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Open Source

The most popular blog posts about open source on Hacker News. 92 posts.

2023
3

Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?

I've had a busy week, so I didn't have time until today to read this news about Red Hat locking down RHEL sources behind a Red Hat subscription. I repeat the title: Red Hat, are you dumb? When Red Hat decided to turn the community CentOS distribution into a leading-edge distro instead of basically "Red Hat Enterprise…

11

I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

Two years ago, Red Hat killed CentOS, a widely-used free version of their Enterprise Linux distribution. The community of CentOS users—myself included—were labeled as 'freeloaders', using the work of the almighty Red Hat corporation, without contributing anything back. Don't mind all the open source developers, Linux…

14

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…

16

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…

23

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…

30

Transparent telemetry for open-source projects

How do software developers understand which parts of their software are being used and whether they are performing as expected? The modern answer is telemetry , which means software sending data to answer those questions back to a collection server. This post is about why I believe telemetry is important for…