“Open source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) can be a game changer when it comes to building a more resilient and accessible chip ecosystem”, says Christophe Alexandre. Together with Noam Cohen he created Naja, an open source EDA tool.

The semiconductor industry is highly complex and globally interconnected, which makes it fragile. Open source can contribute to resiliency in what traditionally has been a closed field.

Christophe: “Open source EDA tools make it easier for newcomers to get started by providing solid, accessible foundations that don’t require massive initial investment or deep legacy knowledge, and it can bridge chip design with other fast moving fields like machine learning and AI. It can accelerate the creation of a local semiconductor ecosystem by breaking down the traditional barriers and opening up innovation. So trying to grow a new EDA ecosystem in Europe just by using the old closed and behind the gates model just doesn’t seem realistic anymore. If we want to build something resilient, open source needs to be a core part of the strategy.”

Links

NGI Zero projects

Learn more about Naja:

Other projects and topics mentioned

NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations lead by NLnet. It provides financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet.

The podcast is hosted by Ronny Lam and Tessel Renzenbrink, the jingle created by Yarmo Mackenbach, all from NLnet.

The NGI Zero podcast is shared under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

LibreQoS greatly improves the quality of experience of internet connections. It was born out of necessity during the COVID pandemic when massively increased internet usage resulted in intermittent package loss. Robert Chacón, CEO of LibreQoS and operator of a small ISP that provides internet to under-served communities, noticed how it affected his customers’ ability to work from home and do online learning. In response, LibreQoS was created to fight bufferbloat and latency issues by prioritizing interactive sessions like video calls over, say, downloading large files.

In this episode we speak to Robert, Herbert Wolverson (Chief Product Officer), and Frantisek Borsik (Chief Operating Officer). They talk about how they open sourced LibreQoS in the hopes of helping other small ISPs who bring internet to the under-served, and their surprise at the rapid rise in popularity with deployments in 58 countries. They provide insight in the world of ISPs, and how stable internet connections aren’t just about good gaming experiences but can actually save lives.

In loving memory of Dave Täht

Links

NGI Zero projects

Learn more about LibreQoS:

Other projects and topics mentioned

NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations lead by NLnet. It provides financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet.

The podcast is hosted by Ronny Lam and Tessel Renzenbrink, the jingle created by Yarmo Mackenbach, all from NLnet.

The NGI Zero podcast is shared under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

“The consumer electronics industry works differently than people actually think”, says Armijn Hemel creator of DeviceCode. Behind the different brands and casings is often the same hardware, created by a single Original Design Manufacturer. But the disclosure of security vulnerabilities is mostly focused on single devices. So when a CVE is published for device A from vendor X it conceals that the security flaw may also exist in a similar device of a different vendor. DeviceCode collects structured technical information about consumer devices to reveal these hidden patterns of the industry in order to improve security.

Demystifying the electronics industry can also be a step toward increasing the local production of electronics. Reasons to opt for local manufacturing are the vulnerability of global supply chains, environmental impact, worker rights, software security and preventing backdoors. A better understanding of the industry could inspire a bottom up approach to a more diversified electronics industry.

Links

NGI Zero projects

If you are interested in Armijn’s knowledge about Open Source Software supply chain management (briefly mentioned at the end of the podcast) watch the NGI Zero webinar with Armijn: Open Source in (Consumer) Electronics Supply Chains (Episode 1 of a 4-part series The Ins and Outs of Open Software Supply Chain)

Other projects and talks mentioned

Talks on the hardware supply chain by Andrew “bunnie” Huang

NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations lead by NLnet. It provides financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet.

The podcast is hosted by Ronny Lam and Tessel Renzenbrink, the jingle created by Yarmo Mackenbach, all from NLnet.

The NGI Zero podcast is shared under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

“This project was fueled by the idea that we should be less dependent on proprietary software. We don’t have control over software managed by companies that can access, analyze and sell our private data. It was a journey to own our software again”, says Julien Malka. He and Camille Mondon have implemented Clevis in NixOS to make it possible to remotely reboot servers with full disk encryption. The project was extended to port the Proxmox Hypervisor on NixOS. In this podcast episode they explain their project and talk about self-hosting as an antidote to the centralization of the internet.

Links:

NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations lead by NLnet. It provides financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet.

The podcast is hosted by Ronny Lam and Tessel Renzenbrink, the jingle created by Yarmo Mackenbach, all from NLnet.

The NGI Zero podcast is shared under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

“There would be no room for conflict if everyone in the world could exchange ideas without being watched”, says Kirill Zholnay founder of SelfPrivacy. SelfPrivacy aims to make self-hosting accessible to non-technical users. Born out of a dream to enable every person on the internet to live free of Big Tech surveillance, it provides a simple solution to set up and manage your own server. We spoke to Kirill Zholnay and lead full-stack engineer Inex Code about the need for user autonomy, their crush on Deltachat, NixOS, the joy of receiving positive feedback and how SelfPrivacy is financed.

Links:

NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations lead by NLnet. It provides financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet.

The podcast is hosted by Ronny Lam and Tessel Renzenbrink, the jingle created by Yarmo Mackenbach, all from NLnet.

The NGI Zero podcast is shared under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

“The only thing that’s going to solve the mental health crisis in software engineering is more compassion, more collaboration, more attention to the people that you spend time with”, says Daniel Thompson-Yvetot, co-founder of Tauri Apps and CEO of CrabNebula. He also speaks about how the Cyber Resilience Act can be a watershed moment for open source. And how today’s internet is designed for autocrats and corporations and that the projects he works on like Tauri, Verso and Servo, all aim to help us regain our digital autonomy.

Links:

NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations lead by NLnet. It provides financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet.

The podcast is hosted by Ronny Lam and Tessel Renzenbrink, the jingle created by Yarmo Mackenbach, all from NLnet.

The NGI Zero podcast is shared under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

Adrian Georgescu was part of the Voice over IP revolution and in this episode you’ll learn much about that history and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). With his company AG Projects, Adrian created Blink, a SIP client developed in parallel with the creation of SIP by the IETF. After Blink and SIP hit their limits, he created Sylk Suite which combines SIP with WebRTC to enable multi-party video conferencing.

NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations lead by NLnet. It provides financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet.

The podcast is hosted by Ronny Lam and Tessel Renzenbrink, the jingle created by Yarmo Mackenbach, all from NLnet.

The NGI Zero podcast is shared under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

It is important to be able to communicate freely, says Jérôme Poisson a.k.a. Goffi. He is the main developer of Libervia, a communication ecosystem based on XMPP. XMPP is mostly associated with chat but Libervia offers many more features such as blogs, fora, calendars and file & photo sharing. It has gateways to other open protocols like ActivityPub and email.

Jérôme identifies multiple problems in digital communications such as Big Tech monopolies and public debates taking place on proprietary platforms. Libervia can’t address all of these problems, because many of them are societal. But it does address some of them with a platform that is decentralized, based on Free Software and open standards. The project has strong ethics in its DNA, written down in a social contract.

Erratum: The security audit for Libervia was done by NGI Zero partner Radically Open Security not by NLnet.

Links:

ActiviyPub:

NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations lead by NLnet. It provides financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet.

The podcast is hosted by Ronny Lam and Tessel Renzenbrink, the jingle created by Yarmo Mackenbach, all from NLnet.

The NGI Zero podcast is shared under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

“Can you really speak of a program being free software if you cannot bootstrap it?”, says our guest Janneke. He is the founder of GNU Mes, a project addressing the security concerns that arise from bootstrapping an operating system using large, unauditable binary blobs.

NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations lead by NLnet. It provides financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet.

The podcast is hosted by Ronny Lam and Tessel Renzenbrink, the jingle created by Yarmo Mackenbach, all from NLnet.

The NGI Zero podcast is shared under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

One of the issues with today’s internet is that a lot of data is siloed. Consequently, users are locked into Big Tech ecosystems and its hard to reuse data. Joep Meindertsma, CEO of Ontola.io, talks about how his project Atomic Data addresses this problem with LinkedData. The free and open source project is a modular specification for sharing, modifying and modeling data. It uses links to connect pieces of data which makes it easier to connect datasets - even when these datasets exist on separate machines.

Inspired by Tim Berners-Lee, Joep works on an iteration of the semantic web that enforces JSON compatibility and type safety.

He also talks about the effect of NGI Zero funding on Atomic Tables and has some advice for people who are considering to apply for an NGI Zero grant.

Links mentioned in the episode:

NGI Zero is a coalition of non-profit organizations lead by NLnet. It provides financial and practical support to people working on the free and open internet.

The podcast is hosted by Ronny Lam and Tessel Renzenbrink, the jingle created by Yarmo Mackenbach, all from NLnet.

The NGI Zero podcast is shared under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.