Writing
Tagged “open source”
64 articles
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OPINION: A Betrayal of the Open Source Spirit
Red Hat built a billion-dollar business on other people's open source and on a promise that anyone could rebuild what it sold. Then it ended CentOS and put RHEL's source behind a subscription agreement. Two weeks after…
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How Apple Leveraged Open Source Technology to Build macOS
Underneath the Mac is a Unix built from Mach, BSD and decades of open source, and Apple has given some of it back and walked away from some of it. How macOS got its foundations, what Apple contributed, and why the bash…
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The Apache Software Foundation: Celebrating 25 Years of Innovation
It started with a few webmasters swapping patches for an abandoned web server. Twenty-five years later the Apache Software Foundation hosts more than 300 projects that quietly run the world's data, and has a governance…
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What is OpenStack and How Does it Compare to VMware vSphere?
OpenStack and vSphere get compared constantly, and the comparison usually misses that they're different kinds of thing. vSphere runs virtual machines very well. OpenStack builds a cloud. What each one is, who should run…
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OPINION: Why I Prefer Debian
Debian is my default for almost everything. Not because it's exciting, but because it's boring in all the right ways, and because nobody can sell it. The reasons, the trade-offs I accept, and where I'd pick something…
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Introduction to OpenTofu: A New Era of Cloud Infrastructure Management
OpenTofu is Terraform as it was before HashiCorp changed the license, kept open by the Linux Foundation and now shipping features Terraform doesn't have. Where it came from, what it does, how to move to it, and why IBM…
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The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Reflections on its Relevance in 2024
Eric Raymond's 1997 essay argued that open, chaotic development beats careful central planning, and that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." This spring a backdoor sat in plain sight in xz for weeks. What the…
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You Are a Linux User Even If You Don’t Know It
"I've never used Linux" is one of the most common things people say and one of the least likely to be true. A tour of where the Linux kernel is quietly running in an ordinary day, from your phone and TV to your car, the…
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The 4th of July and the Open Source Movement
Benjamin Franklin refused to patent his inventions and Thomas Jefferson wrote the best description of open source two centuries early. A short Independence Day piece on what the founders thought about ideas, and what…
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Open Source: Free as in Freedom
Open source was never about the price. It's a short list of rights, and this year a growing number of companies want the reputation without granting them. What the freedoms actually are, how free software and open…
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The History of Tux!
Linux's mascot lost every logo contest it entered, was drawn in a pre-1.0 release of the GIMP, and owes its existence to a zoo in Canberra and a claymation studio in Bristol. The real story of the penguin, and why a…
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The History of Unix and Its Relationship to Linux
Unix was written in a month on a cast-off minicomputer, spread because an antitrust ruling stopped AT&T from selling it, and splintered the moment AT&T could. Linux shares none of its code and most of its ideas. How the…