Last week, Debian announced that in September 2006 they accidentally broke the OpenSSL pseudo-random number generator while trying to silence a Valgrind warning. One effect this had is that the ssh-keygen program installed on recent Debian systems (and Debian-derived systems like Ubuntu) could only generate 32,767…
About a week ago, the Facebook Data team quietly released the Cassandra Project on Google Code. The Cassandra project has been described as a cross between ...
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
Miguel de Icaza's Blog
At some point in the past year I watched a video of an Eric Sink presentation and he asked the following question (he said it was asked of him by a college student): Why would someone buy your product when it has an open source competitor? He didn’t answer it in his presentation, but if I rememb
Update: Here's how to get started using Ubuntu on Windows See also Scott Hanselman's blog here I'm in San Francisco this week, attendin...
The original call to switch to the term `open source'.
Thunderbird provides an open-source, cross-platform email alternative for those of us who still use stand-alone email clients (and I am one). It’s trust-worthy, it’s under your control, and it’s built to reflect the Mozilla mission. Once again we’ve been asking the question: is Thunderbird a likely source of…
I just had my first pull request to matplotlib closed. Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad.
In the last week of October 1998, a confidential Microsoft memorandum on Redmond's strategy against Linux and Open Source software was leaked to me by a source who shall remain nameless. I annotated this memorandum with explanation and commentary over Halloween Weekend and released it to the national press. Microsoft…
F-Droid is a popular alternative app repository for Android, especially known for its main repository dedicated to free and open-source software. F-Droid is often recommended among security and privacy enthusiasts, but how does it stack up against Play Store in practice? This write-up will attempt to emphasize major…
A: To answer common questions about the Debian Free Software Guidelines and how we judge whether some piece of software is free.
If any of you reading this have decision-making ability along those lines, I would appreciate your assistance in making this happen. If you're wondering why: they are still shipping a version of my software that I released in 2014. Since that's roughly a decade in software years, it recently began popping up a single…
