Tinkerer and thinker on everything free and open. Exploring possibilities and engaging with new opportunities to instigate change.
In May last year, I wrote an article in which I argued for the need for interoperability trumping the need for centralisation over time. The background to the article was Signal, a secure messaging app built on a centralised platform, and the critique which it had to endure for its decision to stay centralised. My bet, one year ago, was t…
Jonas Öberg
When I was a teenager, around 15-16 years old, I started to learn C programming by reading the source code for the Linux kernel. Mind you, the kernel was quite a bit smaller then and quite easy to understand. For any software over 25 years old, I think it's remarkable how legible and understandable the kernel still is. But there's no deny…
Jonas Öberg
At the last Open Source Leadership Summit in February, I had the chance to develop some of my thoughts around OpenChain™ and its applicability for the free and open source software community at large. To recap, OpenChain is a Linux Foundation project currently headed up by Shane Coughlan (who used to work with the FSFE and is still…
Jonas Öberg
Some years ago by my reckoning, we passed peak GNU. It went by quicker than some of us noticed, but it was anticipated. By peak GNU, I refer to the impact of the GNU project on free and open source software, both in terms of technology and in terms of license choices. The GNU project, more than any, have pioneered the idea of copyleft lic…
Jonas Öberg
This past weekend, I participated in a training for "Skogsmulle" leaders and it gave me a first hand view of why focusing on leadership of free and open projects is exactly the right thing to do. To give you some context before I talk about why this is relevant for free and open source projects -- and indeed many other projects and organi…
Jonas Öberg
There's a theory going around the hospitals here. The theory states that if you perform a venipuncture on a kid, the kid will grow up being scared of hospitals. You don't want that, so you avoid it, like the plague. Without any scientific data on this, I'm going to say: bollocks! I have a theory of my own. It's this: parents get so freake…
Jonas Öberg
As many, I've been reading with some interest the discussion on the ksummit-discuss mailing list. A discussion which has included quite a lot of the active free software community and been summarized very well by LWN. Something I noted, which is also covered by the LWN article, is the difference between Linus Torvalds (Linux) and Matthew…
Jonas Öberg
Some time ago I participated in a campaign workshop with the FSFE. One of the people holding the workshop admitted to previously having been arrested for demonstrating against nuclear power by climbing a nuclear power plant. It's interesting that regardless of your political affiliation: communist, socialism, capitalist, libertarian, you…
Jonas Öberg