Tuesday, 9 June 2009

Inside the Virtual Anthill

"Inside the Virtual Anthill: Open Source Means Business"
BBC Radio 4, Broadcast June 1, 2009

"Gerry Northam goes behind the scenes to investigate 'open source' computer software. Much has been said about the likes of free web browser Firefox and the operating system Linux, but little about how thousands of programmers scattered around the world collaborate in a 'virtual anthill' to create products that rival more commercial offerings. Gerry finds out how it is done and shows how its ethos is being applied to other kinds of business, with some startling results."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kp806

Good programme to introduce the notion of open source with examples from Mozilla, Linux, IBM and others. A good resource for educators and community activists. Available on iplayer. No downloadable podcast yet, however you can download the stream with mplayer (thank you to B. Halpin for the tip) with:

wget http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/aod/playlists/zy/7p/k0/0b/RadioBridge_intl_2000_bbc_radio_fourfm.ram

mplayer -dumpstream -bandwidth 9999999 `cat RadioBridge_intl_2000_bbc_
radio_fourfm.ram`

The URL for the stream is available in the iplayer page source code.

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