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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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- 4 days ago
Episode 882 transcript
2026-09-15 Jonathan: [00:00:00] 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, well, open-source, of course. We're talking open-source automation and some experts in that field. I've got Jan Altenberg with me, and he is, I discovered during the pre-show, a German engineer working on, well, a lot of different things, all the way from the pre-empt real-time kernels to being around computers since the 1980s. He started with a Commodore VC-20, the ever-present VIC-20, one of, I don't, I think the Commodore 64 actually holds the record, but the VIC-20 has to be one of the most popular computers ever sold. But yeah, we're talking open-source, we're talking automation, and let's bring the man himself on. Jan, welcome to the show. Jan: Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Great. Looking forward to talk about open source [00:01:00] today. As you mentioned, I've been working with computers for quite some years. Actually, I have to admit that I was not working with Commodore. This was my colleague I'm working with at OSADEL. But actually, for me, it's even more than, I would say, I've spent 35 years with computers. The drawback was that my first computer was running proprietary software, which was pretty sad, but I think I'm with open source since 30 years now. Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, that's a long time. Yeah, I see now that it was Alex, your colleague, that started with the Commodore VIC-20, but still, you've been around, you've been doing this for a while. We were talking before the show about how this interview came together, and I'm pretty sure that it's from where I was at Embedded World earlier in the year. And I took one of the days, and I went to the software wing, because they have like five different halls at Embedded World, because it's a huge show. And I went to the software wing, and I just walked around, and I looked for anything [00:02:00] that had "open source" in the title or that I knew was an open source project. I'm like, "Here's my business card. You should come be on the podcast." And so we finally made this one work, talking about the Open Source Automation Developer Lab. Now, what is open source automation in this context? Are we going to be a very AI-heavy episode again today? Is that the sort of automation that we're talking about? Jan: Oh, well. So, AI is everywhere these days, but maybe it's a bit different for us. So, what is the Open Source Automation Development Lab? As the name says, we do a lot of with open source and automation. So, we are around since a bit more than 20 years, actually. What is interesting for you to know is, I mean, as you mentioned at Embedded World, there's many different companies, right, doing software, doing open source. So, we actually, we do not have the legal form of a company, actually. [00:03:00] So, we are a registered German cooperative. Jonathan: Okay. Jan: So, that works a bit different. So, it's actually that we are owned by our members, So, we do not have a single owner, and we don't really primarily operate profit-oriented, so the thing what people do is, with a cooperative, they gather in a place and put some budget together to do something useful in common interest, right? So, in Central Europe, this is pretty common, for example, for small wine producers, so you might have everything to do the wine, but you do not, cannot maintain as a small company all the infrastructure to sell the wine and do all the production and the bottling and that stuff, and that's why wine producers gather in a cooperative, so they could finance that infrastructure together. And what happens at OSADL is that our members do the very same for open source in industrial products. So, our members [00:04:00] have the interest of using open source in industrial products, mainly in automation, but in other products as well, right? And the reason why we were founded roughly 20 years ago was basically real-time Linux. Which was around at that time, in the early 2000s, and it was proven to work. So, it became of interest for German machine producers, so it rang the interest of many engineers in Germany. But the question for the deciders was: this is a young project, right? So, will the maintainers continue that work? Who can help us with quality assurance, and who to ask, right? And this is why these companies founded OSADEL back then, to, like, provide funding to the real-tim
- 4 days ago1h 9m
Episode 882 - Better Together
This week Jonathan chats with Jan Altenberg of the Open Source Automation Development Lab, a cooperative of nerds that care about Linux and Open Source! Jan and OSADL helped push Real Time Linux across the finish line, are looking at safety critical hardening, and general cooperating to make Open Source and Industry work better together. 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/
- 1 weeks ago
Episode 881 transcript
FLOSS-881 Jonathan: [00:00:00] 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 updating. In fact, this is a topic that was not on my radar, but one of our listeners, thank you to everyone out there, said, "Hey, you guys really need to talk about Update CLI." And I said, "I don't know what that is, but we'll send the email." And so we emailed Olivier Vernon, who is our guest for today, and we said, "Hey, we would love to talk to you about this." And he said, "Sure." And so we've got him on the show. Olivier is the guy behind Update CLI, and unfortunately, I just got logged out of my email address that has his bio. Let's see if I can get back into that. We're doing it live, as they say. But let's go ahead and bring him on, and then I'll get back to the bio. Olivier, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here. Olivier: Thanks for having me on the show here. Yeah, I was really [00:01:00] glad to hear that you would contact me. So, I've been following what you did here for a few years, so that's really nice to hear. For the BIOS, quickly to talk about me, so I'm working, so I've been working on open source software for the past 10 years, both professionally and on the side as well. Jonathan: Mm-hmm. Olivier: I've been contributing to open source conferences and so on, so the biggest one is probably the FOSDEM for those people who know what FOSDEM is about. And so, the reason why I'm Jonathan: Oh, okay. Mm-hmm. Olivier: here today is because I was interested to talk about that side project that I've been maintaining for five years, which is all about updating your Git repositories, and so, yeah, that's why I'm here. I don't know if, yeah, the project is named Update CLI, so for people who are not familiar with this, it's kind of interesting because there is no, like, similar project, but it's a CLI. I mean, you can guess based on the name. That allows you to automatically update your Git repositories based on [00:02:00] manifest that tells you how to update those Git repositories. So the purpose is really to help you on the maintenance of your projects, and so you stop monitoring third information coming from the web. You just define, okay, you have a Git repository. What would be the latest information, URL, version, whatever? So, people usually, when they think about Update.cli, think about Renovate or Dependabot, which is kind of the closest, I would say, project for what it does, and otherwise, it's just bash scripts, Python scripts, and so on, so it's kind of a seed between the two worlds. Jonathan: It's amazing to me to see, like, how much of the world is run by nothing more than a pile of Bash scripts. Olivier: Yeah, exactly. And it's like, yeah, Bash is really awesome, until you reach some limitation. Jonathan: Oh yeah, absolutely. there are elements of it that drive me crazy um and in fact there is a uh several years ago we interviewed another project called amber that they were like [00:03:00] we love bash except for this set of things that's terrible about it so we made our own scripting language that compiles down to bash code it's like well that's cool um okay so what's what is this what does this problem look like like at what point does someone reach for update cli what where in like an open source project or just you know your your homebrew whatever it is you're doing what what does the problem look like Olivier: So, the problem was, back then, like five years ago, when I started working on a project, I was working at the time on the Jenkins project. We had a lot of Git repositories, Java libraries, and so on, and one of the projects which is still running today is the infrastructure where we run the Jenkins, where we test Jenkins, and so on, and so all that infrastructure is managed by infrastructure as code, like Puppet, Kubernetes, and so on, and one of the Jonathan: Mm-hmm. Olivier: problems I was facing back then was, quite regularly, someone would build a new application, and then I would forget to update that application on [00:04:00] the Puppet infrastructure, or Kubernetes Jonathan
- 1 weeks ago1h 5m
Episode 881 - Eating Its Own Tail
This week Jonathan chats with Olivier Vernin of Updatecli, the tool that helps you update everything! Need to roll out dependency updates intelligently? Or even automatically deploy to a server on changes? Updatecli can help! 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 880 transcript
FLOSS-880 Jonathan: [00:00:00] Hey, folks. This week I talk with Benjamin Samuels of Trail of Bits and we're talking about Patch the Planet. That's the Trail of Bits initiative to help open source projects deal with the absolute tidal wave we're all seeing of pull requests, bug reports, and vulnerability disclosures. This is Floss Weekly, episode 880, recorded Tuesday, September the 1st. The two wolves 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 something really cool. We've got Benjamin Samuels of Trail of Bits, and he does their boring blockchain thing that we may cover a little bit. But the other thing he's involved in is Patch the Planet, which is all about helping open source projects with security problems. And reading the notes ahead of time, I happen to know that, take a drink, we're gonna talk about AI. But not necessarily the [00:01:00] everybody should using it, but this is causing a problem for some open source projects. Like, how do we deal with that? We'll get into all of that. Let's go ahead and bring him on. Benjamin, hey. I'm super glad that you're here. Welcome to the show. Benjamin: Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Jonathan: Yeah. So tell me... Let's see. Where do we start? You've got a background in electronics. You were telling me before the show started that was your college major. And you found Hackaday way back in the day- Yeah ... looking for I think like a lot of us did, looking for information about what's practical for me to try to tackle in the electronics world? Benjamin: Yeah. Back in the day, back in college, poor college kid it's really hard to figure out, what kind of electronics projects can you actually do on your own that you don't need a whole lot of equipment for? And it was way back before Arduino like you a- if you wanted a microcontroller, you had to buy a pick, and you had to buy a programmer, and just getting into stuff could be like, $500 to $1,000. And the real struggle was, like, looking for projects that, [00:02:00] I could actually tackle. 'Cause, you're learning electronics, you wanna actually do it. But it was a really high barrier for entry, and Hackaday was a s- a source of some of my earliest projects, just trying to reproduce what other people had built. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. I remember I've told them this story ahead, before the show started, w- when I was first trying to run some ethernet and trying to figure out how to terminate ethernet. I think I learned that from Hackaday, and that may have been one of my first exposures to this world that we now all live in. Jonathan: But one of the other really interesting things I did very early was toner transfer method for making PCBs- Yeah ... and that was surprisingly easy for a, I think, t- maybe teenager, either teenager or college student, myself at the time, to get into. It's like, 'cause you could get a magazine and print onto the magazine. S- if you had the right kind of printer that did waterproof toner, and then you could take, and you flip it upside down, and you put it on your PCB board, and you take an iron and iron it, and the toner would transfer. And you could caref- I think you had to use water because you wanted that, you wanted the paper itself to disintegrate and leave the toner [00:03:00] behind. And then you could dump that into a bath of what was it? Hydrochloric and muriatic acid, the mix? Something like that. Yeah. And it would etch the copper, but leave where the toner was. And so that was... I, man, I remember that. I have... I still somewhere around here, I have a device that I built that way. It was a- ... headphone preamp. My, my first foray into playing with tubes as well. Sup- super cool times, man. I hadn't thought about that in a long time. Thank you. Thank you, Hackaday. Benjamin: Thank you, Hackaday. Yes. Jonathan: So you kinda went from the hardware to the software and security, and you're now at Trail of Bits. What do what do you do at Trail of Bits? What's your job there? Benjamin: So I'm the director of engineering of the blockchain practice and we're a part of a larger group called Assurance, which means software assurance, trying to make sure that software is secure and to have all kinds of companies out there that have very high impact software where
- 2 weeks ago1h 6m
Episode 880 - The Two Wolves
This week Jonathan chats with Benjamin Samuels of Trail of Bits! The conversation focuses on Patch the Planet, a new initiative to help Open Source projects deal with the fallout from AI coding and vulnerability research. What's the unexpected dichotomy driving the polarized response to LLMs? And what does the future look like for Open Source in the age of AI? 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 879 transcript
FLOSS-879 Jonathan: [00:00:00] This week we're talking with Nathan Freitas of The Guardian Project, talking about their work with Tor and the Butter Box some things for Signal, and a whole lot more. You don't wanna miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly, episode 879, recorded Tuesday, August the 25th. Easy like butter It's time for FOSS Weekly. That's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we have a treat. We have a returning... I don't remember if it's a returning guest, at least a returning topic. I think it's the same guest. We're talking about the Guardian Project, and we've got Nathan Freitas with us, and he is the founder, the director. He's the guy from Guardian Project. He's also the director of reality at Proof Mode. And he's been around for a while. His first open source work was back in 1996 over at UC Santa Barbara working [00:01:00] on an NSF/NASA-funded digital library project, Alexandria, a precursor to Google Maps. And a bunch of other things from doing Java at Palm to Tor, the first port of Tor to Android. He's- Nathan's been around. He's been around the block. And we're gonna talk to him, get an update on things that the Guardian Project is doing, and I think probably just talk a bit about the state of the world, which is a little dangerous, but we're gonna, we're gonna brave it. We're gonna do it. So without any further ado, Nathan, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here. Nathan: Thanks so much. Yeah. Returning guest and have talked, yeah with Doc and folks in the past on- ... pre- previous incarnations. And I definitely enjoy this podcast because we can get into the weeds, and people love it, the details. Jonathan: Absolutely. Nathan: The packets, the patches, the- whatever you wanna talk about. Jonathan: I reached out, yeah, for sure. I reached out to both Doc and Simon to be able to co-host today, and didn't hear back from either of them. I think they're both super busy and didn't get a chance to get back to me. [00:02:00] But Nathan: it's- It is summer still, though. Jonathan: Yes. Nathan: We're s- my kids are in s- camps and things, so you know. It feels like summer here in Boston, so I don't mind if they're out on the beach or somewhere. Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Were you at, I should have asked this before the show. Did you make it to DEF CON this year? Nathan: I didn't, and I missed Hope as well. As a East Coaster, I'm a big Hope guy generally. And yeah, I- I'll admit COVID got me off going to big things, and I just haven't mentally gotten back. There's a couple things I do. But the beauty of being in the Boston area often is it's feels like a constant hackathon of ideas and code- ... and meetups, and you've got so many big brains and open source history and things to do that I often o- feel already overwhelmed by stuff, I unders- Jonathan: I understand. Nathan: But I know a lot of great people were at both New York and Vegas, Jonathan: yeah. So I'm in southwestern Oklahoma. Long-time listeners of the show know this, but I'm in southwestern Oklahoma, and great, amazing people here, but not a hotbed of open source and technology most of the [00:03:00] time. So I really enjoy being able to get out to things like DEF CON. I made DEF CON for the first time this year, and really had a blast. Already making plans for going back with a bigger presence next year. Awesome ... but it was a, yeah, it was really cool. I saw there was a Tor booth at DEF CON, actually. Yeah, absolutely. And I did not get a chance to stop by and talk to them. I really wanted to because Tor, Tor is one of those technologies that I've been interested in for a very long time. I it's one of the things that got me started with the security aspects of technology, 'cause I had a buddy that was d- at a college behind a firewall, and we had to do something to get his internet traffic out. Yeah. And then I had at least one person I was helping for a while try to run Tor through the Chinese fire, or the, the great firewall of China. And it's like, it's a really interesting project. It's got a weird history. And you've
- 3 weeks ago1h 6m
Episode 879 - Easy Like Butter
This week Jonathan chats with Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project! What is going on at the forefront of Open Source and privacy advocacy? Where are we on a true Tor browser on iOS? And what's the ideal solution to the Android Lockdown issue? 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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