I’ve: been using aerc for a bit now to test it out as my default mail client. I have to say that I’m truly loving it. Today I was trying to clean up the view so that I wasn’t looking at two dozen old IMAP folders in the folders pane, and remapping a few folder names when I ran into what I thought was a snag but was actually a failure on my part to configure things properly at first....
August of last year, Hashicorp decided to move its products away from open source licenses to a source-available license with fuzzy parameters on its use in production. Shortly afterwards, the community forked Terraform as OpenTF and then it was endorsed and picked up by the Linux Foundation as OpenTofu. Now the project is ready to declare a stable release that it says is a production-ready “drop-in replacement for Terraform.” OpenTofu isn’t a direct clone of Terraform, however....
Ohio LinuxFest (or OLF these days) is returning to Columbus, Ohio on September 8th and 9th. Happy to announce that I’m going to be doing the Friday keynote, " Open Source Can’t Win."
Just learned this morning that Bram Moolenaar, creator and maintainer of Vim, passed away recently at 62. I’ve been a user of Vim since my 20s, so even though I’ve never met Bram his work has been an important part of my life. I’ve already written about how I got started with Vim a while back, so I won’t rehash that here. Suffice to say that I’ve spent a lot of time in Vim since 1999 when I got started with it....
Still working on the next installment of the Clone Wars, but in the meantime… some interesting things I’ve stumbled on the past few days. AI Audio Challenge: Audio Restoration of 78rpm Records — The Internet Archive is looking for “a program that can take all or many of the 400,000 unrestored records” in its 78rpm archive and clean them up. They have 1,600 examples of 78s that were cleaned up manually by humans, and are hoping that they can be used to train a program to do the work in an automated fashion....
In our last episode we talked about the origins of Oracle Linux. This time around, we’ll look at one of Red Hat’s responses to the threat posed by Oracle Linux. Specifically, Red Hat’s decision to “obfuscate” the kernel source delivered in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6, and how it communicated (or didn’t) those decisions.
The AlmaLinux project, after taking some time to think it over, has decided to pursue RHEL compatibility but is no longer aiming to be 1:1 “bug-for-bug” compatible with RHEL. Be sure to read their announcement from Chair of the Board, benny Vasquez. Board minutes are also available.
Since Oracle has weighed in about Red Hat’s source changes, it’s time to take a look at the history of Oracle Linux. That takes us back to 2006, the world of enterprise computing, and into new markets. Specifically, Java and middleware.
After Saturday’s post I wanted to take a step back and talk about some history that many have either forgotten or weren’t familiar with in the first place. Some may remember it quite well, but haven’t quite gotten the lessons right the first time around. Let’s talk about Red Hat Linux and the early days of Red Hat Enterprise Linux before it was even called that. Red Hat sets the standard My Linux journey started with Slackware Linux in 1996, completely by accident. By that I mean that I had never heard of Linux or sought it out, until I stumbled on a 4-CD set and decided I wanted to learn more. I was studying English lit and Communications/Journalism at a state school in the northeast corner of Missouri. Nobody I knew cared much about computers beyond games or running Word to write their papers. It was literally years before I met someone else who was an avid Linux user. It was a surprise to learn, a bit later, that Slackware was a Linux and that many distributions existed. As I learned more and more about Linux, though, something became clear: Red Hat was the popular choice. Red Hat was the Coca-Cola of Linux, even before its IPO in mid-1999.
It’s been an exciting week for people who care about Linux distributions, FOSS licensing, FOSS distribution, FOSS business models, and the future of open source in general. Red Hat’s announcement that CentOS Stream will be the sole repo for public RHEL-related source code releases has generated a lot of chatter and exposed a lot of misconceptions about what the GPL requires and doesn’t.