I cringed a bit when I read that back in April. There is quite a bit of open source software in use at VPR, but not much on the broadcast side (darkice and icecast is the only thing that comes to mind at the moment, plus nagios for monitoring). I'm hoping that will change some day, but it's going to be a long time . . . the broadcast community doesn't seem very friendly to the idea of FOSS. I've posted on the Public Radio Engineers list about some open source software we use, and received some criticism that FOSS is only for toying around with at home, not real business.
As far as open content, I'm not even sure how the licensing works for VPR's web content, I should really look in to it some day, when I'm not sitting in an Internet cafe with the clock ticking in Athens :) Asa On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 3:47 AM, Stanley Brinkerhoff <[email protected]> wrote: > Nate Herzog wrote a masterfully crafted piece on the Vermont 3.0 blog > regarding "Open Source Radio" at VPR. > > http://www.vermont3.com/2009/04/open-source-radio-behind-the-sounds-at-vermont-public-radio.html#comments > > Hold everything. Open Source Radio? Hear me out. Open source, broadly > defined — I know there are many different open source models and licenses > out there, but broadly defined — has to be three things: > 1. Maintained by the community. Check — VPR is supported and financed in > large part through the efforts of their listening community > 2. Available for free. Check — VPR content is freely available from a > variety of sources. > 3. Accessible for improvement or modification. In this case, the source code > is the story content. I'll get back to this. > Its one thing to play fast and loose with broad definitions -- but to > attempt to capture the good will of a development community, a philosophy, > and an entire mantra is in poor taste. VPR may be community driven radio -- > but to call it "Open Source" only serves to discredit VPR in the eyes of > true FOSS developers, and to attempt to promote VPR in a capacity it is not. > > > Stan >
