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