Best of 2026

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2026. 248 posts.

Open Source
154

Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to

Thirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix: registries charge companies for supply (they already do), then route a slice automatically to the maintainers who make…

175

Briar is in maintenance mode

This is a quick update about the status of Briar. Short version: the project is still active but we’re only making essential security updates and bugfixes for now. Long version: For several years we’ve been trying to find solutions to some of the longstanding issues with Briar, such as high battery usage and…

177

Twenty Years of RISC OS Open

On 20 June 2006 we incorporated RISC OS Open Ltd with one slightly mad ambition: to take a proprietary operating system and open it up to anyone who fancied helping. Twenty years on, that has largely happened, and the RISC OS of today is in far better health than the one we inherited.

179

Science Is Open Software

TL;DR I claim that modern science is synonymous with open source software. This post explains why, why it matters, and what you can (and should) do next. Why do you care about (open source) software? - Everyone I spend a lot of my time working on software. I have been asked why software matters more times than I can…