Episode 882 transcript

2026-09-15 Jonathan: [00:00:00] time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free Libre and open-source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we're talking about, well, open-source, of course. We're talking open-source automation and some experts in that field. I've got Jan Altenberg with me, and he is, I discovered during the pre-show, a German engineer working on, well, a lot of different things, all the way from the pre-empt real-time kernels to being around computers since the 1980s.

He started with a Commodore VC-20, the ever-present VIC-20, one of, I don't, I think the Commodore 64 actually holds the record, but the VIC-20 has to be one of the most popular computers ever sold. But yeah, we're talking open-source, we're talking automation, and let's bring the man himself on. Jan, welcome to the show.

Jan: Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Great. Looking forward to talk about open source [00:01:00] today. As you mentioned, I've been working with computers for quite some years. Actually, I have to admit that I was not working with Commodore. This was my colleague I'm working with at OSADEL. But actually, for me, it's even more than, I would say, I've spent 35 years with computers. The drawback was that my first computer was running proprietary software, which was pretty sad, but I think I'm with open source since 30 years now.

Jonathan: Yeah, yeah, that's a long time. Yeah, I see now that it was Alex, your colleague, that started with the Commodore VIC-20, but still, you've been around, you've been doing this for a while. We were talking before the show about how this interview came together, and I'm pretty sure that it's from where I was at Embedded World earlier in the year.

And I took one of the days, and I went to the software wing, because they have like five different halls at Embedded World, because it's a huge show. And I went to the software wing, and I just walked around, and I looked for anything [00:02:00] that had "open source" in the title or that I knew was an open source project.

I'm like, "Here's my business card. You should come be on the podcast." And so we finally made this one work, talking about the Open Source Automation Developer Lab. Now, what is open source automation in this context? Are we going to be a very AI-heavy episode again today? Is that the sort of automation that we're talking about?

Jan: Oh, well. So, AI is everywhere these days, but maybe it's a bit different for us. So, what is the Open