Jeremy White

I’ve got a treat for you in this episode! We have Jeremy White, founder of CodeWeavers and the world’s most affable curmudgeon, as our guest on this week’s show. For anyone who doesn’t know, CodeWeavers has played an enormous part in helping the Wine Project succeed. What’s Wine, you ask? In essence, Wine is a compatibility layer that helps you run Windows applications on other operating systems like Linux and MacOS… natively, without emulation. It’s also a key part of the technology responsible for making sure that many Steam games run on Linux. CodeWeavers (and by extension, Jeremy) has been involved with all of that.

In this full hour worth of conversation, we cover all manner of interesting things. We talk about how Jeremy set up CodeWeavers to be an employee ownership trust before he retired… and how he thinks that’s going. We talk about the frustrations that he and I have with the fact that we’re almost 30 years into Free and Open Source Software being a thing, but it doesn’t seem to have the traction we expect it to. We get into the nature of creativity and the differences between how artists solve problems compared to how engineers solve them.

And that’s just scratching the surface! There’s more on Wine, file formats, free versus open, Linux distro hopping, mentoring in the FIRST Robotics Competition, and being deliberate about how you spend money. It’s really a great episode!

Also, we’re six episodes in since I restarted the show. I’m loving the feedback that you’re sharing. Keep it coming! I’ve got more episodes in the pipe and a bunch more great interviews lined up. Of course, it’s hard to do a show like this and just be screaming into the wind; it’s a lot easier when there are more people listening to it and talking about it. So if you know anyone who uses open source tools and does something creative (or has an interest in those things), let them know this show exists! Let’s see if we can even more people talking about this stuff!