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Open Source

The most popular blog posts about open source on Hacker News. 66 posts.

2019
35

Open-Sourcing Inform 7

This is a talk and slides from Narrascope 2019 , held at MIT, Boston, on 14-16 June 2019. It's a sequel to a talk given in London a year earlier , when I went into "literate programming" at greater depth, but when the design of Inter was more embryonic. I'd like to thank the Narrascope organisers for fitting me in to…

36

Xfce 4.14 released

Why is the release manager late to the party with his blog post? The explanation is simple: We prioritized sticking to the schedule and getting our releases out to everyone as planned, as our codebase was ready. What was not (entirely) ready was some parts of the website, which were brought up-to-date over the course…

39

The Principles of Versioning in Go

This blog post is about how we added package versioning to Go, in the form of Go modules, and the reasons we made the choices we did. It is adapted and updated from a talk I gave at GopherCon Singapore in 2018 .

42

On Recent Controversial Events

Update in 2024 : You may have linked to this page because it's heavily quoted by a semi-anonymously published website called the “Stallman Report”. While the author of that document tried to contact me shortly before launching their site, I missed that email for a week or two. (I get a lot of email and as those of you…

44

Debian Riscv64 port in mid 2019

It's been a while since last post (Talk about the Debian GNU/Linux riscv64 port at RISC-V workshop), and sometimes things look very quiet from outside even if the people on the backstage never stop working. So this is an update on the status of this port before the release of buster, which should happen in a few weeks…

46

Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War

When I heard that ARM was to stop doing business with Huawei, I was a little bit puzzled as to how that worked: ARM is a British company owned by a Japanese conglomerate; how was the US able to extend its influence beyond its citizens and borders? A BBC report indicated that ARM had concerns over its US origin…

47

How to liberate a Chromebook

Google is about as open as a clam. Over the holidays, I found a Chromebook that Samsung had given me to evaluate about six years ago and which had been gathering dust ever since. Coincidentally, Laura’s sister Annie had just told me that she needed a laptop. Hmm… Well, there was no way I was going to give her a Google…

50

FreeBSD – A lesson in poor defaults

This page lists some of the changes I make to a vanilla install of FreeBSD for security hardening. Some changes to increase network performance or make things a bit more sane are also included. It only covers basic changes that a sysadmin can make to a running system.

57

Back from the Blender Conference

Yesterday, me, Dmitry, Wolthera and Agata visited BlenderCon 2019 . Intel had asked us to come to the conference to help set up the Intel/Acer booth, which was showing off Krita in all its HDR glory . After all, it’s pretty cool when a free software project has a real, tangible, technical, artistic first ! It was…