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 …

(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 wrote this when the particular leadership controversy in question, the details of which are mostly mentioned in passing rather than described, was current. Bigger leadership controversies in FOSS have come to the fore since, but these questions remain.)

The title for this file is intentionally ambiguous, meant to evoke …

The advantages of full freedom are not that difficult to recognize and describe. What's tricky is recognizing and characterizing non-free components in a mixed environment, plotting a course away from them, and then navigating that course successfully.

I was heartened to see, for example, the GNU project develop a rubric …

What we share with other people of our own thoughts spans a massive range of possibilities from the very personal to the very public.

At the most personal level roil our wildest dreams, our deepest fears, our greatest hopes. Here then also are our greatest vulnerabilities.

At the other end …

I tend to think of $PUBLIC_FIGURE as a radical and an extremist. These terms usually carry a perjorative connotation. Similar terms include "fundamentalist" or "absolutist" and might also be defensible here.

To draw some of the personal sharpness out of it, one might argue less that they are these things …