The Emmabuntüs collective enlightens Jonni Bidwell as to its kind and open source efforts.

A map showing the 29 computer rooms YovoTogo has set up across Togo.

CREDIT: YovoTogo, JUMP Lab’Orione and Emmabuntüs

A ltruism and open source often go hand in hand. Through our recent coverage of Perl (see LXF276) we’ve seen that the idea of helping others was intrinsic to both the language’s (and the community’s) development.

More generally, anyone who gives their time and expertise to an open source project, whether it’s through code, translation, documentation or polite bug reports, is helping that project. You might think that hacking on your favourite project is probably not going to save the world. But then that all depends on the project.

Back in 2016 (see LXF216), we featured Emmabuntüs, a French collective that combined the power of Linux with the charitable efforts of a hardware recycling cadre. Back then it was putting its bespoke spin of Ubuntu (also called Emmabuntüs) on donated and refurbished computers, and sending those machines out into the world. Both locally, to the Emmaüs communities in France, and through partnership with other organisations, as far afield as Kathmandu, the Ivory Coast and Benin. Nearly six years on and Emmabuntüs is still at it. The only thing that’s changed is that the distribution is now based on Debian.

The collective’s latest initiative is a customised USB image for mass repurposing of machines. Thanks to some canny scripting, this makes doing this at scale much less time-consuming. Join us as we find out more about that and all the other great work the Emmabuntüs Collective do.

Claude and Patrick from the collective hard at work refurbishing boxes.

CREDIT: YovoTogo

Origin story

The name Emmabuntüs comes from the international Emmaüs movement (see www.emmaus-international. org), which is focused on tackling homelessness and poverty; and Ubuntu, which the distro was originally based on. There are Emmaus charity shops in the UK, but the movement began in France.

Patrick from the Emmabuntüs collective explains: “The Emmaüs movement is a secular movement that was created by the French priest Abbé Pierre, a former resistance fighter and former member of parliament, to help the poor and homeless people notably during the 1954 great cold wave.

“If your readers are not familiar with his efforts, we encourage you to watch the beautiful film on the early days of the movement, Hiver 54, l’abbé Pierre. In 1963, the movement became international, and there are now more than 350 groups around the world. They all adhere to a universal manifesto, adopted in 1969, and share a common goal: to serve before oneself who is less happy than oneself.”