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Posts published in “Interview”

LQ Turns 16 so We Talk With Founder Jeremy Garcia

By Robin "Roblimo" Miller on July 7, 2016 |

Interview, and Video

LQ Turns 16 so We Talk With Founder Jeremy GarciaJeremy Garcia LinuxQuestions.org

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.

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A Conversation With the Award-Winning Rikki EndsleyRikki Endsley

A Conversation With the Award-Winning Rikki Endsley

By Robin "Roblimo" Miller on June 16, 2016 |

Interview

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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Jeff Hoogland Talks Bodhi Linux, Enlightenment, Moksha and ‘Magic the Gathering’Jeff Hoogland - Bodhi Linux

Jeff Hoogland Talks Bodhi Linux, Enlightenment, Moksha and ‘Magic the Gathering’

By Robin "Roblimo" Miller on May 19, 2016 |

Desktops, Distros, Gaming, Interview and Video

The FOSS Force Video Interview Just a few days before releasing Bodhi Linux 3.2.1, Bodhi’s founder and lead developer, Jeff Hoogland, took time out to…

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Getting FOSS Text-to-Speech App Ready for Prime TimeTypeTalk

Getting FOSS Text-to-Speech App Ready for Prime Time

By Ken Starks on April 19, 2016 |

Accessibility, Community, Interview and Software

The Heart of Linux

The lead developer of a new text-to-speech app based on MaryTTS talks about what’s been done and what remains to do.

It’s been a while now since we talked about creating a front end GUI to the open source text-to-speech program, MaryTTS. I have a personal stake in this, as I lost my larynx, and thus my voice, due to throat cancer.

FOSS text-to-speech front end
The front end of the new user interface for MaryTTS, a text-to-speech solution.

The state of text-to-speech software in the Linuxsphere is horrible. Don’t get me wrong, the software is out there and much of it is fairly good. Where we fall down is that it requires using the command line to get much of it to work. Often TTS software in Linux comes in parts and pieces that have to be assembled in order to get it to work, and the terminal is where most of that work needs to be done.

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

linuxlock.blogspot.com/
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Ubuntu MATE’s Martin Wimpress Talks Raspberry Pi & FOSSMartin Wimpress

Ubuntu MATE’s Martin Wimpress Talks Raspberry Pi & FOSS

By Isaac Carter on October 21, 2015 |

Hardware and Interview

The FOSS Force Interview

Recently, I had the privilege to sit down and interview Martin Wimpress, who among other things is the project lead for Ubuntu MATE. One reason I interviewed him was because I wanted to see what he’d have to say about his work with Ubuntu MATE and the Raspberry Pi, as well as to get a gleaning of his overall thoughts on free and open source software. As you will discover, Wimpress is definitely not a person who’s short on thoughts, or shy about expressing them.

Ubuntu Mate logoThe other reason for this interview, perhaps the main reason, is because from one developer to another, I look up to Martin quite a bit and admire him for the things he is accomplishing and doing.

Isaac Carter

In addition to hosting a Raspberry Pi meetup in Washington D.C., Isaac Carter is a co-host on mintCast. He’s also a software engineer who enjoys working with Java, JavaScript, and GNU/Linux. When he’s not coding, you can find him reading on any number of subjects or on the golf course.

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Deb Nicholson Talks (What Else?) Software PatentsDeb Nicholson

Deb Nicholson Talks (What Else?) Software Patents

By Christine Hall on August 10, 2015 |

Business, Interview and Patents

The FOSS Force Interview

Back in June I had the opportunity to meet Deb Nicholson, a person who is well known to people who frequent open source and Linux conferences.

I was dog tired, having had only about four hours sleep. I’d gotten up at about five in the morning, much earlier than I think is civilized, in order to make it to Charlotte in time for the opening ceremonies at the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF). I’d allowed for traffic jams in the morning rush hour traffic that didn’t happen and so arrived early enough to have time to try to catch a nap on an inviting and empty couch I found in the vendor hallway that turned out to be part of the booth space for Internet Systems Consortium.

Deb Nicholson
Deb Nicholson
Luckily for me, Chuck Aurora, who had driven up from Mississippi with his family to maintain the booth and try to grab a few contacts, was generous when he arrived with his teenage daughter in tow, and wasn’t perturbed that I’d mistaken his booth for a public rest area. I didn’t need to get up and find someplace else to sleep, he said, exhibiting the southern hospitality I’d been told to expect at SELF. I was free to go ahead and nap if I could.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingDeb Nicholson Talks (What Else?) Software Patents
SELF 2015: Linux, Guns & BarbecueSouthEast LinuxFest 2009

SELF 2015: Linux, Guns & Barbecue

By Christine Hall on June 8, 2015 |

Community, Interview, News and Operating Systems

The FOSS Force Interview

From what I learned talking with Jeremy Sands last Tuesday, everything about the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) will be marinated in southern culture. So much so that if this were twenty years ago, I’d be expecting to see geeks with cigarette packs rolled-up in the sleeves of their T shirts. But these days people don’t smoke much anymore, not even in North Carolina, a state built by tobacco money.

SouthEast LinuxFest's Jeremy Sands
SouthEast LinuxFest’s Jeremy Sands in 2010.
At the very least, I expect to find that at SELF even the software will be southern fried and smothered with gravy. That’s because SELF intends to be more than just another LinuxFest. It intends to be a celebration of southern living, hence the guns and barbecue. Presumably, grits will be served at breakfast, and Southern Comfort and Bourbon will be available at the after parties.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingSELF 2015: Linux, Guns & Barbecue
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