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Postcard is now open source
Self-host a personal website + newsletter
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,100 posts.
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Open source supply chain security at Google [video]
I was a remote opening keynote speaker at ACM SCORED 2023 , which we decided meant that I sent a video to play and I was on Discord during the talk for attendees to text directly with question as the video played, and then we did some live but still remote Q&A after the talk.
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Announcing the Journal of Open Source Software
Making AI work better for science @ Fulcrum. Previously Senior Fellow @ Schmidt Sciences, Product for @github's Copilot, Head of Data Science @stsci. Zoonive...
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HashiCorp did it backwards
Hashicorp recently announced they’re changing the license of Terraform to a source-available license, BSL1.1.
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How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?
After building the infrastructure to analyse the code in an Ubuntu release I decided to satisfy a simple curiosity and figure out how much GNU software is actually part of a modern distribution. I picked Ubuntu natty (released in April) as a reference, am counting lines of code (LOC) as the rough metric for size of a…
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Oil Shell: Success with Aboriginal, Alpine, and Debian Linux
Three months ago, in Roadmap #5 , I wrote that OSH will be a better shell for building Linux distributions . It will run existing code, including bash scripts, but it's stricter and easier to debug.
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SolarPi experiment 2: Finally something that works
After more than a year, I finally got to the point where I have more or less 24/7 solar-powered Raspberry Pi microserver.
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OpenBSD on the Huawei MateBook X
The Huawei MateBook X is a high-quality 13" ultra-thin laptop with a fanless Core i5 processor. It is obviously biting the design of the Apple 12" MacBook , but it does have some notable improvements such as a slightly larger screen, a more usable keyboard with adequate key travel, and 2 USB-C ports.
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Bruce Perens: Invasion of the Ethical Licenses (2019)
About 23 years ago, I created the Debian Free Software Guidelines to help the Debian developers decide what software was permissible to include in Debian, which aspired to be 100% Free Software, and what should be consigned to a "non-free" repository upon which Debian would never depend. Nine months later, those…
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XFCE 4.20 Released
After almost two years of work, we are happy to announce the release of Xfce 4.20.
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A retrospective on Requests
After writing my thoughts on github3.py down here, someone was asking about Python libraries that people recommend new Python developers read for learning how to structure code and use the packaging systems. My initial reaction was "Don't listen to folks that tell you to read python-requests as a good example." When…
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Linux Foundation Secure Boot System Released
As promised, here is the Linux Foundation UEFI secure boot system. This was actually released to us by Microsoft on Wednesday 6 February, but with travel, conferences and meetings I didn’t really get time to validate it all until today. The files are here
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Building Alex Taradov’s open-source USB sniffer
A couple of months ago I stumbled upon a post on Hackaday about an inexpensive open-source USB 2.0 sniffer created by Alex Taradov . This is a really cool project! Normally, USB sniffers like this can cost thousands of dollars, especially if you’re paying for fancy protocol decoding and also want high-speed 480 Mbps…
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The complete idiot's guide to OpenBSD on the Pinebook Pro
Today I will show you how I installed the latest snapshot of OpenBSDon my Pinebook Pro with plenty of detail so that you can do it, too.I will include instru...
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Dear Mozilla community: I screwed up. Big time.
I screwed up. Big time. Not just with Adblock Plus users but with the Mozilla community at large.
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An IRC-Enabled Lawn Mower (2021)
IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat . Invented in the late 1980s, it's one of the oldest and most popular realtime chat protocols. Despite being over 30 years old, it's still actively developed, and hundreds of thousands of people still use it to chat every day.
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The Unlicense is an inferior license wrapped in an atrocious name
Not only is it poorly drafted with better alternatives available, but “Unlicensed” means the precise opposite of “unlicensed”.
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Microsoft’s failed attempt on Debian packaging
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
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Why it took 4 years to get a lock files specification
(This is the blog post version of my keynote from EuroPython 2025 in Prague, Czechia.) We now have a lock file format specification. That might not sound like a big deal, but for me it took 4 years of active work to get us that specification. Part education, part therapy,
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Supply chain nightmare: How Rust will be attacked and what we can do to mitigate
An essential part of being able to say "I told you so" is in fact having told you so. Well, here we are. For those living under a rock (lucky
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AI and Open Source in 2023
The Highs and Lows: A Year in Review
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The circus freaks of open source
The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others. For example, it earns the achievement, coveted in OS dev circles, of being self-hosted. 1 TempleOS…
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My proposal for scaling open source: don’t
I've had a number of conversations about what "we" in the "free software community" "need" to do to combat the growth in proprietary, user-hostile and customer-hostile business models like cloud user-generated content hosts, social media platforms, hosted payment platforms, videoconferencing services etc. Questions…
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Why Linux is not ready for the desktop, the final edition
The previous iteration of this article was too technical, too long, and contained a lot of controversial points, so I've been thinking for a long time about rewriting it completely, making it accessible to the non-technical folks, and exposing the deeper core issues that still make Linux a questionable match for the…
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Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)
I maintain a sorta-popular open source package, and I want to prevent big corporations and "bad guys" from using it. I want feedback on how to do this.