Open Source

My website ↗ you’re reading is nice enough, but it needs work. I’m offering prizes as follows: 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 mutually 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 items from the following list — prizes as per the above, based on scale/complexity Things to be added or improved: ...

Patents and the MIT License Some of my software projects use MIT so I have studied this issue. Although in many respects the world has moved on from copyright wars to much higher-stakes legal shenanigans, the detail of licensing still matters. In my case: My LumoSQL project is based on probably the most-used software, SQLite, whose license states it is in the “Public Domain”. The meaning of this isn’t entirely clear in some cases, and a 21st century software project starting decades after SQLite shouldn’t copy this. I chose MIT as a commonly accepted alternative, but which license is that exactly, and what does the text imply about patents? This is known, but I had to dig. The MIT license is massively used, but who will defend it if needed? We know the answer for the GPL, and also Apache-type licenses. I am now satisfied that quite a lot of enormous organisations really do care about MIT. There are lots of reasons why MIT isn’t ideal, but in my view those are trumped by it being widely accepted as fit for purpose, and relied upon by organisations who care that it remains effective and unambiguous. My notes are mostly kept in my many 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 in 2026. My goals: Modern-looking Easy to maintain, minimal infrastructure Content lasts indefinitely even as web technologies come and go including the ones I use now I decided on a static website ↗, with content in Markdown ↗ and a modest amount of templating. I chose the Hugo ↗ static site generator with the PaperMod ↗ theme. I use the web fonts Inter, Amiri, Noto Serif Devanagari and Source Han Serif CN (self-hosted, no Google Fonts tracking by calling googleapis). ...

This file is a Code of Conduct first written in 2020 for the LumoSQL project, with the heading: 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. Collective kindness is needed more than ever in this global pandemic. Here is Version 1.6 – Updated 9th February, 2026. ...

When Linux was a Struggling Challenger 💡 Key Point This is a 2026 restoration of my (Dan Shearer’s) 1998-2001 guide, preserved at archive.org ↗. Links have been updated to point to the archives where possible. 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, and a fancy new ex-IBM CEO resigning under a cloud. Founded in 1998, Linuxcare aimed to be the “0800 number for Linux”. So close! ...

The Fossil ↗ source code management system is the most fully-featured alternative to Git, and has decades of development and testing starting in 2007. After helping Fossil make some changes I now use Fossil for several projects. I also use Git extensively on various software forges (but not GitHub unless I must). Mercurial ↗ is actively maintained but has lost most of its mindshare since Mozilla ↗, Bitbucket and others migrated away, and is rarely chosen for new projects today. So it’s either Fossil or Git. ...

LumoSQL ↗ protects data on mobile phones and other computers using a new data storage technology which is highly compatible with most existing devices. The first part of this gives better robustness in the case of a powerloss or other crash, and at-rest encryption. Most apps have no encryption at all so this is a great improvement. With the second part of LumoSQL being developed now, the device owner decides who can read or change their data down to the level of individual rows if they choose. This decision continues to be enforced even after it has been copied off the phone to (for example) a bank or dating or insurance company for processing with their in-house database software. Today, device owners are rarely in control of the privacy of their own data, despite the many privacy laws. If a phone is separated from its owner, LumoSQL data rows cannot be read without the consent of either the phone owner or someone to whom the phone owner has granted access even if the phone has been unlocked. These controls are fine-grained, meaning different levels of permission can be granted. ...

I participated in many battles directly against Microsoft in the Ballmer era, 1998-2014. Every Samba feature release seemed to further anger Microsoft. Copyright and then especially patents were weaponised, and highly-skilled technical marketing teams spread confusion and intimidated their own (Microsoft’s!) customers if they considered adding Samba compatibility to their IT. In the Nadella era from 2014 to now, Microsoft and other tech giants are using even more brutal ways including paracopyright, technical protection measures and the Unitary Patent System to coerce governments and their citizens. ...

In 2014, Microsoft got a new CEO and dramatically changed course from explicit hostility to embracing open source. The battleground is now [about paracopyright and preventing non-US cloud](/articles/software-patents-tpm-paracopyright) but it has its roots in the great open source IP battles of the 21st century. This timeline covers the period when Microsoft decided free software and Samba in particular was an existential threat. Microsoft often buried competitors in expensive litigation, but turned out to be much more difficult to bury open source like Samba. This was the Ballmer era, named after the then-CEO, and the history of Samba’s triumphs feels highly relevant to 2026 where other giant companies seek to prevent the rise of open source competitors. ...

In 2026, the Samba Project ↗ is over thirty years old and has conservatively a billion users. Samba started when I got upset at Microsoft for trying to monopolise all computer networking at the University of South Australia in 1993. 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 is implemented by talented software engineers with a very large number of total contributors. I was (and remain) most interested in interoperability architecture and design, why these things are needed and make sense to users. Plus some protocol analysis, for example, technical readers may know the NTLMv2 encryption scheme was tricky, but turned out to be the same as used in the NTFS filesystem - NTLM is deprecated in favour of Kerberos now ↗ but those were the days. I wrote How to Replace Windows NT with Linux, explaining protocol-first strategies for removing Microsoft software. ...