What's up with FUTO?

Some time ago, I noticed some new organization called FUTO popping up here and there. I’m always interested in seeing new organizations that fund open source popping up, and seeing as they claim several notable projects on their roster, I explored their website with interest and gratitude. I was first confused, and then annoyed by what I found. Confused, because their website is littered with bizzare manifestos,1 and ultimately annoyed because they were playing fast and loose with the term “open source”, using it to describe commercial source-available software.

FUTO eventually clarified their stance on “open source”, first through satire and...

Cloudflare bankrolls fascists

US politics has been pretty fascist lately. The state is filling up concentration camps, engaging in mass state violence against people on the basis of racialized traits, deporting them to random countries without any respect for habeas corpus, exerting state pressure on the free press to censor speech critical of the current administration, and Trump is openly floating the idea of an unconstitutional third term.

Fascism is clearly on the rise, and they’re winning more and more power. None of this is far removed from us in the FOSS community – there are a number of fascists working in FOSS, same...

Atomic Distros

Hey, does anyone here have strong opinions or real experience with atomic distributions, like Fedora Silverblue? I am considering it for a professional laptop, where I want to avoid components breaking so the immutability and containerization is something that sounds good. And I have come to terms with GNOME, so that is not an issue for me at least. What I worry about is, e.g. with Fedora Silverblue, that my previous experience with regular Fedora always degraded after an upgrade or two, and I don't know if this is something that Silverblue can help me here.

A better future for JavaScript that won't happen

In the wake of the largest supply-chain attack in history, the JavaScript community could have a moment of reckoning and decide: never again. As the panic and shame subsides, after compromised developers finish re-provisioning their workstations and rotating their keys, the ecosystem might re-orient itself towards solving the fundamental flaws that allowed this to happen.

After all, people have been sounding the alarm for years that this approach to dependency management is reckless and dangerous and broken by design. Maybe this is the moment when the JavaScript ecosystem begins to understand the importance and urgency of this problem, and begins its...

Embedding Wren in Hare

I’ve been on the lookout for a scripting language which can be neatly embedded into Hare programs. Perhaps the obvious candidate is Lua – but I’m not particularly enthusiastic about it. When I was evaluating the landscape of tools which are “like Lua, but not Lua”, I found an interesting contender: Wren.

I found that Wren punches far above its weight for such a simple language. It’s object oriented, which, you know, take it or leave it depending on your use-case, but it’s very straightforwardly interesting for what it is. I found a few things to complain about, of course –...

2025-08-09

dmenu 5.4 released: download dwm 6.6 released: download slock 1.6 released: download st 0.9.3 released: download tabbed 0.9 released: download

What's new with Himitsu 0.9?

Last week, Armin and I worked together on the latest release of Himitsu, a “secret storage manager” for Linux. I haven’t blogged about Himitsu since I announced it three years ago, and I thought it would be nice to give you a closer look at the latest release, both for users eager to see the latest features and for those who haven’t been following along.1

A brief introduction: Himitsu is like a password manager, but more general: it stores any kind of secret in its database, including passwords but also SSH keys, credit card numbers, your full disk encryption key, answers...

Just speak the truth

Today, we’re looking at two case studies in how to respond when reactionaries appear in your free software community.

It is a technical decision.

The technical reason is that the security team does not have the bandwidth to provide lifecycle maintenance for multiple X server implementations. Part of the reason for moving X from main to community was to reduce the burden on the security team for long-term maintenance of X. Additionally, nobody so far on the security team has expressed any interest in collaborating with xxxxxx on security concerns.

We have a working relationship with Freedesktop already, while we would have...

Some fun engineering advice blog

Found a link toward this fun, but very wise, huh... blog, I guess? I don't know.
Maybe there is a better forum category for this, if so, please move the thread accordingly.
Anyway, here's the link: https://grugbrain.dev
Enjoy!

Unionize or die

Tech workers have long resisted the suggestion that we should be organized into unions. The topic is consistently met with a cold reception by tech workers when it is raised, and no big tech workforce is meaningfully organized. This is a fatal mistake – and I don’t mean “fatal” in the figurative sense. Tech workers, it’s time for you to unionize, and strike, or you and your loved ones are literally going to die.

In this article I will justify this statement and show that it is clearly not hyperbolic. I will explain exactly what you need to do, and how...