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.
The 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.
Bender 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.