Interview with Jeff Geerling
raspberrypi.com
raspberrypi.com
I get the same feeling from Jeff's videos I did when I watched PBS as a kid. That's not a dig; I find his videos extremely calming, informative, and well produced. The man radiates positivity and kindness.
That's a rarity these days on YouTube. Presumably "high energy" content does better algorithmically, but for me personally the false enthusiasm, or manufactured outrage trends grow old rather quick.
Quite reassuring that there are still nice places on the internet.
I would have killed for this kind of content as a youth.
No yelling or clickbait titles, just someone calmly playing Doom and while explaining game mechanics and level design.
Red Shirt Jeff forever!!!!
He also seems to be brand loyal, but I'm being too harsh.
I started writing on the blog 20 years ago while in high school and college. I like leaving up the old to help people see not everyone comes straight out of the womb with the same maturity and style of someone in their 30s/40s.
I still have a lot to learn, and I imagine I would say the same thing when I hit my 40 year blogiversary :)
Got lured into Jeff's cluster shenanigans and got a few more pis and set up a tiny cluster with various services I found useful[1]. I built a bunch of services from scratch. Eventually my hybris grew and I started drawing up plans for my own search engine, running off this cluster.
I figured why not, covid was coviding and I had a lot of time. Turns out you need more than bunch of pis to run a n internet search engine, so I got a bigger server. Still my first iteration indexded like 200k docs.
One thing turned into another and now I've quit my job to work on this full time. Weird how the world works sometimes.
I guess what I wanted to say is: Thanks, Jeff.
[1] This was before the semiconductor shortage, back when pis were abundant. Sorry if I contributed to any shortages. I've sold off the ones I didn't end up using :)
Oh man, this is something I wish the EU would work on fixing. There's no reason there couldn't be a battery standard.
At least with the tools, if you pick a brand like DeWalt or Milwaukee... they have been around for decades and will stay around for decades, and the tools don't just die if the company gets bought out.
Well, at least until 'smart' tools start getting forcibly pushed into the market. But Internet connectivity is bad enough in many construction environments that it might never happen (we can hope...).
I have a bunch of Makita cordless tools (and IME, Makita was #1 for pros 10-15 years ago, not a niche brand).
Several years ago (2015-ish?) they changed up the battery shape a little bit so newer batteries wouldn't fit on older tools. It was to add another pin so the battery could tell the tool it was dead and quit drawing power (why the battery couldn't just cut power is beyond me). So (at the time) I had a drawer full of year-old tools that wouldn't work with the extra batteries I just bought.
As it turns out, you can file down part of the tool body and the new batteries fit old tools, but without the power protection. So they didn't end up in the landfill, but it's still hugely annoying.
(Oh and Japan mandates a particular kind of battery-to-device interface that isn't required anywhere else in the world which is why Makita batteries look different than everyone else's...)
https://www.protoolreviews.com/power-tool-manufacturers-who-...
This is interesting, got any sources?
The first project I did as an independent LLC was built out a network with a bunch of eMacs and a central G4 server for a law firm :P
Whenever I see just a name on HN, I expect an obituary. Got a few more gray hairs from seeing this.
Nobody even mentioned his books! His Ansible for DevOps book I have used at 2 companies to teach Ansible.
He's an amazing guy and our industry is better off for having him in it.
Yep, agreed. Huge pet peeve of mine as well.
It's not like anyone's under any obligations to provide any sort of rights, but at some point you have to admit that the term "open source" comes with a lot of expectations and norms that licenses like BSL just simply do not meet, and trying to call your project "open source" or call BSL in the "spirit" of open source is just misleading.
I bought a used print copy of his book during lockdown and bought the digital copy to directly support him.
He’s a good writer on the page as well as a good hands-on/interactive instructor.
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
I started writing my blog in 2004, and decided to leave up almost everything from the earliest days when it was on Xanga, then Thingamablog (SSG before it was cool!), and now Drupal.
Unlike most people, I'd rather be an open book. I figure intelligent people can understand how something written in high school/college days two decades ago can reflect on personality, while also understanding that those words are likely not the same words the person would write today.
It's also why I leave up my very early YouTube videos. It's not like everyone who has seen some success in their 30s/40s popped out of the womb the way they are today!
I don't agree with Jeff's 2009 views on abortion, but it's not really relevant to the work he's done here, and neither is whether or not he's changed his mind in any way about it.
The only companies that need ten year lifecycles are the same consumers Red Hat caters to with RHEL.
Red Hat is continuing to honor all its licensing terms. It just isn't doing its freeloading competitors any favors. And yes: they're freeloaders.
Red Hat's choice never touched the community in any way. As a hobbyist who uses Red Hat stuff, I'm not using RHEL, and even if I was, Red Hat gives generous licenses for hobbyists like me.
Jeff (and everybody else) jumped on the hate bandwagon. It wasn't kind, it was mob behavior, and it completely lacked any nuance.
Thousands of sysadmins, open source devs, even Hatters themselves used CentOS as a proxy for RHEL where they didn't want to deal with licensing crap.
In the middle of the CentOS 8 lifecycle, they converted CentOS to CentOS Stream (nobody asked for this), forcing everyone who had migrated their tooling and infra from CentOS 7 to 8 to migrate instead to... what?
Rocky/Alma stepped in and saved the day for all those folks.
Then in the middle of the CentOS Stream 9 lifecycle, they hid some of the sources required for rebuilding a CentOS-equivalent (at least simply/easily) behind a Red Hat account and told the community they should be happy with 16 dev licenses for RHEL if they truly needed RHEL compatibility.
As I said then, "no thanks."
The lovely RHEL people and CentOS people didn't have a say. We kept hearing and believing that the CentOS stream change was never intended to break CentOS users until they hid the sources.
RHEL is built on open source products, and support is sold. To innovate in open source by coming up with ways to get around GPL (we'll retaliate if you publish our legally publishable sources IIUC) is evil. In direct violation of what every other contributor to linux/GNU/anything GPL ever released their software under.
Disclaimer: I was part of other projects, not this directly, and I had nothing, but respect and love for everyone I worked with. We were in denial then too.
Doesn't mean they were right.
Hate bandwagon? I'm not a huge follower of Jeff's but I have never seen a single thing from them that I would consider "hateful" or jumping on a bandwagon.
What I can gather is that you disagree with those who did not like Red Hat's actions w.r.t. CentOS and RHEL updates, but just because you side with Red Hat here doesn't really make the argument less valid, neither does unjustly categorizing it as hateful. (Or false. I'm not seeing the reams of false claims. I see some accurate ones though, like that Redhat had promised not to change access to the sources previously[1].)
[1]: https://www.learnlinux.tv/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/red_hat...
I'll just address this bit. Yes, it was a hate bandwagon and it wasn't jumping on one, it was leading it. It was all over his LinkedIn and everywhere else he could post at the time.
(And I say this as an open source developer myself, who has spent thousands of hours writing code for free.)
If you want to side with Red Hat on this, fine, but it's not necessary to exaggerate the actions of those with an opposing view to the point that you're trying to make them look bad.
I also in general think it's silly and unnecessary to defend a giant corporation (remember, IBM owns Red Hat now, and it's not like RH had been a scrappy little Linux company for a long while before the acquisition, even) over regular ol' community members and IT sysadmins who have a beef.
The sources are all still there, they just need to work a little harder to get it. Forgive me if I shed no tears.
Generally speaking, the people who did the work to found RESF weren’t doing so in order to have someone else do their work for them and just rebrand it. There was a terrific amount of work that happened because a huge community of users had just had the rugged pulled out from under them.
(To be very clear, on a personal level I have some deep and stringently opposed views to some people in the RESF/CIQ ecosystem. I’m not offering any unconditional or personal defenses.)
Jeff’s takes were some of the most measured of the disagreement with Red Hat’s moves that I’ve seen.
I've reviewed my comments and this is mostly false. Not sure why you felt you needed to put this one in here.
> Does he not also have the right to call out IBM/Red Hat?
"Calling out" does not mean distorting facts to kickstart a rage-fuelled campaign against the company that offers, to this day, the most to the Linux ecosystem, free of charge, freely licensed.
To wit, he is an influencer, I am not, and should be much more careful with how he wields his influence. That was what I have re-iterated, comment by comment.
Huh, me too. Could've sworn I saw this, and now I don't. My bad...
It's true that the ones it gets wrong stand out like sore thumbs. Then again, it's probably good for the community to have something innocuous to hate.
Typically with Crohn's issues you have weeks or months of fun issues that lead up to anything too serious! (But not always)
FWIW I did not expect bad news since I didn't see a date range after the name in parens.
Geerling's an excellent trailblazer, explainer, and all round lovely guy, and his specialties are much broader than just R-Pi.
He's not biased at all when it comes to comparing the Pi to the competition in his blogs, I mean erm clones, there is no competition anyways.
Jeff Geerling blog: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog
As https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html explains, throwaway accounts are fine for sensitive information but you certainly shouldn't be using multiple ones in the same thread.
The guy who was in that Pi factory tour looks similar but is my British doppelgänger.