Editor’s Note: We’re excited to announce that Hackaday is the new home of FLOSS Weekly, a long-running podcast about free, libre, and open-source software! The TWiT network hosted the podcast for an incredible seventeen years, but due to some changes on their end, they recently had to wind things down. They were gracious enough to let us pick up the torch, with Jonathan Bennett now taking over hosting duties.
Tune in every Wednesday for a new episode, featuring interviews with developers and project leaders, coverage of the free/libre software you use everyday (maybe without even knowing it), and the latest Open Source news.
This week Jonathan Bennett and Simon Phipps talk with Neal Gompa of Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE and more. The conversation starts off with asking Neal how he went from working on a minor project 11 years ago, to being the lead of KDE on Fedora. How does a company properly sponsor Open Source development? Neal speaks from his experience at Red Hat and other places, to give some really interesting answers.
The crew move on to what happened at Red Hat with CentOS, and why just maybe it was a good thing. Is the age of a company a good indicator of how they will treat Open Source? Is CentOS Stream the best thing to happen to Red Hat Enterprise Linux? What was it like to be at Red Hat during that time? How does a company manage the tension between sales and engineering? We cover this and more!
See Neal’s website for more information, as well as his GitHub sponsors page.
Direct Download for your off-line listening pleasure.
From [1]: “On December 13, 2023, TWiT dropped the podcast, citing cost concerns.[2] In response, the show was picked up by Hackaday, with Jonathan Bennett taking over as lead host.”
So it seems that amongst other things here on Hackaday, weekly Jonathan Bennett will author both This Week in Security (TWiS) and Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS).
The problem I see is FLOSS remains (for now) as a freely downloadable .mp3 podcast audio file [3], but TWiS is only available as a Blog post [4]. Actually I don’t see this as a problem, but others may disagree with me. (In-fact was TWiS ever a podcast?)
Over time podcasts (et-cetera) became harder and harder to download for free and play on hardware you own whenever and wherever you wanted. That is when I stopped listening. That is where both audio and video content is going these days. You want it? Fine, become a paid “Plus” member and stream it via our DRM crippled app. And to remove ads, pay more to become a “Plus-Plus” member! No thank you…
1. FLOSS_Weekly – History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOSS_Weekly#History
2. We Won! – The Victories of Free Software and Open Source [starts at 48m23s in]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3vbPHHDlOY#t=48m23s
3. FLOSS Weekly Episode 762: Spilling the Tea
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/forcedn/b27a1a7a-dbb9-4922-ac3e-601e2d6ca1e1/FLOSS_Weekly-Ep762.mp3
4. Posts by Jonathan Bennett
https://hackaday.com/author/jonathanbennett492054495/
Heya. This Week in Security has only ever been a column here on Hackaday. FLOSS Weekly will be free to download for as long as it’s here at Hackaday, which will be for the foreseeable future. In fact, see the last link in this article for the direct download to a regular old MP3 file of the podcast. Enjoy!
For those of use who’ve never heard of “FLOSS Weekly!” (yes, these people do exist, and I’m only one of them). What is FLOSS Weekly! An introduction would be nice as I do not intend to go through 761 episodes just to get an idea of what’s this is all about. Please feel free to inform us.
Signed: a dedicated Hackaday reader who likes living under a rock
Hah! Sorry about that. I added a quick explainer to the first sentence.
I don’t want to call it Twitter.
I think just Twitts is a more fitting name for that particular social network.
Will there be a possibility in the future to subscribe to the podcast via the usual channels for podcasts (Just like one can subscribe to the Hackaday podcast itself)?
Looks like you could when it was at TWiT
https://feeds.twit.tv/floss.xml
Yes! It’s already in some of those places, like Spotify and Audible. The last link in the article is for the RSS feed. We’re working on adding it to the Youtube channel, too.