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- ...