LugRadio

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

~ the obituary ~

LugRadio came out of the Wolverhampton Linux User Group, which explains most of what the show was. Jono Bacon and Matthew Revell agreed on the idea in 2003, pulled in Stuart Langridge and Stephen Parkes to fill the desk, and released episode one on 26 February 2004 under the title "The Phantom Message". It went out fortnightly: four British accents arguing about Linux and free software, plus whatever else had annoyed them since the last one.

The guest list got serious quickly for something recorded by a user group. Nat Friedman of Ximian came on, as did Chris DiBona, who ran open source at Google. Simon Phipps came down from Sun and Eric Raymond turned up too. Linux Format named it Best Linux Podcast in the Christmas 2007 issue, and in 2006 the UK Linux and Open Source Awards gave it Best Marketing Campaign, which is an odd prize for a radio show and was probably the right one.

Licensing mattered to them in a way it does not to most shows. Episodes went out under a Creative Commons license that forbade derivative works until December 2007, when the team switched to Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 and then went back through the archive relicensing what they had the rights to relicense. The paperwork took a while.

~ the case file ~

~ wolverhampton, with a helicopter ~

LugRadio Live started in 2005 and drew 250 people and 18 exhibitors, Ubuntu and O'Reilly among them. One of the 14 speakers was Mark Shuttleworth, who arrived by helicopter. The following year it pulled around 400 attendees and more than 30 speakers, and in 2007 it moved into the Light House Media Centre in Wolverhampton for a two-day run in July.

Then they tried America. LugRadio Live USA 2008 ran on 12 and 13 April at the Metreon in San Francisco, with Miguel de Icaza and Ian Murdock on the bill, and pulled roughly five hundred people, some of whom flew in from Europe and Australia. A user group from the Black Country had built an international conference inside four years.

A fortnightly audio file in 2004 was a bandwidth decision before it was a listening decision, and the ones I made on a Turkish connection that year did not run to seventy minutes of men in the West Midlands discussing package managers. The bigger distance was the duller kind. Half of what LugRadio became happened in a room in Wolverhampton that you had to physically get to, and the podcast was the part that traveled.

~ season six, episode one ~

The end was announced on the episode of 30 June 2008: the show would finish at LugRadio Live UK that summer. It did, on 19 July 2008, season five episode 23, recorded at the conference. That should have been the whole story.

Instead they came back on 24 October 2009 to record at LugRadio Live 2009 and filed it as season five, episode 24, slotting it into the season that had already ended. Then on 7 July 2011, after what the show itself called a three-year hiatus, the full desk sat down for a reunion titled "Adam's Lumpen Potato Adventure", with Ade Bradshaw back alongside them. They discussed where identi.ca fit in the new social order and what it meant that LibreOffice and OpenOffice were now competing suites. It is labeled Season 6 Episode 1. The season has one episode in it.

~ the site that never came down ~

lugradio.org still answers. The front page still carries that 2011 reunion under the heading "Latest show", with its running time of 76 minutes and its timestamped segment list, and the last line of the description reads "That's it for our 2011 reunion show: we'll see you in a couple of years, probably". The archive page behind it lists all 108 episodes with dates, from The Phantom Message in February 2004 forward, which is how the count in this grave was taken.

There is a banner at the top pointing at badvoltage.org, where Langridge and Bacon went on with Jeremy Garcia. The redirect that matters was never installed, though. The old show sits there at its own address, undeleted, with a promise on the front page that is now fifteen years overdue.

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