Tag Archives: FLOSS Weekly

FLOSS Weekly 622: Keith Packard

Simon joined Doc Searls to host episode 622 of FLOSS Weekly featuring Keith Packard, one of the key figures of the open source software movement. They talked about Keith’s involvement in the X System and Freedesktop.org and strayed into related topics including the many projects Keith has helped and his interest in rocketry!

One significant discussion considered the thread joining the fork of XFree86, the recent vote to change the board of Nominet in the UK and the controversy over the reinstatement of Richard M Stallman to the board of the Free Software Foundation this week. Each represents a significant entity to the open movement which has leadership that was established as a “club” between activists and failed to progress into a well-governed organisation representing and controlled by the community.

FLOSS Weekly 616: Software Heritage

Simon co-hosted FLOSS Weekly 616 this week and along with Doc Searls interviewed Roberto di Cosmo from (among other things) the Software Heritage project, which has the goal of archiving all the world’s software source code. The discussion was as wide-ranging as you’d expect, covering both the idea of software as a cultural artefact and the specifics of Software Heritage such as the unique IDs it gives every software version it archives so that software becomes citable in research. One particular topic was the grant programme that Sloan Foundation funds to get new connectors for Software Heritage written, which readers may want to consider.

FLOSS Weekly 531: Bareos

Bareos is not pronounced the same way as bareness and despite sounding like it is nothing to do with a guy called Barry. It’s a comprehensive and mature backup system forked from the Bacula project when it headed proprietary a few years back. Simon joined Randall Schwartz to interview one of its founders and find out where it was headed and just what sort of open source project it is.

 

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FLOSS Weekly 488: Keycloak

Simon co-hosted this week’s show, which looked at a very interesting identity management system called Keycloak that puts commercial-strength federated authentication, authorisation and identity management within the reach of every developer. It’s written in Java, backed by Red Hat and has a large and active community.

 

 

FLOSS Weekly 484: The Lounge

After the Pidgin show a while back, Simon stepped in at 11:59 for Randal again, hosting an interesting show about a pure community project that makes a web-hosted IRC client called The Lounge. If you need a web client where you can maintain ongoing IRC sessions, this open source, self-hosted alternative to IRCCloud and others may be the answer. It’s written in Javascript, runs in Node and there’s a ready-to-use Docker container available.

FLOSS Weekly 479: Pidgin

This week Simon co-hosted episode 479, an entertaining interview about the Pidgin project, one of the most important Open Source Free software projects. It’s a multi-platform program that allows pretty much any instant messaging system to be used from a single interface. It also includes libpurple, a library that can be used in other software to do the same thing, and Finch, a terminal-based IM app with all the same capabilities.

Amazingly, Pidgin is developed by a tiny group of part-time developers. Maybe it’s time for the Open Source community to step in and help to guarantee the future of this important, widely-used app and library? A donation might be a start but they seem to need more…