January 29, 2021

Open source civilization (Changelog Interviews #428)

1 hour 18 minutes

This week we’re talking about open source industrial machines. We’re joined by Marcin Jakubowski from Open Source Ecology where they’re developing open source industrial machines that can be made for a fraction of commercial costs, and they’re sharing their designs online for free. The goal is to create an efficient open source economy that increases innovation through open collaboration. We talk about what it takes to build a civilization from scratch, the Open Building Institute and their Eco-Building Toolkit, the right to repair movement, DIY maker culture, and how Marcin plans to build 10,000 micro factories worldwide where anyone can come and make.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members get a bonus 2 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

Linode – Get $100 in free credit to get started on Linode – Linode is our cloud of choice and the home of Changelog.com. Head to linode.com/changelog OR text CHANGELOG to 474747 to get instant access to that $100 in free credit.

Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog

Render – Get $100 in free credit to give Render a try! Plus they’re going to assign a world-class engineer to your account to provide guidance and answer any questions. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box — one-click scaling, zero-downtime deploys, built-in SSL, private networking, managed databases, secrets and config management, persistent block storage, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Send an email to [email protected] to get your free credits.

LaunchDarkly – Test in production! Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users.

Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.

Featuring:

Marcin Jakubowski – Website, LinkedIn, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Special thanks to Josh Fong for requesting this episode back in July 2020.

Marcin’s TED Talk

OpenSourceEcology.org

Open Building Institute Kickstarter

From this post on Vice/Motherboard — Kyle Schwarting is a farmer by trade, and a hacker by necessity. His farm, about 20 minutes outside the city limits of Lincoln, Nebraska, is full of tractors and agricultural equipment, which he picks up in various states of repair from fellow farmers, fixes up, and resells. “I would say what I’m doing is hacking,” Schwarting tells me, gesturing to a Windows laptop and a USB-to-tractor cable he Frankensteined himself.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

...more

View all episodes

By Changelog Media

4.4