In my last post, I briefly mentioned that there is an ethical discussion in the software community about the relationship between ethics and free software. The crux of this ethical discussion is the relationship between software and civil liberties. Much of this discussion centres around the use of the word ‘free’; or, alternatively, the phrase […]
Author: Cory Benfield
The GPL vs. The MIT License: Which License To Use
A great many developers, myself included, believe that it is important to spend at least some time contributing to open-source software projects. These projects will hopefully be licensed (if you haven’t got a license on your open-source project, you’re doing it wrong), to ensure that your contributions are used in the way you (or the […]
The Success Of Git: Why Subversion Needs To Die
I’ve not been programming for all that long, but in that time I’ve used two different version control systems. In my internship I used Subversion (SVN), and in my personal life and open-source stuff I’ve used Git. I find the relationship between the various major VCSes to be quite interesting, and wanted to devote a […]
Politeness and Open-Source Software
Over the last couple of weeks, there has been what can really only be called a ‘brouhaha’ brewing over the role of politeness in open-source software. This argument was largely brought to the fore by a comment made by Linus Torvalds in response to a GitHub pull request. You can see the comment Linus made […]
Building a Minimalist Blog in Python (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Web Development).
As of today, I have taken my final examination as an undergraduate student of Physics. With my graduate software engineering job beginning in September, I am one graduation ceremony away from being a Software Engineer instead of a Physics Student. Despite the fact that the world needs another programming/tech blog like a hole in the […]