One may observe an axis, or a “spectrum”, along which free and open source software licenses can be organized, where one end is “permissive” and the other end is “copyleft”. It is important to acknowledge, however, that though copyleft can be found at the opposite end of an axis with respect to perm...

freedesktop(.org), aka FDO, recently banned Hyprland maintainer Vaxry from the FDO community, and in response Vaxry has taken his case to the court of public opinion, publishing their email exchanges and writing about it on his blog. It saddens me to bear witness to these events today. I wrote in Se...

freedesktop(.org), aka FDO, recently banned Hyprland maintainer Vaxry from the FDO community, and in response Vaxry has taken his case to the court of public opinion, publishing their email exchanges and writing about it on his blog.It saddens me to bear witness to these events today. I wrote in Sep...

Prusa is a 3D printer manufacturer which has a long history of being admired by the 3D printing community for high quality, open source printers. They have been struggling as of late, and came under criticism for making the firmware of their Mk4 printer non-free.1 Armin Ronacher uses Prusa as a case...

Prusa is a 3D printer manufacturer which has a long history of being admired by the 3D printing community for high quality, open source printers. They have been struggling as of late, and came under criticism for making the firmware of their Mk4 printer non-free.1Armin Ronacher uses Prusa as a case-...

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, has been subject to numerous allegations of misconduct. He stepped down in 2019, and following his re-instatement in 2021, a famous open letter was published in which numerous organizations and individuals from throughout the Free Softwa...

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, has been subject to numerous allegations of misconduct. He stepped down in 2019, and following his re-instatement in 2021, a famous open letter was published in which numerous organizations and individuals from throughout the Free Softwa...

I am working on rousing the Hare community to get the word out about our work. I have drafted the Hare evangelism guidelines to this effect, which summarizes how we want to see our community bringing Hare to more people. We’d like to spread the word in a way which is respectful of the attention of o...

I am working on rousing the Hare community to get the word out about our work. I have drafted the Hare evangelism guidelines to this effect, which summarizes how we want to see our community bringing Hare to more people.We’d like to spread the word in a way which is respectful of the attention of ot...

Some free software projects reject anonymous or pseudonymous contributions, requiring you to author patches using your “real name”. Such projects have a so-called “real name” policy; Linux is one well-known example.1 The root motivations behind such policies vary, but in my experience the most often...

Some free software projects reject anonymous or pseudonymous contributions, requiring you to author patches using your “real name”. Such projects have a so-called “real name” policy; Linux is one well-known example.1The root motivations behind such policies vary, but in my experience the most often ...

There is a phenomenon in society which I find quite bizarre. Upon our entry to this mortal coil, we are endowed with self-awareness, agency, and free will. Each of the 8 billion members of this human race represents a unique person, a unique worldview, and a unique agency. Yet, many of us have the s...

There is a phenomenon in society which I find quite bizarre. Upon our entry to this mortal coil, we are endowed with self-awareness, agency, and free will. Each of the 8 billion members of this human race represents a unique person, a unique worldview, and a unique agency. Yet, many of us have the s...

There are forbidden topics in the hacker community. One is sternly reprimanded for bringing them up, by their peers, their leaders, and the community at large. In private, one can expect threats and intimidation; in public, outcry and censorship. The forbidden topics are enforced by the moderators o...

There are forbidden topics in the hacker community. One is sternly reprimanded for bringing them up, by their peers, their leaders, and the community at large. In private, one can expect threats and intimidation; in public, outcry and censorship. The forbidden topics are enforced by the moderators o...

Hyprland is an open source Wayland compositor based on wlroots, a project I started back in 2017 to make it easier to build good Wayland compositors. It’s a project which is loved by its users for its emphasis on customization and “eye candy” – beautiful graphics and animations, each configuration t...

Hyprland is an open source Wayland compositor based on wlroots, a project I started back in 2017 to make it easier to build good Wayland compositors. It’s a project which is loved by its users for its emphasis on customization and “eye candy” – beautiful graphics and animations, each configuration t...

There is a machine learning bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by machine learning. But it will probably be crappier, not better. Contrary to the AI doomer’s expectations, the world isn’t going to go down in flames any faster thanks to AI. Con...

There is a machine learning bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by machine learning. But it will probably be crappier, not better.Contrary to the AI doomer’s expectations, the world isn’t going to go down in flames any faster thanks to AI. Cont...

I am pleased to be writing today’s blog post from a laptop running Ares OS. I am writing into an ed(1) session, on a file on an ext4 filesystem on its hard drive. That’s pretty cool! It seems that a lot of interesting stuff has happened since I gave that talk on Helios at FOSDEM in February. The tal...

I am pleased to be writing today’s blog post from a laptop running Ares OS. I am writing into an ed(1) session, on a file on an ext4 filesystem on its hard drive. That’s pretty cool! It seems that a lot of interesting stuff has happened since I gave that talk on Helios at FOSDEM in February. A pictu...

This blog post is a response to Mark Dominus’ “The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace”. I’ve been working on a shell for Unix-like systems called rc, which draws heavily from the Plan 9 shell of the same name. When I saw Mark’s post about the perils of whitespace in POSIX shells (or derived...

This blog post is a response to Mark Dominus’ “The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace”.I’ve been working on a shell for Unix-like systems called rc, which draws heavily from the Plan 9 shell of the same name. When I saw Mark’s post about the perils of whitespace in POSIX shells (or derived ...

My Linux distribution of choice for several years has been Alpine Linux. It’s a small, efficient distribution which ships a number of tools I appreciate for their simplicity, such as musl libc. It has a very nice package manager, apk, which is fast and maintainable. The development community is prof...

My Linux distribution of choice for several years has been Alpine Linux. It’s a small, efficient distribution which ships a number of tools I appreciate for their simplicity, such as musl libc. It has a very nice package manager, apk, which is fast and maintainable. The development community is prof...

SourceGraph is making their product closed source, abandoning the Apache 2.0 license it was originally distributed under, so once again we convene in the ritual condemnation we offer to commercial products that piss in the pool of open source. Invoking Bryan Cantrill once more: Bryan Cantrill on Ope...

SourceGraph is making their product closed source, abandoning the Apache 2.0 license it was originally distributed under, so once again we convene in the ritual condemnation we offer to commercial products that piss in the pool of open source. Invoking Bryan Cantrill once more: Bryan Cantrill on Ope...

A few months ago, as Elon Musk took over Twitter and instituted polices that alienated many people, some of these people fled towards federated, free software platforms like Mastodon. Many people found a new home here, but there is a certain class of refugee who has not found it to their liking. I g...

A few months ago, as Elon Musk took over Twitter and instituted polices that alienated many people, some of these people fled towards federated, free software platforms like Mastodon. Many people found a new home here, but there is a certain class of refugee who has not found it to their liking.I go...

This has been a very challenging year for me. You probably read that I suffered from burnout earlier in the year. In some respects, things have improved, and in many other respects, I am still haunted. You might not care to read this, and so be it, take your leave if you must. But writing is healing...