Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 267 posts.

Open Source
37

BMW are complying with the GPL

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…

44

Mono Relicensed as MIT

At Microsoft Build today, we announced that we are re-releasing Mono under the MIT license and have contributed it to the .NET Foundation . These are major news for Mono developers and contributors, and I am incredibly excited about the opportunities that this will create for the Mono project, and for other projects…

53

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…

60

Why I close pull requests

I maintain many open source projects on GitHub and elsewhere (over 160 as of this writing). I have merged and/or closed thousands of Pull Requests (PRs) and patches in the past few years, and would like to summarize here many of the reasons I don't merge many PRs. A few of my projects have co-maintainers, but most are…