We had a great live AMA session with our advisor Brian Fox at our Telegram group earlier this week. We have summarised all the questions from the swarm community and the answers from Brian.

Name any two major hurdles (tech or business hurdles) that you see Bluzelle will face in its early stages of development and how do you plan to address them?

I am advising Bluzelle on the Open Source/Free Software front. However, that having been said, I am a firm believer that getting adoption of your protocol, service, or software is always somewhat harder than people realize.

So, with that in mind, I feel like the choice of open source license, and growth of the community around the software and protocol is a key factor.

Do you see Orchid Protocol as one of the “early adopters” utilizing Bluzelle’s DB solution?

The Orchid Protocol is an excellent platform for the decentralization of the Internet as a whole. The goals of Bluzelle and Orchid are extremely well aligned, and I expect to see technology overlap and sharing taking place over time.

What are your thoughts on how decentralization will affect political systems?

Most political systems are the definition of the centralization of power and authority. We subversive types tend to think all kinds of crazy things will happen. Truthfully though, I see blockchain as the truthsayer of the Internet, and thus the great democratizer of the internet.

We went from yelling, to snail mail, to telegraph, to telephone, to the internet. And we didn’t realize how much data would actually be flowing back and forth between all of us netizens.

How do you see decentralization and open source affecting and improving the electoral process?

We desperately require transparency in our election systems. And we don’t have that today. Many places have no paper ballots at all, and no way to validate that one’s vote is counted as caat. This is not a good thing.

There is space for blockchain in our election systems, and there is space for open source in our election systems.

Without open source, you might as well not be voting. Even paper ballots alone aren’t enough. We need durable and accountable records to keep the greedy and unscrupulous from suborning our democratic process.

So you envision something like Ethereum address per citizen?

I believe uniquely identifying me for the purpose of a single contest is important. But identifying me for the course of all contest is a violation of my privacy.

What do you think will be the major challenges Bluzelle will face in adoption? Do you see any similarities with GNU Bash?

All open source has adoption issues. But honestly, Bluzelle’s adoption issues are very different from Bash’s. When Bash first appeared on the scene, it was tied to the only 100% free software project in the world. By the time other shells started to appear (like zsh, ash, etc.) bash had already been adopted.

And Cygnus was a gigantic reason that FOSS spread so fast. Those guys immediately went after the enterprise, and once the enterprise started spending $100k on something, everybody started paying attention.

What are your thoughts on Orville? — star trek sacrilege?

A good friend of mine turned me onto it. I watched the first episode and thought “this isn’t really going to go anywhere,” and then I watched the second episode and out of the blue I guffawed! And then I thought the show was excellent.

What’s your position on GPL v3?

I love the GPL. Other licenses lose the flavor of Free Software. Unlike RMS, I don’t mind saying Open Source. But like RMS, I think Free Software is important.

Any major POSIX advancements coming to bash soon?

David Korn kept trying to add Korn shell features into the Posix spec for shells, and I fought most of his features tooth and nail, because they weren’t good features. There’s a lot of politics in centralized systems, including things like POSIX.

What do you think of the latest trend teaching everybody to code?

Everybody should know “how to code” in the same way that everyone should know geomtry. It is a useful thing to do with your brain that will help you whenever you need to solve a problem or do something procedurally.

Is there a book you would recommend as a starting point what would it be?

If you are 4 years old, learn the logo language. If you are 10, recreate a game in any language, like python or whatever. If you are a serious student of computer science and thought problems, program anything significant in scheme, or in assembler.

Any interest in rewriting bash in Rust to guard against vulnerabilities or other issues?

Bash is a piece of software that is older than many of the people that I communicate with. I’ll give you $100 if you find a memory error in Bash (would have said the same thing in 1990, btw). Instead Bash exposed memory errors in Sun’s libraries.

What’s your favourite Donal Fox composition?

It’s called “Peace Out” but you won’t hear it anywhere. For something great, you might try Refutation and Hypothesis.

Is society cutting itself off from it’s creative / problem-solving roots by cutting arts programs and boosting science programs?

People gravitate towards their “bliss” If you are a creative person, you will always be doing something creative. I am a professional musician, and I was a cook.

What inspired you to start in computer science?

My dad is a physicist, and a deep analytical thinker, who happens to be socially minded, and a musician in his own right. We always got problems to solve, and I liked problem solving the most.

What do you think are the most important technical challenges in Bluzelle’s roadmap, and your perspective on the ability of the team to solve them?

I don’t believe that Bluzelle’s challenges are technical in nature. I believe that Neeraj has a solid grounding in the subject matter, and a very clear understanding of what it takes to achieve Bluzelle’s goals. I believe that the biggest challenge will be articulating the benefit to enough people to hit critical mass rapidly. And that is a marketing challange, not a technical one!

Please tell us what working with RMS (Richard Stallman) was like, especially back in the good old days at the FSF at MIT?

It was very interesting. I met RMS because I met RMS’ code first. When I first used Emacs running on a 300 baud modem connected to a twenex system, I fell in love with the structure of the code. It was obvious to me that the code was elegant. I could guess at what functions would exist, and how they would be named.

So I wrote a version of emacs for the apple called Amacs. It was as complete as could be, with M-X completion and dynamically loadable libraries.

I wrote that in assember on the Apple, with 48k of RAM, and another 12k that was bank switched (look it up).

What does unicode/utf-8 support look like for bash these days?

I haven’t got a clue at what the unicode/utf-8 support is like in Bash today. If there’s a big enough problem, I would be happy to fix it — by rewriting the code. Bash was my 3rd C language program I had ever written, and the 3rd unix program I had ever written.

How do you help app team in adopting Bluzelle DB? I’m sure most will have certain barrier to change from their traditional DB to Bluzelle DB.

A proper API will make all the difference in the world. But the application space has to fit. You don’t just replace one system with another unless the second system is better suited (or just better) than what you are using. The number of people that flocked to redis cracked me up. They immediately started trying to use it for RDMS problems — mostly because that’s the only way they could think of databases.

What does GNU really stand for?

GNUs Not Unix — what did you think? And Bash is NOT Brian’s Awesome SHell, but it should be.

Well, if you pronounce “gnu” like the animal, it sounds like “new”. So that was clever. And then, recursive acronyms were all the rage at MIT right then.

The first editor for the lisp machine was called EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs). And then the second one was called ZWEI (Zwei Was Eine Initially)

So we pronounced it GahNew so that people would know how to spell it.