Episodes
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Pine64 is one of the most ambitious open hardware projects around, delivering a wide range of low-cost and modifiable products including smart phones and watches, laptops, earbuds, soldering irons, and plenty more, all based on ARM and RISC-V. Senior advisor Lukasz Erecinski joins us on this episode to talk about the company's origins, letting your userbase weigh in on the hardware design process, running Linux on a phone, the promise of RISC-V, and a lot more.
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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With tens of millions of units sold, it's no surprise the Raspberry Pi has become synonymous with the phenomenon of single-board computers, and it's also a great gateway into the world of open source. For this ep, we spoke to none other than co-founder and CEO Eben Upton about every Pi-related topic we could think of, including the Pi's origins in academia, early challenges designing the first board, adapting to pandemic supply constraints, selling such a successful device at low margins, and a lot more.
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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Episodes manquant?
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We couldn't do a podcast about open source without exploring a major Linux distribution, and there's hardly a more influential or enduring distro out there than Debian. So we're delighted to be joined on this episode by the current Debian Project Leader, Jonathan Carter, who spoke with us about a wide range of topics including progress on his goals since taking over the leadership role, why so many other distros are built on Debian, the revolutionary nature of dpkg and apt in the '90s, whether the testing release is appropriate for end users, our shared love of BeOS, what's going to happen when there are no more Toy Story characters, and more.
Download or find out more about Debian: https://www.debian.org/
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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Martin Owens joins us on this episode to talk about the popular open source vector graphics package Inkscape, where he serves as both a developer and a member of the project's leadership committee. Martin shares his perspective on everything from the position of Inkscape in the digital creative market to its exceptionally distributed, consensus-based leadership model, implementing PDF support from scratch, the elusive CMYK support, and a lot more.
Learn more about and download Inkscape: https://inkscape.org/
Martin's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/MartinOwens
Martin's page on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/doctormo
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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The MiSTer project is the most exciting thing going in classic video game emulation, and José Tejada Gómez--better known as jotego--is one of the developers at the forefront of this open-source effort to revive dozens of old game consoles and computers. José joins us for a fascinating chat about the ups and downs of programming FPGA chips, balancing his day job as an analog circuit designer, intellectual property in decades-old arcade hardware, using crowd funding to support open source work, the endless debate about emulation versus replication, and plenty more.
Find out more about the MiSTer project: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki
Keep up with José's work: https://www.patreon.com/jotego
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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The classic open source audio editor Audacity has been around for over two decades, but the Muse Group and product head Martin Keary only came onto the project within the last two years. In this ep we talked to Martin about his extensive background in UX and how he's bringing that expertise to a project as old as Audacity, its recent rapid growth and future roadmap, the bumpy public relations issues that occurred around the Muse Group taking ownership of the project, and more.
Download or learn more about Audacity: https://www.audacityteam.org/
Martin's YouTube channel, with a lot of discussion about Audacity history and development: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl_dlV_7ofr4qeP1drJQ-qg
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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Jeremy Allison has been working in open source almost as long as "open source" has existed, largely on the Samba project that facilitates filesharing between Windows and the Unix world. In this ep we chatted with Jeremy not just about where Samba has been and where it's going, but also a wide range of other topics like the Silicon Valley Unix Wars, why it's getting harder to find good C coders, when SMBDirect is coming to the project, aging out of relevance in software development, and more.
SHOW NOTES
Find out more about Samba: https://www.samba.org/
The HD streaming box Jeremy mentioned: https://osmc.tv/vero/
Jeremy's column about startup life: https://www.samba.org/samba/news/articles/low_point/column07.html
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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3D printing has come a long way in a short time, and the open-source web interface OctoPrint has been easing and extending the 3D printing experience for a decade now. On this ep we had a fascinating chat with creator and maintainer Gina Häußge about the project, covering topics like the work that goes into supporting endless printer models, transitioning from being the sole contributor on a project to managing contributors, doing open source work in Europe, why you shouldn't run your Raspberry Pi on an iPhone charger, and lots more.
SHOW NOTES
Find out more about OctoPrint: https://octoprint.org/
One of Will's oldest 3D prints at Tested.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOrr_HpxBhY
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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We briefly covered Blender in our sixth episode, and now it's time to delve deep into the past, present and future of this sprawling 3D animation package with team members Pablo Vazquez and Dalai Felinto, who walk us through Blender's closed-source origins and early crowdfunding efforts, the increasing importance of Blender both in developing markets and in game development and film visual effects, managing the parallel workflows of Blender's many sizable components, the importance of diversity in software development and interface design, and a whole lot more.
Find out more about Blender at blender.org.
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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If you're reading this, odds are good you've used VLC before. The most capable video player out there got its start in surprising ways, and on this ep we're joined by project founder Jean-Baptiste Kempf to talk about both VLC's origins and everything else, from '90s MPEG2 decoder hardware to the French Minitel system, the state of modern DRM and upcoming video codecs, VideoLAN's business model, friction with Apple on the App Store, and plenty more.
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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The simple data transfer tool curl, and its associated library, are estimated to be installed on roughly 10 billion computers, VMs, and embedded devices around the world. For this ep we had a wide ranging conversation with Daniel Stenberg, curl's longtime author and maintainer, about starting up such an essential project back in the '90s, juggling the dizzying array of protocols curl supports, the decision-making process around one of the most critical open source programs in use today, and a bunch more.
SHOW NOTES
Find out (way) more about curl on its home page: https://curl.se/
Daniel blogs extensively on curl and other topics: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/
Daniel is also working on a memoir, available online: https://un.curl.dev/
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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Home Assistant is the one-stop shop to control every single smart home and IoT device you own. It's also one of the biggest open source projects around, and for this ep we sat down with its founder Paulus Schoutsen to talk about where the project is at and where it's going, how he's backing an open-source project with a company that generates revenue, the forthcoming Matter standard that will allow devices from all companies to interoperate, building and shipping a piece of hardware during the pandemic, and a bunch more.
SHOW NOTES
Find out more about Home Assistant: https://www.home-assistant.io/
Here's our Tech Pod episode 59 about Home Assistant: https://techpod.content.town/episodes/59-how-you-know-youre-living-in-the-future-s8PvcUbe
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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Foone Turing regularly performs feats of retro-computing resurrection on Twitter, but convincing Microsoft to release the source code for its classic '90s animation program 3D Movie Maker may be their greatest achievement to date. We sat down with Foone to talk about their plans for expanding 3DMM, asking a big software company to dig through their archives, ancient CompuServe nodes, illicit source-code possession, what's in their forensic data-recovery toolkit, the shocking origin of Comic Sans, and more!
SHOW NOTES
The 3D Movie Maker Github Repo: https://github.com/microsoft/Microsoft-3D-Movie-Maker
Foone's biggest Twitter thread about the project: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1511808848729804803
A big repository of films from the 3DMM community: https://3dmm.com/movies.php
Foone's video game death generator: https://deathgenerator.com/
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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Design researcher Abbey Ripstra has spent her career making technology more approachable, and nowhere has her work and expertise connected with more people than at the Wikimedia Foundation. On this ep Abbey joins us to talk about what human-centered design research means, methodologies for conducting user-experience studies in a wide range of territories and contexts, designing products for billions of people, some of the ways design and research differ in open source versus the corporate world, and more.
SHOW NOTES
Find out more about Abbey's current work at: https://wearetrimtab.com/
And read about the research she conducted at the Wikimedia Foundation here:
New Editor Experiences: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Editor_Experiences
New Readers: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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Creative software is getting more expensive all the time, but by the same token FOSS alternatives are getting more and more robust. On this ep we check in with what's new in some of the biggest open-source creative applications like Blender, Audacity, and the GNU Image Manipulation Program, plus we talk through some tips and tricks for more of our favorite open-source apps like VLC, EarTrumpet, Windows Terminal, WinMerge, and more.
The software we discussed in this ep includes:
Blender: https://www.blender.org/
Audacity: https://www.audacityteam.org/
GNU Image Manipulation Program: https://www.gimp.org/
VLC: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
EarTrumpet: https://eartrumpet.app/
Windows Terminal: https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/windows-terminal/9N0DX20HK701?hl=en-us&gl=US
WinMerge: https://winmerge.org/
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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We've often said that open source is for more than just software, and on this episode Project North Star's Bryan Chris Brown is here to prove it with a freely available, modifiable design for an augmented reality headset you can build yourself. Join us for a discussion about topics like the ins and outs of open hardware design, sourcing parts from unlikely places, printing lenses out of resin, doing architecture work in the Unreal Engine, how standards like OpenXR fit into the picture, and a whole lot more.
Check out Project North Star's extensive community documentation, and follow Bryan on Twitter.
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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By popular request, we're getting as fundamental as we can in this episode with a back-to-basics primer on as many open source concepts as we could come up with, which we hope will lay the groundwork for future episodes. Ever wonder about the difference between a branch and a fork, the ways copyright interacts with code, how open source extends beyond just software, or what makes a Linux distro a Linux distro? This episode is for you!
Notes
If you want to demystify software licensing, look no further than https://choosealicense.com/ and https://tldrlegal.com/
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google, and learn more about their event detailing Kubernetes' move away from Dockershim here: http://goo.gle/LKL22
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Three episodes in, we figured it was about time that we talk over our own origins with open source software, and then ponder the present and (attempt to) predict the future of FOSS for everyday people. Listen on for some reminiscing about Sparcstations, Will's time in a penguin suit, and our earliest tries at using Linux on the desktop, an examination of some previously corporate tech that's now being democratized in open-source form, and more.
Here's Will's old Maximum PC chronicle of using 2005-era Linux (in a penguin suit):
https://books.google.com/books?id=rwIAAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA52#v=onepage&q&f=false
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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Building a NAS served as the gateway into free and open source software for both of us, so in this ep we're looping back around and checking in on the current state of FOSS-y network attached storage options like OpenMediaVault, TrueNAS, and Proxmox, plus dishing out some practical tips about why you'd want a NAS in the first place, some advice on hardware requirements, best practices for backups, and more.
FOSS projects for running your own NAS that we mentioned in this episode include:
OpenMediaVault: https://www.openmediavault.org/
TrueNAS: https://www.truenas.com/
Proxmox: https://www.proxmox.com/en/
And some of the turnkey hardware solutions you might pair with these projects are:
Synology: https://www.synology.com/en-us
QNAP: https://www.qnap.com/en-us/
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
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Jim Bailey wanted a way to stream StarCraft – so he wrote his own software to do it. From humble origins, the Open Broadcaster Software has become the de facto standard for streaming video online, and we sat down with Jim to talk about the present and future of OBS, what it’s like maintaining such a critical project, getting your code vetted by NASA, and more.
Download OBS at https://obsproject.com/
The FOSS Pod is brought to you by Google Open Source. Find out more at https://opensource.google
