FLOSS Weekly

49 Articles

FLOSS Weekly Episode 768: Open Source Radio

January 31, 2024 by 8 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Doc Searls talk with Tony Zeoli about Netmix and the Radio Station WordPress plugin. The story starts with the Netmix startup, one of the first places doing Internet music in the 1990s. That business did well enough to get bought out just before the Dot Com bubble burst in 2000. Today, Tony runs the Radio Station plugin, which is all about putting a station’s show schedule on a WordPress site.

In the process, the trio covers Internet radio history, the licensing complications around radio and streaming, the state of local radio, and more. Is there a long term future for radio? Does Creative Commons solve the licensing mess? Is AI going to start eating radio, too? All this and more!

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 767: Owntracks, Are We There Yet?

January 24, 2024 by 2 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Jeff Massie talk with JP Mens about Owntracks, the collection of programs that lets you take back control of your own location data. It’s built around the simple idea of taking position data from a mobile phone or other data source, sending it over MQTT to a central server, and logging that data to a simple data store.

From there, you can share it as trips, mark points of interest, play back your movement in a web browser, and more. And because it’s just JSON inside MQTT, it’s pretty trivial to make a connector to interface with other projects, like Home Assistant. We’ve even covered the process!

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 766: WebRTC — The Hack That Connects Everyone To Everything

January 17, 2024 by 7 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch talk with Sean DuBois, WebRTC wizard, all about the crazy feats the Pion Go server is capable of, how WebRTC is about to change OBS, and what it looks like to build a successful Open Source Career.

WebRTC is for more than video. The TOR Snowflake project uses Pion to sneak TOR traffic through firewalls even with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) at play. Since nobody wants to block web conferencing, TOR and even Wireguard can use this to slip though.

Sean is also working on some game-changing patches for OBS Studio, including WHEP support to go along with the newly introduced WHIP feature. This enables direct connections to another OBS client, as well as connection to another WebRTC client like vdo.ninja without running an embedded browser to make it work.

And then there’s WebRTC For The Curious, a free CC0 e-book all about the nuts and bolts of WebRTC. And Broadcast Box, a ready-to-run WebRTC one-to-many broadcasting solution that lets you run your own streaming service. You can connect with Sean at the Real-time Broadcast Discord server for information about all of the projects listed here and more!

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 765: That Ship Sailed… And Sank

January 9, 2024 by 5 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Aaron Newcomb talk with Randal Schwartz, the longest running host of FLOSS Weekly, Perl’s biggest cheerleader, and now Dart and Flutter expert. What’s new with Randal since his last FLOSS Weekly episode in May 2020? Why should you look at Dart and Flutter? And how do you avoid becoming a security martyr?

Randal has been busy since handing over the reigns of FLOSS Weekly, adding to his Perl credentials a solid claim to being a Dart Flutter expert. The Dart language has some real appeal, taking the best features from JIT languages like JavaScript, and also offering binary compilation like a real systems language should. Then the Flutter framework lets you write your code once, and literally run it on any screen. Sure, there have been some growing pains along the way, and listen to the episode to hear Randal describe the “45-degree turns” the language/framework duo has taken through the years.

Then as almost a bonus at the end of the episode, Randal quickly covered his now-expunged conviction for “doing his job with too much enthusiasm”, and covered some basic pointers to keep other security researchers out of trouble. This week is a nostalgia trip for long-time listeners, as well as a real treat for everyone else.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 764: You Have To Be Pretty Cynical

January 3, 2024 by 8 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Katherine Druckman talk with benny Vasquez, chair of AlmaLinux, all about the weird road we’ve been on with Enterprise Linux distributions, and how that’s landed us here, where we have AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and multiple other Red Hat downstream distros. What’s the difference between those projects, and why does it matter?

Projects need more than just developers. How do you keep members doing documentation, bug hunting, outreach, and even graphic design plugged in and feeling like part of the team? How do you walk the narrow line between the different directions a project can drift, setting up your community for long term success? And where’s the most surprising place benny has found AlmaLinux running? And why is benny’s first name never capitalized? Give this week’s show a listen to find out!

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 763: Fedora Fixes Everything

December 27, 2023 by 18 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch talk once again with Neal Gompa of Fedora, CentOS, openSUSE and more. This time the focus is Fedora, with sprinklings of Immutable Linux, KDE 6, and the new Linux stack of Pipewire, Portals, and Wayland. Neal gives us a rundown of what exactly makes Fedora Atomic so interesting, and why you probably don’t want it running on your desktop. But in a computer lab, or on a public machine? Fedora Atomic might be exactly what you need.

Up next there’s Pipewire, the userspace sound server that replaces Pulseaudio and Jack. Should we think of Pipewire as Jack 3.0? And what’s the secret to getting really reliable low-latency performance for Pipewire in Fedora? It might not be what you expect.

There’s a popular rant online, that Wayland breaks everything. And for years, that’s been a relatively accurate statement, in that Wayland hasn’t been ready for prime-time. Fedora 40 has gone all in on the belief that Wayland’s time has come, with KDE and Gnome no longer having an X11 native option. It’s Wayland all the way. And as one that has run Rawhide, I can say that the future there is bright. Literally, if you have an HDR capable monitor.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 762: Spilling The Tea

December 20, 2023 by 8 Comments

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!

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