I’ve been using Github for the past year to work on projects with friends (like Instant.fm and iBoard). But until now, I’ve only created private repositories.
I’ve been meaning to open source the rest of my projects on Github, but haven’t got around to it, until now!!
Right now, I’ve mostly posted some small projects, but I plan to use Github for pretty much anything I build, from now on.
RMS, as he likes to be called, is a living legend in the computing field. He’s widely considered to be the father of the free software movement. There is no question that the free software philosophy has brought enormous amounts of good to the world. I firmly believe this. I think most programmers and computer scientists would agree, too.
GNU/Linux render farm at Dreamworks
Free software is everywhere today. The popular operating system GNU/Linux (which Stallman wrote large parts of) powers so much of our computing today, nearly everyone has used it, whether they’ve heard of it or not.
The majority of servers on the Internet are powered by Apache and GNU/Linux, major parts of the Internet and most networks in large corporations are powered by GNU/Linux, and even 95% of the desktops and servers at major Hollywood movie studios like Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, and Sony run GNU/Linux.
Many people are confused about what the phrase “free software” means. Before I continue, let’s be clear about the definition of free software. Read the rest of this entry »
When artists do work, they should be paid — no one is debating that. Musicians are paid when they perform at concerts, when they sell discs, and when they compose for someone. Artists are paid when they sell their artwork, when they are commissioned to make art, and when their art appears in art museums.
However, artists shouldn’t chase down and sue every adolescent who copies their work without advance permission. The job of artists is to create stuff — and for that they should be compensated. They should not necessarily be compensated for the distribution of their work, especially when computers and the Internet make it trivial to distribute bits at a near-zero cost.
At the end of the day, artists should be paid when they make stuff. Mozilla is a great example of a company that understands this. Let’s say that software engineers are artists for the sake of this example (in many ways, we are artists). So, Mozilla engineers get paid when they’re designing, programming, and submitting patches for Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey. Yet, when the time comes for the software to be distributed, Mozilla engineers are not paid anything. All Mozilla software is free (as in freedom) and open source, as governed by the Mozilla Public License. Read the rest of this entry »
I just read a great article about copyright that articulates the free software position extremely well. It’s written by Richard Stallman, the guy who started the free software movement.
Some highlights:
The copyright bargain places the public first: benefit for the reading public is an end in itself; benefits (if any) for publishers are just a means toward that end. Readers’ interests and publishers’ interests are thus qualitatively unequal in priority.
This is why our discussion about copyright is so unbalanced today. People need to remember that the public is more important than the publisher. Read the rest of this entry »
Hi, this is Feross. I'm a computer science student at Stanford University. I'm interested in Internet technology, web development, and computer security. I like hacking on cool software projects, running, basketball, retro video games, and shiny gadgets.
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