In our wider community we are all familiar with the idea of open source software. Many of us run it as our everyday tools, a lot of us release our work under an open source licence, and we have a ...

Earlier this year, a Microsoft developer realized that someone had inserted a backdoor into the code of open source utility XZ Utils, which is used in virtually all Linux operating systems. The ...

The world has come to rely upon the free work of millions of skilled software developers—the maintainers of free open-source software (FOSS) projects. But the world hasn’t given them a tip. While it’s ...

For the longest time, open-source was nothing more than a buzzword rattling around the brains of technologists and fans of the Linux operating system. Flash forward a decade or so and open-source has ...

In Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, a cynic is described as "a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing" while a sentimentalist is "a man who sees an absurd value in ...

I have a couple of years of programming experience and would like to help out the open source world by contributing some of my effort and time. I don't have much Linux experience as a user, and none ...

I published a version of this article on Medium eight years ago. This version is updated with new references and arguments. Over the last few years, I’ve been a part of lots of discussions — across ...