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About Blee: enveloping our own autonomy directed digital ecosystem

Mohsen BANAN (he/him) - Pronunciation: MO-HH-SS-EN

Format: 46-min talk ; Q&A: BigBlueButton conference room
Status: TO_CAPTION_QA

Talk

00:00.000 Introduction
05:17.550 Blee: A Bigger and Different Vision for Emacs
08:02.817 The ``Nature of Polyexistentials'' Book
15:49.850 Governance of Polyexistentials
20:04.600 Proper Governance of Manner-of-Existence of Software
26:00.083 Blee Overview
26:25.083 Bootstrapping: From Fresh Debian to Raw-BISOS and Raw-Blee
33:27.667 Some Blee Concepts
35:14.050 Blee Org Dynamic Blocks --- Everywhere
35:59.150 COMEEGA -- Collaborative Org-Mode Enhanced Emacs Generalized Authorship
37:51.850 Blee Panels: Active Org-Mode Universal Self-Documentation
38:12.233 Some BISOS and Blee Capability Bundles
41:04.950 Next Steps (2024)
42:54.267 Economics and Business Dimmensions of ByStar Digital Ecosystem
43:38.433 Pointers for Digging Deeper
Duration: 45:30 minutes

Q&A

05:33.280 Q: I'm from Brazil, which edition would you recommend?
07:07.080 Q: Thank you for this talk! How does your perspective interface with works such as Yanis Varoufakis' Technofeudalism?
08:21.980 Q: To what extent do you agree that the introduction of proprietary systems in education creates an environment for exploitation while at the same time diluting the learning value of the curriculum?
09:40.053 Q: As a specific example of how "ownership is not clean" ...
15:05.278 Q: Do you have any recommended reading materials designed for such an audience?
Listen to just the audio:
Duration: 18:11 minutes

Description

Emacs has long been recognized as the ultimate integration platform, enabling the creation of an unparalleled user environment. In 2010, Tomohiro Matsuyama, captured this concept crisply:

"The reason why Emacs platform is good is that it cooperates with OS, not because it is good by itself."

Building on this idea, Blee (ByStar Libre-Halaal Emacs Environment) can be seen as yet another Emacs re-distribution, akin to Doom Emacs or Spacemacs. However, Blee is distinct. While Doom Emacs is multi-platform oriented, Blee is paired exclusively with Debian — and on mobile, with Termux-Android. While Doom Emacs is Emacs-centric, Blee is digital ecosystem-centric.

To further elucidate Blee, let’s break down the subtitle of this presentation:

"Enveloping Our Own Autonomy Directed Digital Ecosystem With Emacs."

  • "Enveloping": Blee is designed to fully integrate and encapsulate usage of an entire digital ecosystem.

  • "Our Own Autonomy-Directed Digital Ecosystem": In contrast to the proprietary American ecosystems of Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and Amazon, Blee is part of the Libre-Halaal ByStar Digital Ecosystem. ByStar is ours.

By* challenges the existing proprietary American digital ecosystem while operating concurrently alongside it. ByStar's primary offerings are tangible autonomy and genuine privacy on a very large scale. ByStar represents a moral inversion of the proprietary American internet services model. By* is about redecentralization of internet application services.

Some might dismiss ByStar as an ambitious, utopian vision. In response, I’ve authored a book titled:

Nature of Polyexistentials:

Basis for Abolishment of the Western Intellectual Property Rights Regime

And Introduction of the Libre-Halaal ByStar Digital Ecosystem

On Line:   PLPC-120033 at Github -- DOI --- PDF: 8.5x11 -- A4
US Edition Book Prints At Amazon:   US -- France -- UK -- Japan   (424 pages --- 6 x 0.96 x 9 inches)
International Edition Book Prints:   Iran (Jangal Publishers)   (406 pages --- 23.5 x 16.5 cm)

Comments, Feedback:   plpc-120033@mohsen.1.banan.byname.net

Blee and Emacs are integral parts of ByStar.

Analysis of digital ecosystems is inherently interdisciplinary, and so is my book. But, in this presenation, I won't be delving much into the philosophical, ethical, moral, societal, and social dimensions of the book. This presentation, focuses on the technical aspects of ByStar and Blee, specifically through the lens of Emacs users and developers.

Blee’s approach to integration differs from traditional Emacs culture in three key ways:

  1. Avoiding the "Curse of Lisp": While Emacs culture emphasizes doing everything in Lisp, Blee consciously avoids this pitfall.

  2. Cultivation of Best-of-Breeds: Emacs folklore tends to follow a laissez faire approach, but Blee is disciplined around cultivation of selected best of breeds.

  3. Digital Ecosystem Orientation: Unlike traditional Emacs, which is component-focused, Blee is designed in the context of the entirety of our own digital ecosystem.

In ByStar, much of the integration occurs outside of Emacs, through a framework called BISOS (By* Internet Services OS). BISOS builds on Debian to provide a unified platform for developing both internet services and software-service continuums. BISOS and Blee are intertwined.

Now, in 2024, I am advancing Matsuyama concept with specificity:

"The reason why Emacs platform is good is that it facilitates creation of integrated usage environments like Blee, which cooperate with Debian, BISOS and ByStar."

An early version of BISOS and Blee is available for public use and experimentation. To get started with BISOS, Blee, and ByStar, visit https://github.com/bxgenesis/start. From a virgin Debian 12 installation ("Fresh-Debian"), you can bootstrap BISOS and Blee in one step by running the raw-bisos.sh script. It produces "Raw-BISOS" which includes "Raw-Blee". You can then customize Raw-Blee to create different parts and aspects of your own ByStar DE.

I welcome your thoughts and feedback, especially if you experiment with Blee, BISOS, ByStar, and the model and the concept of Libre-Halaal Polyexistentials.

About the speaker:

Mohsen Banan is a software and internet engineer. He was one of the principal architects of the Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) network specifications. He is the primary author of two Internet RFCs. He is the principal architect of the ByStar Digital Ecosystem and BISOS and Blee. The software and internet services that he publicly offers all conform to the definition of Libre-Halaal Software and Libre-Halaal Internet Services. All of his public writings are web published and unrestricted. He has never applied for a patent. As an expert witness he has assisted in legal efforts involving invalidation of a number of patents. He has been using Emacs since 1986.

Previous Talks: https://emacsconf.org/2021/talks/bidi and https://emacsconf.org/2022/talks/mail

Discussion

Questions and answers

  • Q: You mentioned that there's two editions: one aimed at westerners, and one for worldwide readers. I'm from Brazil, which edition would you recommend? It's a western country, but you didn't make the distinction exclusive for the second edition, so I thought it would be better to ask.
    • A: For everybody listening to this conference, the international edition is the right choice.
    • It features more aggressive stances against intellectual property (being linked specifically to the American culture)
    • There are pieces in the book where the typical American audience might be offended
    • ...But if your skin is thick enough to deal with reasonable criticism, the international edition is for you.
  • Q:Thank you for this talk! How does your perspective interface with works such as Yanis Varoufakis' Technofeudalism?
    • A: Not familiar with the book.
    • There is a lot of global growth and collective understanding towards the notion that the direction we're headed in (i.e. American digital ecosystems) is dangerous.
    • We should revisit the entirety of the strategy.
    • [For the questioner] Can you clarify? (I'll write to you :) )
  • Q:To what extent do you agree that the introduction of proprietary systems in education creates an environment for exploitation while at the same time diluting the learning value of the curriculum? My computing education at school amounted to learning how to use the MS Office suite - ie, the opposite of lasting, open knowledge.
    • A: The idea is that teaching and learning should be unrestricted, such as the Muslim/Iranian saying: "Passing along the learning is the tax on having learnt". [ The "tax" on knowledge is sharing it with others. زكات علم، آموختن آن به ديگران است. ]
  • Q:As a specific example of how "ownership is not clean", look at the Star Trek Picard series: they continuously asked Patrick Stewart to come do another Star Trek series but he wouldn't because Star Trek changed from what it used to be, at least until it they came up with a series that honored what Star Trek used to be. Does this intersect?
    • A: Not sure if I fully get the point.
    • On my criticism of the FOSS movement:
      • The idea is that we have jumped on the FOSS movement and recognized it as an alternative, but we haven't looked deeply enough to see if our own philosophy and movement have problems.
      • The problems that I note is that the FOSS movement does not recognize clearly and explictly that the entirity of the intellectual property system is flawed.
      • It's only now that we are seeing the FOSS movement is broader than the Western world.
      • The labels of Free Software and Open Source are not necessarily correct.
      • We are not paying enough attention to establishing relationship with society.
      • There's a whole chapter in the book dedicated to this topic.
    • [To the questioner] Clarification please
      • The point of the question was even though a media company owned Star Trek they couldn't do what they wanted with the series if you involve other people. The question was also open ended so you did answer it by taking it where you wanted it to go.
  • Q: I am involved in Politics in my country, my party is very sympathetic to FOSS ideals and I've been pushing for better policy with regards to public procurement. Do you have any recommended reading materials designed for such an audience?
    • A: The idea is that my own book would be an excellent resource. I'd say the bibliography in the book contains various other pointers that could be quite useful.
  • Q: How can we promote a culture of more active thought with regard to the societal impacts of ethical and philosphical choices made in the wider FOSS community?
    • A:

Notes

  • Am I too young to understand? Maybe I need to read the book
    • Aah I get it!! IPR forces single ownership of what are polyexistentials
  • From YouTube: ​​gnome is not halal. ​​gnome is western
    • Did he elaborate on how GNOME is haram by his definition? Oh, sorry, nevermind, the quote on GNOME isn't from the speaker.
  • interesting. and - obviously - radical thoughts. not sure about if Americanism critique is the core, but moreover a general critique of (extreme) capitalism mechanism. but that's certainly not merely a "Western" issue. imo
  • Okay, I have to admit, I love this political/philosophical dissection of software's impact on society.   Very interesting.
    • It's like an extension of the GNU (free software) thought. I think I need more literature on that topic...
    • Essentially a free, open-source and privacy-respecting ecosystem akin to those provided by the big tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Apple).
  • Great talk on Polyexistentials. Awesome to see EmacsConf including international voices .
  • He hit the nail on the head:  This point has been on my mind: Capitalism creates artificial scarcity and then manufactures junk to fill it.  How can that be overcome?  So that we get software that is actually needed ...
    • I don't know if this is a problem with Capitalism which can be many things to different people to the point the term might not mean much. I have a problem with people competing through corrosion rather than compition. For example google is restricting access to google drive api making everybodys app but googles worse. Capitilism "not fake Capitalism" predospes a free market which would limit this
  • The blee panel actually is cool!
  • Very thought-provoking talk!
  • Dovetailing nicely / with other talks from EmacsConf 2024
    • Working on Emacs vs working for Emacs
    • Peter mentioned "too much choice"
    • Mixing org-mode with programming languages
      • org-babel has successfully integrated org-mode with all kinds of languages
      • Has happened within the context of literature programming
        • cf. Literate Programming for the 21st Century (EmacsConf 2024)
      • Traditional programming mixed with org-mode
        • polymode is key to that
  • Several concepts which were introduced like "dynamic blocks everywhere" and "COMEEGA" would probably require other talks
  • Probably my favourite talk of the event
  • Wonderful talk!
  • This presentation gets better and better.
  • going to go checkout the book later as half way thorugh the talk i got term overload
  • Great talk, great software.
  • Thank you for the presentation Mohsen.
  • while this heavy topic is certainly a major critique of capitalism as such, i certainly would not mix in here any sort of religion-related things. hence leveraging "Halaal" for this is quite disturbing.
  • I skipped the whole thing because I suspected it would just annoy me for no other reason than that one term. (Maybe this was excessively prejudicial of me, but seriously, not my religion, I suspect I'd be unwelcome.) (maybe this is an English-specific thing, Do Not Mention Religion, because last time we mentioned it we had centuries of religious wars.)
  • Mohsen's response to the above two bullets. Halaal is a very sensitive and potent word. There is an entire chapter titled: "Introducing Halaal and Haraam into Globish" in the book. In those 10 pages, I clarify that my use of Halaal is philosphical not religious. Unfortunately the equivalent word for halaal does not exist in English. Americanists, should first try to understand what halaal really means.

  • Hard topic, it feels like we are in an era of closing open-source software, eg redhat

  • YouTube comment: Phenomenal thinking. I will be reading the Nature of Polyexistentials

  • YouTube comment: Dude was cooking with this one 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Transcript

Greetings. Salaam. This is Mohsen Banan. I am a software and internet engineer. The title of this presentation is "About Blee". Blee stands for ByStar Libre-Halaal Emacs Environment. In this presentation I want to look at Emacs as a primary ingredient for the usage environment of an autonomy and morality directed digital ecosystem. My focus here is not just Emacs. This is about augmenting Emacs in the context of our own specific digital ecosystem. This presentation is part theoretical and part practical. I spend about half of my time on the theory and the bigger picture. The second half is hands on and Emacs centric. Emacs has long been recognized as the ultimate integration platform, enabling the creation of an unparalleled user environment. Tomohiro is right on the mark when he says: "The reason why Emacs platform is good is that it cooperates with OS, not because it is good by itself." But this recognition has often been in the context of a generic and abstract "OS" So, I am updating MATSUYAMA's observation as: "The reason why Emacs platform is good is that it facilitates creation of specific integrated usage environments like Blee, which cooperate with Debian and BISOS as part of the Libre-Halaal ByStar Digital Ecosystem." Emacs is an especially good choice as the universal core of user environments of a digital ecosystem, because it has an incredibly powerful display engine, and an incredibly powerful Elisp engine, and an incredibly powerful input methods engine, and an incredibly powerful common agents paradigm, and a very rich set of mature and convivial idioms and means for absorption and integration of external software services continuum capabilities. In our model, we first augment Emacs with a set of cohesive elisp capabilities and create Blee -- ByStar Libre-Halaal Emacs Environment. We then further enhance Blee with an integrated framework on top of Debian called BISOS --- ByStar Internet Services Operating System. Blee is inherently intertwined and integrated with BISOS. This combination of the universal BISOS and Blee then forms a foundation for creation of an autonomy directed digital ecosystem that we call ByStar. Over the past two decades, I have been working on creating a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and non-proprietary digital ecosystem. We call it ByStar (By*). ByStar challenges the existing proprietary American digital ecosystem while operating concurrently alongside it. ByStar's primary offerings are tangible autonomy and genuine privacy on a very large scale. By* is about redecentralization of internet application services. The * in ByStar stands for Unix's globing symbol. Signifying that our scope is everything. Blee is a bigger and different vision for Emacs. Let's compare and contrast what I am proposing against common current practices of the Emacs culture. Please permit me to be slightly cynical. Much of what we have been seeing in the Emacs culture and in emacsConf can be characterized as stories of tunnel vision engineers scratching various itches by integrating various capabilities and providing DIY recipes. Emacs and Lisp are so powerful that people have come up with catch phrases like the "Curse of Lisp". The curse is that the power of Lisp breeds individualism. Because you can be so powerful alone, you work longer alone. Because it is easy to spin your own whatever library, many people do. I am suggesting that we should raise the bar. Let's cultivate Emacs in the context of our own digital ecosystem instead. Do more and do more outside of Emacs and recognize that a well integrated smaller Emacs leads to a better usage environment. Broadly speaking, digital ecosystems are viewed as consisting of 4 parts. Ideology, Software, Services and Content. Software, Services and Content are polyexistentials and can be analyzed from 3 different aspects: Functionality, Usage and Manner-of-Existence. By "manner-of-existence" of polyexistentials we mean everything relating to how the polyexistential exists within society. This includes for example, are polyexistentials internally transparent? Societal ideology determines manner-of-existence of Software, Services and Content. And in turn, manner-of-existence of Software, Services and Content impacts society. In the American model, loss of privacy and autonomy are direct consequences of the IPR regime. Based on this characterization, let's consider these three Digital Ecosystems: the Proprietary American Digital Ecosystem, FOSS and ByStar. The 5 big American proprietary tech companies, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon have created 5 competing enclaves as mostly separate and isolated digital ecosystem. In this slide, I am focusing on the first 3 and each of their OSs, their usage environments and their clouds. Let's clearly recognize that the economic model of these proprietary digital ecosystems is "Surveillance Capitalism". Now, let's focus on the right side of this picture. On the non-proprietary side, based on the FOSS model, we have ended up with lots of components. We have Debian as a platform, we have Emacs as an editor-centered usage environment. But on the non-proprietary side we don't have anything that can reasonably be considered a digital ecosystem. I mean, the services aspect is missing. ByStar aspires to be a complete non-proprietary digital ecosystem. We were all born into the belief system of intellectual property rights, making it exceedingly difficult for us to even imagine that this foundational ownership framework could be fundamentally flawed. I am delighted to announce the availability of my recent book, "Nature of Polyexistentials". The full title of my book is: Nature of Polyexistentials Basis for Abolishment of the Western Intellectual Property Rights Regime And Introduction of the Libre-Halaal ByStar Digital Ecosystem. Knowledge, know-how, uses of know-how, ideas, formulas, software and information are inherently non-scarce. They are polyexistentials. Unlike monoexistentials which exist in singular, polyexistentials naturally exist in multiples. What is abundant in nature is being made artificially scarce through man-made ownership rules called copyright and patents. Let me provide a brief overview. This book is divided into five parts, each representing a layer of interest to you and to our societal policymakers. Part I, the philosophical layer delves into the concept of polyexistence. In this part, I introduce, for the very first time, the concepts and terminology of "polyexistentials". The topic of restriction of polyexistentals and the Western IPR is one and the same. Comprehending polyexistence invalidates the Western IPR model. We are living inside of an ownership fallacy. The Western IPR regime is a sin of our times. Part II is the pathology layer. Over the course of the past two centuries, numerous theories have been proposed to justify intellectual property. In this Part, I offer my perspective on the weaknesses inherent in each of these theories. Part III, the ethics layer, focuses on contours of cures. Having dismissed the Western intellectual property rights regime as an erroneous governance model for polyexistentials, I propose the Libre-Halaal model of governance of polyexistentials towards facilitating conviviality of tools. Part IV, the engineering layer, introduces the Libre-Halaal ByStar Digital Ecosystem. as an ethical alternative to the prevailing proprietary American digital ecosystem. Part V, the sociology layer, delves into formulation of Libre-Halaal oriented societal policies. It is evident that the abolition of intellectual property carries significant consequences. In this Part, I present my thoughts on this particular dimension for Eastern societies. For Western societies I confine myself to inside of IPR strategies. You can think of this book as being in two volumes. Our focus is Blee in Volume II. But as our blueprint needs to be interdisciplinary, there are some key concepts of Volume I that I'll briefly discuss here. Volume I deals with the general concept of polyexistence and invalidity of IPR. In Chapter 11, I introduce the very sensitive and potent vocabulary of Halaal and Libre-Halaal. Volume II is backed by software and internet services. The contents of this book belong to all of humanity and verbatim copying of it is unrestricted. If you want to read it, this book is yours. The "Nature of Polyexistentials" book is available both online and in print. This book is available as two editions. The US Edition and the International edition. The US Edition is written with a slightly milder Western unfriendly tone, while the International Edition includes additional original content in Farsi. I consider the International Edition to be the authoritative version. However, many readers in the US and Western countries may prefer the US Edition. I maintain separate Git repositories for each edition on GitHub. US Edition is at bxplpc/120033 and International Edition is at bxplpc/120074 Cloning these repositories will give you access to the book in PDF format (suitable for both A4 and US Letter printing) and in EPUB format. Alternatively, the content can be downloaded directly from your browser without needing to clone the repositories. To ensure broader online availability and stability, I have also published the book on Zenodo, complete with a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). You can download both the A4 and 8.5 x 11 PDFs from there as well. The book is also available in print on Amazon and at most major bookstores in the US and Western regions. The ISBNs for both editions are included in this slide. Additionally, I have published this book in Iran through Jangal Publishers. I did not write this book for profit. My aim is to share my thoughts and encourage readers to engage with my views and ideas. Your feedback is welcome, and I am genuinely interested in hearing your perspectives. In Western markets, I have priced the print edition somewhat above production costs. If you find value in the book and the ByStar project, purchasing a copy will help support my work. Thanks in advance for your support. And here are the same links as a native Reveal slide. If instead of a video, you are viewing this presentation as a Reveal web page, you can just click on the pointers and URLs. The concept of polyexistentials has not appeared in prior discussions of validity of IPR. Once you start thinking in terms of monoexistence and polyexistence, the recognition of illegitimacy of Western IPR becomes very simple. I want to very quickly give you a taste of that. You can of course dig deeper in the book. Existence and possession are aspects of nature. Ownership are man-made rules. All material objects exist in singular and are monoexistentials. For monoexistentials, things are simple. Monoexsitentials, say paper, exists in singular. It naturally has a single possessor. A single owner can be assigned to it which then makes that single possession lawful. Polyexistentials naturally exist in multiples. Much of our world is actually a mixture of monoexistentials and polyexistentials, which we call mixed-existentials. Possession of polyexistentials is naturally many-to-many. Without any conflict, polyexistentials can have many possessors. Polyexistentials are inherently Non-Rivalry. The requirement for ownership to be in harmony with the nature of possession and existence is violated by the Western IPR regime which assigns a single owner to what exists and is possessed in multiples. The end result is creation of Artificial Scarcity. Ramification of ownership mistakes are usually catastrophic. Consider the previous Western and American ownership mistake -- that of American Slavery -- ownership of Africans by Americans and Europeans. See Chapter 7 - "Western Slavery and the Western IPR Regime" of the book for some parallels between these mistakes. This time with the Western IPR ownership mistake all of humanity is in danger. So, how are we to correct this catastrophic mistake? The strategies of Public Licenses and FOSS are not sufficient. hese are minor band-aids. We need to do a lot more. We need to understand what are we going to replace the mistaken Western IPR regime with. My answer is: "Libre-Halaal Governance of Polyexistentials". Much of my book revolves around that. We need to fully reject ownership of polyexistentals and replace it with attribution machinaries towards just rewards. We need to abolish the "Artificial Scarcity" of polyexistentials that the Western IPR regime has created and restore polyexistentals back to their natural state, that of "Non-Rivalrous Public Goods". By now many Westerners and many West-Toxicated are thinking: these are empty slogans that are going no where. And they are right. Copyright and Patents are fully entrenched in the West. But what about the rest of the world, what about the Chinese, the Iranians, Brazilians, Cubans and the rest. The Intellectual Property Rights regime is not universal. There is more to the World than the West. What if the WTO was to be recognized for what it is: the Western Trade Organization? Thus far, I have been discussing the nature of all polyexistentials -- any formula in any form. Next, I want to turn our attention to digitals in general and Software in particular. Software is a very special form of polyexistentials. Software is immediately useful. Software produces tools. Digitals as text, music, video, etc. are pure forms of polyexistentials that are controlled by software. As developers we know well that we can best produce good software through collaboration. In that collaborative model, the software itself performs a collaborative role. Software functions as a vessel for accumulation of our expert component contributions. The Western IPR model cultivates "Artificial Scarcities" and "competition", but software developers instinctly recognized the superiority of the natural collaborative model. Through Public Licenses, us software developers, have done a jujitsu on the IPR model and have created a collaborative framework inside of the copyright model. Based on that, Natural Public Goods have defeated Artificial Scarcity. Our success with software is proof that the entirety of the Western IPR regime is flawed. As a profession, us Software Engineers, need to create a relationship with society. We need to demand for societal rules which establish proper manner-of-existence of software and internet application services. In return, based on that, we should fulfill our guardianship role and make sure that autonomy and privacy are preserved and that practiced digital ecosystems are healthy. To get there we need to come up with the right label that represents the proper manner-of-existence of software. Thus far, two labels have appeared on the scene: Free Software and Open Source. I am saying that both are problematic. Free Software is ill directed. It is based on the model of granting users, freedoms that are irrelevant to most software users. Perhaps Copyleft or Ethical Software could have been better labels. Open Source is a moral compromise. It rejects the requirement for perpetuity of Copyleft. It facilitates convergence of corporate interest and surrogate activities of software developers. Over time, proprietary corporations too have come to recognize the superiority of the collaborative model. These proprietary corporations then derailed the original intent that all software should always remain open-source. With permissive public licenses which permit open-source becoming proprietary, the intent of Free Software has been marginalized and permissive open-source has become the norm. I expand on all of this in Chapter 12, "Digital Non-Proprietary Movements". Instead of Free Software and Open Source, the label that I introduce is: "Libre-Halaal". The Libre-Halaal label is distinct and different from FOSS labels. As an inside-of-IPR strategy, the Libre-Halaal label maps to a single public license --- the Affero GPL (AGPL). In the Libre-Halaal model, it is not up to developers to choose their own licenses. There is only one correct license that conveys the Libre-Halaal manner-of-existence of software. Also, unlike the FOSS labels that dance around the validity of the Western IPR regime, the Libre-Halaal label recognizes the invalidity of the Western IPR regime, calls for abolishment of Western IPR and suggests various outside-of-IPR strategies. See Part V, "Formulation of Societal Policies" for details. Furthermore, unlike FOSS which is just software oriented, the Libre-Halaal label goes beyond software and also applies to internet application services. In many ways, software is yesterday's news. Much of what we are experiencing today is in the form of internet application services. Internet application services provide remote access to execution of software. As such, much of FOSS has become proprietary internet application services as AGPL is rarely used. This is why the Libre-Halaal definitions and labels span software and Internet Application Services. Based on the interdisciplinary stage setting that the "Nature of Polyexistentials" book provided and the ByStar blueprint that we reviewed, we can now focus on Blee. Think of Blee as a layer on top of Emacs and think of BISOS as a layer on top of Debian. Let's bootstrap Raw-BISOS and Raw-Blee. Starting from scratch, get yourself a fresh copy of Debian 12. Then go to https://github.com/bxGenesis/start The README.org file of that github repo is same as Chapter 18, "Engineering Adoption of BISOS and ByStar" of the book. We will next run "raw-bisos.sh", but prior to that let's take a quick look. This bootstrap scripts will do a lot as root on your Fresh-Debian. It is best to first try it on a disposable VM. raw-bisos.sh adds the current debian user to sudoers. Then it installs pipx. And then with pipx it installs from PyPI bisos.provision. bisos.provision includes additional bash scripts that are then executed. Full installation involves setting up various accounts, groups, various directory hierarchies, lots of apt packages and lots of python packages from the bisos namespace. If you are ready, copy and paste this line and run it. You will be prompted for the root password. Then be patient. Full installation can take 15 minutes or so. The logs of this script are also captured in ~/raw-bisos-${dateTag}-log.org What has been installed on your system are Raw-BISOS and Raw-Blee. The universality of Debian let's us build on BISOS and Blee both in the usage environment and the service environment. With Emacs 30 now available on Android and with Termux apt packages infrastructure in place, it will be very viable to port BISOS and Blee to Android. We have not done so yet. We are waiting for Emacs-30 to mature up. This is ByStar's "Mobile Second" strategy. Upon completion of the bootstrapping process, you end up with Raw-BISOS and Raw-Blee. You then need to relogin. At which point you notice that a new account called bystar has been created. "bystar" is the default usage account. Let's login into it. You will see a customized ByStar Gnome Desktop. You will also notice a "Blee Startup" icon. Let's use it and start Blee. Notice that the Emacs splash-screen has been replaced and also note that the splash-screen is in org-mode. All the original Emacs splash-screen info is kept under "About Emacs". Let me enlarge the screen. Now we can live inside of Blee. Notice that the top drop down Emacs menus have been augmented. Everything to the left of the "File" menu, is new. Notice the "Panels" menus. More on these later. Now let me get myself a shell. And run tail /etc/passwd. Notice that a number of new accounts have been created. Notably: bisos, bystar and bpos-delimiter. Let's next cd to /bisos. Everything related to bisos is in here. The rest is as Debian was. Let's take a look at /bisos/blee/env3. All the elisp code for Blee is in here. For now, Blee is layered on top of Doom. Raw-BISOS and Raw-Blee are starting points. They are meant to be customized. Let's next see how that is done. Raw-BISOS and Raw-Blee are foundational layers. They can be augmented in a variety of ways. The basic unit in the ByStar model is the "Autonomous Site". Think of the "Autonomous Site" as the totality of computing and communication capabilities in a modern family home plus the ability of that family to host their own internet application services. Let's walk through how Raw-BISOS and Raw-Blee are used to construct an Autonomous Site. BISOS augmentation model is based on "BISOS Capability Bundles" BCBs. Raw-BISOS can be augmented to become a Virtual Machines Hosting service. From there on we can use reproducible images to implement the infrastructure of sites. Two key site services are the "Site BPOs Gitlab Server" and "Site Registrars". With these in place we can facilitate self-hosting, which in the BISOS model is called Possession Assertable Libre Services (PALS). These topics and these concepts are described in Chapter 17, "Technology of ByStar: BISOS". The concepts of Service Portability, Service Possession Assertion, Autonomous Site and Inner, Outer and Exposed Rims of Autonomous Site are fundamental to ByStar. These are shown in this figure as "Network Abodes". Chapter 17 of the book provides more details. Blee introduces a number of new concepts that augment Emacs. Some of these are intertwined with BISOS and ByStar. But some are not. Here, I provide some examples of these new general concepts. We love Emacs and we love Unix because their design is convivial. By convivial, I am referring to Ivan Illich's concept and terminology of "Tools for Conviviality". It was first published in 1973. It's a must read. A goal of the design of the ByStar Digital Ecosystem is to enlarge aggregated conviviality. Here, let's start by reviewing the idioms and means that have made Emacs and Unix so very convivial and some of the key idioms that have augmented them over the years -- I am showing them as "Linux PlusPlus" and "Emacs PlusPlus". For the most part these two philosophies have not been combined. They were developed and have evolved mostly separately. Think of BISOS idioms as an extension of Linux PlusPlus idioms and think of Blee idioms as an extension of Emacs PlusPlus. Then intertwine BISOS and Blee. This aggregated convivial tools powers ByStar. Let me first explain what I mean by aggregated convivial tools, and then let me give some examples. Here is a key sentence from Illich's, "Tools for Conviviality" 1973 essay: Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. Proprietary manner-of-existence of software makes them industrial. Libre-Halaal manner-of-existence of software is a prerequisite for conviviality. The concept of "Org Dynamic Blocks" is very powerful. But, why should they be primarily used in Org-Mode. I say let's generalize them to "Emacs Dynamic Blocks". Have defaults for org-dblock-start-re in every relevant mode and use them everywhere. Blee does that. In programming languages, Dynamic Blocks can be used as visible macros. Let me give you an example of how I use them. For those of us who live inside of Emacs, enhancing programming with org-mode capabilities is awesome. Incredibly awesome! This can be done in two ways. (1) With Literate Programming and org-babel. and (2) with Traditional/Surrounded Programming and COMEEGA. COMEEGA stands for Collaborative Org-Mode Enhanced Emacs Generalized Authorship. It is just an acronym that I have come up with. Literate Programming and org-babel are well established. There is a related talk in EmacsConf-2024 titled: "Literate Programming for the 21st Century". COMEEGA is the inverse of org-babel. I prefer COMEEGA over org-babel, because I prefer Traditional/Surrounded Programming over Literate Programming. To each his own. This is not about that debate. This is about mixing your programming-mode with org-mode. Much of Blee and BISOS are implemented in COMEEGA. Almost all of our Elisp, Python, Bash and LaTeX work uses COMEEGA. Full and proper use of COMEEGA, requires Polymode. Let's call that Poly-COMEEGA. But Emacs's Polymode is work-in-progress, particularly now with the new tree-sitter. So, in the interim, my usage of COMEEGA has been in the form of Toggle-COMEEGA. Where I manually switch between the programming-mode and org-mode. For me this has proved to be a fine interim solution. In Emacs, the way that we have been dealing with documentation and information retrieval is archaic. Man-pages, TeXInfo, Helpful-Mode and convention based Doc-Strings are old and limited. In BISOS and Blee, we use Blee-Panels for all kinds of documentation. Let me show you some examples. Two fundamental autonomy oriented capabilities that ByStar offers to individuals are: Email and Content Generation and Publication. I'll give a quick overview of these two important capabilities. At the EmacsConf-2022, the title of my presentation was: "Revisiting the anatomy of Emacs mail user agents". In that presentation I gave a brief overview of BISOS-MARMEE (Multi-Account Resident Mail Exchange Environment) and Blee-Gnus. In ByStar, these are typically paired with byname.net autonomous email services. Content Production and Self-Publication is a foundational Blee and BISOS Capability Bundle. Both this presentation and the Nature of Polyexistentials book were developed with Blee LCNT. The original text is always in COMEEGA-LaTeX -- LaTeX augmented by Org-Mode. This is the inverse direction of exporting LaTeX from Org-Mode. For typesetting, the LaTeX syntax is far more powerful than org-mode. And with COMEEGA-LaTeX, you can also benefit from all that org-mode offers. For presentation/screen-casting, the original text is then augmented in layers by images, audio voice-overs, screen captures, videos and captions. The Beamer LaTeX file is then processed by both LaTeX and HeVeA. LaTeX produced slides are then absorbed in html by HeVeA as images. HeVeA is a LaTeX to html translator. HeVeA output is destined to be dispensed by Reveal.js. This video is just a screen capture of the autoplay of reveal file. Viewing this presentation in its original Reveal form is a richer experience. All of this involves a whole lot of integration scripting. In Raw-BISOS these scripts are in file:/bisos/core/lcnt/bin To say that ByStar, BISOS and Blee are big and ambitious is an understatement. And clearly, a small team won't be able to deliver the outlandish blueprint that is outlined in the Nature of Polyexistentials book. We have been at this for over two decades and we feel that now in 2024, it makes sense to involve you. The pointers and instructions for installation and usage of BISOS and Blee that I have provided, produce systems that are minimally functional, but are not clean. At this time don't expect software and services stability and support. Throughout this presentation, I have been emphasizing Service Portability and Possession Assertable Libre Services (PALS). But, a complete digital ecosystem includes various other types of internet application services as well. In this slide PALS are the center and are then augmented by different other type of services. In the ByStar model, equivalent of Facebook style application services are called: "Inter-Autonomous Interactions". With individual oriented PALS in place, using OAuth of PALS, resources can be shared. Based on that we can then structure Inter-Autonomous Interactions while preserving much privacy. Any blueprint for a digital ecosystem must also consider the economic and business dimensions. Chapter 13, "Polyexistential Capitalism", delves into proper economic models for polyexsitentials. The concept of Attribution Based Economics (ABE) which has been discussed in this forum before is included. Chapter 21, "Private Sector Strategies: ByStar Open Business Plan" deals with the business dimension of ByStar. What if in addition to being ethics oriented, the entirety of this book could also be considered a sophisticated business plan? Are there any Venture Capitalists that use Emacs? Here is a set of relatively complete domains and links for digging deeper. These pointers are structured in 4 layers. Ideology, Software, Services and Guardianship. If Blee, BISOS, ByStar, Libre-Halaal and Polyexistentials have piqued your interest and if you wish to participate in making these ideas more widespread and want to further cultivate them, here are some suggestions. The examples of the Blee concepts that I chose were purposeful and targeted. I am hopeful that org-mode developers and emacs developers would recognize that it makes good sense to expand the scope of org dynamic blocks to the entirety of emacs. I am hopeful that the concept of polymode -- a single buffer with regions in different modes and org-mode in particular -- would receive a high priority in our tree-sitter transition. I am hopeful that Blee-COMEEGA can become a generalized form of polymode. I am hopeful that we can build on Blee-Panels and move towards having a richer base for a universal Emacs documentation framework. If participation in any of these is of interest to you, please feel welcome to contact me. Emacs Conferences have proven to be very useful and productive. I look forward to your thoughts, feedback and questions. I want to thank all the EmacsConf Organizers for their great work. And Sacha, Leo and Amin in particular.

Captioner: mohsen

Q&A transcript

Thank you for the talk. I mean, it was a fairly long one and we had two very distinct parts, one which dealt with a philosophy of Libre-Halaal software and then the application, obviously, of BISOS. So thank you so much for the presentation. Before we get started with the question, and for the record, we have about 14 minutes of question time, is there anything that you'd like to add on top of your presentation, something that perhaps would not have fit in the actual presentation format? Sure, but prior to that, félicitations à tous les Français pour le rouvrir de Notre-Dame. Thank you. I'll say thank you because I'm a Francophone and I'm also French, but OK. Yeah, so a few things have come up in various other talks, that kind of EmacsConf 2024 talks, that kind of dovetail with what I was saying. One idea was Peter Prevos's observation of working with Emacs versus working on Emacs. And I'm all for that. So the idea of BLEE is that Others can package things, and we are seeing this in the form of redistributions. There is Doom, there is Spacemacs, and we are seeing the evolution of Emacs into layers. So there is the core Emacs, and there are layers on top of it. And Peter also mentioned about too much choice, this notion of Not always too much choice is the right thing to have. And packaging Emacs with a layer on top of Debian gives you a platform and an environment where the choices are a lot less. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. So that was one idea. The other idea or the other theme throughout the various talks that we saw was this concept of mixing org-mode with programming languages and what Babel has done is two things. One is it has successfully integrated org-mode with all kinds of languages. And that has happened in the context of literate programming. So a talk coming after mine is literate programming for the 21st century, mixing org mode with program languages. And what I am saying is that there is an alternative and that's great, but we should also, consider a traditional programming mixed with org-mode and, polymode is key to that. So those were some of the key concepts that I saw a resonance with as the conference went forward. Yeah, and I think, if my memory serves me right, we have another talk about hyperbole this year, right after this Q&A session. And hyperbole, it's not Org Mode, but I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, Mohsen, you might have seen it from various talks last year, but it also tends to have a similar stance than you, with the fact that text should be embedded in programming languages rather than having Org-Mode implement, I mean, integrate other languages. And I found it funny that we have your talk and this talk which are about the other direction, which I find very resonating as well. Right, right, right. So in terms of other things that did not fit into my talk is that the several concepts that I introduced, namely Dynamic Blocks everywhere and COMEEGA. I'd be happy to expand on those by sharing a screen in due course, whatever is appropriate. Sure, considering the time that we have, we only have about 8 minutes 30 and we already have about four, five questions actually. I suggest we perhaps leave the screen sharing until later if people are interested. I mean this Q&A can last as long as you want. That makes perfect sense. OK, cool. So how about we focus on the question now and starting with the first one.
[00:05:33.280] Q: I'm from Brazil, which edition would you recommend?
You mentioned that there are two editions, one named at Westerners and one for worldwide readers. I'm from Brazil. Which edition would you recommend? It's a Western country, but you didn't make the distinction exclusive for the second edition. So I thought it would be better to ask. Right. So definitely, I would say for everybody who is on this conference, the international edition is the right choice. In this book, I take some aggressive stances against intellectual property and I link that specifically to the American culture. So there are pieces in the book where the typical American audience may be offended. And if your skin is thick enough to deal with what I consider reasonable criticism, then the International Edition is definitely the better choice. Right. So yeah, I believe you also mentioned it. Pretty much exactly the same thing in your talk. So if you need to review, just watch the talk. And I think Mohsen also provides extra information about this. Moving on to the second question. Thank you for this talk.
[00:07:07.080] Q: Thank you for this talk! How does your perspective interface with works such as Yanis Varoufakis' Technofeudalism?
How does your perspective interface with work such as Yanis Varoufakis' Technofeudalism? I haven't read much of that. I think there is a whole lot of global growth and collective understanding towards this notion that the direction we are headed in and by that, I mean American digital ecosystems are dangerous and that we should revisit the entirety of the model and strategy. If the person who asked the question has any additional information, I'll be happy to hear it. Sure. We'll see if the person actually comes back to this. All right. In the meantime, moving on to the next question.
[00:08:21.980] Q: To what extent do you agree that the introduction of proprietary systems in education creates an environment for exploitation while at the same time diluting the learning value of the curriculum?
To what extent do you agree that the introduction of proprietary systems in education creates an environment for exploitation whilst at the same time diluting the learning value of the curriculum? My computing education at school amounted to learning how to use the Microsoft Office suite, i.e. the opposite of lasting open knowledge. Yeah, that's right on the mark. That's right on the mark. So the idea is that teaching and learning should be unrestricted. In the Muslim tradition and in Iranian tradition, we say that passing along the learning is the tax on having learned. So absolutely. I think it makes very little sense for the proprietary Microsoft software to be used as part of education. So the question is right on the mark. Okay, great. Let me just take a note of this. All right, moving on to the next question.
[00:09:40.053] Q: As a specific example of how "ownership is not clean" ...
As a specific example of how ownership is not something clean, look at the Star Trek Picard series. They continuously asked Patrick Stewart to come to do another Star Trek series, but he couldn't because Star Trek changed from what it used to be, at least until they came up with a series that honored what Star Trek used to be. Does this intersect? Let me read this for a moment. Yeah, I am not sure I fully get the point, but. Let me make a point about my criticisms of the FOSS movement in the presentation and in the book. The idea is that we have jumped on the FOSS movement and recognize it as an alternative but we haven't looked deeply enough to see if our own philosophy and movement have problems. The problems that I note is that the FOSS movement does not recognize clearly and explicitly that the entirety of the intellectual property rights regime is flawed. The second piece is that it's only now that we are seeing the FOSS movement is broader than the Western world. The third problem is that the labels of Free Software and Open Source are not necessarily correct. The fourth problem is that we are not paying enough attention to establishing a relationship with society. So there's a whole chapter in the book dedicated to this topic. What I'm not sure about is if I got the point of the question correctly. So again, if the person who asked the question could clarify, I'll be happy to further expand. Okay, considering the time, we only have about one minute to ten seconds until we go. So what we're going to do, as we usually do, Mohsen, is that we're going to move the stream onto the next talk. And if you want to take a little bit of time in this room to answer the question, I'm putting a link to the pad in the BBB chat so you can open it on your end. But as we are still live for 15 more seconds, do you have any last words? Keep up the good work. Those would be my last words, that the Free Software and the Open Source and Emacs are a very valid strategy for inside of IPR resistance. And thank you, Leo and Sacha and the rest of the folks for this wonderful yearly event. Well, thank you so much. And it's always a pleasure to have you. And thank you for your thankings. So we'll be moving to the next talk in 10 seconds. Mohsen, thank you so much. And I'll see you later. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. All right. We are off air. So thank you so much, Mohsen. I'll need to get moving to get ready for the next talk. So again, feel free to take the time you need to answer the questions. I'm going to stop sharing my screen because I need to leave. But take all the time you need. And when you're finished, you can just leave the room. OK. All right, bye-bye. Thank you. Great. I see one more person in the room. Hi, John. I was looking at the questions. To see if there is more that I can add. So, through the regard of societal impacts on ethical, philosophical and wider FOSS community. I'm involved in politics in my country, my party is very sympathetic to FOSS ideas and I have public...
[00:15:05.278] Q: Do you have any recommended reading materials designed for such an audience?
Do you have any recommendation to reading materials designed for such an audience? Um, yeah, this is with regard to the last question that's on the etherpad at this moment. The idea is that my own book would be an excellent resource. I'd say the bibliography in the book contains various other pointers that could be quite useful. I'm reading again. Yeah. Very good. If there are no other questions, I think I'm going to consider this a day and move on. Thank you.

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