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Open Source

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

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247

On the Weaponisation of Open Source

First of all I need the preface this article on how much I abhor the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I wholeheartedly support the sanctions. However, I think the conflict has spilled over into areas of software development that have got some unintended consequences attached. As part of this post, I’m going to look at…

248

I made a patch for Mozilla, and you can do it too

In this article, I will tell how I contributed code to Mozilla during a Bug Squashing Party. I hope to provide some tips and advice about how to start contributing to a Mozilla project (or any other open-source project). I will talk about Firefox and Servo, which, I think, are somehow representative of two common ways…

253

How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard

My Sidekiq project isn’t just about building the best background processing framework for Ruby, it’s also a venue for me to experiment with ways to make open source software financially sustainable for the developers who work on it hundreds of hours each year (e.g. me). Let’s review.

257

RHEL is deprecating KDE

By a strange coincidence the news broke this morning that RHEL is deprecating KDE. The real surprise here is that RHEL supported KDE all. Back in the 90s they were entirely against KDE and put lots of effort into our friendly rivals Gnome. It made some sense since at the time Qt was under a not-quite-free licence and…

258

Why is Debian the way it is?

Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It's thirty years old now. To many people, some of its aspects are weird. Most such things have a good reason, but it can be hard to find out what it is. This is an attempt to answer some such questions, without being a detailed history of…

260

Open Source Speech Recognition

I’m currently working on the Vaani project at Mozilla, and part of my work on that allows me to do some exploration around the topic of speech recognition and speech assistants. After looking at some of the commercial offerings available, I thought that if we were going to do some kind of add-on API, we’d be best off…

270

Running a law firm on Free software

I started running decoded.legal - a small English law firm, focussing on Internet, telecoms, and tech law - on Free software, both client and server side, around five years ago. I have used Free software in my personal life for a lot longer than that.