Writing
Articles
139 articles, newest first.
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Real Machines, No Brain Dumps: What Makes LINUXexpert Different
Most exam prep sells you remembered exam questions and labs that walk you down a single track. LINUXexpert.net runs on exam engines we built ourselves, question pools written from the published objectives, and lab exams…
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The LINUXexpert Study Guides Are Back, With Real Practice Exams
When I retired LINUXexpert.org I figured nobody would miss the study guides. The response said otherwise, and it was overwhelming. The guides are back at linuxexpert.net, brought up to date, and they finally have the…
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The Cathedral Learned to Read: The Cathedral and the Bazaar, 2026
My third annual check-in on Eric Raymond's essay. In 2024 the bazaar turned out to be a few tired maintainers. In 2025 the cathedral bought the stalls. This year a new cathedral showed up that doesn't need to buy…
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Software You Rent vs. Software You Own
Commercial software was never really yours, and the last pretense of ownership is going away. Broadcom's VMware is the loudest example, not the only one. What renting costs, what owning actually takes, and how to tell…
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Just a Hobby: Thirty-Five Years of Linux and the Fortune Nobody Collected
Thirty-five years ago this week Linus Torvalds shipped Linux 0.02 and called it a hobby. Fourteen years later he gave away Git too. A tour of the world we'd be living in if he had sent an invoice instead.
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Why Coffey Labs Is an LLC Now
On October 5 Coffey Labs became Coffey Labs LLC, an Arizona company that owns the projects it maintains. Why I did it, why it had to be now, and what it does and doesn't change for anyone running the software.
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How I Accidentally Released Self-Hosted Thundermail
I read Mozilla's Thundermail FAQ and realized I'd already built the self-hosted kind. Same Stalwart foundation, opposite ends of the problem, and a chart I made to calm down.
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inbuxa, Ten Days In
Ten days ago I said why inbuxa exists. This is what it has done since: a migration tool you can download, the compliance features people hosting mail for others actually need, my own mail on a cluster, and a demo you…
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How Email Got Hard, and How inbuxa Makes It Easier
Email is a simple idea buried under forty years of layers, each optional on paper and mandatory in practice. inbuxa can't make it simple again, but it can make it right by default.
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Six Days Without GitHub: What inbuxa Became Anyway
On the day inbuxa launched, GitHub suspended my account and everything under it, without notice or a reason. Six days later the code lives on hardware I run, production mail runs on a three-node inbuxa cluster, and the…
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INBUXA Is Here: Why I Forked a Mail Server I Genuinely Admire
Yesterday I gave you a name and nothing else. Today the curtain goes up. INBUXA is a mail and collaboration server, its console and its webmail, built as one suite with every feature in the install — and this is the…
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Something Is Coming
I've been sitting on something for a while now. It has a name and a website with almost nothing on it, and I can't tell you anything else yet. That's on purpose.