DigitalOcean Sponsorship

We would like to thank a cloud hosting company DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Tox project as part of their program for sponsoring open source projects.

DigitalOcean has been providing us with reliable cloud server infrastructure for free since July 2015 — for over 6 years now! They have been very generous with supporting us and a pleasure to work with. Just as an example, in 2018 we asked them for a seemingly outrageous $660 in credits as a budget for that year, which they provided us without any questions asked.

Most of our infrastructure is running on DigitalOcean, including our website, wiki,...

Status update, February 2022

Hello once again! Another month of free software development goes by with lots of progress in all respects.

I will open with some news about godocs.io: version 1.0 of our fork of gddo has been released! Big thanks to Adnan Maolood for his work on this. I’m very pleased that, following our fork, we were not only able to provide continuity for godoc.org, but also to simplify, refactor, and improve the underlying software considerably. Check out Adnan’s blog post for more details.

In programming language news, we have had substantial progress in many respects. One interesting project I’ve started is a Redis protocol implementation:

const conn =...


						
						Drew DeVault's blog
						

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Framing accessibility in broader terms

Upon hearing the term “accessibility”, many developers call to mind the HTML ARIA attributes and little else. Those who have done some real accessibility work may think of the WCAG guidelines. Some FOSS developers1 may think of AT-SPI. The typical user of these accessibility features is, in the minds of many naive developers, a blind person. Perhaps for those who have worked with WCAG, a slightly more sophisticated understanding of the audience for accessibility tools may include users with a greater variety of vision-related problems, motor impairments, or similar needs.

Many developers2 frame accessibility in these terms, as a list of boxes to tick off, or specific industry tools which,...

2022-02-11

dmenu 5.1 released: download

Free software licenses explained: MIT

This is the first in a series of posts I intend to write explaining how various free and open source software licenses work, and what that means for you as a user or developer of that software. Today we’ll look at the MIT license, also sometimes referred to as the X11 or Expat license.

The MIT license is:

This means that the license upholds the four essential freedoms of free software (the right to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software) and all of the terms of the open source definition (largely the same). Further...

Implementing a MIME database in XXXX

This is a (redacted) post from the internal blog of a new systems programming language we’re developing. The project is being kept under wraps until we’re done with it, so for this post I’ll be calling it XXXX. If you are interested in participating, send me an email with some details about your background and I’ll get back to you.

Recently, I have been working on implementing a parser for media types (commonly called MIME types) and a database which maps media types to file extensions and vice-versa. I thought this would be an interesting module to blog about, given that it’s only about 250 lines of...

Pine64 should re-evaluate their community priorities

Pine64 has a really interesting idea: make cheap hardware with low margins, get it into the hands of the FOSS community, and let them come up with the software. No one has ever done this before, at least not on this scale, and it’s a really neat idea! Pine64 is doing a lot to support the FOSS community bringing up its hardware, but I’m afraid that I have to ask them to do a bit more.

There’s a handful of different roles that need to be filled in on the software side of things to get this ecosystem going. Ordered from most to least important, these are...

Status update, January 2022

Happy New Year! I had a lovely time in Amsterdam. No one had prepared me for the (apparently infamous) fireworks culture of the Netherlands. I thought it was really cool.

Our programming language continues to improve apace. Our cryptography suite now includes Argon2, Salsa20/XSalsa20, ChaCha20/XChaCha20, and Poly1305, and based on these functions we have added libsodium-style high-level cryptographic utilities for AEAD and key derivation, with stream encryption, message signing and verification, and key exchange coming soon. We have also laid out the priorities for future crypto work towards supporting TLS, and on the way we expect to have ed25519/x25519 and Diffie-Hellman added soon. Perhaps enough to implement an SSH client?

I...

The RISC-V experience

I’m writing to you from a Sway session on Alpine Linux, which is to say from a setup quite similar to the one I usually write blog posts on, save for one important factor: a RISC-V CPU.

I’ll state upfront that what I’m using is not a very practical system. What I’m going to describe is all of the impractical hacks and workarounds I have used to build a “useful” RISC-V system on which I can mostly conduct my usual work. It has been an interesting exercise, and it bodes well for the future of RISC-V, but for all practical purposes the promise of RISC-V still lives...

Street Fighter 2: Sound System Internals