Topics /

Open Source

The most popular blog posts about open source on Hacker News. 1,100 posts.

Any year
121

I forked SteamOS for my living room PC

SteamOS 3 (“Holo”) is the Arch-based Linux distribution built for the Steam Deck, Valve Software’s portable PC gaming device. It’s a very interesting Linux distribution even when you only focus on how it updates itself: updates are performed atomically by downloading a new read-only root filesystem to an inactive…

122

Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

Recently Microsoft has been making a lot of announcements and releases of technology that fall under a supposedly “Microsoft Loves Linux” type of strategy. This is particularly noteworthy given the history of Microsoft since the end of the 90s. Their internal policy was a full attack on Linux 1 . and they were…

125

Winding down my Debian involvement

This post is hard to write, both in the emotional sense but also in the “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time” sense. Hence, please assume the best of intentions when reading it—it is not my intention to make anyone feel bad about their contributions, but rather to provide some insight…

135

How the .NET Foundation kerfuffle became a brouhaha

After I wrote most of this blog post the night of October, 5th 2021 I wasn't sure I would post it. After the events of the last 36 hours, I felt I needed to capture my experience on my website where it can only be edited by me. After reading this, I hope you will have a clear set of datapoints from my point of view…

138

Open Source (Almost) Everything

When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were…

141

A Love Letter to FreeBSD

I’m still the new person here, learning your ways, stumbling over the occasional quirk, smiling when I find the small touches that make you different. You remind me of what computing felt like before the noise. Before hype cycles and performance theatre. Before every tool needed a plugin system and a logo. You are…

142

Open Source is one person

The Register recently published a story titled Putin on the code: DoD reportedly relies on utility written by Russian dev. They should be ashamed of this story. This poor open source developer is getting beat up now to score some internet points. It’s very upsetting. But anyway, let’s look at some receipts. If you’re…

146

Tarsnap has given 2^18 dollars to open source

The largest recipient of this funding every year has been the FreeBSD Foundation, and to date they have received $173,920. It's hard to overstate the importance of the work the Foundation does; they provide hardware which keeps the FreeBSD project running, they fund a myriad of independent projects, and they have…

147

WP21

It seems like just yesterday WordPress was becoming a teenager, and in a blink of the eye it’s now old enough to drink! 21 years since Mike and I did the first release of WordPress, forking Michel’…