not all change is progress
June 22, 2015
Direct download links:
MP3 &
Ogg
Stepping out of the studio, this show Joe and Jesse bring us some interviews from the floor of the recent OpenTech 2015 conference in London. Plus, we take a Luddite Look at a suite of apps developed by one of our very own listeners.
0:05:35 News
Empires Rise, Empires Fall
The Linux Foundation opens scholarship program – will you
apply?
Linux Foundation Launches Node.js Foundation
GPL-Violator Allwinner Joins The Linux Foundation
Apple’s Decision to Open Source Swift Met with Developer
Applause (Swift?
What?)
Rebasing Ubuntu on Android?
Wine: Migrating away from Sourceforge
SourceForge grabs GIMP for Windows’ account, wraps installer
in bundle-pushing adware
SourceForge commits reputational suicide
SourceForge Past, Present and Future: Working to Maintain the
Integrity of Our Open Source Backbone
Project mirroring policies will be revisited with our
Community Panel, existing mirrors removed
GitHub to Seek $2 Billion Valuation in Latest Funding
Round
With Linux, Size Doesn’t Matter
HP kills The Machine, repurposes design around conventional
technologies
Reuters: BlackBerry may launch Android device with a hardware
keyboard (or maybe
not)
Free embedded Linux training materials demystify
Buildroot
Librem 13: A
Laptop That Respects Your Rights
Power over Ethernet for your Pi
Official Raspberry Pi case launches for £6
0:42:17 A Luddite Look
Following our offer a couple of shows ago to spotlight and provide constructive criticism on projects that listeners are working on, Kevin Hausmann bravely stepped forward and asked for a Luddite once-over of his Android GPLv3 Podcatcher Deluxe app.
0:57:40 Feedback
A huge thank you to Kelly Price, Anthony Griggs, Daniel Biskup, Félim Whiteley and Jonathan Glossop for your PayPal donations, and to all of our Monthly Supporters. And thanks also to johanv and an anonymous person for your Flattrs.
Following our discussion on the latest spat in Ubuntu-land, Jonas Rullo and Dennis Wickman got in touch to offer differing points of view. An anonymous listener posted what they claimed was a breakdown of the funding that the Kubuntu project had received from upstream, and some social media detective work on our part suggested that the commenter is indeed a member of the Community Council. But, as Esteban said, posting anonymously doesn’t do wonders for your credibility.
Thanks to Joel Tomfohr for pointing out that Jesse gets to enjoy background YouTube playing on his phone because of his subscription to Google Play Music All Access – that’s one mystery solved. And also to charlesay, who again flagged up Thomas Taschauer’s OpenDocument Reader as a viable ODF viewer for Android.
With Joe still bemoaning changes to Firefox, a number of you chipped in. Kelly Price suggested hand compiling for a speed boost, whilst David Stark kindly provided details of how to use Chrome’s PepperFlash on Firefox. But geekymcnerdypants has clearly had enough of the hand-wringing, and suggested Opera a viable drop-in replacement.
When somebody uses a turn of phrase like “elementary OS is a beautiful farce. It is a horrible piece of junk” you wonder if maybe they’ve been listening to this show for too long ;) Thanks for that, Enzro Greenidge; and also to Robert Orzanna, whose original email prompted our look at elementary OS, and who gamefully got back in touch.
A massive thank you to everyone who contacted us to say how much you enjoy the show, and how we go about producing it. We really were overwhelmed by the level of feedback we got on this topic, and read out just a couple of brief comments from Toby Slight and Brian as being indicative of the feelings many of you have expressed – thanks guys, it makes it all worthwhile.
We briefly revisited the question of show length with comments from Will and MikeF, then wrapped up a rather self-referential segment with a question from Tom Hardy.
1:26:32 OpenTech 2015
We mentioned on a recent show that Joe and Jesse were planning to attend OpenTech 2015. They found time in between sessions to speak to several of those presenting, so sit back and enjoy a flavour of the conference.
Bill Thompson
Bill is a journalist
and pundit, and can be found writing on his personal blog and
presenting Click on the
BBC World Service. Bill’s talk at this year’s conference
firmly put the onus on those of us who are tech-savvy to
educate and inform, so that when public policy positions are
espoused, a broad spectrum of the population will hopefully
understand the issues well enough to rationally debate their
merits.
Kat Matfield
Kat spoke about the trade-offs we’re willing to make in order
to obtain ‘free’ on-line services in return for our data, and
also about
security theatre. You can find her on Twitter, at
her personal blog,
and working for Adaptive Lab.
Ellen Broad
Ellen is the
Policy Lead for the Open Data Institute, who
sponsored the OpenTech 2015 event. She spoke about
encouraging and supporting the growth in use of open data
within the public and private sectors.
Jim Killock
Jim is Executive
Director of the Open Rights Group.
Whilst talking about site blocking and ISP filtering, Jim
mentioned Blocked!,
an ORG website which allows users to check the block status
for specific domains. The Anderson review that Killock spoke
about can be found
here. Some background – and further criticism – of
Scotland’s plans for a national ID system can be found in
a Guardian article from earlier this year.
Qwerty… Sliding keyboard… Linux based… Hmm… http://neo900.org/ :?
Great show…as always. About **Open** conferences. If you go to Linux conferences it is the same. The vast majority of the people are using Macs. Either they are too lazy to configure a laptop or Linux on the laptop just doesn’t fit their needs. A little disheartening.
Anyway, keep up the good work. Barry from Middle America :-)
Actually google ads I end up with ads for stuff I already bought. I heard an interview about something about how duckduckgo gets ad revenue from searches that are related. I mean QA stuff will need to get a good implementation stuff and will always be bugs. Althuogh you did interview someone who works at HP and also contributes to the certain distro and the version with xfce.
On the subject of a good distro for windows switchers I have to add a vote for Ubu MATE 15.04. I adopted linux with ubuntu 10.04 and I found gnome2 to be very user friendly and enjoyed it very much. The Mate team are also putting alot of work into improving new user friendliness, including adding a welcome screen and help documentation for the 15.10 release. Anecdotally, I was able to switch my 12 year old son to linux with 15.04 and he enjoys it. Most of the games he plays are web based and work fine in chrome. He told me that he is glad that I switched him to linux. He was always installing software on his grandmothers Windows pc and loading it full of malware causing alot of frustration. I installed some emulators, playonlinux, and steam for him and the only problem for his gaming is the lack of Unity3d plugin on his old 32 bit laptop. He mostly plays web based games that work fine in Chrome and he was really exited to find out he could use a screen recorder on linux. He had no problems adapting to Mate from windows, and all he ever asks about is what he can install on it. I have to give it to Mate for basic user friendliness and ease of adoption. It has just had so many eyes on it for so many years, and the Mate team are improving it even further. I think mint is also a good option for new users, but i also found Lubuntu to be too restrictive. Ubu MATE ftw.
Hey Luddites, thanks for the review of my Podcatcher Deluxe app! I agree with some of your points and critics and will certainly try to improve on some of them.
One thing I like to clarify right away is that there are NO ADS on the (fully functional) free version “Simple Podcatcher”. I do, however, link to the paid variants of the app. I think that’s important because ads annoy hell out of me and are a broken revenue model anyway.
Not sure whether you are interested in follow-ups on the other points you raise? If so, let me know. Cheers, Kevin
Hi Kevin – I just wanted to thank you again for putting your apps forward for us to look at on air. We’d be more than happy to track developments to the UI as you do make changes (functionally, as I said on the show, you’ve pretty much nailed it), and to publicise when major revisions occur. You know where we are, so do keep in touch, and I hope that the publicity was beneficial for your project.
Patrick, thanks for your follow-up! It was certainly exiting to hear you de-construct my app. And while I do not agree with all your points, I have already implemented some of the recommendations and will push an update very soon. As for UI, I plan to go fully Material at some point but that will take a while. I will make sure to let you know when I’m ready. Best, K.
SourceForge free software? Ha! Not since 2001.
I’m a huge fan of RMS’ basic ideas. (Yes he has a tendency to take something out of context and go down a rabbit hole uncontrollably, but well, we all have our problems.) Anyways as luddites you might want to jump on this article http://www.osnews.com/story/28643/Chrome_listening_to_you_shows_the_importance_of_privacy
Google unapologetically recording everything in your household seems like it may warrant some discussion…
I’m glad that Joe remembers the glory days of the fixed tab close button! I was so annoyed when that changed. I believe at some point there was an addon to put the close button on the left side of the tab.
New listener, really enjoy the shows. Thanks!
Also for those using lubuntu or other lxde based distros and wanting to open open a terminal in the current folder there is a keyboard shortcut f4 to open a terminal in the current folder although I know Joe is not the biggest fan of this method. Although as a user of pcmanfm trying to use thunar I end up wanting the new tab button in the toolbar as I am used to that but I do know there is the control + t keyboard shortcut. I think this may be helpful to certain listeners.
Enjoyed the show. Nice to hear from BIll Thompson.
I agree that open file formats are perhaps more important
than free applications. I think without free software
we’re open to the old embrace-extend-extinguish maneuver.
But, indeed, the format of legacy data is a huge source
of inertia for organizations and individuals. The last
time I had export ODT from MS Word into LibreOffice, it
went better than expected. I wouldn’t want to do it all
the time, though.
The recent news stories certainly don’t look good, but I lost respect for SourceForge a long time ago when I went to download something and had to spend a few moments figuring out where the download link was, not because there wasn’t a download link, but because there were so many ads posing as false download links. I don’t see how any respectable website can tolerate that behavior from its advertisers. Using a package manager to install most of my software in recent years (which involves neither ads nor visiting a website to download something) has made me even less tolerant of this behavior.
Regarding Swift, I interpreted the announcement to mean that Apple would open source the compiler, presumably under a fairly permissive license. I was under the impression that a programming language could not be copyrighted, though the recent Oracle/Google lawsuit over the Android Java API makes me wonder about that now…. I would assume that the Swift language specification is already publicly available, but that it is useless without the compiler that turns Swift programs into efficient executables. I don’t understand what Apple’s plans are regarding Linux. I thought Swift was geared towards iOS and OS X, and I don’t see why Apple would want to put effort into making Swift programs run on Linux. Maybe they just plan to let the compiler work on Linux, so a developer can write a Swift program in Ubuntu and then test it on an iPhone?
I really enjoyed listening to the section on open data. As a librarian, open data, is very important to me. Here is site that does a good job of explaining the advantages and drawbacks of open data from the user’s and creator’s perspective. http://5stardata.info/
Thanks for the show, guys. It was so good, I had to
listen to the ‘Opentech 2015’ bit, twice! I didn’t
realise that even charity sites can be blocked. I do know
that searching is often biassed and even limited. That’s
when ‘duckduckgo’ comes in handy. I can see a time when
the UK and USA will limit like the Great Firewall of
China. The little guy will have a fight on his/her
hands.
Regarding Sourceforge and its so-called ‘download’ links,
it took me back to my days when all I had was Windows. We
get spoilt with our repos.
Podcast length? I just make a note of when I pause the
podcast – no problem.
Keep up the good work!
Brian36, mate-mint user.
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