FLOSS Weekly isn’t about limiting one’s dental hygiene, since for this podcast FLOSS stands for Free Libre Open Source Software. It’s only one of the shows on Leo Laporte’s TWiT Network, but as interesting as roundtable discussions can be, the guest list makes this podcast (or netcast) compelling. Many times I hadn’t heard of the interviewee (let alone the product) but there’s always something interesting. The co-host started out being Chris DiBona (open source program manager at Google), but since he ended up not having enough time to do a weekly show, Randal Schwartz (author of many Perl books) took his place and the quality of the guests hasn’t changed at all.
What kind of people are on the show? In September 2008 they had Simon Phipps (chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems), Jeff Robbins (Drupal developer), Shaun Walker (developer of DotNetNuke), and Roger Dannenberg (of Audacity). While you could say that two of the shows were related to content management, all four shows went in very different directions. Especially interesting were how Shaun Walker was paid by Microsoft for a time to develop DotNetNuke and how Audacity actually didn’t spring forth from a need to do audio editing.
Another thing I enjoy is that the show is willing to get geeky with technical details. Even if it doesn’t completely make sense for those who aren’t familiar with the product, it’s easy to follow the general ideas. For example, Guido van Rossum spoke a lot about the next version of Python, but I admittedly forgot the specific issues he raised (my excuse is that the interview was a couple years ago).
Not all the shows are about software projects. A particularly interesting interview was with Eben Moglen, General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation and the person chiefly responsible for GPL 3.0, even though it took a second listening for some of the finer detail he was explaining to sink in.
One of the running gags of the show is that Leo will try to install the software during the interview, and several times he gets the package working. The latest show was about Rockbox, open source firmware which can be installed onto MP3 players, and after Leo got it installed onto an iPod (with a couple false starts) he was able to play with the interface. Leo even does a live video feed, so those who were watching at the time were able to see the whole process.
The show is definitely worth checking out, even if you just pick and choose the shows which seem interesting to you. Randal keeps a spreadsheet of upcoming guests and solicits suggestions. That combined with the chat room that’s available during recording make FLOSS Weekly a show which is also open source, taking contributions from the community.
