It is Tuesday, July 15th, and this is Don't Forget to FOSS, the weekly podcast about free and open source software, projects and community.

I'm Robin Monks.

Let's dig in.

Last week I'd mentioned snac, and this week I got to give it a try.

Ultimately, I ended up not migrating due to an issue with image uploads.

I'm not sure if this is an issue with snac or an issue with how Ivory uses the Mastodon APIs, but I wasn't able to get image uploads to work on posts.

I also need to look a bit more deeply into, if I can, restyle the HTML output of snac as the defaults are really sparse.

I'll keep an eye out and am still interested in trying to Hollo, too.

Perhaps that'll be next week's project.

Also, last week I mentioned Portainer as an option for running Docker instances.

Since then, I've also found that Komo.do (K-O-M-O-dot-D-O) exists and has largely similar functionality and including things that are only in the professional editions of Portainer, but in Komodo, they're included in the base FOSS edition.

I will be giving Komodo a try soon, but if you wanna give it a try first and report back on how you like it, please do and leave a comment.

This week I saw an RFC was filed that would re-license PHP to the BSD three clause license, which is pretty exciting for someone like me who has a lot of history in the PHP community.

While reading the news though, I realized a lot of people may not understand the nuances between the different types of open source licenses, and even between the different types of open initiatives.

With that in mind, I wanna spend most of our time this week on explaining the rationale and expectations between open initiatives and the culture as a whole, what it means to me and how I got into it.

And once we've laid that groundwork, I'll then go into a few different open initiatives and open licenses.

I was lucky enough to be introduced to the ideas of open source.

Fairly early on, while still in high school myself, I began to experiment with software I could download from the internet on my family's slow dial up connection.

I started to learn that free programs were often trials, but free and open source programs were actually free.

I could download an open source tool and it would actually work without nagging me for money or without crippling certain features.

This was the era when I switched from IE to Netscape and then Mozilla and even played with some of the ultra small Linux distributions like the pre 1.0 version of Puppy Linux, which provided a full operating system with less than 50 megabytes.

I loved Mozilla and quickly jumped into Mozilla's IRC network.

See last week's show about IRC in the modern day.

I found myself more and more interested in things like open office and KDE.

But my internet access and speed were major factors in getting more involved.

Thankfully, a large bookstore about 90 minutes from where I lived, carried both Linux Format-- which was discontinued this year after 25 years of publication, I do hope they publish a complete collection of their back catalog-- and Linux Pro Magazine now simply called Linux Magazine.

Both were pricey but had a magical benefit.

An included DVD that would usually have multiple Linux OS installs, and dozens and sometimes hundreds of open source apps and software code repos.

Just what someone living on dialup needed.

I have fond of memories of running a Fedora Core 1 Beta from one of those DVDs.

End up taking ISOs from them to burn my own Knoppix CDs.

I'm actually not sure if it's Knoppix or kNoppix, but either way you get the idea.

This was back in the day when CD-Rs and CD-RWs were much cheaper and more efficient than buying USB drives.

So booting from CD was still the go-to, and then you might have a 32 or 56 or 1 28 megabyte flash drive for rideable storage.

Growing up, I even had a set of Memorex eight megabyte or potentially 16 megabyte drives that were shaped like tiny CDs themselves and were super awkward to use.

But back then storage was super expensive.

The more I used open source tools and saw the value in having tools that were actually truly free to use as a teenager with no money, the more I wanted to be involved in the movement.

I started where I was familiar Mozilla and with what I knew, which was next to nothing.

Because I didn't know c, I kept all of my contributions to minor things like documentations and the XML based XUL UI language.

Most of my time was spent contributing to reproducing and fixing bugs and bugzilla.

Eventually I got involved enough to become part of the SpreadFirefox project, which was a community site built on Drupal four.

I quickly picked up skills working in Drupal and worked with other awesome folks to build an initiative where if you tried Firefox as your browser, you'd get a free Gmail invite key.

Folks who had spare invite keys could donate them to the cause and that initiative as well as the whole SpreadFirefox initiative were incredibly successful.

I volunteered where I could and with what I wanted to learn.

Things that were exciting to me.

Later, that transition to contributing to Drupal primarily.

And once I had enough experience, I was able to transition the work I did in the community into paid work as well.

Open source licenses are legal instruments that grant the public, you, specific rights such as using, modifying and redistributing the work under well-defined conditions.

Licenses can be focused on code for applications or supporting libraries, artistic creations, data, or the instructions to create physical things like 3D prints, circuit board diagrams, and hardware.

Licenses can fall into four main categories, permissive licenses that let you do almost anything, including reuse and relicense the thing for proprietary use, usually as long as you keep some form of notice in place.

Permissive licenses are those that let you do almost anything.

The MIT and BSD two and three clause licenses fall onto this category.

Copy left or share alike licenses.

Let you modify the thing as long as you provide your own version under the same, or compatible licenses, ensuring improvements remain free.

The General Public License, or GPL version three and the Creative common share alike licenses are examples of these.

Public domain equivalent licenses are where the author waives or dedicates all rights, letting anyone use the work for any reason without restrictions.

creative Common Zero, Unlicense, and 0-BSD are examples of such licenses.

The fourth variety is sometimes called code available.

These licenses let people see the code to potentially modify the code.

But aren't open enough to get any sort of accreditation from the open source initiative.

These often end up being situations where code is only available for a price or for purchase, or you can't really make changes yourself.

These aren't true open licenses.

Things like the elastic license fall into this and they aren't considered open source under the OSI definition, although they may still have source code available for you to view and you may be able to even contribute.

Finding open source software can be a little rough.

Even I tend to discover new projects through word of mouth in my network rather than a central database.

Obviously this podcast can help, but if you're looking for a specific thing, searching for that thing with open source included can often find an open source alternative.

And if nothing directly shows up in the community, asking on Mastodon is usually a good choice, the open source community on Mastodon is super strong.

Asking for what you're looking for there often works.

There's also a strong emphasis in open source in projects hosted by GitLab and GitHub, so searching those directly can often find more underground projects.

If you're looking for something niche I'm sure a lot of folks get involved in open source the same way I did, but there are other reasons to get involved and a large range of reasons to stay involved.

Lots of folks use open source projects and contributions as a way to beef out their resume for other work and to build their reputation.

Open source.com did a nice survey back in 2021 around why people chose to get involved and it's worth a read.

Lots of folks start as I did with their own use, scratching their own itch as what got them into open source initially.

But the reason folks stay are varied.

I see the large variance as a good thing.

That means there's lots of reasons to keep open source alive well into the future.

Today, the biggest risk to open source shows up in GitHub's 2024 survey that I've linked to in the show notes, that demonstrates just how many companies build their platforms on top of open source software, but how few actually give back to the community with money or time.

Keeping open source sustainable means that there needs to be a way for folks working on free and open source software to be able to benefit from their work and sustain themselves.

There's an XKCD comic that's been MeMed for every industry where a giant trillion dollar chunk of the economy for that industry has a dependency on a tool or library maintained by one person who's struggling to get by.

We'll need to be serious about how to solve this issue as a community.

I've seen and contribute to multiple projects that up to that Patreon account.

And for some software I use, I paid extra for a pro or business version that builds on top of the open source components to make sure that their creators get paid.

As far as getting involved is concerned, let me start by saying loud.

Something that's often overlooked.

You do not need to code to contribute to open source.

Even just helping with edits on Wikipedia to subjects or geography you're familiar with is contributing to open source materials for education.

Contributing to Open Street Map is helping build better open data that can reasonably impact thousands to millions of people, but beyond even that getting involved with open source software can also mean writing and improving documentation.

Many projects would love to have someone who would just take screenshots and document how the functionality works if you're fluent in a language other than English, you can make an incredible impact by helping with translation.

There's really a ton of ways you can help without coding, of course, if coding or learning, coding is what you want to do, open source contributions are great there too.

Find a project you like, something you care about and wanna stay involved with.

Look in their issue queue for something simple and get working on something basic to familiarize yourself with the project.

Projects like Drupal will tag easy to fix bugs as novice to give some quick inroads for a new contributor to learn the process and to get feedback.

Hopefully this is a good introduction into both why I got involved in open source and why it still matters to me, as well as to how you can get involved too.

As far as the software recommendations for this week, aside from Komodo at the top, i'm gonna ask folks share with me projects they've been using and enjoying.

if there's some great software you've used and like leave a comment and let me know and I'll try and include more of them in the upcoming episodes Again, thanks so much for listening.

If you're not subscribed to the podcast, you can find, Don't Forget to FOSS in any major podcast fetching app, or you can go to podhurl.com to listen to it directly.

I really appreciate your feedback and there's lots of ways to do that in the show notes.

The music for this show is by Bodan Guzman.

Don't Forget to FOSS is released under the Creative Common Attribution Share-alike 4.0 International License.

See you next week.