The good news follow-up rarely gets as much attention as the original bad-news story. Earlier this month I accidentally kicked off a minor kerfuffle over whether BMW was respecting the GPL. Their i3 car contains a huge amount of Open Source Software and there was some confusion as to BMW's compliance with the licence…
Over the weekend Ars Technica retracted an article because the AI a writer used hallucinated quotes from an open source library maintainer. The irony here is the maintainer in question, Scott Shambaugh, was harassed by someone's AI agent over not merging its AI slop code. It's likely the bot was running through…
I write and publish open source code. I quite often get bug fixes, patches, requests and questions regarding the things I have published. Most of the feedback is respectful and helpful. However …
If you don’t know what OpenCode is, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. The boot is made of TypeScript and the face is everything we have learned about security and systems software since the invention of the electronic computer in the 1940s. The creators describe it as an AI coding agent. As far as I can…
Today we celebrate the fact that it is exactly 17 years since the first public release of curl. I have always been the lead developer and maintainer of the project. When I released that first version in the spring of 1998, we had only a handful of users and a handful of contributors. curl was … Continue reading curl…
[Hacker News discussion, LinkedIn discussion, Twitter thread]
I first met Ian Murdock gathered around a table at some bar, somewhere, after some conference in the late 1990s. Progeny Linux Systems' founding was soon to be announced, and Ian had invited a group from the Debian BoF along to hear about “something interesting”; the post-BoF meetup was actually a briefing on his…
A simple typo of ghcr.io to ghrc.io would normally be a small goof. You’d typically get a 404 or similar error, finally work out the issue, fix it, and move along. But in this case, that typo appears to be doing something very malicious, stealing GitHub credentials. What’s ghcr.io? First, a quick bit of background…
There was a time not too long ago when using Linux entailed some professional risk 1 . First there was compatibility: you may not have been able to render a Word document or PowerPoint correctly, and you might have had to trust Open Office’s export capability to render docs the way you wanted. There might have been…
For decades, discussion of software reuse was far more common than actual software reuse. Today, the situation is reversed: developers reuse software written by others every day, in the form of software dependencies, and the situation goes mostly unexamined.
I decided to build an extension for VSCode. That would add handy buttons for many common commands like save file, format file, show opened files etc.
OpenAI just released its first ever open-source large language models, called gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b. You can talk to them here. Are they good models…
It seems to me that this is a case where problems are in fact solutions to other problems. To wit:
Blog post by Marciano Planque: EOL
In March 2025 I received an email asking about PuTTY’s “logo” – the icon used by the Windows executable. The sender wanted to know where it had come from, and how it had evolved over time.
It's happening. It's the reason that a lot of us came to work for Microsoft, ...
I am fortunate to be one of those people who started tinkering with code in their teens, and then found themselves in the position where their hobby could not only pay rent, but afford a comfortable standard of living, even in New York City.
RAWRLAB Games, as an official middleware Nintendo developer, provides an unofficial Godot port for Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 development at no cost to approved Nintendo developers that qualify as "Godot Ecosystem Contributors" according to the terms mentioned in this announcement . This port is intended…
A while back at the awesome maintainerati Ichatted with a few great fellow maintainers about how to scale really big opensource projects, and how github forc...
From Markdown to paperback and Kindle without proprietary software.
elementary founder: "I might take some time off from Linux or join another community maybe"
<p>I've seen a few conversations where someone says something like this:</p> <blockquote> <p>I've been using an open-source LLM lately -- I'm a huge fan of not depending on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. But I'm really sad that the AI safety groups are trying to ban the kind of open-source LLM that I'm using.</p>…
