The Portable Consultant would like to build his home media network: a media pc network with heavy lifting back-end and slim, quiet front-ends next to TVs and stereos.

There are countless ways to do this, and countless web sites to show you how, but what’s striking is the vast array of open source options. Not only Linux OS spin-offs like MythTV and Mythbuntu, but what appear to be very smooth products like Elisa and Neuros LINK from Fluendo and Neuros respectively.

These companies are not only using Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), but many of them are actively inciting FLOSS developers to join their open source development communities to contribute to and hack their products. Neuros, for example, sends interested developers to its developer wiki directly from the same web page that directs customers to online support forums.

After years of denial from commercial software vendors, the FLOSS paradigm of development and support is proving increasingly useful for commercial consumer products.

These media related software & hardware products, and not the home Linux PC, appear to be the arena where the consumer is meeting open source systems for the first time… whether they know it or not.

Cheers,
-pmh