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It's the OG podcast about Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, FLOSS Weekly! Join us as Jonathan Bennett and the posse of Co-hosts interview big names of Free Software, cover utterly fascinating Open Source Projects you may have never heard of, and cover the news about software you use every day without even realizing it.
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- 1 weeks ago
Episode 876 transcript
FLOSS-876 Jonathan: Hey folks, this week I talk with Michael Meeks about Collabora. They do a lot of things, but we're talking specifically about their office suite and how they pay the bills doing an open source project. This is Floss Weekly, episode 876, recorded Tuesday, July the 21st. There is no money fairy Hey, folks. It's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and my voice is just a little extra raspy, a little extra bassy today, and that is because I've been at Open Sauce this past weekend. And in the infinite wisdom of the people putting the show together, they put our booth back to back with a guitar amp booth. So I've been speaking loudly to be heard over the sound of sick guitar riffs for about three days now, and my voice definitely took the hit. But that was a lot of fun. I'm back now, back in the saddle. Didn't miss any Floss Weeklies this time around, and we have got something really neat today. We're talking with Michael Meeks of Collabora, and one of our, one of our live listeners before we started the recording said, "Are we talking virtual reality, or are we talking office suites?" I think the answer is office suites, but apparently VR is part of the conversation. We'll get some information about that in here in just a moment. So our guest today, Michael Meeks he is CEO of Collabora, and he is, has served as the director of the Document Foundation. He's done all sorts of stuff over the years, including worked at Novell/SUSE, then part of doing lots and lots of Linux stuff over the years, and a, a whole lot more. Let's go ahead and bring him on. Michael, welcome absolutely to the show. It's good to have you here. Michael: Thanks so much, Jonathan. Pleasure to be here. Jonathan: So w- are we talking virtual reality, or are we talking office suites? Michael: That's a really good question. So Collabora, of course, is two things really. So it's a, a consultancy doing Linux enablement, open source stuff across the stacks- in multimedia, graphics all sorts of kernel enablement hardware stuff to get open source in at the bottom of the stack. So it's the obvious choice. There's always someone there that can help you get your hardware enabled, and so open source comes up from the bottom. And then of course, Collabora is also Collabora Office. It's always coming from the top of the software stack with these very, very leaf node- ... with all these dependencies. And so yeah there's two companies there. But we love to share the same brand and, work, work together. We have a mission, which is to make open source rock, and so we do that. Gotcha. And the hope is that in the end, the bottom and the top guys meet in the middle and shake hands and then everything is open source. That's the long-term plan, basically. But yeah- ... we're getting Jonathan: there. It's when they were digging the ch- the Channel, and they started at both ends, and finally they broke through and, shook hands through the rocks. Michael: Absolutely. Absolutely. H- So yeah, a, a breakthrough. Jonathan: How did it come about that there are these basically two separate companies that are under the same banner? Michael: Yeah, so I did a lot of work as you mentioned at SUSE Novell, as distinguished engineer there. And at some point, SUSE got really good management. And the good management realized that infrastructure software services and office productivity are pro- probably two separate things. All of these people are suffering in the Linux kernel at the bottom, toiling away. And, Linus says, "The interesting stuff's happening in user space. Up there. Go and do those things." And so there we were, writing Android apps and so on and people were a bit, aggrieved. And so fair enough, totally fair. We... They spun us out, they did it in a really good way Niels Brinkmann, Ral- Ralf Flakser. And they even gave us a, a small support contract for the first year or so to support their usage of LibreOffice, at the time. And yeah, just brilliant. So we got spun out, and that just makes decision-making so much easier. And helped me learn a whole load of, things about open source and business that seemed so simple back when I was employed and someone else was doing the selling and so on. And now, yeah, make... I think I was extremely naive, let's say. Yeah. To put it- I- Put it one way or another. I Jonathan: understand. Yeah. You got a very abrupt crash course- ...
- 1 weeks ago1h 12m
Episode 876 - There Is No Money Fairy
This week Jonathan chats with Michael Meeks about Collabora! What's the origin story in this consulting company, why do they have an outstanding office suite, and where is the world headed to accomplish digital sovereignty? Listen to find out! You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- 2 weeks ago
Episode 875 transcript
FLOSS-875 Jonathan: This week we're talking with Neriman Gelva about Pewter. That is the operating system that runs literally in your browser. Maybe we're stretching the definition of operating system there just a little bit, but still. This is Floss Weekly, episode 875, recorded Tuesday, July the 14th. JavaScript as a systems language. It's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we are talking about Pewter. That is the operating system, the desktop that lives on the cloud, on the internet, in JavaScript. I have questions about how this works. It's something like that. Can you locally host it? I think so, but I don't know for sure. I know that it's open source. That's why we have them on the show. And the guy behind it, the man himself, is Neriman Jelva. I met him at the Ubuntu Summit this year, and he did a couple of talks there. Actually, they had him do a lightning talk and a full-length talk all about the what you do when your open source project is a runaway hit. And I know a lot of people would say, "Oh, I wish I had that problem." It's actually a big deal. It's a tiring problem. It's a, there, there are things to deal with that maybe you don't think about. But Neriman is a programmer. He is an entrepreneur, and he's been doing this sort of stuff for about 30 years, so he knows what's going on and how it all works. But I think Pewter is a new ballgame even for him. It exploded in popularity. We even covered it. We talked about it over on the Untitled Linux Show as well as this cool thing that you may wanna check out. A lot of people thought it was cool. There's about 42,000 GitHub stars. I don't think he paid for any of those. 390 people have contributed. They've got over 400,000 downloads. And apparently, it's in 100,000 different web applications, which sort of talks to the the actual use case for Pewter. I could go on. I've played with it a little bit, but we do have Neriman here. And let's go ahead and bring him on, and we'll get the answers from him to all of these questions. So welcome to the show, sir. I'm so glad to have you here. Nariman: Thank you so much. Very excited to be here. Jonathan: Yeah, we were talking beforehand about... we were comparing notes about our travel schedule, and I was telling him about things that I've got coming up. But we met at the Ubuntu Summit in London. Are you based out of out of London? I'm in the middle of nowhere in the United States. I'm in southwest Oklahoma. I'm in flyover country. I wave at all the planes going by 'cause I know they got my buddies on them. Where are you based out of? Nariman: I'm in Vancouver, BC, Canada right now. Jonathan: Ah, our northern brethren, the Canadians. Nariman: Yes. Yes. And, but our team is from all over the place, basically. We have a couple people in the US. We have some people in Europe, Asia. Pretty much remote, like a true open source project. Even though we're a company, but... Jonathan: Hey it's allowed to be both. Open source developers- Yes ... need to pay rent and eat too it's okay to make money on these things. Okay, so let's start from the beginning. You- you've got a team now. You've got a business. You've got an open source project. That's not where any of this started, though. What was the very beginning? At what point did you go- A desktop on the internet would be cool. How did that come about? Nariman: Yeah, sure. So if you remember maybe you never had to pay attention to this part of the internet, but I would say between 10 and five years ago there was this period of time where everybody was proclaiming that the browser is the next operating system. It was like something people would say, and I really believe that because I remember the first days of the web. That's when I started writing my first line of code, and then, So I basically grew up with the web, and I saw the progression over time. So I really do believe that the browser is the next operating system, depending on how you define the operating system. So n- obviously not a Linux. That's not what we're talking about. Basically m- more about the user space. That's the discussion. We can talk about this more later on. But the real thing a- around this, the real thought around this was always that, hey, this is like... The browser is like the v- a virtual machine, that you can probably run any application in it. And more and more applications were moving to the web. But nobody really cracked
- 2 weeks ago1h 10m
Episode 875 - JavaScript as a Systems Language
This week Jonathan chats with Nariman Jelveh about Puter! It's the project that takes the idea of the Browser-as-the-OS seriously. Why did a simulated desktop on the web take off, what the story of making it Open Source, and what's coming next? Listen to find out! You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- 3 weeks ago
Episode 874 transcript
FLOSS-874 Jonathan: Hey folks. This week I'm talking with Andrea Gallo of RISC-V International. We talk all about everyone's favorite open ISA, the fact that there might be more RISC-V cores in the world than there are people, and lots more. You don't wanna miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly, episode 874, recorded Tuesday, July the 7th. Really, we do PDFs It's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we're gonna be a little risky today. We're talking about RISC-V. I, I had to make the pun. I know. I'm sorry. I'm a dad. I make dad jokes. Anyway, we're talking about RISC-V, the open ISA, the open ecosystem. And we've got somebody, we have somebody very special from RISC-V International and from various places. He does a lot of things. It's it's the man when you talk about RISC-V. We have we have Andrea Gallo. I think I got that did I pronounce that right, sir? Andrea: Perfect. Yeah, perfect. Jonathan: Okay. Excellent. Perfect. Excellent. And where I forget to ask this sometimes, but where are you speaking to us from? Where are you at in the world? Andrea: I'm just close to Milan, Italy. Jonathan: Oh. Oh, my goodness. You lucky dog. That's awesome. I'm in Southwest Oklahoma, which has its own charms. A business colleague of mine- Of course ... just the other day was driving through Oklahoma, and they stayed at a, he stayed at a little tiny town with his family in Oklahoma. And he's "Oklahoma's really nice." I tried to tell you it's really nice here. So Andrea, y- you are you're now the, let's see, the CEO at RISC-V International, and I have about three different questions that go along with that. And I think the first one is what's your background? Y- if I remember correctly, you're you've come from the technical side of things, not the- ... i, I don't mean to be derogatory here, but not the bean counter side of the house. What i- what has that been like to go from the very technical side of things to you're now CEO of this huge organization? Andrea: Oh it's a big honor and quite a challenge, of course. Yeah, I have a mixed background of hardware and software for- ... for, since the beginning I've always messed up because I always enjoyed mixing the hardware side and the software side- ... in many different roles. And I've al- always enjoyed facing customers as well. So I started as application engineer in my early professional days. But even before that I was writing little games that were published by one of those old style magazines where you had all the listings, and so I always enjoyed the public facing side as well. And I was also responsible for business development in a previous professional role. So I always enjoys the mix of both technical and customer facing. And, Jonathan: I was thinking as you were saying that, th- there, there's some combinations that c- give you superpowers. For example I've, one of the lawyers that I work with, she's also studying to be a CPA, and o- once you have both passed the bar and passed the CPA exam in the US you're a superhero in the legal world. And I think in the software hardware world, someone that has written firmware and dabbled with software, has done hardware designs being able to do both of those sort of gives you a superpower. And then on top of that, you also do the business side of things. No wonder they made you the CEO. Andrea: No, the real guys are the founders of RISC-V, and all the great minds on the technical steering committee that drive the work on RISC-V. Those are the real brains. I think at RISC-V International, we're just serving these big brains. That's our role, help them achieve what they are, they're really doing. Jonathan: So that's a, that's actually a really good segue. What is RISC-V International? How does it fit into the puzzle of what RISC-V is? Andrea: RISC-V International is the nonprofit association is the organization that hosts and coordinates the evolution of the RISC-V ISA. So we ensure that the evolution of the specifications is done in full coherence with the missions and standards set by the original founders of RISC-V and we ensure that there are no deviations along the path and that we ensure that the process follows the right policies and procedures, and it's transparent and collaborative. I think our role is to ensure that all the members that found the work at RISC-V, they collabor
- 3 weeks ago1h 0m
Episode 874 - Really, We Do PDFs
This week Jonathan chats with Andrea Gallo about RISC-V! What does it mean for RISC-V to be an Open ISA? Where is RISC-V popping up, and what's the new frontier? Listen to find out! You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Jul 1, 2026
Episode 873 transcript
FLOSS-873 Jonathan: This week, Aaron and Andy join me to talk about QNX. It's the other operating system that runs in a whole bunch of different places. It really has safety and real-time nailed down. There's just one little problem. This is FLOSS Weekly, episode 873, recorded Tuesday, June the 30th. Wait, that's not open source It's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we're talking about a Unix or a Unix derivative or a Unix-like. I'm not sure which of those terms is technically correct. We're talking about QNX. It runs a whole lot of places. It used to run on your BlackBerry, and it runs a lot of places that you don't think about. Maybe not on your toaster, but maybe on your car. Anyway, we've got we've got Andy Green and we've got Aaron Bassett to talk about QNX, where the company is, where they're going, what changes are there, and why, maybe you should think about doing some development on it. Let's go ahead and bring them on. Guys, welcome. Welcome to the show. It is great to have you both here. Andy: Thanks so much. Really appreciate it. Jonathan: Thanks for having us. Yeah. And now, we gotta start with this. We have to start with this, right? So this is the show about open source, Floss Weekly, free, libre, open source software. We're not... We don't do dentistry here. We do open source stuff. QNX, at least like the core of it, the kernel of it it's closed source. And what are we even doing here, guys? Get get out. What's Andy: the conversation? Yeah. Why are we on this show? Jonathan: Why does this Andy: make sense? Yeah, no that, that's very fair. So I, we have had a kind of a really interesting and long evolving story with open source, and I think for some of your audience who may remember, we did go fully open source at one point in our history. And and that was like right around the time when we were acquired by Research In Motion for use in the BlackBerry, and they were thinking, "Hey this stuff is special sauce. We really don't want this to be, like-" "... our... one of our defining characteristics. We don't want to be fully out there because we wanna actually have some of that proprietary goodness for ourselves, for our own phones." So we clawed that back. And so that that is something that I think, a lot of us in QNX were not necessarily... we understood the business rationale for that and all that. But I think that there was always this feeling that, there's a lot of good and value that we get with working in the open source community and with the open source community, and we wanted to bring some of that back. And so I think relatively recently we've had this, So I guess QNX Everywhere has been a program that, that both Aaron and I are part of both sides of the, on the technical side and on the s- sort of more on the business side. And that's been around for about a year and a half. And that's been our start back to recognizing, l- look we need to be more involved with the community. We need to be more transparent. We need to open ourselves up a little bit more. So I'm not gonna make a commitment and say, "Hey, yeah, we're going all open source," or anything like that. We're not gonna, make that same mistake of making commitments and then pulling back on them. But what we are doing is we are trying to open up a lot of the pieces that we see don't really have impact on our business. Because I'll be frank, there's a few different things that are factors as to where- whether or not we do things open source or not. And one of the big ones is that a majority of our business is based on regulated industries. Things that either have functional safety components or cybersecurity components or things like that. And in a lot of cases there's this thing called SOUP, which is software of unknown providence that is an acronym that's used within those sort of, certification bodies or regulatory communities. And having open source software in a lot of cases makes things extremely difficult to pass through certification. Not because of the testing or anything like that, it's because you can't really guarantee where that software has come from, or you have a very difficult time tracing the line through of all the edits that have been made to it- from different contributing parties. So we have to be super careful and super cautious about things that are gonna impact our business. So we don't we're not gonna go and say, "Oh, yeah, hey, you're, we're gonna open source the kernel," because then anybody can contribute to it, and then we turn ar
- Jul 1, 20261h 3m
Episode 873 - Wait, That's Not Open Source!
This week Jonathan chats with Andy Gryc and Aaron Basset about QNX, and the interesting Open Source history and future of that embedded OS. Why does QNX Everywhere feel more open, and why do you need to register an account to download images? All that and more -- Listen to find out! You can join the conversation in the Hackaday Discord, watch live or get the video version of the show on Youtube, as well as getting the full story and show links from Hackaday. Oh, and follow the official Mastadon account! Theme music: "Newer Wave" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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About FLOSS Weekly
It's the OG podcast about Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, FLOSS Weekly! Join us as Jonathan Bennett and the posse of Co-hosts interview big names of Free Software, cover utterly fascinating Open Source Projects you may have never heard of, and cover the news about software you use every day without even realizing it.
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