Summary: Tim and Roy discuss Apple, Microsoft, UK innovation, and of course a lot of GNU/Linux in this second episode of TechBytes, which is hopefully entertaining
TIM opens this show with an introduction which soon becomes a discussion about Ubuntu. Later on we speak about Silverlight, Moonlight, and WPF, which are seemingly a dead-end endeavour.
Roy corrects some remarks he made last week about Octave, a project he has not tried for years. He now testifies and talks about how impressed he is by Octave, which has made a lot of progress. Other issues that are covered towards the end are licence compliance matters and women in Ubuntu (now exceeding 5%). More show notes can be found at OpenBytes.
In future shows we may speak about Steve Ballmer getting rid of a lot of Microsoft shares, possibly with Marti, Wayne, and several other guests who are sceptical about Microsoft's claims. As a reminder, TechBytes does have room for discussion about the competition, unlike some other shows.
IBM basically laid off almost 1,000 people last week [...] At the moment about 75% of the 'articles' we see about IBM (in recent days) are some kind of slop
Very ill-prepared for the deteriorating situation caused by their clients' past behaviour towards many people, including high-profile figures who offered to testify
Last week IBM laid off almost 1,000 people in Confluent and the media didn't write anything about it, so don't expect anyone in what's left of the media to comment on Fedora's demise and silent layoffs at Red Hat
In an age when ~1,000 simultaneous layoffs aren't enough to receive any media coverage, what can we expect remaining publishers to tell us about Microsoft layoffs in 2026?
Is the "era of AI" an era when none of the media will mention over 800 layoffs? [...] There's a lesson here about the state of the contemporary media, not just IBM and bluewashing