NGI0: Next Generation Internet@NGIZero

"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.

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, noticed how it affected his customers' ability to work from home and do online learning. In response, LibreQoS was created to fight bufferbloat by prioritizing interactive sessions like video calls over downloading large files.

"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.

“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.

"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 in the 5th episode of the NGI Zero podcast

Adrian Georgescu was part of the Voice over IP revolution & in this episode you'll learn much about that history and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). With his company AG projects, he created Blink, a SIP client developed in parallel with the creation of SIP by the IETF & Sylk Suite which enabled multi-party video conferencing harnessing WebRTC.
He also talks about what it's like to run a FOSS company and having to compete with Big Tech offering services for free and much more.

"It is important to be able to communicate freely", says Jérôme Poisson a.k.a. @Goffi@mastodon.social He is the main developer of Libervia, a communication ecosystem based on #XMPP. The open standard 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.

“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.

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 Meinderstma talks about how his project Atomic Data, a modular specification for sharing, modifying and modeling data, addresses this problem.