Free Software (and OSS) Leftovers
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Where’s the Yelp for open-source tools?
We’d like an easy way to judge open-source programs. It can be done. But easily? That’s another matter. When it comes to open source, you can’t rely on star power.
The “wisdom of the crowd” has inspired all sorts of online services wherein people share their opinions and guide others in making choices. The Internet community has created many ways to do this, such as Amazon reviews, Glassdoor (where you can rate employers), and TripAdvisor and Yelp (for hotels, restaurants, and other service providers). You can rate or recommend commercial software, too, such as on mobile app stores or through sites like product hunt. But if you want advice to help you choose open-source applications, the results are disappointing.
It isn’t for lack of trying. Plenty of people have created systems to collect, judge, and evaluate open-source projects, including information about a project’s popularity, reliability, and activity. But each of those review sites – and their methodologies – have flaws.
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Solomon Hykes, Docker’s co-founder, strongly disagrees. “GitHub stars are a scam. This bullshit metric is so pervasive, and GitHub’s chokehold on the open-source community so complete, that maintainers have to distort their workflows to fit the ‘GitHub model’ or risk being publicly shamed by industry analysts. What a disgrace.”
Hykes isn’t the only one who views GitHub stars as a misleading flop. Fintan Ryan, a Gartner senior director, thinks stars are just a game that confuses marketing and the code that’s actually on GitHub. And Microsoft project manager for open-source development on Azure, Ralph Squillace, tweeted, “In my opinion and for Microsoft project [engineering] and management they are worthless. [But] There are always people who seize on them anyway.”
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How Nextcloud simplified the signup process for decentralization
When you download the mobile or desktop app, the first thing you see is a choice for "Log in" or "Sign up with a provider."
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Community Member Monday: Pranam Lashkari (Collabora/GSoC)
Today we’re talking to Pranam Lashkari from our Indian community, who is working in the LibreOffice ecosystem at Collabora, improving the web-based version of the suite…
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Hello world from Eostre Emily Danne, intern with the FSF tech team
In my hobby work, I've worked on making OS installs highly reproducible - my / is a read-only squashfs image that gets periodically rebuilt, my /etc is a git repo, and I keep my /home distributed across a few machines via Syncthing. At the FSF, I'm applying that experience by reimplementing some infrastructure as neat little scripted installs. Without revealing too much about our infrastructure, we have some systems that were created using forgotten knowledge by previous generations of sysadmins; it's my job to turn the arcane shell invocations in their ~/.bash_history files into something we can eventually manage with Ansible, though for now I'll just be writing shell scripts that do the same thing.
This also comes as Trisquel is about to release version 9.0, so I'll probably end up testing that too.
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