Hey folks, just wanted to update you all on what we’ve been doing in the last week or two for the show. As you might have guessed from the title of this post the schedule’s gotten a bit messed up lately. We’ve never really had a strict release schedule and in the early days we just released the show whatever day it happened to be ready, it was different every week. I never worried about it much as I figured it’s a podcast, people will get it when it hits the RSS feed. That was until Lugradio Live last year where people kept coming up and asking me “what day does the show come out?”. Since then we’ve tried to release on a Sunday or Monday more consistently in the hope that it sets people up for the week. We hit this target most of the time but every so often things get backed up and with one thing and another we get off schedule. This is where we find ourselves now, somewhere way off the schedule and nearer to the grass verge Recording and editing about 80mins of audio every week can be quite a strain at times but between us we usually manage it and I’m certainly not complaining, I love doing the show and I love even more that other people seem to enjoy listening to it. If we can bring a smile to one person’s face then that satisfies me greatly. So here’s what’s happened in the last couple of weeks.

We recorded some extra content whilst we were doing episode 72 and that became an extra episode about Mythbuntu (73). The plan was to release 73 in the middle of last week and keep to the weekend releases as normal. Unfortunately we didn’t quite manage that and things got pushed back, we ended up releasing episode 74 just last Thursday night, a couple of days ago. Originally ep 74 was meant to be our extended interview with Miguel De Icaza but unfortunately he had to reschedule and we recorded a normal show instead. Last night (Friday) we recorded a very long and I think interesting interview with Miguel where we discussed his feelings about Microsoft, the whole Novell deal, patent issues surrounding Mono and much much more. It finished up at about 75mins in total and we decided to make this episode 75. I need to edit it a little, add music, sprinkle in some prerecorded bits and do all the usual production work that entails. I expect we’ll release the show on Tuesday probably. Following that I hope we can get back to our normal weekend releases and get back into our rhythm. I notice with a lot of podcasts and I’m not talking specifically about Linux one here but all podcasts in general, the main issue they run into is a lack of shows or lack of content. Gaps between shows get longer, releases are delayed. I’ve even heard some people call this phenomena “podburn”, I’m not sure if that qualifies as a real word but to me it just sounds more like the name of a small Scottish town. Maybe the sight of a battle, the battle of Podburn. In the 16 months or so we’ve been doing this that’s never happened to us and in fact we normally tend to have the opposite problem, too much content and not enough time to release it all. So I guess I should be thankful for that and long may it continue.

Right, that should be everyone up to date now with recent events in Linux Outlaws Land (what a truely disappointing theme park that would make) so move along there’s nothing to see here, go on clear off. I hope you enjoy episode 75 when it hits the net and thanks for listening, reading, contributing and ranting in our general direction. We appreciate it

Since it started, I have been immensly enjoying and learning from the Software Freedom Law Show which is the SFLC’s official podcast, hosted by Bradley Kuhn and Karen Sandler and is being produced by our very own Dan. No matter how much I liked this show form the start though,  two of the most recent episodes have been very special and have actually transcended the podcast in a lot of ways: I think that both Bradley’s keynote on the AGPL and software freedom in web services as well as Eben Moglen’s excellent and inspiring speech on the history of patents and intellectual property law should absolutely be mandatory listening for anyone involved in free software, open source and/or open culture! I urge you to listen to these two shows if you are at all interested in what we are all about on Linux Outlaws. As an historian I found Eben’s overview especially enlightening, he has a very unique perspective on things and is a fantastic speaker. Bradley’s speech kind of extends the focus into the future, as we move to “cloud-based” applications and services. You won’t regret taking 90 minutes out of your free time to listen to this. I learned a lot and was very moved and inspired.

Miguel de Icaza

Welcome to the new blog everyone, I hope you like it. Fab has done a lot of hard work here and I think it’s really paid off. I’d like to share some exciting news with you all and hopefully get your input too. We had Dan Washko from TLLTS on a while back talking about why he doesn’t like Mono and even removes it from all his systems. At the time I said we wanted to get someone on the show to give the pro-Mono viewpoint as we don’t want to appear biased on this subject. I kept mentioning this over the weeks as it dragged on, I was having trouble finding someone really involved in the project to come and talk to us but now we’ve fixed all that, big time! We’ve only gone and gotten the main man himself Miguel de Icaza to agree to join us on episode 74. In case anyone doesn’t know, Miguel is the creator of Mono. He also created Gnome (a true love of mine) and he’s currently working hard on Moonlight, an open and cross-platform implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight. He’s also the Vice-President of Developer Platform at Novell. So it’s safe to say he’s a pretty big cheese, in fact think of the biggest cheese you’ve ever seen and then grate some more on top and we’re getting close.

I’m pretty excited about all of this as you can probably tell and I’m really looking forward to hearing what he has to say about his work at Novell and the wider issues in the Free Software world. I’m a bit late in writing this as the interview is only 3 days away now but I wanted to give everyone the chance to post your questions for Miguel too. To that end I’ve created a new thread on our Linux Outlaws forum for you to post your questions. Feel free to post anything you like, I can’t promise we’ll have time to read them all but we’ll use as much as we can.

Listener input is always important to us so please get involved.

I’m currently listening to Miguel’s interview on LugRadio Season 5 Episode 1 and I recommend it to anyone interested in Mono and the whole Microsoft relationship. We’ll try not to ask all the same questions but perhaps cover how things have changed since late 2007 when that interview was conducted.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts, thanks guys

Dan

EDIT:

We’ve had to postpone the interview for personal reasons so it may not be in episode 74 but will be as soon after as we can. We’re still very keen to do this and so is Miguel, it WILL happen I promise that. In the meantime you can continue to post your questions and discuss the topic on the forums. Thanks everyone, I’ll give you more information as soon as I have it.

Dan

Welcome to the completely revamped Linux Outlaws Blog! This is the first step (well, first-and-a-half really) in my plans to slowly redesign the whole site based on my Podjango project. The theme you see here will form the foundation of the new look, which means a redesign of the forums and linuxoutlaws.net will follow later in the year. I hope you like it, I may still tweak it here and there and feedback is always welcome, as you know.

But the blog has not only been redesigned, I also moved all the content over to a fresh WordPress installation. I have always loved WordPress, but boy is the new admin interface in 2.7 slick! It is my hope that this move will increase usability for Dan and me in an effort to rejuvenate this blog since it has been a bit quieter lately than I’d liked.

I hope you enjoy the new look as much as I do. I am looking forward to a fresh new Linux Outlaws in 2009 with many cool things yet to come!