Following his hilarious Ten Ways to Wreck Your Database, Josh Berkus outlines ten ways to destroy your open-source community. When I started at BitTorrent back in 2005, it had long been guilty of 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 and 10, and it never recovered.
Tag Archives: FLOSS
The world needs more hacker artists
Congratulations to Stani, who won the contest to design The Netherlands’ €5 coin with a beautiful design made using Python, PIL, Gimp, Inkscape, and other free software.
Alphabet Soup ported to Inkscape/SVG
I got this email Tuesday from Joel Holdsworth, announcing that he had ported my Alphabet Soup pseudo-letter-generator from a bitmap to a vector model, and turned it into an Inkscape plug-in. He tells me that the extension will likely be included with Inkscape v0.47.
I cannot begin to express how phenomenally awesome this is. This is the kind of news that keeps me writing, and releasing, little free software projects. Six years ago I wrote Alphabet Soup as a little art project; it was fun. I released it under an open source license, and then never got around to improving it to output a vector format. Then somebody I’ve never met comes along, and not only improves it, but integrates it into a bigger free software project and it will soon be available to thousands of users in a greatly improved form.
You can pull the extension out of Inkscape’s SVN here. You’ll need these files:
share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.inx share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup.py share/extensions/render_alphabetsoup_config.py share/extensions/alphabet_soup/*.svg
Thanks Joel. Thanks Inkscape. I’m feeling pretty damn freetarded right now, and it feels good.
Winning vs. Not Losing
There’s a bizarre parallel between the strategies employed by a resistance organization against a state, and the strategy of the free and open-source software movement. Simply put, both strategies rely on the fact that the underdog merely needs continued survival to ensure that the dominant player has not won, while their opponent needs to achieve total control. Continue reading