Update

In those late 20th century days of FOSS ascendancy, any adoption of FOSS by some organization, whether a business or a government, might be heralded loudly in headlines or comment sections or even by the organization PR departments themselves. Stencils proclaiming a company's "love" for Linux are the archetype from …

I've spent a good part of the day flailing away at the keyboard trying to cram a lot of disparate thoughts about this weekend's news into a text file, but decided my three lines in the exchange below captured the moment as well as anything might for a while:

11 …

Germany's smartphone tracker is open source (Apache 2.0) with a version available on the F-Droid repository. This is the sort of thing that encourages confidence in claims about how the application works.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.corona.tracing/

(Karen and Bradley's talk about using proprietary software is a starting point for this.)

I repeatedly go through phases where I think I'm just on the cusp of sitting down and writing a definitive apologia for my approach to using free software and, in particular, how that approach handles the …

(This is in response to a long-standing GitHub issue for the RIT@FOSS program)

The FOSS@RIT community is a multifaceted manifestation of the larger, also multifaceted, global community of free and open source software users and developers.

There is no single, one true path for joining this community.

There …

I'd already been struggling with how to scope an introduction to the struggle over ZFS licensing and the relative positions of the various players, but this news Friday about open legal battle breaking out between the SFLC and SFC makes this too timely to sit on any further. Suffice to …

Given my long stint doing a lot of sysadmin type work, which saw me working across many machines, often of disparate types, I have tended to customize my environment very lightly.

Doing less of that and more of other things, I've really begun to add some dependencies to my environments …

Nadia Eghbal first came to my attention through her essay (published in May but which I probably didn't see until June)

I hate the term "open source"

I found it alarming, given as how there was already a long-running terminological quagmire around what distinctions, if any, were important between the …

These are some slightly-expanded hot takes regarding I'm giving up on PGP (later republished at Ars)

Several friends were discussing this last week & so I thought to pull my own comments from that discussion and extend them.

Lots of emphasis in that on private communication, instead of on verifiable communication …

So, I have been half-heartedly version tracking the contents of /etc/pam.d.

After having applied updates a while back, I've started working again recently in that directory to enable additional access controls.

So, I see several files have been added or changed since last I made a commit, including …