FLOSS Weekly

More about FLOSS Weekly:

With a library of more than 600 episodes so far, FLOSS Weekly is the ultimate podcast for everyone in the open-source community. This technology podcast covers news and developments in the world of free and open-source software (FLOSS) and features in-depth interviews with prominent guests in the field. Doc Searls hosts the podcast with a rotating panel of co-hosts, including Aaron Newcomb, Dan Lynch, Simon Phipps, Jonathan Bennett, Shawn Powers, and Katherine Druckman. The podcast records live every Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. PT, hits all major podcatchers by Wednesday evening, and is available in video as well.

Interviews with Open-Source VIPs

Many influential people from the free and open-source community have appeared on the show, including Kent Beck, Brian Behlendorf, Dries Buytaert, Ward Cunningham, Vinay Gupta, Jon "maddog" Hall, Miguel de Icaza, Rasmus Lerdorf, Tim O'Reilly, Christine Petersen, Jeremy Ruston, Guido van Rossum, Linus Torvalds, Jimmy Wales, and Rebecca Whitworth. David A. Wheeler of the Linux Foundation is a frequent guest. Behind-the-scenes experts like Stormy Peters and Sarah Novotny of Microsoft have also livened up the show.

The show covers a wide range of topics, such as ZFS, Mifos, Asterisk, and the OSU Open Source Lab. Also, open-source angles on big issues: privacy, identity, blockchain, standards, and networking. The interviewers typically ask guests about the history of the project and its development model (such as which language it is written in, which version control system is used, and what development environment the author uses). Some episodes feature more general topics related to open-source, such as the history and philosophies of free and open-source software.

Topics Covered on this Technology Podcast

Each week, FLOSS Weekly delves into the vast world of free and open-source software. Some of the topics the hosts and guests have discussed are:

• Software Heritage, an extraordinary effort to save all the world's software in all its versions and generations for all time
• Ethics and open source
• The "three legs of the FLOSS stool," developers, companies, and foundations
• Open-source solutions to encryption and securing private information across platforms
• Open and fair artificial intelligence
• OBS.Ninja, Steve Seguin's peer-to-peer, super-low latency video conferencing tool
• Trusting open source in government and business
• Using open-source for education, productivity, and creativity

FLOSS Weekly premiered on April 7, 2006, and was originally hosted by TWiT.tv founder Leo Laporte. His co-host for the first 17 episodes was Chris DiBona and subsequently Randal Schwartz. In May 2010, Schwartz took over from Laporte as lead host. May 2020 saw Doc Searls take over the host role. Most episodes feature the primary developer or developers of a particular open-source software project. The show is an open discussion, with the host and co-host asking questions about the nature of the project.

About the Podcast Hosts

FLOSS Weekly is led by the highly respected open-source scholar Doc Searls and co-hosted by a rotating crew of open-source evangelists. Doc Searls is a journalist, author, and broadcast personality and for a quarter-century, editor for the Linux Journal. Doc is a fellow with the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara and founder/director of ProjectVRM at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Doc's co-hosts are all dedicated to the open-source community. They include Aaron Newcomb, Dan Lynch, Simon Phipps, Shawn Powers, Jonathan Bennett, and Katherine Druckman. Aaron is a highly technical marketing and solutions expert with over 20 years of experience in the IT industry. Dan is a broadcaster, musician, and writer from Liverpool, UK. Simon is a consultant and the founding principal of Meshed Insights Ltd. Shawn Powers is a Linux Trainer, and Jonathan Bennett writes a weekly security column on Hackaday while running a small IT business. Katherine is a Drupal software engineer and podcaster.

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