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The Hibernate Origin Story (Outsider Edition)
Charles Miller recounts, as a bystander in the room, how the Hibernate Java persistence library grew out of work at Sydney company Cirrus Technologies around 2001, why its root package was cirrus.inf, and how it came to be released under the LGPL.
5 min · 1,066 words
A new model for open source: closed to pull requests, open to remix
Geoffrey Huntley revisits The Cathedral and the Bazaar and argues that in the AI era open source needs a new model: keep code open but close it to pull requests, and instead publish guidance so people remix and patch software for their own needs, as he now plans to do with his own GitHub projects.
3 min · 680 words
The GNU Project urges developers not to host repositories on GitHub, arguing it promotes vague licensing, requires nonfree JavaScript, offers SaaSS 'dis-services', centralizes Git, and has other harmful practices, and explains the wrongs each one causes.
11 min · 2,419 words
The Slow Formation of Durable SoftwareHow a group of historians took years to imagine Zotero, the research application that would eventually be used by millions
Today, software can be created more or less instantly with AI, for a large user base or for yourself, for any purpose or for no serious purpose at all. As Robin Sloan enticingly puts it, just “ask for what you want.” The genesis of Zotero, the “free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, annotate, cite, and share research,” used by over 20 million people in dozens of languages and countless disciplines, is the opposite of this instant gratification. It took five…
15 min · 3,481 words
Open Source as We Know It Is Dead
James Ross looks back on 15 years in open source and argues that AI is killing it as he has known it: AI-generated pull requests made contributing cheap but maintaining far more expensive, so the projects he loves are closing their doors to outside contributors, and he admits he has no neat fix.
9 min · 1,974 words
OpenSSH Ships on Every Mac, Linux Server and Windows PC. Its Creator Trusts No One.
A long-form profile of Theo de Raadt, from his exit from NetBSD and lost DARPA grant to founding OpenBSD and OpenSSH, framed by the 2024 xz backdoor, and how his famously paranoid, combative approach to security came to protect remote access on most of the world's servers.
29 min · 6,772 words
Docker has always used microVMs
Dave Scott revisits Docker’s history and argues containers on Linux have long leaned on microVM-style isolation ideas—context for today’s secure sandbox and unikernel discussions.
2 min · 373 words
Aleph Alpha Kolibri: How the Sovereign German LLM Works
Tejas Kumar explains Aleph Alpha's Kolibri, an open-weight German and English mixture-of-experts LLM with 78B parameters and about 3.5B active per token: how it works, how it was trained in Germany and Finland, where it is strong or weak, and when to use it.
13 min · 3,074 words
A Minsky machine in ncurses terminfo
Nicolas Seriot shows how ncurses terminfo parameter expansion can simulate a 2-counter Minsky machine—hosting a Fibonacci program in your terminal, clocked by /usr/bin/top.
5 min · 1,222 words
The hidden design compromises of Docker layers
How Docker and OCI image layers encode filesystem changes with tar archives and whiteouts, and which special filenames you cannot safely use in images.
31 min · 7,144 words
Git 3.0's upcoming SHA-256 default will be a costly mistake
Git 3.0 will make SHA-256 the new default content hashing algorithm and it will be an incomprehensibly expensive and ultimately valueless and avoidable global nightmare.
17 min · 3,902 words
Ploum argues open-source maintainers face an AI Pascal’s wager on accepting LLM-generated contributions: even if AI code looks fine, the asymmetric downside for trust, authorship, and project culture may justify a hard no.
4 min · 993 words
Claude-shaped scienceWorking on Claude-shaped problems with BootLoops, a toolkit for exact calculations in quantitative science
Harvard physicist Matthew Schwartz’s Anthropic guest post on BootLoops: an open-source harness that steers LLMs toward checkable, quantitative “Claude-shaped” problems across physics, ecology, genetics, and more—with human experts supplying scientific taste.
5 min · 1,244 words
A concise history of why Unix cp has both -r and -R, what POSIX says, and when the flags diverge across implementations.
1 min · 302 words
Pirating the PiratesNotes from the underground of film preservation.
Devan Scott on how fan restorers, remuxers, and boutique labels like Arrow and Kino fight studio revisionism—reconstructing historically accurate cuts of films such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when official releases fail.
3 min · 760 words
What's wrong with Open Source AI?
Alexine Le Port on the shrinking gap between open-weight and frontier models—and why open-source AI culture is still mostly vibing instead of shipping durable public infrastructure.
3 min · 651 words
I listened to the recent Ezra Klein interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, which seems to be something of a Rorschach test for AI doomerism: if you are inclined to see doom, Jensen sounds dismissive, but if you (like me) do not fear for the future of humanity at the (metaphorical!) hands of a computer program, Jensen’s responses seem very reasonable. (With some exception: does this guy really not
3 min · 748 words
Several months ago, I decided that AI contributions were no longer welcome in a FOSS project I am building and maintaining - LibreWeddingPlanner. It’s not that it got a lot of contributions with AI — actually all contributions I’ve had are translations and feature requests — but I wanted to avoid future drama and have a position against AI. However, although I was not using AI for my FOSS contributions, I kept using it at work. In my workplace, as well as in many of my developer friends’,…
10 min · 2,190 words
He who does not code, neither shall he eat
You have never heard of me, and depending on who you are, god do I hope you will forget my name as soon as you finish reading this. Quite frankly, I am unimportant. I am not a maintainer of any major Open Source project. My largest Open Source contributions have been completely replaced by better code, and were not meaningful enough to make me qualified to speak on this issue.
10 min · 2,193 words
LLM Policies: Progress At All Costs
Diego Escalante argues that GNOME and KDE LLM-policy debates are really about whether open-source communities will accept “progress at all costs,” and what values get traded away when AI tooling is waved through.
4 min · 1,003 words