Start of an Era

Bing Create’s visual answer to the prompt, “A world of open source software and hardware.”

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, a commons-based approach to archiving the grist that journalism mills, fighting surveillance both online and off, self-sovereign dentity, infrastructure, saving the Internet, and making an intention economy happen.

Across all those years, 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, became a meme that hasn’t gone away. And the word cluetrain still appears almost daily in tweets on X, almost a quarter century after the word was coined. (When Twitter was still itself, cluetrain got mentioned in tweets several times daily. The decline in cluetrain mentions is one small measure of how lame X has become.)

I’ve had less luck with most of the other missions I’ve listed above, but that doesn’t matter.  I’m no less energized by possibilities for all of them that seem boundless to me. So I truck onward.

By the way, FLOSS Weekly has not slipped below the waves. I expect it will be picked up somewhere else on the Web, and wherever you get your podcasts. (I love that expression because it means podcasting isn’t walled into some giant’s garden.) When that happens, I’ll point to it here.