It is important for free software to use free software infrastructure

Disclaimer: I founded a project and a company that focuses on free software infrastructure. I will elect not to name them in this post, and will only recommend solutions I do not have a vested interest in.

Free and open source software (FOSS) projects need infrastructure. Somewhere to host the code, to facilitate things like code review, end-user support, bug tracking, marketing, and so on. A common example of this is the “forge” platform: infrastructure which pitches itself as a one-stop shop for many of the needs of FOSS projects in one place, such as code hosting and review, bug tracking, discussions, and so on. Many projects will...

The Netherlands so far

I moved to Amsterdam in July 2021, and now that I’ve had some time to settle in I thought I’d share my thoughts on how it’s been so far. In short: I love it here!

I did end up finding housing through the hacker community thanks to my earlier post, which was a great blessing. I am renting an apartment from a member of the Techinc hacker space, which I have joined as a member myself. One of my biggest fears was establishing a new social network here in the Netherlands, but making friends here has been easy. Through this hacker space and through other connections besides, I...

Migrating a G Suite Legacy Account

Google recently announced that all “G Suite legacy free edition” (formerly known as “Google Apps”, currently known as “Google Workspace”) accounts will need to transition to their paid workspace plans starting July 1, 2022. Legacy users will get access to a discounted rate of $3/user/month, which will turn into $6/user/month starting July 2023 at the lowest tier.

I’m the sole user on my G Suite account, so the new rates aren’t a big issue per se. I’ve been getting a ton of value from this service for over a decade — namely the ability to use Gmail and other Google services but with my own custom...

Status update, March 2022

Greetings! The weather is starting to warm up again, eh? I’m a bit disappointed that we didn’t get any snow this winter. Yadda yadda insert intro text here. Let’s get down to brass tacks. What’s new this month?

I mainly focused on the programming language this month. I started writing a kernel, which you can see a screenshot of below. This screenshot shows a simulated page fault, demonstrating that we have a working interrupt handler, and also shows something mildly interesting: backtraces. I need to incorporate this approach into the standard library as well, so that we can dump useful stack traces on assertion failures and such. I...

It takes a village

As a prolific maintainer of several dozen FOSS projects, I’m often asked how I can get so much done, being just one person. The answer is: I’m not just one person. I have enjoyed the help of thousands of talented people who have contributed to these works. Without them, none of the projects I work on would be successful.

I’d like to take a moment to recognize and thank all of the people who have participated in these endeavours. If you’ve enjoyed any of the projects I’ve worked on, you owe thanks to some of these wonderful people. The following is an incomplete list of authors who have...

Why am I building a programming language in private?

As many readers are aware, I have been working on designing and implementing a systems programming language. This weekend, I’ve been writing a PNG file decoder in it, and over the past week, I have been working on a simple kernel with it as well. I’m very pleased with our progress so far — I recently remarked that this language feels like the language I always wanted, and that’s mission accomplished by any definition I care to consider.

I started the project on December 27th, 2019, just over two years ago, and I have kept it in a semi-private state since. Though I have not given its...

qTox gets funded for a year

Thanks to a generous sponsor, qTox development gets founded for a year! Anthony Bilinski got funded to work full-time for a year and sphaerophoria part-time for a few months. You can read more about this in qTox’s blog post, where Anthony goes into detail on his plans for the year.

Open Source is defined by the OSI's Open Source Definition

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) publishes a document called the Open Source Definition (OSD), which defines the term “open source”. However, there is a small minority of viewpoints within the software community which wishes that this were not so. The most concerning among them are those who wish open source was more commercially favorable to themselves, and themselves alone, such as companies like Elastic.

I disagree with this perspective, and I’d like take a few minutes today to explore several of the most common arguments in favor of this view, and explain why I don’t agree with them. One of the most frustrating complications in this discussion is the...

CPS-1: GFX system internals

Plaid is an evil nightmare product from Security Hell

Plaid is a business that has built a widget that can be embedded in any of their customer’s websites which allows their customers to configure integrations with a list of third-party service providers. To facilitate this, Plaid pops up a widget on their customer’s domain which asks the end-user to type in their username and password for the third-party service provider. If necessary, they will ask for a 2FA code. This is done without the third party’s permission, presumably through a browser emulator and a provider-specific munging shim, and collects the user’s credentials on a domain which is operated by neither the third party nor by Plaid.

The third-party...