Open Source

Patents and the MIT License Some of my software projects use MIT so I have studied this issue. My notes are mostly kept as contributions to the Wikipedia page on the MIT License since that is where the decades-old knowledge of the MIT license origins is already maintained. The legal minds in many of the largest companies in the world seem to accept that at least in the US the MIT license implies a patent grant. As probably the most-used open source license, the MIT license has many wealthy corporate defenders if anyone wanted to test that idea.

I made a new website recently. My goals: Modern-looking Easy to maintain, minimal infrastructure Content lasts indefinitely even as web technologies come and go I decided on a static site, with content in Markdown and a modest amount of templating. I chose the Hugo static site generator with the PaperMod theme, plus a second theme for CV-type timelines. I used bundled system fonts (no Google Fonts tracking). I added small customisations using CSS and Hugo shortcodes including colour themes, a general timeline (in addition to the CV one), handy infoboxes and the like. Hugo makes this quite easy to achieve while still using mostly standard markdown. That bodes well for being able to move to other systems as the years roll on. ...

My new website is nice enough, but it really needs work. I’m offering prizes! Small fixes for wording, grammar or links - my warmest thanks A page or more of such small fixes - I will buy you the (non-outrageous) beverage of your choice A substantial improvement or correction consisting of a page or more - a pizza from a mutally agreed place 10 non-trivial pull requests for the codeberg repository - I’ll help you learn Linux, if that’s a thing you want Assistance to help me fix any of the following list - prizes as per the above, based on scale/complexity Here’s the list of things I have yet to sort: ...

This file is a Code of Conduct first written in 2020 for the LumoSQL project. Here is Version 1.6 – Updated 9th February, 2026. Heavily adapted and compressed from the large and repetitive version 3.1 of the Mozilla Participation Guidelines and published by LumoSQL under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Contents LumoSQL Code of Conduct This file exists because the LumoSQL Project needed it, less than one year after starting in 2019. We take it seriously, and hope that most English-reading adults can understand what is said. We hope this is not needed very often. ...

When Linux was a Struggling Challenger In 1999 I joined my first startup, Linuxcare in San Francisco. The Linuxcare story is a quintessential United States dot-com bubble narrative, featuring a famous venture capital fund, massive growth, a failed IPO, a fancy new ex-IBM CEO resigning under a cloud. Founded in 1998, it was designed to be the “800 number for Linux”, a concept that history shows was a good one at the time and it could have worked. ...

The Fossil source code management system is the only realistic alternative to Git, and has had 15 years of development and testing. After helping Fossil make some changes I now use Fossil for many projects. I also use Git on various software forges, and Mercurial if I need to work with code from the Mozilla project. One-sentence Summary - Why Fossil? 21st century privacy and reproducibility require code to be in an append-only, non-repudiable Merkle tree with strong crytographic guarantees, and that is what Fossil is by design. ...

LumoSQL protects data on mobile phones using a new data storage technology which is highly compatible with most existing devices. With LunmoSQL, the device owner has ultimate right to decide who can read or change their data… and this decision continues to be enforced even after it has been copied off the phone to (for example) a bank or insurance company for processing with their in-house database software. In contrast, the situation at present is that device owners are rarely in control of the privacy of their own data, despite many laws relating to privacy. ...

I participated in many battles directly against Microsoft in the Ballmer era, 1998-2014. Every Samba feature release seem to further anger Microsoft. Copyright and then especially patents were weaponised, as well as well-funded hit teams aimed at spreading confusion and intimidating their own (Microsoft’s!) customers. In the Nadalla era from 2014-present, Microsoft and other tech giants are using even more brutal ways to extract money from the citizens and governments of the world. ...

This timeline covers the period of most obvious abuses of power by Microsoft against free software and Samba in particular. It was more difficult to bury open source like Samba in expensive litigation than a company, but they tried hard. This was the Ballmer era, named after the then-CEO, and the history of Samba’s triumphs feels highly relevant to 2026. What caused Microsoft’s new CEO in 2014 to dramatically change course from such directed hostility? Perhaps it was a fit of morality. Perhaps it was the intention to launch the much worse extortion racket we see today. ...

In 2026, the Samba Project is nearly 30 years old and has conservatively a billion users. It started when I got upset at Microsoft for wanting to monopolise all computer networking! I discovered some unmaintained but interesting open source software for sharing files and printers with workstation computers. And the rest is the official Samba history. Samba isn’t just a clever idea, it is implemented by talented software engineers with a very large number of total contributors. I was not one of the Samba core engineers, not being good at intensive protocol analysis combining encryption, obfuscation, historical anomalies and sheer overwhelming volume of old-school RPC design. I was (and remain) more interested in interoperability architecture and design, why these things are needed and make sense to users. During its first decade: ...