After 17 years and 761 episodes, FLOSS Weekly ended its run on the TWiT network yesterday. I hosted the last 179 of those shows. My career as a professional (meaning paid) advocate of open source also ended with that show. The full span ran from 1996, when I first appeared on the Linux Journal masthead, until yesterday: about 27 years.
I still participate in market conversations around the many topics I covered in that span, but I’m mostly working on other stuff now. For example, in random-ish order:
- a commons-based approach to news,
- a history (and archive) based approach to journalism in the Digital Age,
- the Digital Age itself (such as what we make of digital tech and the Internet, and what they make of us),
- blogging, such as in my three blogs here (this one, plus ProjectVRM and Trunkline), and supporting what Dave Winer is doing with Feedland and allied work,
- freeing e-commerce from the grips of giants like Amazon,
- fighting surveillance online and off,
- self-sovereign identity,
- infrastructure old, new, and in the future,
- saving the Internet, and
- making an intention economy happen.
All of those are cars in a cluetrain, about which more below.
They are also featured now and then on Reality 2.o, the podcast Katherine Druckman and I have been doing since our Linux Journal days.
For many decades now, I’ve been spoiled by success. For example, open source, an expression whose current meaning was born in 1998, is now beyond huge. Here’s VentureBeat:
Today, open-source software underpins almost everything: A whopping 97% of applications leverage open-source code, and 90% of companies are applying or using it in some way.
GitHub alone had 413 million open-source software (OSS) contributions in 2022.
“Open-source software is the foundation of 99% of the world’s software,” said Martin Woodward, VP of developer relations at GitHub.
By covering open source for Linux Journal from the start, I helped make that happen.
Same with The Cluetrain Manifesto. “Markets are conversations,” a one-liner of mine that became the first thesis in the manifesto, grew to become a meme that hasn’t gone away. The word cluetrain also appears almost daily in tweets on X, almost a quarter century after it was coined. (When Twitter was still itself, cluetrain was mentioned in tweets several times daily. The decline in cluetrain mentions is one small measure of how lame X has become.)
Also blogging!
Hmmm… I don’t think I ever blogged about my only encounter with Robin Williams. It was at some trade show in the early aughts. There was a scrum of attendees gathered around something or someone unseen in the middle. On the periphery was my old friend Tom Rielly, who quickly grabbed me and pulled me into the middle of the crowd, where stood Robin Williams, with two bags of swag. I almost said, “Hey, you look like Robin Williams, only shorter.” Then Tom introduced me, saying “This is Doc. He’s one of the top five bloggers in the world.” I said, “More like one of the top sixteen, but most of the others are duplicates.” Robin then said something funny, and I responded with something funny of my own, and an all-funny exchange ensued during which my separate self said, “Holy shit! I’m doing humor schtick with Robin Williams and holding my own!” After maybe half a minute of this, I excused myself, saying something like, “I’ll leave you to your private audience here,” and exited the crowd.
Oh, and photography. As of this moment, my photos have had 16,855,107 views on one Flickr account, and 1,470,281 on the other. Visits to those run from the hundreds to thousands per day. A search for my name on Wikimedia Commons also brings up 1850 results, nearly all of which are photos I’ve shared using Creative Commons licensing that encourages use and re-use, which is why many (or most) of them find their way into Wikipedia articles.
I’ve had less luck with the other missions I’ve listed above. But I believe in all of them, and in faith, I truck onward.
By the way, FLOSS Weekly has not slipped below the waves. It has been picked up by Hackaday and is now here., hosted by Jonathan Bennett, long a co-host of FLOSS Weekly on TWiT.
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