FLOSS early and often

A few weeks ago I was asked by Chris DiBona to participate in a podcast that he and Leo Laporte put together called “FLOSS“. I didn’t know much about it but when I went to the site I was pretty flabbergasted to be included in such company.

I mean Jeremy Allison (samba), Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP), Guido van Rossum (python) and company are pretty much deities in the open source pantheon and I’m just a cheerleader. Not even one of those small deities like “goddess of the hearth” or “god of months without an ‘r'”, more like a sprite or gnome or whatever you would call those little nameless things who kind of get to meet the gods occasionally.

I pretty much started off the conversation (after Leo politely told me how to adjust the modulation on my headset mic) claiming they must be scraping the bottom of the barrel chatting with me, but they were really cool about it and made me feel welcome. Those who know me can also imagine that once we got rolling on OpenNMS it is a little hard to shut me up.

I was pleased to see that our chat ran several minutes longer than most, but since I haven’t listened to it I can’t tell if it was good or not. I hate the sound of my voice (the voice in my head is much more suave and refined than the one I hear on tape) and I’m just afraid that I will come across as the biggest dweeb on the planet. However, the one post on the site so far seems positive and several of my friends tell me it was good. Then again, my friends lie a lot.

Anyway, check it out if you are so inclined and let me know what you think (and please consider dropping Leo a few shekels by supporting TWiT). The fact that Chris and Leo were willing to talk to me at all makes me even more determined to make OpenNMS worthy of such company.