FOSS
Some Thoughts on Open Core

Why open core software is bad for the FOSS movement.

Nothing is inherently anti-business about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). In fact, a number of different business models are built on top of FOSS. The best models are those that continue to further FOSS by internal code contributions and that advance the principles of Free Software in general. For instance, there's the support model, where a company develops free software but sells expert support for it.

Here, I'd like to talk a bit about one of the more problematic models out there, the open core model, because it's much more prevalent, and it creates some perverse incentives that run counter to Free Software principles.

Kyle Rankin - January 18, 2019
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Ditching Out-of-Date Documentation Infrastructure
Zack Brown
January 17, 2019
bash
Bash's Built-in printf Function
Mitch Frazier
January 16, 2019
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Where There's No Distance or Gravity
Doc Searls
January 15, 2019

Breaking News

openSUSE Announces Three New Tumbleweed Snapshots for 2019, Malware in Google Play Using Motion Sensors to Avoid Detection, Leaked Android Q Features, deepen 5.9 Released and ZFS On Linux 0.8 Coming Soon
Jill Franklin
January 18, 2019
Oracle Releases First Critical Patch Update of 2019, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora to Drop MongoDB, The Linux Foundation Announces Its 2019 Event Lineup, Firefox Closing Its Test Pilot Program and GoDaddy to Support AdoptOpenJDK
Jill Franklin
January 17, 2019
Keep Smart Assistants from Spying on You with Alias, Security Advisory for Old scp Clients, Major Metasploit Framework Release, Mozilla Working on a New Browser for Android and VirtualBox 6.0.2 Is Out
Jill Franklin
January 16, 2019
Participate in Fedora Test Day Today, Netrunner Announces Netrunner 19.01 Blackbird, Security Patch for GNOME Bluetooth Tools in Ubuntu 18.04, New Giant Board SBC from Groboard and Linspire Posts Development Roadmap for 2019-2020
Jill Franklin
January 15, 2019
Purism Announces Version 4 of Its Laptops, KDE Frameworks 5.54.0 Now Available, Debian 10 Default Theme Chosen, Linux Kernel 5.0-rc2 Is Out and Mozilla to Disable Flash in Firefox 69
Jill Franklin
January 14, 2019
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open source

Keeping Your Episodic Contributors to Open-Source Projects Happy

Community managers have long been advised to nurture top contributors, but it is also important to consider infrequent and casual (episodic) contributors. There are more potential episodic contributors than habitual ones, and getting the most out of your episodic contributors can require reconsidering your strategies for retaining and incorporating contributors.
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Non-Child Process Exit Notification Support

Daniel Colascione submitted some code to support processes knowing when others have terminated. Normally a process can tell when its own child processes have ended, but not unrelated processes, or at least not trivially. Daniel's patch created a new file in the /proc directory entry for each process—a file called "exithand" that is readable by any other process.
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Back to Basics: Sort and Uniq

Learn the fundamentals of sorting and de-duplicating text on the command line. If you've been using the command line for a long time, it's easy to take the commands you use every day for granted. But, if you're new to the Linux command line, there are several commands that make your life easier that you may not stumble upon automatically. In this article, I cover the basics of two commands that are essential in anyone's arsenal: sort and uniq.
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