Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

Prusa is a 3D printer manufacturer which has a long history of being admired by the 3D printing community for high quality, open source printers. They have been struggling as of late, and came under criticism for making the firmware of their Mk4 printer non-free.1

Armin Ronacher uses Prusa as a case-study in why open source companies fail, and uses this example to underline his argument that open source needs to adapt for commercial needs, namely by adding commercial exclusivity clauses to its licenses – Armin is one of the principal proponents of the non-free Functional Source License. Armin cites his experience with a Chinese manufactured 3D printer as...

Bash One-Liners for LLMs

I spent the last month working with Mozilla to launch an open source project called llamafile which is the new best way to run an LLM on your own computer. So far things have been going pretty smoothly. The project earned 5.6k stars on GitHub, 1073 upvotes on Hacker News, and received press coverage from Hackaday. Yesterday I cut a 0.3 release so let's see...

Drinking distilled water

Richard Stallman's political discourse on sex

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, has been subject to numerous allegations of misconduct. He stepped down in 2019, and following his re-instatement in 2021, a famous open letter was published in which numerous organizations and individuals from throughout the Free Software ecosystem called for his removal from the Free Software Foundation. The letter had no effect; Stallman remains a voting member of the FSF’s board of directors to this day and continues to receive numerous speaking engagements.

Content warning: This article discusses sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and all of the above with respect to minors, as well as the systemic normalization of abuse, and...

How Apple's Pro Display XDR takes Thunderbolt 3 to its limit

Can I be on your podcast?

I am working on rousing the Hare community to get the word out about our work. I have drafted the Hare evangelism guidelines to this effect, which summarizes how we want to see our community bringing Hare to more people.

We’d like to spread the word in a way which is respectful of the attention of others – we’re explicitly eschewing unsolicited prompts for projects to consider writing/rewriting in Hare, as well as any paid sponsorships or advertising. Blog posts about Hare, videos, participating in (organic) online discussions – much better! And one idea we have is to talk about Hare on podcasts which might be interested in the...

The bash book to rule them all

0x4 reasons to write and publish

Cosmopolitan Third Edition

After nearly one year of development, I'm pleased to announce our version 3.0 release of the Cosmopolitan library.

On "real name" policies

Some free software projects reject anonymous or pseudonymous contributions, requiring you to author patches using your “real name”. Such projects have a so-called “real name” policy; Linux is one well-known example.1

The root motivations behind such policies vary, but in my experience the most often cited rationale is that it’s important to establish the provenance of the contribution for copyright reasons. In the case of Linux, contributors are asked to “sign-off” their commits to indicate their agreement to the terms of the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO), which includes clauses like the following:

The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I have the right...