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Posts published in “Interview”

Jono Bacon on Life After (and Before) GitHub

It caused a bit of a splash in May when Jono Bacon abruptly left GitHub after serving as community manager for only six months. As we predicted at the time, he’s landed on his feet.

The FOSS Force Video Interview

Do you want to know what it takes to be a professional community manager? This interview will show you the kind of personality that does well at it, and how Jono Bacon, one of the world’s finest community managers, discovered Linux and later found his way into community management.

Conversation With Jonathan Thomas of OpenShot

The OpenShot Video Editor has had over a million downloads and might seem like the work of a large corporation. In reality, the founder, CEO and lead developer of the project works out of his home in rural Texas.

The Heart of Linux

One of the main benefits of having a booth at a conference like Texas Linux Fest is having the opportunity to hobnob with the people behind or inside some fairly impressive organizations. This year I had the good fortune to meet Jonathan Thomas, who has provided the world with OpenShot, a premiere video editing tool available for Linux, Mac and Windows.

OpenShot logoThe meeting came about because Reglue’s booth was right across the aisle from OpenShot’s booth. and their display caught my eye immediately. I’ve worked with many video editing tools over the years, and frankly, I’ve usually ended up paying someone to do the work for me because I found the level of complexity and the learning curve to be insurmountable. So being placed this closely to the OpenShot Studios booth rang out as a golden opportunity, which indeed it was.

Ken Starks

Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue

SJVN Talks FOSS, Linux, Microsoft & More…

SJVN has been writing about Linux and FOSS since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and started writing about IT back when single-celled organisms and CP/M dominated the landscape.

The FOSS Force Video Interview

The official Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols LinkedIn page says, “I’ve written over 9,000 articles on business and technology subjects. Highlights include the first popular news story about the web and the first Linux benchmarks. My articles range from features to reviews to OpEd to news reporting.”

A large percentage of those articles have been about Linux and FOSS, so it was logical for us to ring up SJVN (as he is commonly known) and ask him what’s the biggest news about FOSS so far in 2016, and what we can expect in the rest of the year.

Robin "Roblimo" Miller

Robin “Roblimo” Miller is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief at Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned SourceForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, ThinkGeek and Slashdot, and until recently served as a video editor at Slashdot. Now he’s mostly retired, but still works part-time as an editorial consultant for Grid Dynamics, and (obviously) writes for FOSS Force.

Koha Integrated Library System Brings FOSS to Libraries

The proprietary software used by most libraries is incredibly expensive, and comes with support costs that can be even higher. Projects like Koha bring the option of a free and open source solution into play.

The Video Screening Room

Randal Schwartz, from TWiT.tv’s “FLOSS Weekly,” interviews Nicole Engard and Brendan Gallagher, about the open source Koha Integrated Library System (ILS), which originated in New Zealand in 1999. Along with being a web developer, Nicole is a prolific blogger on Opensource.com and last year was recognized by Red Hat for her significant contributions to open source advocacy.

Phil Shapiro

For the past 10 years, Phil has been working at a public library in the Washington D.C.-area, helping youth and adults use the 28 public Linux stations the library offers seven days a week. He also writes for MAKE magazine, Opensource.com and TechSoup Libraries. Suggest videos by contacting Phil on Twitter or at pshapiro@his.com.

Respinning Linux

A talk with Randy Noseworthy, the man behind the Linux respins on the old computers that Reglue makes new again.

The Heart of Linux

It started back in 2009, the first year of Lynn Bender’s fantastic brainstorm “Linux Against Poverty.” Lynn’s idea and subsequent involvement with our organization, then named The HeliOS Project, would infuse our effort with an energy and inventory we still rely on today.

Respin LinuxBender contacted me early in 2009 and proposed we organize an event to bring the greater Austin community, the Austin Tech community and HeliOS under one roof. We would ask people to bring unused or broken computers to our event. Through Lynn’s network connections, a 6th Street bar owner gave up his bar for an entire Saturday. That, in turn, allowed over 50 Austin geeks to converge on 6th Street to set up stations and transform the broken computers coming in the front door into fully-functioning computers going out the back door and into our waiting truck.

Ken Starks

Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue

David A. Wheeler: Working to Prevent the Next Heartbleed

The Heartbleed bug revealed that some important open source projects were so understaffed that they were unable to properly implement best security practices. The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative , formed to help open source projects have the ability to adopt these practices, uses a lot of carrot and very little stick.

Robin "Roblimo" Miller

Robin “Roblimo” Miller is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief at Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned SourceForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, ThinkGeek and Slashdot, and until recently served as a video editor at Slashdot. Now he’s mostly retired, but still works part-time as an editorial consultant for Grid Dynamics, and (obviously) writes for FOSS Force.

LQ Turns 16 so We Talk With Founder Jeremy Garcia

Happy 16th Birthday, LinuxQuestions.org — a helpful site with over 600,000 members. Founder Jeremy Garcia is, not surprisingly, Member Number One.

The FOSS Force Video Interview

LinuxQuestions.org (LQ) recently turned 16, which means we can sing the Chuck Berry song “Sweet Little Sixteen” to it. Even better, this means the site is old enough to drive in most states. Hot stuff! And today’s interviewee, Jeremy Garcia, is the founder and still head LQ-er. In this video, he’ll tell you how he once expected to get *maybe* 100 members, and talks about how he would (or wouldn’t) do things differently if he was starting LQ today.

Robin "Roblimo" Miller

Robin “Roblimo” Miller is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief at Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned SourceForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, ThinkGeek and Slashdot, and until recently served as a video editor at Slashdot. Now he’s mostly retired, but still works part-time as an editorial consultant for Grid Dynamics, and (obviously) writes for FOSS Force.

A Conversation With the Award-Winning Rikki Endsley

She won an award last month at OSCON, which means she really and truly is “the award-winning Rikki Endsley.”

The FOSS Force Video Interview

Rikki Endsley is modest enough that calling her “the award-winning Rikki Endsley” makes her blush. But it’s true. In May, 2016, she won an O’Reilly Open Source Award because she has “demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of open source software.” (Those are O’Reilly’s words, not ours.)

Rikki started writing for SysAdmin Magazine back when it was all about Unix, because Linux hadn’t yet become a big deal. Her LinkedIn profile tells you what she’s been up to since then, up to her present-day position as a community manager and editor for the Red Hat-sponsored OpenSource.com website, a popular site that, Rikki claims, is operated without any help whatsoever from Red Hat marketing or PR people. It’s a good site, too, at least in part because of Rikki’s exceptional leadership.

Robin "Roblimo" Miller

Robin “Roblimo” Miller is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief at Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned SourceForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, ThinkGeek and Slashdot, and until recently served as a video editor at Slashdot. Now he’s mostly retired, but still works part-time as an editorial consultant for Grid Dynamics, and (obviously) writes for FOSS Force.

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