Command Line Heroes

Introducing a show about the developers, programmers, hackers, geeks, and open source rebels who are shaping our digital future.

The O.S. Wars. The 1980s is a period of mounting tensions. The empires of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs careen toward an inevitable battle over proprietary software—only one empire can emerge as the purveyor of a standard operating system for millions of users. Gates has formed a powerful alliance with IBM while Jobs tries to maintain the purity of his brand. Their struggle for dominance threatens to engulf the galaxy...

It's the 1990s. The empire of Microsoft controls 90% of users. Complete standardization of operating systems seems assured. But an unlikely hero arises from amongst the band of open source rebels. Linus Torvalds—meek, bespectacled—releases his Linux O.S. free of charge. While Microsoft reels and regroups, the battleground shifts from personal computers to the Internet...

It's the turn of the 21st century. Open source software is changing the tech landscape. But new patterns of work have now become necessary. Developers search for a revolutionary approach that will allow open source development to flourish. A group of developers convenes at a ski resort in Utah to craft such an approach. What emerges is a manifesto that changes everything...

As the race to deliver applications ramps up, the wall between development and operations comes crashing down. When it does, those on both sides learn to work together like never before. But what is DevOps, really? Developer guests, including Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman and Cindy Sridharan (better known as @copyconstruct) think about DevOps as a practice from their side of the wall, while members from various operations teams explain what they’ve been working to defend...

The rise of Container technologies opens a new frontier for developers, simplifying the movement of work from machine to machine. As Containers become more popular, though, a new battle emerges. This race is for the control of orchestration and involves the industry’s fastest, strongest players...

“There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer.” Or server, to be exact. Big cloud providers offer a relatively easy way to scale out workloads. But what’s the real cost? In this episode, we talk about the battle in the clouds, where any winner is still very much up in the air. Major Hayden, Microsoft’s Bridget Kromhout, and others help us understand the storm that’s brewing and where that leaves open source developers.

Imagine a world where open source never caught on, where no one thought it’d be a good idea to make source code available to anyone. In this episode, we imagine this bizarre possibility. And we celebrate the open source tools and methodologies that got us where we are today. Join us as we wrap up Season 1, an almost 30,000-foot view of how the open source world came to be. Next season, we’re zooming in and focusing on the epic struggles of today’s command line heroes.