Linux Outlaws

» see sixgun.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Linux Outlaws was recorded in two countries at once. Dan Lynch sat in Merseyside and Fabian Scherschel sat in Hanover, and from 5 September 2007 the pair put out a weekly Linux news show under the Sixgun Productions name. Recording happened on Mondays and the episode landed on Wednesdays. The feed carried both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis from the first episode onward.

The show was two people with opinions working through the week in free software, and it ran long. Kernel releases got the same treatment as distribution gossip, and licensing arguments got more. The numbers were good for something made by men who were not paid to make it: episodes generally cleared 20,000 downloads each. Episode 100 arrived on 6 July 2009 and episode 300 on 17 February 2013.

The ending was announced before it happened, which is rare for a podcast. On 3 November 2014 Lynch posted a note titled "Nothing lasts forever" saying the show would finish in December with five final episodes the hosts were calling the last stand. No sponsor had walked and no argument had happened. "Our lives have changed dramatically, both of us, and we just can't keep Linux Outlaws going." Listeners were asked to send in questions for the farewell. Episode 370 went into the feed on 29 December 2014 under the title "Stay Free, Stay Open Source".

By 2007 the line at home could pull down an hour of audio without anybody thinking about it, which is where my overlap with this show starts and roughly where it ends. Linux news reached me as text on forums and English-language sites, read in the minutes between other things. An hour of two men talking was a different order of spending. The Ogg feed is the detail that fixes the show inside its decade, shipping deliberately in a format most hardware in the world refused to play, because that format was the free one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the last stand ~

Five episodes is a long goodbye. The hosts spent them answering listener questions and reading out comments, going back over seven years of arguments they had already had on air once. Scherschel had been a journalist the whole time and Lynch a programmer, which is roughly why the show could hold a technical thread for a full hour.

Sixgun did not close when Linux Outlaws did. Lynch carried on producing Free as in Freedom, and Scherschel started co-hosting Geek News Radio in December 2015. The network's other shows, a Warhammer 40,000 podcast and a music program called Rat Hole Radio, had always run beside Linux Outlaws rather than under it.

~ what stayed in the feed ~

The RSS file outlived the show by eleven months. After episode 370 there is exactly one more item, posted on 30 November 2015 and titled "Important Message". The entire body of it reads "Please listen!" and the link points at the Geek News Radio page on sixgun.org. Several databases record that November 2015 date as the end of Linux Outlaws. The item is an advertisement for the show the hosts made next, posted into an audience that had not unsubscribed.

Both domains are gone. linuxoutlaws.com and sixgun.org now redirect to a path on Scherschel's current site that answers 404, so the show's own address is a dead link sitting inside a live one. The audio survives on the feed host and in the podcast directories, which is where all 370 episodes still are.

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