[ubuntu-studio-devel] Kaua'i Community Radio and Digital Freedom

[Erich Eickmeyer]

Aloha Lex,

This is a fantastic read and wonderful to hear! I'm always waiting for 
success stories like this to come our way! This is the second time I've 
heard of a radio station using Ubuntu Studio for their software platform 
of choice as I was assisting someone in our IRC channel some months ago. 
Maybe that was you? I'm not sure. :)

Either way, this is exactly why we make Ubuntu Studio among many, 
because not only do we want to lower operational costs for use cases 
everywhere, but we want people to understand what it is to be free from 
vendor lock-in. From the home musician's studio to the broadcast studio, 
such as yours, this software is for everyone.

I am very familiar with the Raspberry Pi 5. In addition to leading the 
project that is Ubuntu Studio, I'm also the technical lead for Edubuntu, 
a project led by my wife Amy. Amy is a teacher and Edubuntu is made for 
educational communities, teachers, and learners. This past release 
(24.04 LTS), we released our first ever image for the Raspberry Pi 5, 
which I was able to test and sign-off on using a Raspberry Pi 5 that was 
donated by a community member. One thing I can say is that Ubuntu (and 
Edubuntu) runs beautifully on the Raspberry Pi 5, and I'm sure you've 
noticed the same for Raspbian. I'm not sure how well Ubuntu Studio would 
work on a Rapsberry Pi 5, but it might be worth experimenting with.

As far as "Broadcast Using This Tool (butt)" goes, it appears to be in 
the Ubuntu repositories and may be a worthy addition to future Ubuntu 
Studio versions, even as soon as 24.10 due out in October. I'll look 
into this.

I've CC'd this email to the Community Team at Canonical consisting of 
Aaron Prisk and Mauro Gaspari, along with Ubuntu Founder and Canonical 
CEO Mark Shuttleworth, all people I consider friends. The Community Team 
and Mark in particular love hearing success stories related to the 
Official Ubuntu Flavors, of which Ubuntu Studio is one.

With that, I want to give my sincerest appreciation and thanks. Ubuntu 
Studio is a labor of love for me, not only as an audio engineer of over 
30 years, but because of the success stories like this one.

Mahalo,
Erich Eickmeyer
--
Erich Eickmeyer
Ubuntu MOTU
Project Leader - Ubuntu Studio
Technical Lead - Edubuntu

On 7/27/24 18:18, Lex White wrote:
> Aloha, my name is Lex White and I'm your friendly neighborhood 
> Director of Development here at Kaua'i Community Radio (KKCR). I wear 
> a lot of hats at the station, including underwriting, community 
> outreach, hardware and software development, website design, graphic 
> design, and all kinds of ways of developing our station to be better 
> able to continue serving you, our community, and to serve the goals of 
> our mission such as preserving and perpetuating the Hawaiian culture, 
> and providing a platform of free speech for underrepresented voices.  
> In pursuit of these goals, I have made some sweeping changes in the 
> way that the station handles our technology and especially the kinds 
> of hardware and software we choose to use and deploy.  I would like to 
> take a few moments to share with you some of my background and history 
> with computing, non-profits, and the Free Open Source Software (FOSS) 
> community.
>   In our modern age of complex digitization, where computers are more 
> and more an inseperable part of our lives, where we carry around in 
> our pockets computers so powerful that they can even outperform the 
> supercomputers of yesteryear.  At this crucial place in human 
> development, it is vital that we take some time to consider the 
> repercussions and consequences of our unprecedented access to 
> information and ability to compute and process information at speeds 
> never before dreamed of by our species.  We must choose between the 
> shackles of digital slavery, imposed on us by large corporate tech 
> interests whose profit motive has been admittedly the driving force 
> behind much of our modern technological revolution, and a future of 
> true digital freedom and transparency, with equality for all users and 
> administrators of technological systems.
>   A powerful part of that movement in computing freedom has come out 
> of the Free Software movement.  Free Software is often said to mean 
> "free as in freedom, not as in beer."  That is to say that the 
> software itself is not required to have no pricetag, but it is 
> required to have a certain transparency and accessibility so that we 
> as end-users can always know precisely what code we are running on our 
> machines, and what our electricity and data is truly being used for.  
> There have been some powerful personalities and players that have come 
> out of this field, and I won't list all of them right now, but for now 
> I would like to direct your attention to the Free Software Foundation 
> (FSF), the GNU is Not Unix (GNU) Foundation, and the Canonical group 
> that puts out the Ubuntu distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system.
>   Here at KKCR we have a lot of legacy hardware and software that we 
> are trying to improve, and we can improve it best by adopting an 
> ethical and far-sighted view of the impact of technology. We want our 
> future generations to have a world worth inheriting from us and not be 
> sentenced to a lifetime of digital slavery to unscrupulous 
> corporations and out-of-control Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems.  
> To accomplish that goal, I have instituted a policy of gradually 
> migrating the station away from proprietary, walled garden software 
> and hardware that manufactured for profit by large corporations that 
> you are very familiar with, like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, to move 
> toward solutions that respect the freedoms of their users to have 
> digital privacy and freedom in their ability to use their hardware and 
> software how they choose.
>   To this end, we now run all of our office computers on the station 
> on a GNU/Linux distribution called Ubuntu Studio, which is 
> predominantly aimed at creating a FOSS computing platform for creative 
> individuals and organizations like ours to flourish with all the tools 
> that we need.  Ubuntu Studio is not necessarily perfect in every 
> possible way, and it does allow for the use of proprietary software 
> that does not have to respect the freedoms of its users, but it is a 
> significant step in the right direction for us here at KKCR, and it is 
> a practical and pragmatic solution to our computing needs and the 
> challenges that face our station. I want to thank the Ubuntu Studio 
> community for all that they have done to make a platform for digital 
> creators to have the creative space to bring their artistic vision to 
> the world.  I also have designed and set up some remote broadcasting 
> devices based on the Raspberry Pi 5, a single board computer, running 
> the Linux distribution Raspbian, and using the broadcasting software 
> called, hilariously, BUTT (Broadcast Using This Tool). So believe me 
> when I say that our radio sometimes has to be pulled straight out of 
> our BUTT. Haha. Anyway.
>    My point in bringing this all to your attention as our community of 
> loving and caring individuals is to enlighten you to the idea that our 
> hardware and software does not have to limit us to the walled gardens 
> of corporate masters who would limit our freedom and control our 
> access to information and data. We have already seen how large social 
> media companies can restrict our ability to exercise free speech, and 
> we have also seen recently in the news how large, proprietary software 
> developers like Microsoft develop unsafe computing platforms that put 
> all of their users at risk because they choose to use a design 
> philosophy of Security through Obscurity.
>    We here at KKCR do not support the ideology of Security through 
> Obscurity, whether it be used by the intelligence agencies in the name 
> of national security, or whether it be used by software developers to 
> protect their supposed "intellectual copyrights" at the cost of making 
> our software act as a kind of black box that could be running any 
> arbitrary, malicious code without our knowledge.  Instead, we support 
> free speech, and the ideology of Security through Transparency, a 
> value that I know all of us here at the station hold near and dear to 
> our hearts, and which I hope you, our listeners, volunteers, and 
> community will take as an example of an organization that truly has 
> ethical values and that takes its freedom and integrity seriously.
>    I assure you that I will continue to do everything that I can to 
> support these values in our workplace, and to promote them across the 
> world through the means available to us as a free, non-profit media 
> platform.  We support the FOSS community and we appreciate all the 
> work the many thousands of developers have done to create a better 
> digital world for all of us to enjoy and prosper from.  Please join me 
> in appreciating these developers by checking out the foundations I 
> have mentioned above, and considering ways in which you can transition 
> in your own life from a pattern of digital slavery to a world of 
> digital freedom.  I know to many of you this will be shocking news, 
> you may not even realize the ways in which your freedoms have been 
> insidiously eroded by a corrupt and exploitative class of corporate 
> executives and bankers, but I know that some of you out there will 
> hear this message and hear its truth.  Let the voice of freedom ring 
> from every hill and every valley, from every mountaintop that we 
> broadcast our signal to the majestic and wonderful Hawaiian Islands 
> and the people of this magical and unique 'Aina.  Let your voice be 
> heard as well by joining us in a chorus of voices that sing and cry 
> for freedom, not just for ourselves, but for all beings everywhere.  
> Aloha and hallelujah. Mahalo for your time and attention, and for your 
> continuing support of KKCR and our goals.
>     -Lex White
>
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