It is no secret that I have a soft spot for free open source software (FOSS) culture–I love its unfiltered access, educational potential, fexibility and adaptability, and perhaps most importantly I love the ideology that offers a glimmer of hope towards a future where creativity trumps greed (even though at times even FOSS culture fails to uphold this ambitious goal). Yet, I am not a FOSS zealot. Rather, from a technological perspective I see myself as a pragmatist–with all things being equal, I will pick FOSS solution over a proprietary one, but that’s as far as my FOSS partiality goes. Consequently, I have used and continue to use just about every mainstream operating system and the creative tools that make it unique. It is perhaps because of this pragmatic approach to open source that back in 2004 the Linux audio community picked me as the director of the international Linuxaudio.org consortium, a position I held since.

The key goal of the consortium is offering a convergence among the audio and multimedia enthusiasts and the industry, a place where every voice can be heard. To meet this goal, I set out to consolidate online resources and offer a safe longitudinal platform for their proliferation. Shortly after I joined Virginia Tech, I leveraged newfound partnerships and secured a high-bandwidth hosting solution at no cost to my department. Today, Linuxaudio.org hosts a broad array of resources including over half-dozen mailing lists, wiki and documentation, archives from every Linux Audio Conference since 2002, and the growing ecosystem serves over half a Terabyte of web traffic every month. Over the last decade Linuxaudio.org’s membership has exceeded 80 member projects and companies.