Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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How far did my post go on the Fediverse?
My instance looks at all my followers - some of whom are on completely different instances - and sends my post to their instances.
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When going gets tough those with ulterior motives find easier ways – eudev consolekit2
Recent excitement revolves around talk about eudev deficiencies as a replacement for systemd’s udev. Consolekit2 having too many functionalities missing against elogind that it will eventually run out of steam. In particular this package named libgudev requires now particular version specific udev utilities to compile and eudev has not reached this stage of development. Developer/s said when time comes available it will receive some refreshing and incorporation of this utility. But what is the rush? For packages that are used to auto-discover and mount disks (particularly usb hot-plugs) and for them to be the latest of edition need this updated libgudev that eudev can’t support.
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Do Bounties Hurt FOSS?
As with many things in life, motivation is everything. This also applies to the development of software, which is a field that has become immensely important over the past decades. Within a commercial context, the motivation to write software is primarily financial, in that a company’s products are developed by individuals who are being financially compensated for their time. This is often different with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, where the motivation to develop the software is in many cases derived more out of passion and sometimes a wildly successful hobby rather than any financial incentives.
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Niko Matsakis: Empathy in open source: be gentle with each other
Over the last few weeks I had been preparing a talk on “Inclusive Mentoring: Mentoring Across Differences” with one of my good friends at Amazon. Unfortunately, that talk got canceled because I came down with COVID when we were supposed to be presenting. But the themes we covered in the talk have been rattling in my brain ever since, and suddenly I’m seeing them everywhere. One of the big ones was about empathy — what it is, what it isn’t, and how you can practice it. Now that I’m thinking about it, I see empathy so often in open source.
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Google Open Sources Binary File Comparison Tool BinDiff
Google has released the source code of BinDiff, a binary file comparison tool popular within the security research community, on GitHub.