Episode 875 transcript

FLOSS-875

Jonathan: This week we're talking with Neriman Gelva about Pewter. That is the operating system that runs literally in your browser. Maybe we're stretching the definition of operating system there just a little bit, but still. This is Floss Weekly, episode 875, recorded Tuesday, July the 14th. JavaScript as a systems language.

It's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we are talking about Pewter. That is the operating system, the desktop that lives on the cloud, on the internet, in JavaScript. I have questions about how this works. It's something like that.

Can you locally host it? I think so, but I don't know for sure. I know that it's open source. That's why we have them on the show. And the guy behind it, the man himself, is Neriman Jelva. I met him at the Ubuntu Summit this year, and he did a couple of talks there. Actually, they had him do a lightning talk and a full-length talk all about the what you do when your open source project is a runaway hit.

And I know a lot of people would say, "Oh, I wish I had that problem." It's actually a big deal. It's a tiring problem. It's a, there, there are things to deal with that maybe you don't think about. But Neriman is a programmer. He is an entrepreneur, and he's been doing this sort of stuff for about 30 years, so he knows what's going on and how it all works.

But I think Pewter is a new ballgame even for him. It exploded in popularity. We even covered it. We talked about it over on the Untitled Linux Show as well as this cool thing that you may wanna check out. A lot of people thought it was cool. There's about 42,000 GitHub stars. I don't think he paid for any of those.

390 people have contributed. They've got over 400,000 downloads. And apparently, it's in 100,000 different web applications, which sort of talks to the the actual use case for Pewter. I could go on. I've played with it a little bit, but we do have Neriman here. And let's go ahead and bring him on, and we'll get the answers from him to all of these questions.

So welcome to the show, sir. I'm so glad to have you here.

Nariman: Thank you so much. Very excited to be here.

Jonathan: Yeah, we were talking beforehand about... we were comparing notes about our travel schedule, and I was telling him about things that I've got coming up. But we met at the Ubuntu Summit in London. Are you based out of out of London?

I'm in the middle of nowhere in the United States. I'm in southwest Oklahoma. I'm in flyover country. I wave at all the planes going by 'cause I know they got my buddies on them. Where are you based out of?

Nariman: I'm in Vancouver, BC, Canada right now.

Jonathan: Ah, our northern brethren, the Canadians.

Nariman: Yes. Yes.

And, but our team is from all over the place, basically. We have a couple people in the US. We have some people in Europe, Asia. Pretty much remote, like a true open source project. Even though we're a company, but...

Jonathan: Hey it's allowed to be both. Open source developers- Yes ... need to pay rent and eat too it's okay to make money on these things.

Okay, so let's start from the beginning. You- you've got a team now. You've got a business. You've got an open source project. That's not where any of this started, though. What was the very beginning? At what point did you go- A desktop on the internet would be cool.

How did that come about?

Nariman: Yeah, sure. So if you remember maybe you never had to pay attention to this part of the internet, but I would say between 10 and five years ago there was this period of time where everybody was proclaiming that the browser is the next operating system. It was like something people would say, and I really believe that because I remember the first days of the web.

That's when I started writing my first line of code, and then, So I basically grew up with the web, and I saw the progression over time. So I really do believe that the browser is the next operating system, depending on how you define the operating system. So n- obviously not a Linux. That's not what we're talking about.

Basically m- more about the user space. That's the discussion. We can talk about this more later on. But the real thing a- around this, the real thought around this was always that, hey, this is like... The browser is like the v- a virtual machine, that you can probably run any application in it.

And more and more applications were moving to the web. But nobody really cracked the general purpose environment where you can just have any type of application, have an IPC, a desktop environment, and those kind of things. It's been tried many times before.

In fact, I think the first try goes back to the late '90s.

Imagine those browsers. Somebody tried to build a desktop environment. I think it m- it may have been literally called WebOS or something like that. So this has been tried many times in the past, where you have this operating system-looking or a desktop environment in the browser connected to the cloud.

So there's been many attempts before, and I really wanted to take a stab at this, and that's why I was always passionate about it. And around five years ago peak COVID time, I was I was pretty disillusioned with building business sort of applications and that kind of industry, that kind of subsector of of the software industry.

So I was just visiting my sister, and then I was on vacation, and then I just decided to do this. I was like, "I'm going to go after this." So started out as a hobby project, and then it took off later on. But the gist of it is people always wanted to do this. There's been many attempts at it, and then I think a lot of things came together a few years ago that made it actually possible.

Jonathan: B- I jumped ahead by a question, and you answered the one that we need to ask. But let's make sure that we've gone over it. What is Pewter? What's the... what's the... is there a problem that it solves, or is it just a... s- start with this.

Tell, tell us what exactly it is. What would you describe it as, someone that doesn't know, that's never touched it?

Nariman: Yeah. So I would say Pewter is what we call the open source internet computer or internet operating system. If you go to Pewter... let's put the open source stuff aside for one second just- Sure

just to explain how this thing works. If you go to pewter.com and create an account, you're basically given a very small cloud computer or a computer in the cloud- ... that you can use personally. Now- You might think, "Oh, we're giving you a server, or we're giving you a container." It's none of that.

It's something that we built from scratch. It's a distributed file system with authentication database, everything attached to it. Anyway, you get this virtual computer, a cloud computer in the cloud that you can use for basically any purpose. You can put files in it. You can run applications on it. A lot of people use it to just r- use our office softwares.

Just like a regular computer, it has very general purpose applications. Now, why would you want something like this? That, that goes back to the fact that, hey, operating systems in general I'm not talking about the kernel, but the user side of things, haven't really evolved in a very long time.

We've been always device-bound, and anything with the cloud was always tacked onto the operating system. For example, operating systems don't support a cloud file system. It's always been, hey, I do something on my computer, and then it sync to the cloud. Or I'm using some website that does this for me.

Or authentication is never universal. Maybe with Apple you have a little bit of that, with Google, but it's pretty fragment fragmented. So when you go into different applications, it's usually I create an account with this app, with that app. So the whole being sorry for the buzzwords, but cloud native or AI native thing-

it, it never it doesn't really happen with the with the regular dominant operating systems. And so Pewter is an attempt at bringing that sort of modern paradigm to the basically desktop environment or Chrome-like interface, Chromebook-like interface. Now I could go on and talk about the use cases and what p- people are using it, but if you have any questions, I can answer those before.

Jonathan: We will get into the use cases. I've, I've- Yeah ... gotta ask, though, and this maybe will lead on to that well. I'm going to intentionally undersell Pewter so that you can tell me where I'm wrong. It's just a, it's just a website that writes some JavaScript that looks like a desktop. That should be easy.

Why did it take off?

Nariman: That, that's a good question. So in the beginning, I think in the very beginning, Let's say four years ago when I put it on Reddit and it really blew up. I think at the time it was mostly because people were just shocked by the amount of effort h- that had gone into it, and the level of detail that was worked on.

So ba- and back then, this is before AI. So I would say maybe five years ago.

Jonathan: It's

Nariman: in the dark times. But back then it was pretty difficult, right? It was really difficult to code like that. I had to sit down and manually code every single interaction. It was pretty difficult.

So I think the very first time I put it out, people were just shocked by this, and then over time an application ecosystem formed around it. So we add applications. It started with very simple applications, like a Notepad application, and then a very simple camera application, and then all these APIs formed around it to make these applications better.

So people started slowly, gradually using it as f- for file storage. For a file storage where you can edit text files. Believe it or not with something like a Dropbox or a Google Drive, you still can't edit plain text. So if you put the plain text in one of these services, you still can't edit it.

You have to download it or install their local applications to do that. Yeah. So it started fill these small niches where you put your files there, and the interface is more advanced than a Dropbox or a Google Drive. You can double-click. You're familiar with this paradigm. I double-click on a text file, I can edit it, and then a photo editor was added so you could edit photos.

But then the reason a few years ago it really took off was that we managed to port Visual Studio Code to Pewter. So we were- Interesting. Yeah ... basically the first yeah, the first company or project that managed to port it completely to the web and hook it up to the cloud. Now that's, that was a big hit, and it happened completely organically.

But then again about a year ago coding basically died and nobody uses their code editor anymore. So that, that one- I- ... that one went down, but by the-

Jonathan: I resent that.

Nariman: You tell me, I've been coding since I was seven, so I... my identity is really tied to it.

Jonathan: Yeah. Interesting.

Nariman: Yeah.

So it, it has started with basically a shock value sort of a thing- ... and then it, an ecosystem s- formed around it with applications and then with features. So now you can do a huge number of things with Pewter. It is really full of features. You can drop a directory on the desktop, you can right-click it and publish it as a website.

It has zipping, compression. You basically get a lot of the things you get with a regular desktop, but it's happening in the cloud. So going from device to device, it's always there. Nothing changes. Your environment doesn't change. You can go from your- Laptop to your phone to your TV to your Tesla fridge.

You, you name it. If you have a browser, you can use it basically.

Jonathan: Yeah. So there's a ... To write all these apps, is there like an API that, that sort of resembles like a... Is it almost like a C standard lib or a, POSIX layer that you guys have written for JavaScript?

Nariman: Yes and no. I, we were definitely inspired by it, but I think the JavaScript ecosystem in general, we had to move more towards maybe a Node.js-like API, but the concept is pretty much the same.

We couldn't make it POSIX compliant. Maybe we'll end up doing it at some point. I did try it a few years ago, but it didn't really work out. We were almost there, but w- it didn't really work out. Now, we have our own basically standard, but it's close to typical APIs from Node.js or those kind of environments, more higher level.

Jonathan: Yeah. So th- there's a, there's an obvious thought that I've had, and probably other people have asked you this too. But something that's really becoming popular and that people are doing a lot with is WebAssembly. And you've got some crazy things like taking existing apps and compiling them to WebAssembly.

And so I'm, I've gotta ask, I'm so curious, has there been any work done with this in Pewter? Can I take an existing C++ app, compile it to WebAssembly, and somehow bootstrap that into this on the internet desktop interface?

Nariman: Funny you ask, because we're doing a lot around that right now. In fact, tomorrow we're dropping a bomb when it comes to that.

We're releasing a major port, a really major application. I don't wanna name it, but everybody knows it. We ported it to the web for the first time. Nice. And I think... And then we have two more, and they're progressively crazier. So yes and no again. The layer is not there yet, but we're working on it, and we have the proof of concept coming out.

The first demo is coming out tomorrow. So very timely question actually. Nice.

Jonathan: Yeah, so I was thinking about this at the Ubuntu Summit, and it's a potential end game of this, you could see there's several different ways this could go, but in the end, you could see Pewter being, like, almost a target that you could use CMake to compile something to.

If you have a sort of a standard interface that would be, would map onto POSIX. You may not be POSIX compliant per se, but you can map it onto POSIX. And you could imagine just being able to write a prog- a cross-platform program, and one of the targets be Pewter via WebAssembly.

And that's really interesting to think about.

Nariman: Yes. Yes, for sure. And I think we're making incredible progress towards that. And this demo coming out tomorrow is a really great proof of concept. There, there's work to be done because there's a lot of file system calls and those sort of things- that we have to properly port and create a layer for. But what we're definitely making huge progress. Again, I think I keep, I I don't really bringing this up all the time, but I think AI is helping a lot with that as well. For sure. Otherwise, we would've needed s- we have a lot of contributors, but we would've needed way more than that to, to achieve some of this stuff.

Jonathan: Yeah. So what what does the contributor base look like? There's hundreds, thousands of people working on it? What... How does that map?

Nariman: No. No. We're at 390 right now, and there are ups and downs. So the way we typically do open source contributions, attract open source contributions, is that we go through cycles- where we create a lot of issues, we ask the community to help us out, and that's when things pick up, and then we have a merge cycle where we go through all of these and merge them back in and close all the issues. So right now we're not in one of those cycles, but when it happens we get a ton of contributions.

I think by the end of this month we're gonna start another cycle like that. It's an odd, ... I would say it's an odd arrangement the way we do it, where we go, we call for contributions, and we create a lot of issues and we ask people to help out. But you didn't ask this question, but it's an answer to the burnout question, so that you w- you wanna manage your resources, especially you have limited resources, you wanna have focused times where you're only focused on the open source.

Of course, we get contributions over time. We get contributions from some companies that are using Pewter, so there's ongoing things like that as well. But the bulk of contributions happen in cycles rather than consistently.

Jonathan: Managed sprints with the community.

Nariman: Yes.

Yeah. I would call it that. That's a better way to call it actually.

Jonathan: Yeah. Interesting. I'm looking at the App Store now and there's just a bunch. There's just a bunch of crazy stuff on here. There's games, productivity, lots of AI stuff of course, but has anybody ported has anybody ported Doom yet?

Nariman: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That, that, that was a thing. That was a thing back in the day. Yeah? Ev- everybody was obsessed with bringing Doom to it. But then again, Doom has been ported to the web, and Pewter is basically a web environment, so you don't have to do much to bring Doom to Pewter.

Jonathan: Yeah, that's fair.

That's fair. I remember you said that apparently there's been some interest in Pewter from the crypto community. Not the cryptography community, but the cryptocurrency guys.

Nariman: Yes. So I think there is some parallels between Pewter and the ideas of a decentralized ownership and decentralized computing.

So it's been it's being used by two crypto startups, and they've raised a bunch of money, and they're working... They basically forked Pewter, and they're building their own version of it, which is pretty awesome to see. So some of it comes back upstream obviously. And yeah, so they're building...

One, one project which is interesting is that they're building a decentralized app store on top of Pewter. And so with NFTs, every time somebody clicks on an app or opens a file the creator of that app or file is supposed to get paid. I think it's a pretty cool idea.

Jonathan: Interesting. Yeah. How does that work with the license?

Isn't Pewter AGPL?

Nariman: Yeah. It should be fine. As long as you open source it.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Nariman: Oh,

Jonathan: that's true.

Nariman: It should be fine.

Jonathan: Yeah. A- AGPL is kryptonite to a lot of big companies like Google and Amazon. They're like-

Nariman: Isn't that the point?

Jonathan: I just find it interesting this startup, a crypto startup can could use AGPL and play nicely with it.

I thought it would have been kryptonite to them too.

Nariman: Yeah. But I really like it. I remember reading this article by Torvalds a long time ago, and he was saying GPL is the reason Linux is this big. I think he's being too humble, but it, it does make sense. It makes a lot of sense, right?

We're going to give you a huge amount of resources we've put into R&D and IP creation. We're gonna give it to you. You can do whatever you want. Just- ... if you change it, just contribute it back and everybody wins. That's basically the idea. But AGPL as everybody probably knows, the audience being open source AGPL is basically the GPL of the cloud world, so that, the loopholes around cloud are basically closed up.

Jonathan: Yeah, the GPL, if the code runs on somebody else's computer, you don't get any rights to it. The AGPL- Yeah ... basically says you still get rights to it, even if you use it on somebody else's computer.

Nariman: Yeah.

Jonathan: Yeah, it's, Now, does that mean that all of the apps have to be AGPL as well?

Nariman: No. The SDK is Apache.

Jonathan: Okay.

Nariman: And the linking happens within an iframe, so it's not linked directly to our environment. No, you're safe. Your app is yours.

Jonathan: You've done your homework. You understand how that works.

Nariman: We have a, we have an incredible lawyer by the name of Heather Meeker, who's done all these licenses.

She's very famous. She has written so many books about open source. In fact, she's the reason, she's the main reason I open source. She convinced me. So she's done she's done the open- the open core licenses for MongoDB, Elastic, if I'm not mistaken, all these big names. So she's incredible with this.

And she guided us.

Jonathan: Yeah. What so that was something I was gonna ask you about. When you first wrote this, it was all closed source, and you got talked into making it open source. I'm curious how that went, and also how it's going. What do you think of that decision now?

Nariman: So ever since I put Pewter out, I would say one of the top three requests from the community was to open source it.

So I was bombarded by it, comments, emails, DMs. Every- everybody just wanted this open source. I didn't, I- it wasn't a huge priority for me at the time in the beginning And because we ended up be- becoming a funded startup, there was also considerations around, hey, should we open source this as a business?

And so I wanted to, even though, look, for many years I've been a programmer, ba- I basically grew up writing code, I still needed a proper, really logical business argument for it. I had to understand it really well- ... before open sourcing it. 'Cause I'd never done an open source company before, where the core product is literally open source, the entire thing.

Yeah. So I wanted to understand this really well before I do it. I met, I ended up randomly meeting through friends, the founder of you might m- you may have heard of them, n8n the workflow automation software. So they are open core, but they're massive contributor base base.

If you care about GitHub stars, I think they're around 200,000 now. So they're a really huge project. Yeah. Super close to the community, really doing it right. So the founder actually told me, "This is perfect for open sourcing." He gave me a number of reasons, and then he introduced me to the person I just named, Heather Meeker, whose whose entire career has been focused on open source.

And then she's the one that gave me a bunch of really specific reasons why Pure should be open source. So for example, one argument is that, first of all, open source doesn't work for everything. For example, open source games, they're not a really huge thing, right? There are a number of open source games, but you never heard of a open source game that has, I don't know, 100 million users or something like that.

Players. So some type of software is not really good for open source, even though I think everything should be open source. It's pretty awesome. But from a business perspective. But then again open source does really well with infrastructure or hyperhorizontal platforms, namely databases, programming languages, compilers- and and the best stuff of all, operating systems. You want that hyperhorizontal platform to be open source so that people can work easily on the long tail of applications of it. As an example- ... we would've never thought somebody would take Pure and extend it for crypto. These ideas wouldn't, would never come to us.

So they took it, and they're improving Pure just because they have another type of use case for it. There's another really good reason for it. So in the beginning when we put Pure out and it went viral a couple of times, one of the biggest questions people had was around privacy. They're like- "oh, you're harvesting the data. You're trying to resell it." Because it was an open source and it was free, just, I just put it out. And because of the architecture, it was super cheap to run. So everybody was like, "What is this? If this is, if these are VMs or containers, how can he afford it if he's not selling the data," right?

So it's, it makes sense. Even though I spent so much money on creating this incredible privacy policy, nobody cared. They were all suspicious. And then I remember Heather told me that the, your community is mostly developers, and you're basically front-loading the cost of building trust and branding with developers by releasing your IP to the world.

So overnight, you're exchanging that with brand equity- ... and trust with developers. And she was right. The moment we open source it, when we open sourced it two years ago, never again did anyone ask me about privacy. It was the number one question before that, and the moment it became open source, nobody really worried about it.

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely.

Nariman: So there were a couple other reasons, but I think these were really solid reasons. And there, there are some practical questions about how to open source. For example, you want to use common open source licenses. AGPL, MIT, BSD what have you. You don't wanna go out and create a custom license.

You gotta be very brave to do that. The reason being people just don't know it, and then you add this thing called understanding tax to it, where now you have to understand what the license is. If it's a company, the lawyers are typically familiar with AGPL, GPL- ... all these famous ones. But then now you have a weird license that nobody understands, and everything just- Right

screeches to a halt.

Jonathan: If you're AGPL or GPL, there are literal cheat sheets where you just go, "Can I do this thing that I wanna do?" And it goes... Yes.

Nariman: Yeah. True. True.

Jonathan: Absolutely. So there's a- y- you were talking about trust a little bit, and I was gonna hammer on this, because that's the- that's the first thing that comes to my mind, is, somebody has a product, especially if it's free, and it's just out there and it does great things. I'm like, "Man, why would I trust this?" There's the old adage, right? It goes, "If something is free, you are the product."

Nariman: Yeah.

Jonathan: And that makes a lot of sen- especially the AI world that we live in now, that's also true, because usually if the thing is free, that means that your data that's going into it is being used to train an AI somewhere.

And people might say, "Oh that's overly cynical." It- You may have seen Pokemon Go, right? Everybody was playing a few years ago, this was before COVID. I'm old enough to remember the Pokemon Go craze. Turns out that data has been used now to train AI of all those players' data. Oh, I didn't know anything.

Nariman: Oh,

Jonathan: wow. Yes. Yes. I forget- I never

Nariman: played it, so

Jonathan: I forget the exact details, but yeah, Poke- the Pokemon Go data has now been recaptured and where they had all that, the data downloaded, and it it's being used to, for training for AI now.

Nariman: Oh,

Jonathan: wow. Again the product was free, therefore the data that you generate is the product.

And it's not that can't be a thing with open source. Obviously, there are companies that use data that... And sometimes that's not necessarily a problem, just so long as, everybody's upfront with it and you understand what's going on. But even just, would I be willing to put anything at all confidential into Pewter?

If I can't see the source and I don't know what it's doing, then no, not at all. So I, I think just from the trustworthiness perspective open sourcing it was really the only option. I just, I can't see, I can't see the thing having a life outside of being open source just because of that.

Nariman: You're right. You're right. And this answers the second part of your previous question- ... how is it going now after open sourcing? I would say it was an incredible decision. It, it couldn't be better than that. I think open sourcing Pewter was the exact right decision. I sh- I just should have done it earlier.

So no I don't regret it even a bit. And I think it's given me so much personally and as a business. It's just Seriously, the best decision in the life of Puter, in the history of Puter.

Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. So I've... i'm real curious about a few things related to this. Do, does Puter have end-to-end encryption?

Can... And again I'll be slightly cynical here. I'm doing it on purpose- Yeah ... since you can make the point. Can you look at my files if you want to?

Nariman: Y- your files are encrypted at rest on S3. Okay. And if you really care about the privacy part, the open source Puter works really well, so you can put it on your own server and you can do that.

But as much security and privacy as we get from AWS, and I think as an open source project and being a startup, we are pretty... I look at other projects and a lot of projects obviously have resource issues. You don't have enough volunteers and everything. But I think we- we've been pretty diligent when it comes to privacy and security.

We have this really active bug bounty. We do, for example, buckets in different regions. We support this kind of stuff that is pretty much enterprise level, but we support it as an open source project. So we've gone out of our way to be privacy friendly. Now, end-to-end encryption, the way where your files are encrypted in the browser, we still don't support that, and it's mostly because we're not too good at it.

We still have to figure out how to do it properly, but I think we're not too far from that. And our business model has nothing to do with people's data. That's one thing. So it's not oh, we're gonna sell ads to them based on their files or anything like that. So it's only in our interest to actually get deeper and deeper into this- Yeah

because it's good for businesses and enterprise.

Jonathan: Yeah. What is the business model?

Nariman: Yeah, the business model is actually pretty simple. It's subscription based on the amount of resources that you have. So when you go create an account, you get a few megabytes of free storage, some AI credits.

A lot... What we do, aside from AI and storage, we provide a lot of services under one API. There's a database there's hosting. There's, again, the AI and storage. So there's a lot happening. We have serverless workers, which is compute in the cloud. We have all of this as a simple API, and obviously if you consume, if you use a lot of apps, you're gonna keep consuming these resources, and at some point you'll, you're gonna end up upgrading.

Jonathan: You're gonna grow out of the free tier.

Nariman: Yes. So it has nothing to do with somebody analyzing somebody else's data to monetize this. It's none of that. It's basically pure cloud computing infrastructure for the regular user. Yeah. So it really does make sense for us to get deeper and deeper into privacy, security, and those type of things.

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. Do you see a, Do you see a future where it might be, like, really useful for enterprise? Are you guys gonna have a, Oh, I for- I forget the terminology. There there's several different accreditations that you can get to where, you can use it with US government stuff and do you see that sort of thing in the future?

Nariman: Oh, for sure, yes. Yes. And I think we're very well-positioned to do that because maybe out of luck in the very early days, I designed the architecture that is basically sharded to a to certain regions, meaning that even if you use pewter.com, which is the hosted version- ... you can, in theory, have all your data housed in a specific location.

So that's really perfect, and it was baked into the architecture from five years ago- I see ... and it just grew with it. And that was by luck because I just saw the API and in the early days it was only S3. I saw the API that you can set the region. I'm like I'm gonna add this to our API."

So that's basically what I did, and everything formed around it. So now that gives us so much advantage because this entire architecture and all these hundreds of thousands of lines of code has formed around that architecture that architecture choice. So we are incredibly well-positioned from that perspective.

Also, being open source and having feature parity between o- the open source and the closed source version, proprietary version, the hosted version, all of these, and the fact that everything on Pewter is scoped to the user rather than being multi-tenant, that's also really incredible for the enterprise.

It basically makes it enterprise ready right off the bat- ... from a technical perspective, but we still have to go get those certifications. I get that.

Jonathan: Yeah. But that is something you guys are thinking about NIST certification and all that?

Nariman: Yes.

Jonathan: I s- definitely some potential there.

Another hat that I wear, I've had to start thinking about these things, and some of that is a challenge to get right 'cause you've got to certify the entire desktop, the whole computer you're working on, and so- Yeah ... it seems like it could be a really interesting piece of the puzzle for businesses that need it, that are required to have it.

Yeah.

Nariman: Yeah. And I think in general, in the long term, it is, just from a business perspective, it might be a moat. I think some of these certifications actually enforce some good practice, so it's not just check- I see that-

Jonathan: Some of them enforce some bad practice too.

Nariman: Yes. True.

Jonathan: Make it opt-in please.

NIST certified you've got to use five-year-old encryption. You can't use the newest stuff, and there's-

Nariman: Yes.

Jonathan: There's some nasty stuff in there too. Oh, anyway so all of that is... Let's see. I asked you about the the WebAssembly, and you said you've got a f- you've got a fun announcement coming tomorrow.

Hopefully, we can get that in the show notes, and people can go and check that out. It's pretty obvious why you used JavaScript, right? There wasn't a whole lot of other option outside of JavaScript. But you opted to use jQuery, and I'm curious about that. I have... So far I've managed to resist, and I've not written anything in jQuery.

I don't know why I am stubborn and have chosen this hill to die on, but so far I have. Nothing particularly against it. I just, for whatever reason, it's no, I don't want to use jQuery in any of my stuff." What led to that decision to, to use it?

Nariman: Yeah. So with the performance requirements of the desktop environment, we couldn't really use frameworks, front-end frameworks.

So we had... Basically our choice was vanilla JavaScript meaning no li- no, no frameworks. And vanilla JavaScript is pretty nice. It's come a long way, it's... a long way. But I would say- It's still pretty difficult to work with vanilla Java scale- JavaScript at scale. So jQuery this library that was released, I think, in 2008, and it was built- That's a while ago

for a completely different... a lot of stuff that jQuery did in the early days made it into the JavaScript, ... standard. Yeah. So we use jQuery as basically a helper library rather than a state management sort of a framework. But then again this sort of became a meme and I just ran with it.

I'm like, "Okay, people make fun of it, but it gets so much attention." And some people actually defend it because it was such a wild choice building something this complicated in jQuery. But looking at other major very front-end heavy applications like OnlyOffice or Photopea, and I think even Google Docs they're- they don't really use any frameworks.

They might use frameworks around the around the core for some of the basic UI stuff- Yeah ... but none of the major rendering or anything like that is happening using frameworks. It just, it's not performant enough for these purposes. So I use jQuery, and it- it's been incredible. We got really good feedback around the front-end code because it's easy to understand.

Anyone who has any JavaScript experience can probably easily understand it, and you don't have to be tied to a certain framework to just read the code. So it did work out really well. And the desktop environment is very very stable, super stable. It never basically crashes. And it doesn't have performance issues.

So far, we haven't heard complaints about it. It took many years to get here- ... but I think it was a right choice. But then again, something that has to be clarified, jQuery is a helper library that helps with with some of the stuff that we do with vanilla JavaScript. It's not, we're not managing the state using jQuery.

That's not... We- we're managing the state using DOM, which is another crazy thing we do. But but jQuery is not, oh, jQuery versus React. It's not like that.

Jonathan: Yeah. Interesting. You guys are using it more just to like backwards compatibility and to make sure things act the same on Firefox versus Chrome, that sort of thing, right?

Nariman: That, that was the initial reason jQuery was made. To make make the code work consistently across different brow- browsers, because they weren't adhering to the standards perfectly- ... back in the day. But we use it because of SelectorsAPI. But that's not a problem anymore,

Jonathan: right?

Nariman: Yeah. You tell me. Have you written code for Safari?

Jonathan: They still make Safari?

Nariman: Oh my God. We have to. And- it's a, it's an incredible browser, but there is the stuff where- Yeah ... all of a sudden something breaks. And you go dig in, oh, it's not it's not... They haven't implemented the certain standards or whatever.

Especially with the stuff that we push some of the really cutting edge that our team does, the ones that we are actually gonna start announcing, we do hit the wall pretty quickly with Safari a lot of times.

Jonathan: Yeah. No, I'm not surprised. That makes sense. Yeah. I say that tongue in cheek, but Safari's dropped in popularity a lot.

And then of course, if you're running iOS, your browser is Safari- Yeah ... whether you like it or not. Yes. I'm curious, have you tried any of the up and coming alternative browsers like Ladybird or what's the other one? Servo, I think is the other one.

Nariman: Well, Ladybird I love Ladybird. I've been a sponsor for a very long time.

Oh, very nice. Cool. I think it's an incredible project. I've talked to Andreas.

Jonathan: Oh,

Nariman: he's great. Yeah. And I once o- one of their team members used to work for Pewter as well.

Jonathan: Okay.

Nariman: So yes I do I do love them, and I think it's a great idea. The core of it is that Ladybird, I think could be the Linux of browsers, a really completely proper- open source license core that doesn't have any commercial interest. It's not tied to a certain company. And it's not corrupted. I love it. I love it, and I think it has incredible potential because if... Going back to what I said half an hour ago, if you go back to the idea that the browser is the new OS with some footnotes- Ladybird is very well positioned to be the kernel of that, basically. And in- incredible project.

Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. Super cool.

Nariman: But does it work? We did port it to Wasm. It's a browser. It doesn't get more complicated than that. I think it's one of the most complicated pieces of software you can ever build.

We did port it to Wasm just for fun a couple weeks ago, so you could run Ladybird in a browser. I mean- Oh ... just for fun, obviously. Not a lot of utility value, but we just did it for fun.

Jonathan: That does get back to that thought, though, about WebAssembly as the new a new target to be able to compile anything to.

I think that's a really intriguing idea. And- Yeah ... boy, I hope that can become a thing. There are so many things that would be really fascinating to be able to just run them inside of a browser instead of on the desktop. B- but does Pewter work inside Ladybird?

Nariman: Yes.

Really? To some degree. Yes. Surprisingly, yeah. Yes,

Jonathan: asterisk.

Nariman: We, we haven't tried it recently, but I remember Andreas actually did create a video about it. A lot of the things loaded, and I'm really surprised because we're doing some really crazy performance intensive stuff behind the scenes.

And this was, I think, over a year ago, so I'm pretty sure it's way better now, way better. Yeah, I'm

Jonathan: sure. The way Ladybird development works is one of the developers goes, "Hey, this website would be really cool to support." And then they go and they try to load it up in Ladybird, and they see all the things that are broken, and they'll just sort of- step down through the list of what they need to do to make that particular website work. And that's how the development works over on Ladybird right now. Yeah. And if you've got some people there that are interested in making Pewter work, then, yeah, sure. I'm sure they're working on the things that you need to bring it up.

That's pretty intriguing that it works there on yet the, yet another browser. So is there better support for Pewter on Ladybird than there is on Safari?

Nariman: No. No. Okay. I haven't been able to corrupt them. No.

My sponsorship is not big enough to sway the interests of developers.

Jonathan: Yeah. That's funny. That's funny. I- so interesting interesting segue here, talking about being corrupted. You've taken some venture capital money, right? How does that, how

Nariman: does that work? Oh, boy. That's corruption now?

Yes. We have. We've done we've done, I would say, two rounds of financing- Okay ... institutional investors.

And yeah we were lucky to find investors that are super aligned with open source. They get it, they understand it. Open source com- it's called commercial open source software. So that's when you take an open source project and you have a commercial arm, it's called COSS or a commercial open source software.

I think the understanding of it has been commoditized at this point. Investors get it. They understand it. They know how it works. They know what it means to be a commercial open source project. I think the success successes of the past the more recent ones, like MongoDB, Elastic- these sort of infrastructure offerings that became huge that really pushed investors to take open source more seriously. But historically-

...

Nariman: I think open source was undervalued until we had these giant unicorns come out of it. So at this point, people just get it. A lot of VCs, they they are tracking every metric of repositories.

They have indexes. They have they have software that tracks it to see how well they're doing and reach out to them. So it's become a very competitive s- space. So back in the day, I think it would've counted as semi corruption, but now it's just

Jonathan: How is that process going though working with your in- your investors?

Is it still going along pretty well? You guys are ma- making them happy and they're making you happy?

Nariman: Yes. Yes. I think when it comes to open source, we w- again, we were just incredibly lucky to have investors that just get it.

So being open source, I don't even remember being open source was a question at all in any maybe issue that we had with techno- whatever is happening on a day-to-day basis, it's never "Oh, maybe you shouldn't have open source."

Like- ... not even once has that come up as far as I remember. So it's never about being open source is just the bedrock of everything we're doing, so we don't even go back to it, "Oh should we change the license or anything like that?" Yeah. No.

Jonathan: Yeah. You've done quite a bit recently with with AI tooling, right?

A bunch of the apps now have AI. You even mentioned that when someone signs up, they get some free AI credits to use.

Nariman: Yep.

Jonathan: What's been the what's been the special sauce that makes that work? Why is that so interesting inside of Pure?

Nariman: Yeah. So if you go to our developer site the about s- SDK and everything, developer.pure.com or the API documentation, docs.pure.com we've explained this using illustrations and everything, but early 2025, we saw a surge in application.

So first of all, when we open source in March 2024 application development really surged on Pure. We had issues at attracting developers, but open sourcing it really put us in a much better position, so we started getting developers organically. But I s- started seeing a surge in 2025, early 2025, and then we realized this is because of AI.

So turns out- ... the architecture of Pure is really good for vibe coding and AI programming.

Jonathan: I was just looking this up. So the term vibe coning, vibe coding was coined in February of 2025 by Andrej Karpathy.

Nariman: Yes. That's when it started taking off, and I would say end of 2025 is when it just completely revolutionized- programming.

Jonathan: JavaScript is probably really s- well-suited to the LLMs writing it, isn't it?

Nariman: Yeah, I think not being typed or weakly typed, that contributes to it. And it's just, you don't need a very complicated build process-

...

Nariman: To run a JavaScript program, basically, especially the browser-based ones.

And again that's one reason Pure JS took off so much, because you add... lLMs, they don't need to MPM install anything, or they don't have- ... you just take that CDN URL, you put it in your HTML file, and then you see it in ChatGPT or or Claude. So that's why it took off. But yes, JavaScript is well-suited.

Python, JavaScript. Yep.

Jonathan: Yeah. You think about it, too. The entire training corpus of LLMs has JavaScript just sprinkled all throughout it because they're training on the internet. And so they're just seeing- ... JavaScript everywhere. Yes. And that's one, you might be able to make the you might be able to make the argument that JavaScript is the native language of LLMs just because there's so much of it on the internet.

JavaScript and H- HTML, right?

Nariman: Yeah, and I think there's another reason for this. So if you go to ChatGPT or Claude- ... but nowadays people use people use Call Code and Codex. They actually go through the installation process and download these tools. But a lot of people just use ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, the web interface.

Yeah. And if you ask the web interface to build an application for you, the only way it can actually show you something when they load the artifact or the preview panel the only way they can do it is by writing it in JavaScript. So they're biased, I think. They're biased towards building it in JavaScript so that the user can see it.

Yeah. And I think that creates a vicious cycle or a flywheel.

Jonathan: Yeah, for sure. One of, one of the guys I work with, he used, I think it was Claude, to put together like the b- a bare bones presentation, like PowerPoint presentation, and he got to looking around in the back end of that, and Claude built it in JavaScript first and then rendered it from JavaScript over to PowerPoint.

Oh, wow. And did a really good job on it, too, which is fascinating. Like they're really good slides. Oh, wow. We've used them several times now. Just keep... we keep iterating on them. We'll go and we'll make changes by hand as needed. We'll have the LLM do changes, just depending upon what it is.

But yeah, it's so- Was that

Nariman: Claude Design,

Jonathan: or? I think it was I think it was Claude. I don't for sure if it was Design or Chat. Probably Design. I don't know. It's been a little while ago that he did this, so I don't know if Design was a thing at the time. I think it probably was. It was probably in Design, but yeah.

It's incredible. It's real fascinating to see. You've run multiple companies now. You said you're a serial entrepreneur. Is it particularly different doing an open source company?

Nariman: Yeah, there, there are differences. We have a much larger community to deal with.

And yeah, the, in terms of community and conflicting interests is a completely different ballgame.

And from a business perspective also, the strategy is kinda interesting too. You have this hybrid strategy where, okay, you have the open source project and that has to stay open source and has has to have maximal feature parity with the proprietary version, and then you have this other product which is proprietary.

You wanna make sure there's no conflict of interest between the two. Be very clear. So there, there is really differences. My other company, I did... I was pretty cl- pretty close to open source projects as well. For example I our company was doing very large scale data extraction from the web.

So- ... Mixnode was a name, and it was massively scalable web crawling. So it was actually suited for AI and those kind of applications where you need billions of web pages of homogeneous data. So not scraping, nothing like that, just getting huge amounts of data to basically for machine learning for the most part.

And I would, we were one of the seeders of Common Crawl, which all these LLMs are based on. So we would we would contribute to Common Crawl, and we had a lot of open source projects as well with Mixnode. But it was never the core strategy. W- looking back at it, we should have probably open sourced it.

What were we thinking? But then this was a long time ago. But yeah, no, it is definitely different. There it's more complex to run an open source company, but I would say it's way more rewarding when it comes to software.

Jonathan: Yeah. You get to see... I- if nothing else, you get to see your stuff used in places that you wouldn't have you wouldn't have imagined.

Nariman: Yes, and I think that's incredibly important, not just because it's fun- ... which it is, but it's also very important that a lot of people take your creation, and they use it for things that you couldn't have imagined. So I've heard that somebody's using Pewter. They're trying to use it in a car in China.

And so these are the types of things that I would never come up with them myself, right? Look at Linux. It's being used in the craziest places, and it makes sense 'cause you need that diversity of backgrounds of people who use it so that they can- ... take this, and they were like, "Oh, I have this idea.

I could use this in my line of work for this purpose." And it wouldn't be possible without open source.

Jonathan: Yeah. Have you, I don't mean this as a gotcha question, although it is. Have you seen Pewter pop up yet? Has it been used for things that you're like, "Oh, I really didn't wanna see our name there"?

Nariman: Oh we are a very huge target for cyber attacks and those sort of things, and we have... I hope I'm not challenging people to attack us more, but we have pretty powerful anti-abuse systems in place. But there's been, people people were using it for phishing, that sort of stuff.

Yeah. It's under control. We have a lot of systems in place right now. We are, again for a small company or with limited resources, I think we've done exceptionally well when it comes to that. We put a lot of effort and investment into it. But the really bad stuff, no.

Thankfully, we've managed to prevent those.

Jonathan: That's good. I I, so I'm involved in the Meshtastic project. Obviously you know that. That's what I was talking about at Avanti Summit. We did an interview one time with a reasonably well-known online magazine and, no, I think they have a print version too, and the the whole...

It was like a 45-minute interview. The first 40 minutes were great, talking about the technology, and then they had the gotcha question at the end, which we knew it was coming. We figured that they would try to do this to us. But they had the gotcha question and they're like, "You know that Meshtastic is potentially being used for human trafficking across the Mexico border."

And we're like, "Sure it is. Don't do things that are illegal with Meshtastic. Other than that, we're just like Signal. It's an open source project. You can use it for whatever you want." So we were ready for it. We knew there was gonna be a question like that coming, and there's some other things going on around the world that we keep, try to keep track of and, some of it's cool.

Some of it, you're like, "Yeah I wouldn't, really didn't wanna see our name there." But anyway I think it's something that a lot of open source projects have to have to wrestle with and deal with, particularly ones, like Signal and Telegram, those sorts. They, they wrestle with this more than even than we do.

But I'm always curious to hear, like, how that plays out.

Nariman: Yeah. How can you even prevent it, right? If it's open source-

...

Nariman: And you can

Jonathan: take

Nariman: it.

Jonathan: Depending upon what it is, like what you're talking about, there's also the question of should you even try to prevent it? Or is this just...

You know what I mean? There's a... And I guess when you're talking about a hosted platform like what you guys are doing, you do have some responsibility to prevent certain things. But there is, part of the open source definition, in fact, is, you don't make moral judgments with your licensing.

Yeah. So like it's, it, you, doing open source you cannot say, "We consider this to be evil and therefore you're not allowed to do this with our software." And boy, that's unpopular with some people, but there's a really good reason that exists, and that is that, the world cannot agree perfectly on what it means to be evil or not.

Nariman: Yeah.

Jonathan: And that's really what that boils down to. Have you guys gotten-

Nariman: haven't some of the craziest inventions come out of military, for example? Oh, sure. If there was a moral judgment against it, "Oh, you can't use this technology," or, you can do a certain thing," we wouldn't... Maybe we would have them anyway, but probably not as fast as coming from a military funding- basically, a research facility. Military funded.

Jonathan: I'm trying to remember. I wanna say the microwave was actually invented because of radar, if I remember correctly.

Nariman: Yeah. I

Jonathan: think,

Nariman: I think so.

Jonathan: Do. Yeah, I'd have to, I'd have to look to find that out for sure, but I think that, I think it's all related to that.

Have you guys... And you may not be able to comment on this and that's fine, but I'm just curious, have you guys gotten like subpoenas yet? "Turn over this person's data"?

Nariman: I'd rather not comment on that. All right.

Jonathan: That's fine. That's fine. Yeah, that's a, it's a, it's such a tricky thing to deal with, right?

We've yeah we've seen a limited amount of, We have been contacted by law enforcement once, and that was very informal. But still we see that on the horizon of this could be a thing. Now the advantage over at Meshtastic is we don't have anything that we can give over.

Nariman: Yeah, that's what I was wondering. What were they looking for?

Jonathan: They were... I think in that case, they were just looking for information. We think this person may have a Meshtastic radio. What can you tell us about it?" We're like, "Not much, man. Here's the documentation."

Nariman: Yeah. Yeah. They...

they can ask the same thing from ChatGPT or something 'cause I know you're not tracking anything.

Jonathan: Yeah, so the, Yeah, for sure. Apparently the the microwave oven. This sounds like it was written by probably Google's AI, but it may be accurate for sure. The microwave oven was invented in 1945 by Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon who was working with electromagnetic waves.

So yeah, Google- Google's AI overview. But still, that- that's- that matches the that matches the memory I have. He was testing out a radar magnetron and noticed that the candy bar in his pocket had melted.

Nariman: Oh. Oh, wow, I didn't know this part. Yes. That's really cool.

Jonathan: Yes. It's also terrifying.

Nariman: It's yeah, it's like the story behind antibiotics where it was basically an accident.

Jonathan: Basically an accident, yes. In the case of the microwave oven, though, he was microwaving himself accidentally, and that-

Nariman: Yeah. ...

Jonathan: that maybe was less good, but, I dunno. Oh, true. Fun stuff, though.

Nariman: Things haven't improved much because-

right now if I put something in the microwave, I have a cold basically outer layer with a super hot nuclear kernel of, ... spaghetti. Or the other way around. Actually it's really cold inside.

Jonathan: Yeah, that's usually what happens. It's

Nariman: raw outside.

Jonathan: Yeah. So what, we talked a little bit about this, but what's the weirdest thing that you've seen somebody do with Pewter?

Where has it surprised you the most to find a pop-up or to hear a, s- from a customer?

Nariman: Ah, that's a good question. It's funny that I'm blanking because PeterJust RS CK has been used by 180,000 applications, and I'm blanking. I don't know which one is the craziest. I think in our showcase we have some really cool stuff. God. I'm blanking right now.

I'll remember it though. Oh,

Jonathan: you'll remember the-

Nariman: I'll remember it

Jonathan: in a few minutes ... yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you think of it before, before the Hackaday article goes live tomorrow- Yeah ... you can send me a, send me an email. Okay. And we can include it in the show notes. That'll work. Sure ... the story of the Chinese car company sounds pretty fascinating.

Nariman: Yes. If

Jonathan: somebody wants to use it-

Nariman: But it's not- ... for their self-driving car ... it's not really public, and I'm not sure when we're gonna hear back with a solid POC. But I think- Sure ... it should be soon.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Nariman: It was supposed to be more than six months ago, but then again, you know how- Oh, yes ... how scoping and...

Jonathan: I know how it goes, yes. I- I've been catching up on some of my emails, and it's "Oh, this was sent two months ago. Sorry for the delay. Been really busy."

Nariman: At some point you run out of excuses,

yeah. There's nothing you can say. You can just start stop apologizing and just respond.

Jonathan: Just do it. Yep. Just do it. And then I gotta ask you a couple of questions. First off, before I get to these, is there anything that we didn't talk about that we should have?

Nariman: No, I think it's been pretty great. We touched upon the most important aspects of it.

Jonathan: Okay. All right. Yeah I feel like we've done we've done a pretty good job taking a tour through the ecosystem.

... If somebody wants to get involved particularly host your own, where's the best place to go to?

Nariman: Our GitHub page. And we've put a lot of effort into making it easy to run Puter. You can... As a de- for dev environment, you can just download it, clone it, and then npm install, npm start.

There's nothing else you need. And then we have the curl to bash as for the- Oh, you remember that. Okay.

Jonathan: Yes, I do.

Nariman: Great. Curl to bash

Jonathan: ometer. I... So I've complained about curl to bash for years. And when he started telling that story, I'm like, "Somebody else is on board." Bad. Don't do it.

Nariman: Yeah.

Yeah. But that's what people expect, right? There was so much... we internally, we argued too much about this, right? Because our better engineers meaning everybody aside from me, was against it, but I'm the one who was like, "No, we have to do it because everybody expects it." We ended up doing it because I pushed really hard, but I get it.

I get it. It's not the most popular thing from, So- ... the engineering perspective ...

Jonathan: I have thoughts here. And we probably ought to explain to folks what we're talking about, right? So- ... the question here is, like, how do you install software? And one of the popular ways to install software is that the software company just gives you a script.

You download the script, you run the script locally, and it does all of the installation magic, right? And so you end up doing a curl piped into bash. And at the Ubuntu Summit we were talking about the, one of the keynote itself was from Shuttleworth, was, like... He had this, this- He called it to the curl to bash-ometer.

And it was essentially like how many of the most popular applications is this the primary installation method? And, his chart basically w- y- you're going along and you have this, and it just goes up through the roof, right? It was it was pretty interesting to look at, and they were of course using that to pitch snaps as the alternative.

And I have for the longest time made the argument that, unless you really trust the person publishing this script, you should not just run the script, and the fact that websites can get hacked means that you probably shouldn't just run the script anyway. You need to look at it and try to figure out what it's doing.

And installing packages is better. But then of course there is the sort of the overhead of somebody like Pewter has to then package up the thing for RPMs, package it up for Debian, package... Make sure that package works on Ubuntu, package it up for this, package it up for that, and it's a lot of overhead work, right?

And so there's this kind of back and forth of do you just write one script that does the install or do you do the packaging? And what I would actually say is you probably have to have a script that does the install, right? Like I don't think there's any getting away from that because that's how you would do...

That's how you're gonna install it inside of a snap. That's how you're gonna do a Docker install, all of these things. But like it is also super useful to have then based on top of that, a snapshot that is installable without the script. And there's tooling to be able to do that so that you can not directly run the big ugly scary script on your production machine, which is really what we want to avoid, right?

Nariman: Yeah. But it's the most convenient one, right? Absolutely. Sure. You're encapsulating the entire complexity of choosing what to download, what to run- ... and you just give them one script. So that's why I fought so hard for it. And I'm like, "Hey, it's our responsibility to make sure everything is safe."

I know it's easier said than done. We have way too much experience with this security stuff to underestimate how much of an effort it is. Yeah. But at the end of the day I've always been har- fighting super hard to make it easy to run Pewter. And in the beginning, for the longest time, and I think one of the reasons Pewter used to go viral over and over again, is because for the longest time, if you went to pewter.com, you would just see the desktop.

You didn't even have to create an account. It was just a desktop environment. It would do everything automatically for you. It would basically trust you, give you credits no matter what, just because I want it to be incredibly easy to use. The reason we ask for accounts now is actually over time, that became an issue where people got confused if they have an account or not.

So it's not even because I want them to create an account. Anyway- ... but the idea, the core of the idea has always been it has to be incredibly easy. It has to be easy. Whether it's open source, whether it's hosted, you wanna make it, make this super convenient for the user. And I think curl to bash- with all its faults it is something people expect for the most part, and that it is a pretty convenient way to install.

But then you might end up nuking your machine, so you gotta be careful.

Jonathan: Yeah. Is there like a Docker image or a snap- Yeah ... or something like that people can use?

Nariman: Yeah, we have a Docker image. Yeah.

Jonathan: Okay. That's... See, that's perfect, right? It's the best of both worlds. You get both.

Nariman: Yeah.

Jonathan: There there's a... I think you probably... Most projects of this scale, you've gotta have an installer script. I think, like you said, that's just expected. Yeah. And then you also have a group of people, like me, that look at that script and go, "Psh, I'm not running that on my computer. I don't know what's in there."

We're just a little bit paranoid. Yeah. For good reason, I would like to think, but still a little bit paranoid. And then, you've got the Docker image, you've got the other things to where, you can package it up, and people can do it without having to run the script.

And so everybody's happy.

Nariman: I think it's great. Being paranoid about this stuff is great actually. It keeps everything, th- these are the checks and balances around open source, right? And I think these sort of being "Oh, let me look at the script first," it actually, in a way, helps make the project better over the long term if the maintainers actually listen to the concerns.

But the good thing is that now you can probably... you don't have to read the script. You can just drop it in chat GPT and be like- It's true ... "Hey, is this... How horrible is this?" Not if it's good or not, how horrible is it? It,

Jonathan: it-

Nariman: And then you can

Jonathan: see- ... you know what, I'm about to run this script.

Do you see any signs that it's gonna do anything malicious or otherwise cause problems? Yeah.

Nariman: Yeah.

Jonathan: That's actually a really good point. We have tooling now.

Nariman: Yes.

Jonathan: Yes, we have tooling, We have tools that make this easier. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I'm looking at your documentation to make sure that you have the the other stuff documented here.

I don't see it. Maybe I'll make a pull request inside the self-hosting Puter. Oh, boy. Yeah. The one-liner recommended... I don't see the, I don't see the alternative.

Nariman: Huh. Take a look.

Jonathan: But I'm, I am of course very quickly skimming through this, so I may just be missing it. But yeah, I would love to see a a little alternative so that people...

Oh, hey, look. Ha, even above the one-liner, there's the Docker Compose option. Okay. Yes. You're good. I just missed it.

Nariman: Thank you.

Jonathan: Very cool. All right. Again, two final questions I've gotta ask. People will send me emails if I forget this. F- what is your personal favorite text editor and scripting language?

Nariman: Oh, boy. I wasn't... D- do I have to say Vim? Is that, You can

Jonathan: say whatever you want to. I answered this with Nano most of the time. I'm not... You're not gonna lose geek points. We've had a few people tell

Nariman: us- I do Vim I really do, but believe it or not I'm gonna sound horrible, but I do use the text editor on Puter a lot.

Sure. So it was the first application I built on Puter- ... and it's been it's been improved over the years. I'm actually used to it. So-

Jonathan: Yeah ...

Nariman: but then again, I don't think that's what people wanted to hear. So I'm gonna say Puter. No, that's a

Jonathan: perfectly valid answer. Okay ... I just I think yeah, Vim plus Puter, I think that's a perfectly valid answer.

Can you run Vim inside of Puter?

Nariman: Somebody did port it, actually. We actually took out the terminal because it was way too buggy, so it doesn't really... until we bring it back, I don't think- Or we can have Vim again I was

Jonathan: g- I was getting ready to ask if there was Bash inside of Pewter

Nariman: No we did, but it was way too buggy.

We tried so hard. We tried to port Linux to Pewter. We got really far, but it was just not production ready.

Jonathan: Right.

Nariman: We're making more... As I said we- we're doing this release tomorrow. We're getting way more serious about porting things to Pewter really complicated software.

And we're making progress. Again like I keep saying this over and over again, but I think AI is really helping us with this.

Jonathan: Oh, sure.

Nariman: So now with fewer resources, we actually have a chance at porting those really massive software to, or packages to Pewter.

Jonathan: Yeah. That would be fun to see that come back.

Oh, yes. Just as a command line purist, that would be fun to have it back. Yes.

Nariman: Yes.

Jonathan: And its scripting language.

Nariman: Scripting language JavaScript. I was gonna say. Yeah, it has a special place in my heart.

Jonathan: Yeah, of course. I suppose on Pewter it counts as a system language, right?

Nariman: Yes. As crazy as it sounds when you say it out loud, it is true.

Jonathan: Yeah, makes sense. All right. Hey, it's been a lot of fun. Thank you, man, for for coming on. And we... After after some big announcements, we will have you back here in a few months and talk about some changes- Sure ... that's changed. It sounds like things are moving pretty quick over in the Pewter world.

Nariman: Yes. Thank you for having me on. Yeah. This was great.

Jonathan: Yeah, it's been awesome. Thank you so much. It was good to see you

Nariman: again. Yeah, likewise.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Nariman: Take care.

Jonathan: All right. That is Neriman Selva talking about Pewter, a really fun project, and c- becoming quite the successful business, so good for them.

Next week we have somebody else that I met at UbuNTU. We're talking Michael Meeks from Collabora, the open source office suite. And then after that, in two weeks, we are talking with Francois Proulx about Smoked Meat. That is all about security in places like GitHub, in your CI runs. And then we're having Jonathan Polance, a return from Ferrous Systems.

We're gonna talk more about Rust and the things going on in that world. If you have a project or you know of a project that needs to be on the show, let us know. It's floss@hackaday.com. Give us an email there and we will get them scheduled. All right. Wanna say thank you to everyone that watches, that listens.

Get, whether you get us live or on the download, and we will see you next week on Floss Weekly.