So you want to compete with or replace open source

We are living through an interesting moment in source-available software.1 The open source movement has always had, and continues to have, a solid grounding in grassroots programmers building tools for themselves and forming communities around them. Some looming giants brought on large sums of money – Linux, Mozilla, Apache, and so on – and other giants made do without, like GNU, but for the most part if anyone thought about open source 15 years ago they were mostly thinking about grassroots communities who built software together for fun. With the rise of GitHub and in particular the explosion of web development as an open platform, commercial stakeholders in...

text coordinate systems

Interesting discussion of some of the subtleties which come up when writing code to display and manipulate text:
https://zed.dev/blog/zed-decoded-text-co...te-systems
Much of this echoes Finseth's classic book on implementing emacs-style editors, but with updates to reflect our Unicoded world.
(Many people will avoid dealing with these issues by simply dropping in whatever text widget their favorite library provides, but I enjoy cooking from scratch.)

Writing a Unix clone in about a month

I needed a bit of a break from “real work” recently, so I started a new programming project that was low-stakes and purely recreational. On April 21st, I set out to see how much of a Unix-like operating system for x86_64 targets that I could put together in about a month. The result is Bunnix. Not including days I didn’t work on Bunnix for one reason or another, I spent 27 days on this project.

You can try it for yourself if you like:

To boot this ISO with qemu:

qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom bunnix.iso -display sdl -serial stdio

You can also write the iso to a USB...

Old vi

I investigated when the flash option was added to vi. It was when System V entered the VAX. 1983.
Result: a new Vim patch…
https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/14778

Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges

Copyleft licenses are not “restrictive”

One may observe an axis, or a “spectrum”, along which free and open source software licenses can be organized, where one end is “permissive” and the other end is “copyleft”. It is important to acknowledge, however, that though copyleft can be found at the opposite end of an axis with respect to permissive, it is not synonymous with the linguistic antonym of permissive – that is, copyleft licenses are not “restrictive” by comparison with permissive licenses.

Aside: Free software is not synonymous with copyleft and open source is not synonymous with permissive, though this is a common misconception. Permissive licenses are generally free software and copyleft licenses are...

Filesystem choice

I've been thinking about moving to Artix Linux because I kinda dislike systemd. So I've been thinking about a lot of choices that have to be made while installing and the one I can't answer for myself is the filesystem I should choose. I am currently choosing between ext4, btrfs, zfs, xfs, reiser(fs/4), heard it's a killer filesystem ;). I've also learnt about bcachefs, which seems kind of interesting. I'm not interested in using RAID, LVM and encryption. I want to have a simple setup with one /boot partition and one / partition.
So I'd like to hear from you

FDO's conduct enforcement actions regarding Vaxry

freedesktop(.org), aka FDO, recently banned Hyprland maintainer Vaxry from the FDO community, and in response Vaxry has taken his case to the court of public opinion, publishing their email exchanges and writing about it on his blog.

It saddens me to bear witness to these events today. I wrote in September of last year about problems with toxicity in the Hyprland community. I initially reached out to Vaxry to discuss these problems in private in February of last year. I failed to get through to him, leading to that blog post in September. I spent some time in the following weeks talking with Vaxry on his behavior and...

The evolution of the Super Nintendo motherboard

2024-04-05

st 0.9.2 released: download

This reverts a commit and a regression with cursor move with wide glyphs, for example with GNU readline.