NGI0: Next Generation Internet

“Open source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) can be a game changer when it comes to building a more resilient and accessible chip ecosystem”, says Christophe Alexandre. Together with Noam Cohen he created Naja, an open source EDA tool. The semiconductor industry is highly complex and globally interconnected, which makes it fragile. Open source can contribute to resiliency in what traditionally...

LibreQoS greatly improves the quality of experience of internet connections. It was born out of necessity during the COVID pandemic when massively increased internet usage resulted in intermittent package loss. Robert Chacón, CEO of LibreQoS and operator of a small ISP that provides internet to under-served communities, noticed how it affected his customers’ ability to work from home and do online...

“The consumer electronics industry works differently than people actually think”, says Armijn Hemel creator of DeviceCode. Behind the different brands and casings is often the same hardware, created by a single Original Design Manufacturer. But the disclosure of security vulnerabilities is mostly focused on single devices. So when a CVE is published for device A from vendor X it conceals that the...

“This project was fueled by the idea that we should be less dependent on proprietary software. We don’t have control over software managed by companies that can access, analyze and sell our private data. It was a journey to own our software again”, says Julien Malka. He and Camille Mondon have implemented Clevis in NixOS to make it possible to remotely reboot servers with full disk encryption. The...

“There would be no room for conflict if everyone in the world could exchange ideas without being watched”, says Kirill Zholnay founder of SelfPrivacy. SelfPrivacy aims to make self-hosting accessible to non-technical users. Born out of a dream to enable every person on the internet to live free of Big Tech surveillance, it provides a simple solution to set up and manage your own server. We spoke t...

“The only thing that’s going to solve the mental health crisis in software engineering is more compassion, more collaboration, more attention to the people that you spend time with”, says Daniel Thompson-Yvetot, co-founder of Tauri Apps and CEO of CrabNebula. He also speaks about how the Cyber Resilience Act can be a watershed moment for open source. And how today’s internet is designed for autocr...

Adrian Georgescu was part of the Voice over IP revolution and in this episode you’ll learn much about that history and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). With his company AG Projects , Adrian created Blink , a SIP client developed in parallel with the creation of SIP by the IETF. After Blink and SIP hit their limits, he created Sylk Suite which combines SIP with WebRTC to enable multi-party vi...

It is important to be able to communicate freely, says Jérôme Poisson a.k.a. Goffi. He is the main developer of Libervia, a communication ecosystem based on XMPP. XMPP is mostly associated with chat but Libervia offers many more features such as blogs, fora, calendars and file & photo sharing. It has gateways to other open protocols like ActivityPub and email. Jérôme identifies multiple proble...

“Can you really speak of a program being free software if you cannot bootstrap it?”, says our guest Janneke. He is the founder of GNU Mes, a project addressing the security concerns that arise from bootstrapping an operating system using large, unauditable binary blobs. GNU Mes helped to reduce the number and size of binary seeds that were used in the bootstrap of GNU Guix 1.0 by a factor ten from...

One of the issues with today’s internet is that a lot of data is siloed. Consequently, users are locked into Big Tech ecosystems and its hard to reuse data. Joep Meindertsma, CEO of Ontola.io , talks about how his project Atomic Data addresses this problem with LinkedData. The free and open source project is a modular specification for sharing, modifying and modeling data. It uses links to connect...