Episode 21: How Playing Minecraft Opened a Door to the Open Source World with Justin W. Flory

SustainOSS — Fri, 17 Jan 2020 03:45:00 -0500

Panelists

Eric Berry | Pia Mancini | Justin Dorfman | Allen “Gunner” Gunn

Guest

Justin W. Flory
Rochester Institute of Technology

Show Notes

In this episode we talk with Justin Flory, quite possibly the future of Open Source Sustainability. Justin fell into the Open Source world as a 15-year-old out of necessity while trying to build and maintain his Minecraft server. Justin currently attends the Rochester Institute of Technology, currently the only institute of higher learning offering a Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture minor. He is best known as an Open Source contributor in the U.S.

01:21: Justin Flory discusses his contribution to the Linux open source community and getting involved with his University’s open source program.

02:11: The driving force at an early age was playing Minecraft as a kid and wanting to have his own server to build a community to play with friends. This led to learning networking, system administration, and eventually drove him to some Minecraft open source software. It was there he helped out and eventually became a community manger.

07:32: Justin talks about the Spigot Project and how they funded it through a web store, contests, and donation drives.

09:18: While at RIT, he became more involved in the open source world through such things as the FOSS Initiative, Libre Corps, UNICEF, Open APS, Night Scout, and Sugarlabs, and the One Laptop per Child ecosystem.

12:51: Also at RIT, and as part of his minor, discusses his class on FOSS.

14:29: Breaks down the 2006 post on Linux.com by Bruce Byfield on why FOSS is not on activists’ agenda and how he was ahead of his time.

21:54: Justin talks about one of the sessions he went to at the Mozilla Festival in 2019 about the Extinction Rebellion.

23:40: Gunner joins in and Eric talks about the upcoming events in Brussels: Sustain, CHAOSS, and FOSDEM. Justin Flory and Michael Nolan will be speaking at FOSDEM and he gave us a preview of his “Freedom and AI” which will showcase the Four Essentials of Freedom. This will be held on Saturday, February 2, 2020.

Spotlights

• 34:24: Justin Dorfman spotlight this week is Tailwind CDN.
• 34:55 Pia’s is Queer JS.
• 35:43: Gunner picks the harden Linux movement, Tails OS, and Qube
• 36:19: Eric brings back one of his old favorites, Mert by Brian Gonzalez
• 36:52: Finally, Justin Flory picks Spigot, the open source Minecraft server software.