Everything Open 2026 – Day 1 – Afternoon

The unreasonable cost of open source contribution by Rob Norris

  • Slides: https://despairlabs.com/presentations/open-source-cost/
  • Link to Chris Neugebauer’s Monktoberfest talk in 2024
  • The xkcd diagram is about projects and their funding. Not so much about the people and what they need
  • People talk about: Projects, Foundation, Company, Government, Charity or non profit, Grants
    • The above are not people
    • Who is the “Random person in Nebraska” and what are their wants and needs?
  • I can tell you about my story
    • 30 years of “non-mainstream” computing
    • 20+ years as sysadmin, programmer, etc
    • Overview of family situation. Partner and semi-adult children. 5 people total.
  • Monthly Expanses. All in $AU
    • Rent $2400/month
    • Groceries $2500
    • Utilities $850
    • 2x cars $3100
    • Heath: $2800
    • Total $12,000/month average in 2025
  • Income
    • $14,500 /month
    • Enough to cover month to month but not to to large items
    • $22k/month before Tax
  • This is a lot more than Patreon or similar will support for just about anyone.
  • Set up as a business
    • Set up a business
    • Invoicing
      • Local and International requirements
    • Tax of various types
    • Things a normal person doesn’t have to think about like Insurance, Office Space, Loans, Equipment
    • Contracts. Agreements, IP, Disputes
    • Charging for hours
  • Customers
    • Go off your profile/reputation
    • Grant applications, advertising?
    • Customer relationship management
  • What have we learned
    • Lot of software out there doing critical things
    • It needs to be maintained
    • We don’t value maintenance work
    • We have set up maintainers to fail.
  • “I’m not taking any questions, cause I don’t have any answers”

Roll for initiative: The battle against the beast of AI Slop by J Rosenbaum

  • How to recognise AI Images
    • Zoom in and look for details between elements, especially in the background
    • For video look at it frame by frame, doesn’t stuff jump around
    • Look at facts presented, google the name.
    • Look up the place or objects in it. Do they look like real versions?
  • AI Text
    • Hidden Unicode
    • Weird case, Bold, lists
    • Messed up facts.
    • Lack of an opinion
  • Music
    • Wobble in sustained notes
    • Safe, Homogeneous
  • Protecting yourself against AI slop
    • Duck Duck Go
    • Swearing and -Noai in google doesn’t work anymore
    • Don’t interact with it
    • Tell people who are sharing it
  • Running locally
  • Find Ethical tools. eg “Fairly Trained” , “Mitsua”
  • Protecting your Work
    • Tarpits
    • Glaze, Mist, protects your style from being trained
    • NSFW brushes
    • opt-out
  • People have been hired to tidy up Ai-generated content and make it look less sloppy.

Is it even worthwhile to self-host these days? by Steven Ellis

  • User Personas
    • FAF “Family Acceptance Factor”
      • Some of them have no technical skills
      • Some of them use phones, windows, android, etc
      • Some use facebook for phones, some use instgram
  • How: The Dream vs reality
    • Start with an old laptop maybe
    • Network is critical. Start Clean
  • Focus Technologies vs the nice to haves
  • Why?
    • Cost? – Often a fallacy
    • Security / Privacy – What do I want to share?
    • The Hoster can be compelled to turn data off by government?
    • Maybe beteer buying a service that we trust rather than trying to run ourselves
  • Domain
    • Don’t host your own domain
    • Don’t buy too many domains
    • Small biz should own their own domain
    • Big companies should own all the domains and variations
  • Email
    • Use your domain
    • Have a backup for things like the email bill
    • Self host – Stalwart , Docker Mailserver / Mailcow
  • Family Mail / Small Business
    • Do they need all the features?
    • But need to support multiple devices
    • Hard to scale small to very large business
    • Doesn’t you family need exchange features?
  • Photos
    • Lots of self-hosting options
    • Immich, Photoprism, Pcgallery, Powigo, NextCloud
    • Default Providers
    • Hosting Service
    • Gallery/ Sharing
    • Backups
    • Google One Account
      • Which has local NAS backup
      • and more backups
    • Sync out of Google is getting harder
  • Media
    • 1000s of DVDS, Critical Documents
    • Family videos
    • Accessing the Media
    • Stephen’s approach
      • TrueNas
      • unraid, proxmox, openmedia vault
      • containers for most services
      • Regular offsite backups
  • Iot
    • Matter seems to be the platform of the future
    • Use the Tuya App
    • Alternative Firmwares – ESPHome,
    • IOT vlan so can’t see home network
  • AI
    • Sucks down Power and high spec HW. $$$
    • Self Host home automation, private voice service
    • Can work with older GPUs . Integrated GPU in chips can do enough
  • Self hosting Journey
    • Almost everything in containers
    • Efficient Power supply unit is worth it.
    • Fresh tomato – Firewall on Netgear R7000
    • GigE is probably fast enough
  • Take Aways
    • Not everything scales up or down
    • Automate everything
    • FAF is critical
      • Can your partner / kids / parents use it?
      • Appliance / Containers are very effective
    • Backup everything, regularly
    • Do you want to Provide 24×7 support for the whole family
  • Make sure you document everything?
    • Have an offline copy
  • Hardware redundancy?
    • None but bought better hardware
    • Backups and procedure to recover quickly
  • Network over Power
    • Can sometimes work but try all other options first
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