Open source builders on code, licenses and money.
FLOSS Weekly seats Doc Searls and a changing lineup of co-hosts across from the people behind open source projects, from Adam Jacob on System Initiative to Evan Prodromou on ActivityPub. The show has finished its run at TWiT, and it signed off with a panel gathered to declare that free software had won.
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FLOSS Weekly is the archive of a TWiT interview show about free, libre and open source software, led by Doc Searls with a lineup of co-hosts that shifts from episode to episode. Several of its guests come with a project attached. Adam Jacob, known for Chef, talks about System Initiative, where a high-fidelity model backed by a hypergraph of functions sits at the bottom instead of source code. Philip Griffiths gets into the plumbing of OpenZiti: mutual TLS between every hop, end-to-end encryption on top, and a cipher choice that can be swapped out. Evan Prodromou, introduced as the father of ActivityPub, explains why owning your own domain matters when a Mastodon server disappears. That conversation has some history behind it, since Prodromou was a guest within the show's first ten episodes, back in 2006. The engineering sits alongside money and principle. The Adam Jacob episode is built around how to price and capture value from something that can be copied without limit. In a table-for-two session, Doc and Dan Lynch weigh what the OpenAI board crisis meant, given that the board had been set up as a nonprofit meant to keep things open. Doc also passes along, without naming the person, a longtime open source advocate's fear that generative AI will make harm far easier than good. Licensing is the other thread. When Jon 'maddog' Hall's connection failed about a third of the way in, the rest of that episode turned into a GPL and licensing conversation between Dan Lynch and Doc. The episode titles like a pun, among them 'ActivityPub Crawl - Evan Prodromou on ActivityPub & OpenEarth' and 'Raiders of the Lost Source - Rocky and Oracle Unbreakable Linux, OpenAI Shakeup'. That playfulness carries onto the mic, down to a BSD devil joke that a panelist admits is not very good. Asides about Halloween theming and stray iOS gesture effects show that the conversations also went out on video. Episodes include TWiT network promos and sponsor reads. The run ended with episode 761, recorded December 13th, 2023. For that episode, Katherine Druckmann, Simon Phipps, Dan Lynch and Leo Laporte joined Doc to declare that free software had won as a cause, a community and a show. The celebration still leaves room for dissent, as one panelist argues that Apple building proprietary products on BSD code without contributing back is not what success should look like. It signs off by repeating Simon Phipps's 'thanks for all the fish'. What remains is a closed archive of open source projects explained by the people behind them, with the arguments about principle left in.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants open source projects explained by the people who made them, and who enjoys side arguments about the GPL, permissive licenses and what counts as success.
What sets it apart: It pairs close technical detail from project builders, down to encryption on every hop and hypergraphs of functions, with arguments about licenses, money and AI. It closes with a final panel that declares victory for free software while still debating what winning means.
We're not talking dentistry here; FLOSS is all about Free Libre Open Source Software. Join host Doc Searls and his rotating panel of co-hosts as they talk with the most interesting and important people in the Open Source and Free Software community.Although the show is no longer in production at TWiT, you can enjoy episodes from our archives.
Doc Searles has room for your 'but how?' from open-source pricing to the browser's green lock.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A final Floss Weekly roundtable asks what victory means once open source is everywhere.
Floss Weekly closes with "We Won!", a farewell roundtable that treats open source victory less as a finish line than as a problem to define. Doc Searles brings together Katherine Druckmann, Dan Lynch, Simon Phipps, and Leo Laporte for a conversation that ranges from BSD's…
Adam Jacob connects open source pricing to an infrastructure model built around active data instead of source code.
Adam Jacob frames open source money through a clean but useful split: code can stay abundant, while the business charges for the value wrapped around it.
A grounded look at what federated social networks let users carry with them, and what still gets left behind.
ActivityPub Crawl treats federated social networking as infrastructure with real consequences. Evan lays out how ActivityPub supports Mastodon and other social networks, then moves into the practical stakes of portability: a person using their own domain can point it to another…
An open source debate that frames AI governance as a technical problem with moral consequences.
Open source anchors this Floss Weekly conversation as Doc Searles and Dan Lynch consider the OpenAI crisis through governance, ethics, and licensing.
A dense, practical tour of OpenZT's encrypted hops, hidden metadata, and familiar security signals.
OpenZT arrives as a bid to make secure networking feel foundational rather than bolted on. Philip Griffiths frames zero-trust networking around mutual TLS between every hop, end-to-end encryption from source to destination, and an ambition to become the Linux of secure…
BSD news with operational consequences attached.
Loose tech talk with real builders.
Open source health, measured with context.
Real hardware, live from the desk.
Simon Phipps says open source now generates over a billion euros of GDP for the European Union.
Adam Jacob traces his career from running ISPs on Red Hat servers and Sun machines to co-founding Chef and now leading System Initiative.
Evan Prodromou, the creator of StatusNet and co-creator of ActivityPub, joins Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett on Floss Weekly 759.
Oracle Unbreakable Linux hit 9.3 with a newer 5.15 kernel than Red Hat Enterprise Linux's 5.14-based branch.
Philip Griffiths tells FLOSS Weekly that OpenZiti was built because networking security is "broken" and that the project is not just "a better VPN." He explains that OpenZiti pushes authentication and authorization before connectivity, uses strong cryptographic identity, and aims for "application embedded" security.
This episode features a discussion about the GPL and open source licensing with guest Dan Lynch, after a brief appearance by John 'Mad Dog' Hall.
Doc Searls and Simon Phipps interview Seth Fry about community, democracy, and governance in open source software.
The hosts discuss DIY broadcasting using open source tools, continuing a previous conversation with guests Tim Pozar and Brian David.
Doc Searls and Dan Lynch interview Pete Kaminsky about Massive Wiki and other open source topics.