pouhiou : And it still exists, it’s called Framatalk.

Christophe : Framatalk.

And so, what happened? We can imagine 40 courses at once on our little instance, it couldn’t do it, clearly. And there, we received an email from a member of Frédérique Vidal’s cabinet who was worried about our banner that we had put up to tell people from the National Education, “Well, you’re nice, but you depend on a ministry, ask your ministry.” And the first thought he gave me on the phone, he had contacted me, yes, I had given my number, he had contacted me, was to say, “We can give you money.” There you have it, “We can give you money.” That is to say, in fact, I tell him, “But wait, we’re a small association, you don’t know us, you’re ready to give us money so that we can host university courses, seriously? It’s not even a market offer. Really, you’re on the street.” So there you have it, that was the anecdote.

Christophe Masutti

Pierre-Yves : I have another anecdote of this type. If you like juicy anecdotes, Walid.

Walid: Yes, a lot!

Pierre-Yves : It was a few months later. We’re talking this time, I think it was the day of Pentecost, a Whit Monday. I have my smartphone notifications that start beeping in all directions and I don’t know why. In fact, it was the day when the Minister of Higher Education and Research and Mounir Mahjoubi, Secretary of State for Digital Affairs at the time, announced the availability of the Parcoursup code on a platform that was not GitHub, but Framagit. Framagit is our software forge, rather reserved for developers. And so, they had published, just like that, without warning us, the Parcoursup code, which attracted tens of thousands of people to Framagit. And Luc had to intervene on Whit Monday to make sure that everything continued to work, because they had made this announcement, and for the anecdote within the anecdote, in fact, they made the announcement when the technical teams of Parcoursup had not yet made the deposit public. The code was available, we could have access to it, but ordinary people didn’t have access to it because they hadn’t made the repository public.

And so, there you have it, I think that these two anecdotes show at the same time the poverty sometimes of certain ministries. Their way of operating, which is to say “we are replacing public services with private services”, or the communication problems which are quite serious in my opinion.

Pierre-Yves Gosset

Because the Parcoursup code, inevitably, everyone wondered how this black box that is Parcoursup worked. And so, it’s very good that they released the code, and the technical teams that developed that code did their best. Really, I take my hat off to them.

But the idea that the political communication behind it is “No, but look, not only is it free, but we published it with the good people at Framasoft”, it was really a way of using us as a guarantee to say “Look, it can’t be frowned upon since it’s published by Framasoft”.

Pierre-Yves Gosset

And it’s also because, and here I think someone like Bastien Guerry at the DINUM could talk about it, but how difficult it is sometimes to set up a software forge within a public service. And so, since they didn’t have a forge, they said to themselves, “We’re not going to put it at Microsoft, we just have to put it at these Framasoft peccores.”

Why and how does Framasoft close services?

Walid : There, we talked a lot about opening a department. You spoke at one time about closing a department. Why do you decide to close services? What do you say to people when it closes?

Christophe : Pouhiou and pyg will explain this to you better than I can. The fact of shutting down services, or at least not accepting additional people, additional users, is a message. First of all, it’s a message that consists of saying that we want to love each other first. It’s not our DNA to grow, but rather to develop. That’s the aspect I remembered as a non-tech, if you will. The difficult part of that was getting the message across. Because we’ve grown, if you will, we’ve grown in terms of maturity. Earlier, we were talking about YunoHost, this small distribution that allows you to install services like this on a web server, or even just install… But hey, installing Framadate, as Pouhiou said, as soon as you start talking about code, you’ve lost 90% of the people. And why? Because quite simply, not everyone is necessarily interested in doing that. When I talked about free service, I talk to users, and even if everyone agrees on the main principles, not everyone is ready to spend time. Moreover, we don’t necessarily have the time to do it and the leisure to do it. And this is precisely what the GAFAM are playing on, that is to say that we have been providing all-in-hand, turnkey services since the beginnings of IT. In any case, the notion of the usefulness of the computer is that, it’s service.

Pouhiou : I’m taking the liberty of bouncing back on what you’re saying, Christophe, because that’s typically what, for me, has also been a strength. So, I remind you, De-google-ify the Internet, the 30 services are October 2014, October 2017. We go back a few months, May-June 2017, we start to think what we’re going to do next. As a result, a lot of desire within the association, a lot of projects already to start, etc. And above all, a double realization is that on the one hand, the problem is not Google, the problem is not the GAFAMs, the problem is not the GAFAM NATU BATX, so I could do all the tricks for you, but there you go, all these genres of the web. The problem is the system that generates them. And so this system that has a name, surveillance capitalism. And so, we’re starting to get to this, to arrive at this systemic problem, and where we say to ourselves, suddenly, first thing, we’re going to have to support a whole bunch of people in the free software communities, who had a very, very simple vision of Microsoft is evil, or Google is evil, etc., to accompany, to say in fact, ok, but it’s not just evil, good, or using free software or proprietary, or proprietary, that’s not just the question, the question is what is the choice of society in which we want to live, and therefore what digital? We do in this society, and what digital technology does this society produce. And so, we said to ourselves, we will have to support people. And to support the librist on this, because there are many who had stopped at just the proprietary-free binary. And on the other hand, a whole bunch of audiences that we meet, of whom we realize, precisely, that our usual arguments, “this is proprietary, this is free: ok, I understand, but in fact, I don’t care a bit”. On the other hand, when you start talking to them about systemics, they are people who understand. Because when they are part of feminist activism, queer activism, ecological activism, activism… I can make you a lot of them. When they are people who have worked on health systems, on national education, on disabilities, on ableism, these people think in terms of the system and see the systemic problems.

And these are people who, as a result, will be sensitive to other arguments and to something very simple. At the time when Framatalk was released, the video tool was Skype, from Microsoft, Zoom did not yet exist. And the thing is, Skype had become a hell on earth. You had to install it, it didn’t work, you had to log in to your account, it never worked. In short, it has become a hell on earth. We release Framatalk, the argument is not it’s free and it respects you, that’s the second argument, but the first argument that has made it adopted by thousands of people is: “you have nothing to do”. You go to FravaTalk, you choose the name of your salon, it gives you a web address, you give this web address to your grandmother, she puts it in her computer, her browser tells her I can use your microphone? She says Yes I can use your camera? She says Yes It’s okay, you connect. And that, compared to Skype, was a miracle.

And you have a lot of people who loved it. And so, when you start saying “but in fact, we offer a digital that gives you peace”. We offer a digital that doesn’t try to lock you into our system with an account. We offer a digital that is simpler. more destitute. It’s starting to speak to a lot of people. And so, there is this systemic thinking that is starting to arrive and that’s when we launched this whole Contributopia campaign, which was to say we’re going to support the free world and the world of activists in making links between them, since the links are obvious to us, since we have one foot in both. And so, suddenly, we have to build bridges between these two worlds. And so, that’s how, for me, really, we started this progress, precisely, more political, more systemic. and which has made it possible to open up services and the general public even more.

Pouhiou Noénaute

Walid : So, when you decide to close a service, it means that you say “we don’t accept any more people or we’re going to stop this service, but go see one of the kittens or go see other people who can do the accommodation to continue to have this service”.

Pouhiou : Even today, you go to Framabin, which is a tool for writing code or things and sharing passwords, it’s encrypted, a small text tool. Framabin, we don’t host them anymore. But you go on framabin.org, you’ll have… “Be careful, it doesn’t exist anymore but you can find the same service here, here, here and there with people you trust” generally from the CHATONS collective. And so the idea was to say how do we, since we have new ambitions, a new campaign, new projects, we can both get rid of certain projects because it’s okay, the spin-off has been successful or because the project doesn’t work, there have also been times when in fact there were 100 people who used the thing, Anyway… Well, it doesn’t work, we stop, at some point, it’s OK. And so, really, that was what it was to say, but in fact, services, one, are not eternal, and two, you can also be a gateway, but one that makes you bounce back to other people.

The handover to Mobilizon

Walid : When you decide to no longer host a service, but to continue, to continue the development of your service. I mention this because there is an example that resonates with me… which I follow quite closely, which interests me quite a bit, is the case of Mobilizon, where finally, overall, you have left the hand to the development of this software. And I’d like you to explain a little bit how we get there, why and how.

Pierre-Yves : Mobilizon is different. Yes, Mobilizon is different, because we were the ones who developed the service. Mobilizon,

Walid : It wasn’t in De-google-ify the Internet, it was next door, in fact.

Pierre-Yves : It was also next door. Here too, you have questions of planetary alignment, when they can be happy or unhappy.

There is a belief that we have always tried to undo, and that is that Framasoft is an association of developers. We are not an association of developers. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t developers in Framasoft, whether in the salaried team or in the volunteer team, but that’s not the point.

Pierre-Yves Gosset

Mobilizon was developed by Thomas.

Walid : Wait, let’s remember what Mobilizon is.

Pierre-Yves : Absolutely, it’s a federated service, a free and federated service, which allows you to share events. The idea was to have an alternative to Facebook events or other platforms of this type. To explain why Mobilizon is stopping, we need to explain why we are launching Mobilizon. Why are we launching Mobilizon? Because first of all, there is no alternative to Facebook events. So, when you want to celebrate your birthday and you want to share it on social networks, where do you go? In fact, you go to Facebook. Because if you announce it on Twitter or on Mastodon, it doesn’t work very well to know how many people are going to come, etc. So, there is really this ambition to say: “let’s create a decentralized platform for event management”. It’s also the moment when you say to yourself… you have to bet on a technology that is ActivityPub. ActivityPub, which is a technology that allows you to have a single software that is able to connect to other software. And that for us, it was really something very important in the logic of De-google-ify Internet. It was the idea to say, in fact, rather than everyone having their own micro-blogging instance called Mastodon. In fact, Mastodon, the good thing is that we can connect them to each other. And so you, you can be at mastodon.social, I can be at Framapiaf, Pouhiou can be at piaille.fr, etc. And therefore the fact of being able to talk to each other. And so we decided to embark on the development of Mobilizon also because we have some experience, thanks to Peertube, around the issue of decentralized and federated software. And we launch the software with the objective of saying, “ok, actually, what we want is to be able to share events in a federated way”.

And it lasts, I think, 4 years between the moment we announce the software and the moment we stop it. And after 4-5 years, we believe that this software, on the one hand, has reached a maturity that is sufficient. So afterwards, we can always improve it. But behind this sufficient maturity, what does it mean? It means that in fact, you have a person who is constantly developing behind it. So here, we have to deconstruct another myth which is more on the side of the free community. It’s that it is enough that the software is free for there to be contributions on it. It’s much more complex than that.

Pierre-Yves Gosset

There are ways to make it easier to contribute, but it doesn’t just magically come. So we have a lot of experience, especially through Contributopia, where we say to ourselves, in fact, Framasoft may not be the best association to come and contribute to our projects, because we move fast and because we may have this free software culture, we are not necessarily good at welcoming contributions. And so, related to that, comes the point that Thomas, who is the developer of Mobilizon, is concentrated, let’s say, at the time, maybe 70% of his working time on Mobilizon, but there’s the other project, Framaspace, which is coming, and as a result, we have to free up working time for him. And so, we say to ourselves, but we’re no longer able to develop this software with the same strike force as before, and so, once again, when you have a project, you have constraints. And so, our constraint is that the person who has been developing Mobilizon, for the past 5 years, says, “well, I’m sticking my tongue out a bit. I would also like to do other things. Now, you’re asking me to work on Nextcloud, I’ll have less time.” And that’s when there is a collective and an association called Keskonfai ? Finally, the association is called Kaihuri, but the project is called What do we do behind? And who contacts us saying, but we would have such, such and such a need on Mobilizon. We have an in-house developer, but as a result, we don’t have a lot of time, and we don’t have a lot of money. Could you add this or that feature? And we’re here, but in fact, we just don’t have time. In concrete terms, even today, Pouhiou will be able to confirm to you, we have work to do until the end of 2026. So, it’s not possible to say, oh well, yes, of course, we’re waiting for people to come and tell us what we should add. And so, we decide at that time to say, in fact, we have to transmit the Mobilizon code. So, we decided to pass it on to the community and in particular to the Keskonfai project. And we like it very well. If they need to go further with this software, we have shown what we want to do. We position Framasoft, once again, as a prefiguration association, that is to say an association that does things to show that it is possible, but we don’t have too many scruples or shamelessness to say to ourselves, in fact, once this project has reached a certain maturity, we have to be able to let it compost itself. There you have it, software compostability exists. And we say, well, okay, actually, we did what we had to do with it. And on this Mobilizon compost, we hope, other projects will be born in the future.

Pouhiou : And just to clarify, it’s not because we no longer develop the Mobilizon software that we have stopped the online service Mobilizon.fr. We continue to maintain it and you can create an account, create your group, your events, etc. on Mobilizon.fr.

Christophe : That, Mobilizon, is the perfect example of the creation of a common. Not only that, we understood that in fact, there were other issues than free software. Being free is not enough today. Being free is not enough. There are other systemic issues, as Pouhiou said. And these systemic issues intersect with the population’s ability to take hold of free software, appropriate it and develop it according to needs. And it’s not just us who can determine what the needs are, first of all. And secondly, it is part of the possibility for us to offer services whose packaging discourse makes it possible to touch on issues that are far beyond the sole use of free software, the user-friendliness of the software, but also its challenges, I am thinking in particular of AI now, ecological issues, frankly. So there you have it.

Where do we stand with De-google-ify the Internet at the end of 2024?

Walid : What I’d like us to do here is that it’s the end of 2024. Where are you with De-google-ify Internet, actually? What worked? What went wrong? What is your feeling on this?

Pouhiou : I think that a first thing that worked for me is what you were talking about earlier Christophe, the prefiguration, to show that it is possible. Sorry, pyg that you were talking about it, but it’s true that Christophe often talks about it too. And so in particular, the impact that it can have and that we discover, that we have discovered all along, the impact that it can have to just do things and show them to the general public. In 2014, Google is my friend, even though it’s been a year or more since Edward Snowden made his revelations. Google is my friend and all that. And in 2017, that started to change. We talked about the GAFA, the media talked about the GAFA. And I think that we were not for nothing in talking about the GAFAMs. And add the M for Microsoft, which was forgotten. So at the cultural level, we talked earlier about being able to show that if the ministries today do not use alternative digital tools or other institutions, it is rather a lack of political will and resources put into it. I think we had that part in that, the fact that we also showed a whole bunch of other communities outside of those of the free software players that the values we have about sharing, autonomy, independence, mutual aid, etc., solidarity. In fact, these are values that are already shared and that there are many other communities today that can have digital tools in collaboration with their values. And for me, all of these are successes today. And then, at first glance, so be careful, the figures I’m going to release come from the Institut du Doigt Mouillé, which is Professor Lalouche’s chair.

Walid : As usual.

Pouhiou : That’s it, because we don’t track people. So, we can’t know exactly, but we do know the number of visits. It is estimated today that our small association, under the law of 1901, serves 2 million people every month. And it’s something for us that is almost difficult to imagine. We’re behind the scenes behind the scenes, we know how the sausage is made. We know the hacking aspect and the anecdotes. And in fact, there are 2 million people who change a little bit of their digital habits thanks to our little association. And that, for me, is one of the beautiful things.

Pierre-Yves : I’m just bouncing back on that to say that indeed, for me, what we managed to bring, in addition to everything Pouhiou said, I obviously agree with you, we introduced digital collaborative practices that could pre-exist at Google Docs, etc. But for example, I see the impact that Framapad has had, and not only in the teaching community, but in the associative community, etc., with people who say to themselves “Oh but wait, the report, we can take it together”. It’s something that’s quite fabulous. And indeed, on Framapad, you go there, you don’t necessarily need an account. You make your report, you get it, you export it, etc. And so, on the positive side, I think there’s indeed this whole practical digital collaborative side that allows you to get out, once again, of “I’m all alone behind my computer, but we’re going to do things together together”. That’s obvious. In what didn’t work as well, we talked about it a little bit earlier around Contributopia, but… There is a bit of the phrase “alone, we go faster, together, we go further”. I think we have to assume that Framasoft is an association that is sometimes difficult to work with. Not because we wouldn’t be nice, but because we go fast. And once again, if we only did Mobilizon, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. If we only did Peertube, we could do things differently. But we did Mobilizon, we do Peertube. We do Framaspace, we do Emancipasso, we make a publishing house, we do interventions, we accompany people, we do MOOCs, we have done Framakey, etc. It was a bit endless. And as a result, I think there’s something we didn’t know how to explain that Framasoft was a bit of a locomotive that was launched at full speed and that, indeed, we’re not necessarily going to slow down so that you can hang on to the wagon when you’re a developer, etc. And this is something that I have heard as a critic for 15 or 20 years. Today, we tried a lot of things, especially Contributopia, to try to slow down and say to ourselves “Oh well, we’re going to try to work on the support side, etc.” My personal point of view on this is to say “In fact, we’re going to stop lying to ourselves, we’re going to move quickly”. On the other hand, our strength and our main value is that when we say… Here, for example, we wanted to release a free application that we will talk about during the campaign. In three days, this application was developed, a mobile application for sound transcription, etc. I think it’s quite fabulous that we have the resources to say to ourselves , “Oh well, in three days, we’re going to do this.” Or when we say to ourselves “Hey, we’re going to release Framaspace in a few months with two devs, well an adminsys and a developer, we manage to produce behind a platform that is capable of deploying 1500 Nextclouds”. And that’s still…

Pouhiou : That’s really what Nextcloud deployment farm is all about. It’s incredible, architecturally.

Christophe : We go fast, but the world goes fast. If we had stuck to “you have to install Linux on your computer”, I’m sorry, but now, we’ve moved up a gear, but the world is also with us. Today, it’s not because you use free software that you are not monitored. Just because you use free software doesn’t mean you’re going to escape AI on your computer. I’m sorry, but here, we have to say things as they are. So, we must immediately ask ourselves questions. And again, I find that… well, I’m not the only one to find it, I think Pierre-Yves will agree with me, we’ve already fallen behind. The free software community is lagging behind what is currently happening in terms of new digital uses and in particular everything that revolves around…

Pierre-Yves : Artificial intelligence.

Christophe : Artificial intelligence. And yes, we have to move quickly. So, we go fast, because on the other hand, it also amuses us a little. We have to tell it like it is. If it didn’t amuse us, we wouldn’t be here. When I get out of work, I don’t necessarily want to not have fun. It’s not… And therefore, that’s what brings us together. You were talking about Mobilizon earlier. This is an example of the commons. So, we have to do something together. But at the same time, this common must be able to keep pace with what they… what I call the technological offensive, makes us and in front of us. And that, perhaps, in this case, we could say, in a certain sense, that Framasoft has given itself this mission.

The world has changed, free software needs funding and resources

Walid : When I hear you speak, it makes me think of something. I stopped free software for a few years when I co-founded a company. I had a lot of stuff to do, I had free software, but I wasn’t a contributor or anything anymore. And so, I started using proprietary SaaS tools. And in fact, basically, I discovered a lot of tools and a lot of ways of doing things that I had absolutely never confronted before. I think in particular, I talk about it regularly, but for me, it was a bit of an eye-opener when I started using a tool called Notion. And never in the free software industry, at the time, had anyone told me about this thing. And when I talk about it at trade shows with people, and I tell them, “yes, but tools like Notion, even you have Affine, Outline, all that stuff” and people, like, they’ve never tried, they don’t know. And me, every time, I tell them, but “Guys, we have to stop. You see, your old interface, people don’t want to use that thing anymore.” And in fact, if you don’t use a proprietary service and you don’t see the advantages of this thing, in fact, it’s really hard for you to understand that the world has changed. And that’s really a thing, how can I put it, me, at work, we use a lot of proprietary tools. I don’t want to say that it’s not a problem for me, but hey, there you go, on the side, I do other things in the free software. But in fact, it’s the fact of using these tools that you understand the uses and why you understand why certain things are missing in free. We were talking about it earlier with Pierre-Yves. The platform I use to record, it’s not free. And I don’t necessarily know anyone who does exactly the same thing. But except that in fact, if you’ve never used it, you don’t know that this platform is great and that there is no free equivalent.

Pouhiou : For me, it’s something that also shows, at least in the experience of Framasoft, something that is both successful and unsuccessful, for me. That is to say, at the same time, this method of moving quickly and thinking systemically has allowed us to continue to offer things that, a priori, are relevant since they reach an audience. And in particular also by questioning oneself about… What, in the model of the web giants, in the model of surveillance capitalism, locks them up and that we are free to do? What can we bring that they can’t? There are a whole bunch of things, but purely in the features, in the software, etc., that precisely don’t lock users in, that preserve their attention, etc., that we can afford and that they can’t. That’s interesting. The other thing that has to do with success and failure is also the question of funding. This is because Framasoft lives on donations from individuals. It regularly motivates us to report, to ask for money, etc. Behind it, it’s also a lot of work.

Walid : a hell of a job.

Pouhiou : But behind it, it gives us a lot of independence. The problem is that it can give a false image. I mean, we were compared to, I don’t know what it was, CozyCloud and HelloAsso, which are large companies with dozens of employees, with millions in profits every year. Compared to our association, it’s nothing at all. It’s not comparable.

And so, there’s this problem of financing where if you want, at some point, to make beautiful interfaces, to do relevant things, to be of service, not to exploit people, in fact, you need money. It costs money, all that. And the problem is that today, we can see, Framasoft has always been financed, in the end, with the paperclip budget of any French IT company. And we are among the luckiest in the free software world in terms of finances, among the most privileged. So there, for me, there is a problem that is quite huge, which is to say, very well, we want a different kind of computing, which is at the same time beautiful, comfortable, practical, respectful, etc. Okay, but how do you find the money?

Pouhiou Noénaute

That, for me, is not solved. But it is not for Framasoft that he will solve. We do what we can on the other side.

Walid : Financing is a central problem. I was highlighting the fact that if I take it, I’m not Mobilizon, there are so many people who have used Facebook events that everyone can see. But there are plenty of professional tricks where if you haven’t used these services, it’s dead. You can’t even imagine that it exists and you can’t understand how much it serves people and how you’ve completely missed all this stuff.

Pouhiou : So you have to pay the project managers. You have to go and find people who will test proprietary things, who will look for designers, who will do UX surveys.

Walid : Of course, but what I mean is that I’m not necessarily talking about you. I’m talking about free software projects that compete with these tools and that haven’t seen that these tools have arrived and that they’ve changed the game.

Pouhiou : I agree with you. And that’s precisely what I’m saying, is that there’s the side, at the same time, Framasoft has managed to finance itself, even if it’s still poor, but in the free software world, we’re doing well. In free association, I’m not talking about free entrepreneurship, but it’s a tree that hides the whole forest of people who can’t finance themselves. And there were the Next Generation Internet projects, which today are potentially in danger, but which have really helped enormously. And for me, there are really all the commons today than if we could finance them… So, I’m talking about designers (Editor’s note: see the episode with Maïwann), I’m talking about project managers, but also about digital mediators (Editor’s note: see the episode with Audric). We need a lot of people to help people emancipate their digital practice. That, today, is a huge need. And in fact, all these financing needs, today, they cannot be covered by solidarity and the appeal for donations.

How Framasoft spread

Walid : We agree. The next question I would like to ask you is what have you sprung from all this? What do you know that was born from what you created? This is not an easy question.

Pierre-Yves : It’s not at all… This is not a difficult question. This is a question that… It’s complicated to roll out because Framasoft is completely multi-project. And so, I can tell you that Framakey, for example, which is a project, admittedly, today, deceased of Framasoft, in any case, free software does not die, so it is not deceased, it is put back in the drawer today. it made Framakeys for dyslexic people, there were Framakeys with Ubuntu, there were Framakeys that were taken over by a popular education association called CEMEA and a company called CozyCloud to make Framakeys for people in precarious situations. That’s an example of how a free software project can be compostable again. Now, the thing I’m most proud of personally as a spin-off is that, as I said in episode 1, I consider myself an associative activist more than a free software activist. Free software is great, I love it, it’s my skill too, so yay. But my activism is political and it is associative above all. Because I think that the associative world is the only thing that manages to keep the neoliberalist bulldozer behind it at bay. And what I’m most proud of is that Framasoft was able to inspire people to create associations behind it. I’m thinking in particular of the KITTENS, there are several dozen kittens that I have met who have told me “but if you hadn’t opened the way, we wouldn’t have gone there”. And so I say to myself, ok, today, if Framasoft dies tomorrow, it’s not my wish, but if it happens, I won’t experience it that badly, because we will have inspired other people. And I find it extremely rewarding. The fact that we ourselves have been inspired by other people, because once again, we too have perched on the shoulders of other people before us. But the fact that we have shown that it is possible and that we have gone with a narrative that is positive, an illustration, once again, I think of David Revoy in particular, who shows that it can be something joyful, that it can be something light. We also brought, via a certain humorous dimension, lightness in something that was not just a fight. And the fact that other people said to themselves “ah, but actually, I can do this too”, is for me the greatest achievement of Framasoft in the last 20 years.

Christophe :

I wrote in the chat “how we became radicalized since De-google-ify”. It’s not so much that we’ve become radicalized, but in fact, we’ve understood a lot of things. We grew old together, of course, because De-google-ify wasn’t yesterday.

Christophe Masutti

All the same, I’ll just take an example, because we talked about free software. The case of Framabook, for example, is quite illustrative of this discourse. We tried to set up a publishing house, we did a lot of publications, we made a publishing house.

Pouhiou : about fifty books!

Christophe : including those of Pouhiou. Read! And so what was the idea? It was to be able to publish free books. So books under a free license, it’s already not intuitive. We had to deal with the publishing world, that is to say what are the practices of the publishing world? It is to make authors’ contracts with the question of “to whom I give the rights in order to be able to distribute my book”. So we have legally created contracts that are said to be non-exclusive, that is to say that allow the author to go to another publishing house if he wants to publish his work in addition to our own version, Framabook. And then we said to ourselves, but actually, yes, well, so we sell the books in paper format. Already, we were reaching a rate that was rarely seen in publishing, that is to say that we were able to pay each author 8% of paper sales. There is not a single author who has earned more than 500 euros with us. It would have been known.

Pouhiou : Yes, but we’ve all sold more books than Christine Boutin. And that’s a source of pride.

Christophe : Yes. And then, we also had a cast that was quite large. I mean, there are quite a few books that have left. We didn’t do all the stats, obviously, possible. But anyway, there were still quite a few downloads.

So, it was not bad for that. But that wasn’t enough because we were still prisoners of the capitalist model. That is to say, the capitalist model is that of saying “we have to make the work profitable”. So, we have taken, with books in common, these last two years, we have taken the opposite view. We said to ourselves, well, then, fuck capitalism. We are going to propose a system that is absolutely not that of making a work profitable, which is, on the contrary, of publishing directly in the commons. And so, how do we pay the author? Well, we’re going to pay him upfront, that is to say before he even writes the first line of the work, that is to say that he comes with a project, and it is this project that he obviously presents to us, and we establish a contract on the basis of the project, not on the basis of the work. And the work is made collectively, that is to say, well, obviously, the author creates the work, but the work, it is accompanied, and it is from the outset a common, it becomes a common.

Christophe Masutti

By the way, when we say that, for example, we put 5,000 euros on the table, we really like it and find me an author who earns 5,000 euros unless his name is Jean d’Ormesson or published by Gallimard, there is not… That’s the thing, it’s the model that needs to be changed. That’s why we talk about an anti-capitalist model.

Pouhiou : and I think it takes up a bit of what you both say Christophe and Pyg, what we have spread for me and which is important and really cultural and political, that is to say that when I see in many circles, the fact of saying “no but wait”, or young people, in quotation marks, because now at 40 brooms, I can say young people, who arrive and say “no but wait, we’re not going to use this thing, I have a Framachin who can help you”, or people who say “it’s been in my AMAP”. Oh but you’re part of Framasoft? “Oh but too well, we use your… I don’t know, Framapad, Framadate is coming into service” when we don’t know each other. For me, there is something gained, to say to yourself “hey, there are people who have found a corner of the Internet that suits them”. When you also talk about offering a positive landscape, you have to realize that since 2014, we have been working like crazy, not to say “we present you Framatalk, and why do we recommend you to use Framatalk? Because it’s not Skype, and Skype is bad guys, they do this to you, they do this to you, they do this to you. These are not the arguments that are being proposed.

And to speak positively is a real job. And it works. The work we do with David Revoy’s illustrations, you’ll never see in the illustrations we do with David Revoy computer screens, Matrix green, terminals, etc., because each time, we don’t show the tool, but we show the use. What does the tool do you use? What does it do to you as a human, as a society, as a group?

Pouhiou Noénaute

And for me, it’s really… As a result, I find it difficult to answer. How did we spread? Because I would never have the pride to believe that Framasoft is responsible or at the origin of this. But when I see today all the awareness that there has been around surveillance capitalism, the awareness that there has been precisely on a more systemic thinking than Ubuntu or Linux… oh sorry, Windows or Linux, I’m tired. When I see a whole bunch of people who say “but in fact, we can militate and mess around at the same time” by releasing something stupid, like we did a lot of April 1st, we have a lot of April 1st stuff, and the last April 1st that we released was great for making fun of the republican commitment contract that is imposed by the State on associations that want to receive subsidies. We made the framasoftian commitment contract and before each service, you had to commit to a completely dithyrambic, grotesque and ridiculous contract. Well, that’s and it’s militancy. For me, all this percolates culturally and I’m rather proud of it.

Framasoft and political commitment

Walid : I can’t help but end without asking this question that I discussed informally with Pierre-Yves. This is the political commitment part. The part of going to carry and lobby the institutions, it’s not you who do it. It’s APRIL, it’s La Quadrature, etc. You bring services, a universe, etc. So you are campaigning in your own way, but you are not going to see politics. And that, I would like you to explain.

Pierre-Yves : I’m going to steal a sentence that Calimaq, someone who works on the question of the commons and the law, whispered to me. For me, there was really the issue of white blood cells and red blood cells. And both are essential in your body. If you don’t have white blood cells, you get sick. If you don’t have red blood cells, you don’t have oxygen in your body. There are people who manage to do both, so much the better. Personally, I’ve always seen Framasoft as part of the red blood cells. That is to say, our job is to bring oxygen. We need white blood cells, which will defend the body against external aggressions. And I think that metaphor works quite well. That is to say, we recognize the absolutely essential work that APRIL or La Quadrature do. In people who make white blood cells and red blood cells, I’m thinking of Wikimedia France, for example. It is an association that will not only lobby, but above all maintain and offer an encyclopedia that literally serves billions of people.

And so we, our positioning, is to say in fact, let’s do with who we are. And when you talk to Pouhiou, Christophe or me, and it will be the same with most of the members of Framasoft, you can see that we are more like red blood cells. We are not necessarily people who are extremely keen on the question of how we are going to fight against a bill, etc. We’re pretty good, Christophe was talking about Team Bald, to produce intellectual reflection that will then be synthesized, reformulated, etc. by other people. But it’s our red blood cell capacity that I think we need to preserve.

Pierre-Yves Gosset

And again, I often use the phrase “you have to act where you feel strong.” That is to say, from a political point of view, acting where we feel strong, that is to say, once again, not on the development side, but rather on the service proposal and tooling side of what we call the contribution society, the fact of knowing how to equip this contribution society is a strong political act. Obviously, we need white blood cells, but we are not white blood cells, and we should not pretend to be white blood cells. And that’s why often, when people come to us and say “yes, do you want to sign this petition? Do you want to participate in our walk? “, our answer, “well actually no”, because spending time on it is not spending time on our work as red blood cells.

Christophe: We are an association that proposes, that is to say, this is exactly what Pouhiou was saying just now, the message is positive. And I think that if there’s also another thing that we’ve spread, it’s maybe this one too, which is to say that there’s no point in making people feel guilty because they use proprietary software. It’s absolutely useless. On the other hand, what it does serve is to be in the proposal and to show that this model works. I really admire the associations that are involved in activism and lobbying public institutions, for example, because most of the time they will come up against immense disappointments. And then, from there, they start again, they don’t give up. You go from the League of Human Rights to, for example, La Quadrature du Net. For me, it’s the same energies. So, it’s really very difficult. We didn’t choose this path because, on the one hand, there are already some who are doing it. And then, on the other hand, it’s not our desire. Our desire is really to offer things and, as we said earlier, to prefigure the digital world we want tomorrow. And by prefiguring it, we show that it can be done.

Pouhiou : And what’s interesting is that as a result, we’re neither in competition nor excluded. That is to say that we have never wanted to give in to the discourse, and in some activist circles, there can be this, of “no, but there is no point in proposing alternatives, what is needed is to fight the bad guys and destroy everything or the other way around”. In fact, for us, the two are complementary, and as a result, we have never closed the door to our friends from La Quadrature, APRIL or the League of Human Rights or others. We have never closed the door to those who do citizen advocacy by saying, but in fact, “Hello, we are not going to come and work with you because it is not our competence, it is not our quality. On the other hand, on the days when you need support, we can give a little help, the day you need expertise, we are there, then we follow you, we read your expertise, we read your work and it will inspire us for our proposals.” And so, on the other hand, there is always this serene exchange between these ways of ultimately complementing each other towards the same society. Because we always come back to the same thing, which is that in fact, associations that do citizen advocacy and associations or collectives that make proposals, we talk about Framasoft, but typically for me, an AMAP, a self-managed grocery store, etc., it’s also an association that makes a proposal, a shared garden, It is also a positive proposal. And they don’t say they’re going to destroy McDonald’s. And I’m not saying it’s wrong to dismantle McDonald’s, it’s been useful. So, the idea, precisely, is to say, in fact, here, inspire each other, let’s give each other a hand when necessary, but I, personally, don’t know how to go and see the laws, go see the ministers, and the time I met Mounir Majoubi, it gave quite a carnage. It was funny. It’s not carnage, but it was funny. A priori, he remembered it, or his assistant remembered it. But suddenly, we don’t know how to do that. And we’re comfortable elsewhere, so let’s complement each other.

The participants’ final words

Walid: I’ll leave you each one last word. If you have a message to pass on before we leave. Christopher. Want to get started?

Christophe: last word, prefiguration. It’s the term I cherish the most, that I find in the definitions of David Graeber and company. It is to say that if we want to appropriate a digital space that is both friendly and emancipatory, there is nothing better than trying to build it here and now. Yes, we speak Latin, but Team bald, sorry.

Pouhiou: I still have hair.

Walid: Well, Pouhiou, you, your last word?

Pouhiou: solidarity, then.

Pierre-Yves: You stole my word, bastard.

Pouhiou: I’ll leave you solidarity. No, no, go ahead. But because Framasoft, in 20 years, has not worked, for me, it has been the main engine. It was this question of solidarity and sharing. And, spoiler alert, this year, it was more difficult. But it has been more difficult for all the communities that benefit from solidarity, etc. And as a result, there in particular, we are going to start a donation campaign for the end of the year for the association. We are going to propose two donation objectives. One that allows us to just continue next year and one that would allow us to start again for 20 years, I mean anything, but to do some prefiguration, to have new proposals, etc. But because lately, it’s been more difficult. It’s inflation for everyone. And so there you have it, the question today is, we have benefited from solidarity, I think we are making our contribution to collective solidarity, and today what role do you want to have in the future of Framasoft? Will Framasoft continue to be visible or will Framasoft innovate in the coming years? It’s a bit now that it’s going to be played, so I’m placing the site soutenir.framasoft.org if you want to support us.

Pierre-Yves: I would have liked to take solidarity but so I’m going to take common because the world is bad. For me clearly the world is on fire and it’s everyone’s fault. We all have our share of responsibility in this, but it is partly the fault of a system called capitalism. One of the possible answers that has been demonstrated and on which we can continue to prefigure is the question of the commons. And here, I’m talking about all the commons. It turns out that for Framasoft, our expertise is in the digital sector. That’s where we’re strong. So, for me, what I wish for Framasoft for the years to come is to continue to work on this issue of digital commons in the face of individualization, appropriation, I want to say selfishness, etc.

Walid: I’m going to make a final word!

Pouhiou: That’s it, I was going to ask you, and you your word Walid

Walid: Wally? Oh well, I’ll give it to you, so the first thing is if by chance you make vintage PLM t-shirts, then think of me.

Pierre-Yves: It works.

Walid: That’s it, so it’s the first one. The second is… First of all, I’d like to thank, thank you, since it’s a project to tell the 20 years of Framasoft’s history, which we started discussing after the Peertube episode. So it took a while, but in fact, it was very good. That way, it allowed me to talk to a lot of people, with Pierre-Yves and also to see a little bit about what I wanted to talk about. So that was really great. That’s really something very important. And the third is that in fact, when I started working on Projets Libres!, I rediscovered a lot of things in the world of free software that I didn’t know. Including two in particular that really left me on my ass. The first one is all Framasoft, really, I didn’t know the whole story and it was really one of my great discoveries. And the second one, it’s also thanks to Framasoft, I think it was a discussion, discussions maybe with Pierre-Yves, I don’t know anymore, it’s NLNet, NLNet funding, where then, really, it was the… Well, I said to myself, fuck, but… This thing is really amazing. And I think it also came maybe from the discussions on Peertube, I don’t know. So there you have it, thank you.

Pouhiou: I’m just clarifying, NLNet is one of the main players in the funding of the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet grants.

Walid: And if listeners want to know more, I did an episode with Lwenn Bussière who works at NLNet. And we’re talking about NLNet funding and what it is, where it’s coming from, etc. And it’s an episode that worked very well and is also very important. So there you have it. Thank you to all of you. First of all, thank you for your trust and your time, because here, we have just recorded about 4 hours of interview together in several days. Thank you to the entire Framasoft team.

Pouhiou: good luck to you for the editing work!

Pierre-Yves: good luck.

Walid: thank you to the whole Framasoft team. And then, we’re going to meet again next time for a third episode on a new series called How to evaluate free software. In the first episode, there’s a conference we’re going to give at the show, a round table we’re going to give at the Open Source Experience show with my friend Raphaël Semeteys. which will be rebroadcast, which will be the first episode and after that it will be a series with other people including Framasoft, so it’s going to be great too.

Listen, for the listeners, their mission is to share this episode, to make it revolve around you, to give Framasoft money to allow them to continue this, and really to talk about it around you and also to make comments to tell us what you like about Framasoft, That’s it will please everyone. Good luck to all. See you again. And then, be well. And once again a big thank you to you. Thank you.

Pierre-Yves: Thank you.

Pouhiou: Thank you. Hello. Hello. Ciao

Christophe: ciao.

This episode was recorded on October 22, 2024.

License

This podcast is released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license or later.