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Open Source

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

2018
2

OpenStreetMap Is in Trouble

I was a contributor for OpenStreetMap for a long time, and I advocated for OpenStreetMap for a long time, but the project has stalled while the proprietary mapping world has continued to improve in data quality. For those of us who care about Free and Open data, this is a problem. In this article, I explore the…

12

Go += Package Versioning

More precisely, we need to add the concept of package versions to the working vocabulary of both Go developers and our tools, so that they can all be precise when talking to each other about exactly which program should be built, run, or analyzed. The go command needs to be able to tell developers exactly which…

15

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…

20

Why the world needs OpenStreetMap (2014)

Every time I tell someone about OpenStreetMap, they inevitably ask "Why not use Google Maps?". From a practical standpoint, it's a reasonable question, but ultimately this is not just a matter of practicality, but of what kind of society we want to live in. I discussed this topic in a 2008 talk on OpenStreetMap I gave…

24

Opus 1.3 Released

Ever since version 1.1, Opus has been able to automatically detect whether its input is speech or music, and choose the optimal encoding mode accordingly. The original speech/music detector was based on a simple (non-recurrent) neural network, followed by an HMM-based layer to combine the neural network results over…

26

FOSS is free as in toilet

I am a bit dissatisfied with the use of the Tragedy of the commons to represent issues with free and open source software development. It is not an abstract resource that can be depleted when overused. It is not magically maintained if left alone.

27

The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

I could write a lot of things about the Github acquisition by Microsoft. About Github's embrace and extend of git, and how it passed unnoticed by people who now fear the same thing now that Microsoft is in the picture. About the stultifying effects of Github's centralization, and its retardant effect on general…

29

A EULA in FOSS clothing?

There was a tremendous amount of reaction to and discussion about my blog entry on the midlife crisis in open source . As part of this discussion on HN, Jay Kreps of Confluent took the time to write a detailed response – which he shortly thereafter elevated into a blog entry .