On Friday, as you may know, I made Podcatch.com public.

It's a quick way to find a great podcast to listen to, now. Without subscribing.

The list of feeds is curated, it originated from the feeds my Facebook friends liked the most. In that I think it's a prototype for how social networks can be used to create new flows that aren't complicated or hard to use or appreciate. I think, btw, this is the holy grail Twitter has been looking for.

The JavaScript environment

What I haven't talked about yet is all the great open technology it builds on. Stuff that's available to anyone to use to create new apps. One of the amazing things about developing in JavaScript in 2015, and hasn't been well-appreciated yet, is how deep and generous the developer community is, to itself. I've never seen anything like this.

Technologies we use

So here's a partial list of technologies I'm using to make this work, all of which are open source and available to all, free of charge and on equal terms.

1. Font-Awesome for the icons.

2. Bootstrap Toolkit for the CSS framework.

3. jQuery to make access to the DOM uniform across browsers.

4. snap.js manages the sidebar in the app (new feature today).

5. River4, manages subscriptions, river generation and browsing.

6. Feedparser does all the feed parsing for River4.

7. OPMLparser reads the subscription lists for River4.

8. RSS is what podcasting is built on, of course.

9. Node.js runs the custom back-end Podcatch software and River4.

10. NPM supports the building of the backend bits.

11. V8 which is the JavaScript interpreter in Node.js.

12. HTML5 has an <audio> element we use to play the podcasts.

13. Google Fonts for Oswald and Ubuntu.

Thanks!

Thanks to all the generous developers (with a caveat that I am thanking myself for River4 and RSS, I know it's weird).

I'm sure this list will grow as I remember more bits of generosity that I'm building on.

This tech makes people rich

BTW, one of the reasons I listed the open tech that podcatch.com builds on is to increase the visibility of these essential components.

For entrepreneurs and VCs who have made billions from tech, you should know that this would not be possible without the generous work of people who mostly do it for love, with no expected remuneration.

If you think you support open tech and are not actively supporting this work, you're not. Sometimes you have to tell truth to power. This is one of the truths that has not been well-told.