This isn't an original idea, but I needed to get it out of my brain. There are many different definitions of what "Open Source". We can have a lovely argument over a pint as to whether GPLv3 is too open or if a licence which hasn't been validated by the OSI counts. But, more fundamentally, I think Open Source roughly falls into seven levels. These aren't in any particular order of importance.…
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Last week I attended an unofficial discussion group about the future of AI in Government. As well as the crypto-bores who have suddenly pivoted their "expertise" into AI, there were lots of thoughtful suggestions about what AI could do well at a state level. Some of it is trivial - spell check is AI. Some of it is a dystopian hellscape of racist algorithms being confidently incorrect. The…
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My wife and I run a side project called OpenBenches.org - it is a fun little crowd-sourced memorial bench site. It's mostly fun, except when the bills come due! Most hobby sites and side projects don't cost a lot to run. Lots of services have generous free tiers to (ab)use, and they can pay well in "exposure". But OpenBenches is reaching a tipping point where it is slowly overwhelming us. …
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I'm going to be slightly contrarian and say that I like Discord. It's great to be able to get real-time help on a problem. And it is fun to see, again in real-time, what other people are working on and struggling with. In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack, Matrix, Gitter, IRC, or whatever. And of course Open Source projects will follow the maxim of "go where your audience…
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Someone recently complained that using JetPack's Akismet anti-spam plugin wasn't very privacy friendly. So, because I take every minor complaint as a personal rebuke, I decided to switch to AntiSpam Bee - an open source and local antispam solution. And... it's pretty good! There is the occasional false negative - but not significantly worse than JetPack. Most of the false negatives are from…
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I recently downloaded a single-page HTML template for a project I was working on. I wanted a good-looking scaffold to help me getting running quickly. The code had an attribution licence which I was happy to comply with. I ended up removing about a whole bunch of the HTML that I didn't need. That also allowed me to remove the majority of the CSS which was unused. I deleted all the JavaScript. I…
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I was trying to install a new open source project and was having a hell of a time. Nothing seemed to be working despite me following the tutorial to the letter. I was getting the most bizarre error messages and was on the verge of quitting to become a goat farmer, when I threw one last dice... I read the tutorial. Previously I'd been copying and pasting the instructions as I went. One step said …
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Today is a day of mixed emotions for me. The UK's COVID tracing app is finally closing. The app was, by any reasonable measure, a success. A team of experts at the Pandemic Sciences Institute at the University of Oxford and Department of Statistics at the University of Warwick estimate the NHS COVID-19 app prevented around 1 million cases, 44,000 hospitalisations and 9,600 deaths during its…
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At a recent OpenUK meetup, one of the participants declared that Open Source had comprehensively won. While businesses might not always release their proprietary source code, 100% of everything they wrote used an open source programming language. I wondered how true that was. You can, perhaps, moan about the shenanigans around Java's licencing and you mutter about whether it is easy to get…
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I was recently interviewed in the BCS Magazine discussing the intersection of AI and Open Source. We're at a weird time with AI and Intellectual Property. Well, IP has been in a weird place since Napster launched at the turn of the century! None of the issues around sharing, remixing, and controlling have been properly resolved. Copyleft is a noble goal - but seems more honour'd in the breach…
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Exactly two years ago to the day, I reported a weird little emoji bug with Bitwarden. Let's say you want a password of: ✅🐎🔋📎 (As close as possible to Correct Horse Battery Staple) That works. Emoji are stored and retrieved correctly. You can use them with any system which supports them. But you can't view them. Here's what it looks like if you try to see your password using the Bitwarden Andr…
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I'm chuffed to bits to announce that I was recently elected to chair the BCS's Open Source community group! The British Computer Society is an august body, and the OSSG have put on some brilliant talks in the last few years. But I'd like to shake things up a little. I want us to move away from doing talks to a small group of London-centric folk. I want us to spread the message of open source…
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