Years and years ago, I had a podcast. It was called the Open Source Creative Podcast. It was a fun little thing that actually started because I had a tendency to talk to myself while driving in my car on my daily commute to and from work. I figured that if I’m going to sit there an talk to myself, I may as well record it and talk about something that other folks might actually be interested in hearing.
So I made the show about using open source tools to make creative stuff. I mean, these tools are an intrinsic part of my creative pipeline, regardless of what the final output is. There’s value in that. There’s freedom in that, true creative freedom.
This was the birth of that podcast. It went for 52 episodes (and one additional one that I never actually published… I still feel bad about that) and by the time I’d gotten to that point, the show had migrated out of my car and to my desk, complete with much nicer audio gear, full video, and interviews with people who were (and still are) a lot more interesting than me.
Then I got busy.
All kinds of things came up, absorbing the time that I had available for recording, editing, and sharing the show. So it fell into the ranks of the podfaded.
But you know what? I look around and I see madness in the creative world. Canva bought Affinity and made it kind of mostly free of charge. Adobe decided to discontinue Animate… and then backed down from that, sort of. Creative communities are eating themselves with witch hunts of artists accusing each other of using LLMs to produce their work. LLMs themselves bring in questions about the sovereignty and ownership of your own work. It’s a weird time.
Actually, weird is the wrong word. It’s an important time. From my perspective, the creative freedom that you get with open source tools is more relevant and important than ever. And these tools have been around forever (at least, in internet years, close enough to forever). Despite that, I’m amazed that there are still people who don’t know they exist… or know that they exist and are steadfastly unwilling to take advantage of them.
It boggles the mind.
But, it’s also a signal, a sign. It’s an indication that there’s still a lot of education that needs to be done to let people know that open source tools exist, that they’re just as capable as their closed source counterparts, and that they give you, the creative human, an unmatched level of freedom to create.
So the Open Source Creative Podcast is coming back. I’ll be doing video, interviews… the whole shebang. Let me know what kinds of things you’d like me to cover.
