not all change is progress
November 22, 2015
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0:08:09 Off the Beaten Path
0:20:35 Feedback
0:38:52 First Impressions
After kicking off by talking about a tool likely of interest to anyone dealing with MySQL and MariaDB database management, we moved on to your feedback. We rounded things off with a look at VeltOS, a distro that promises more community involvement than most.
0:08:09 Off the Beaten PathPaddy introduced mycli, a drop-in replacement for the MySQL and MariaDB command line clients that offers auto-completion, syntax highlighting, configurable key bindings and more. The development of mycli is notable for having been funded via a Kickstarter campaign, and we chewed over whether other projects might have success following the same path.
0:20:35 Feedback
A huge thank you to John Stoume, Richard Thompson, Gary Williams and Tom Hardy for your PayPal donations. And to Martin Petersen, Nick Santini, eldirco and Iain Simpson for joining the ranks of our Monthly Supporters, and to johanv for the Flattr. Really, guys, thanks a bunch.
We recently gave away a ticket to OSCON, and were pleased to hear back from Andy Mitchell (the lucky recipient) about his experience there. Pleased you enjoyed it, Andy!
Following the dismissal last show of optical media as an effective archive medium, CountZero got in touch to help put the record straight.
Thanks to Harry Myhre and Iain Simpson for their additional thoughts about the staging of FOSS events. And to Keith Zubot-Gephart, who brought up some aspects of SailfishOS that we hadn’t really considered during our brief review.
Finally, we heard from John Hanks and Nathan D. Smith following our news item last show about High Performance Computing.
0:38:52 First Impressions
We don’t tend to review pre-release software for obvious reasons. But some of the decision making around VeltOS got us sufficiently intrigued to take an early peek.
On the crazy names of applications and what the hell is
lollipop I just want to play my music: Can’t they just
put a short description under the application’s icon and
name? Of course, them someone would need to build a
database with all the packages and/or their documentation
and who’s gonna do this, right?
It’s not like we got keywords assigned to packages and
manpages with a short description on top to do such a
thing…
A bit of just-after-coffee grumblyness from someone running his few GUI applications by hitting metakey+R and typing the first few letters of the executable’s name before using Ctrl+R to complete from the history… Still I hate stumbling through unknown menus, when helping someone with an unfamiliar desktop environment.
Nice show so far, guys! ;)
Hmm, crowdfunding for Free software…
Might work? I think it’s sensible even for just getting
over the initial bump of a (usable) 1.0. Everyone
in/around IT, not only (dare to say “us”) FLOSS
advocates, is coming to realise it’s Free software
keeping the internet running and companies like M$ donate
to projects like OpenBSD. Over time it may slip in
people’s mind that there’s a value to free software,
too.
Git Tip(?) might have been a bit too early to be
successful but we may see crowd funding do something like
the FreeBSD and OpenBSD foundations are doing: Sponsoring
the non-sexy but necessary projects which the devs
working in their free time won’t touch because they’re
not interesting/adding the fancy new features.
Need something fixed that requires cleaning up a nice
chunk of code making everyone’s live easier in the long
run? Throw a few bucks in the tip jar over there.
/Can be/ a viable option for contributions from companies, too. If they don’t claim too much control over the project this way. But then, they may just hire the devs…
Most people don’t want to sponsor free software the same way most PBS listeners never contribute to the pledge drives. There’s a conversion rate between “user” and “developer” in open source too.
If you’re really really lucky, in your project’s entire _lifetime_ you will hear from around 1% of your userbase in any way. Bug report, drive-by patch, email with a question, tweet, etc. A tiny subset become regular contributors pushing forward the development on the mailing list.
If a webcomic can get 2% of its readership to buy merchandise or contribute via paypal, it is astoundingly successful. Comics like https://www.patreon.com/jephjacques and https://www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersmith have pulled off quite a reasonable standard of living.
If an open source project with 250,000 regular users can get 1% of them to give an average of $5/month on patreon, that’s a full time job at silicon valley rates. It’s not how we’ve historically sustained software development, but now that the tools are there Linus wouldn’t need a job at Transmeta or the Linux Foundation if he was graduating today.
This is not a question of “if”, it’s a question of “when”.
Rob
I agree about the disappointment of Linux ecosystem folks not dogfooding on the desktop. For a ray of hope, see Jessie Frazzelle (of Docker) and her Linux presentations (using i3wm!): https://twitter.com/chanezon/status/666212755657981953
Also, let me add a plug for my favorite online backup thing: TarSnap. It uses S3 on the back-end, but everything is encrypted with a local key (which you MUST preserve if you want to recover). Charges are based on daily capacity and bandwidth. So far very reasonable – I’ve been backing up my VPS since Halloween and haven’t managed to spend a dollar yet.
Lol, now OSS’s new name is PSTS “Please Steal This
Software”. Abbie Hoffman would be proud.
On the search for programs issue, I can see the quickness
of two to three characters and the program will come up,
but……..
where is it, where is the config file, if its a game
where are the save files, on older dos systems is it an
exe, com, pdf, xls. ok the last is a push, but when your
a power nerd knowing your system is built upon picking
your way through it time and time again.
I await the howls of derision.
I’ve been listening for about a year now. I’m a Linux Action Show refugee and also an HPC admin (my official title is architect but it’s mostly admin work) and it never registered that most Linux podcasts don’t seem to mention HPC until you guys actually did. Most of my work has been in oil and gas and I work for a company whose base is integration of large HPC deployments (rack and stack, cabling, hardware testing) and it’s safe to say that a good porting of the HPC for oil and gas in Houston, Texas flows through our warehouse. HPC is growing and the industries are pretty diverse. I remotely manage clusters for a pure research facility and a university. I’ve deployed clusters for defense contractors, universities, cancer research facilities, finance, oil and gas, and even public health research. All of which were, you guessed it, Linux! The technologies involved in HPC are pretty exciting and I’m lucky to have a career where Linux is truly the lifeblood. I am recently home from SC15 and just thought I’d comment since you mentioned you hadn’t had anyone say they were an HPC admin. It’s been my bread and butter for almost 10 years now. Keep up the great show, it makes my commute much nicer and I’m very appreciative of that. Oh, yeah, and I absolutely love Unity, but that’s usually the only thing you guys are dead wrong about. ;)
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