Birch Street Computing -

about me

John M is a Linux fan in Lowell, MA.

I work at at a company writing software. I fool around with Free and Open Source software for fun & profit.

I was big into Last.fm and you can still see some of what I listen to there. I can also be found using github and recently sourcehut as well as bitbucket (historically). I don't care for most popular social media sites. If I have an account on one or the other it's probably either old and unused or was created just for tinkering.

promo

Links to things I like, use, or otherwise feel is worth sharing. Things I'd like to see get more popular.

Says it better than I could

This article from Cato says something I've been thinking about ever since I started reading Reason.com's site. He demonstrates how two of my interests are really compatible even though some people don't think they are. :-)

I also think that Open Source (the system of development) which commonly produces Free Software is in itself a market response. Software is a pretty unique product, and in many cases traditional companies were not providing the customer with what they wanted. Things like mail servers, web servers, and operating systems have to work well after the marketing presentation. Sysadmins, programmers and other folks just got sick of flaky junk and built replacements... they became both provider and customer. That and a continuous non-marketing and non-deadline driven development cycle is good for infrastructure type software.

A lot of the OSS environment is built around the quality versus flashiness argument. I have a feeling that it's a response to the previous environment. The Free Software licenses give OSS development a leg to stand on and quality can flourish.

(Original blog post linking to article)

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