Linux, musical road-dogging, and daily life by Paul W. Frields
 
Category: <span>Politics + Philosophy</span>

Manners matters.

I was checking out this fabulous new book called Open Advice after seeing a link on a mailing list. The book is a collection of reflections by experienced (and often well-known) free and open source software contributors on things they wish they’d known when they started in FOSS. I found …

On burnout.

Bruce Byfield has published an article on burnout in community projects, to which I was happy to contribute some thoughts. Overall I believe the thoughts people shared in that article, while not surprising or radical, can help people avoid putting themselves in a burnout situation. Moreover, they can potentially help …

Communicate more, not less.

A couple unrelated comments and discussions I saw over the past few days prompted me to write about how the open source way should affect conversations in Fedora. Our modus operandi in Fedora is “default to open.” It keeps us accountable to each other, honest in our assessments, and (hopefully) …

Restoring a voice.

To Ian’s post I can only say, “right on.” There’s an even deeper underlying concern for free software’s desire to have an unencumbered way to create content. It’s to restore the ability of people to use moving pictures as part of their voice in the processes around them. Codecs are …

Unleash the hounds!

Greg, So it was written, so shall it be done. I contacted both of Virginia’s Senators, Mark Warner and Jim Webb, to show my support for the Open College Textbook Act of 2009. It did, indeed, take under five minutes to exercise some of my power as a voting constituent …

Even keel, arrr.

(I’m not ready for International Talk Like a Pirate day to be over, apparently, given the subject line.) Spot, in response to your insightful post, your experience at Atlanta Linux Fest seems a bit different from the many distribution-agnostic events that happen every year, like SELF, UTOSC, LinuxTag, and Ontario …