Welcome to the Write Free Software forum! This thread is the best place to introduce yourself to the rest of the community here. Who are you and why are you interested in free software?
As for myself, I’m Drew DeVault and I’ve been a free software advocate for a long time. I am the maintainer of several projects and the founder of SourceHut. I write about free software on my blog as well. I’m pretty knowledgeable about all things free software so feel free to ping me if you need help with anything.
Hello! I’m hexaheximal, a developer who enjoys making free software.
I really like being able to study and even modify all of the code powering software I use - and then I see proprietary software break, in which case you have to rely on the original author/company doing it for you.
I daily-drive Debian, since it’s what I’ve always used and enjoyed the most. In terms of desktop environments, I use either GNOME, KDE Plasma, or i3, depending on what machine it is and how I’m feeling that day. And that’s just a small incomplete list - I’ve used many niche window managers and desktop environments in the past.
I really like Go. And I mean it. I obviously don’t use it for everything, since there are different languages for solving different problems, but for CLI tools and server-side code I almost always use Go nowadays, since it’s simple and fun.
My name is Niklas, I’m from Mannheim, Germany, and I first got in touch with the forest of open source licenses about 14 years ago when I wrote a small tool for merging large text files that I wanted to release as free software.
I am a supporter of the fediverse and digital sovereignty. Namely, I run the fediverse instances rheinneckar.social (Mastodon) and rheinneckar.events (Mobilizon) that mainly accomodate people from the Rhine-Neckar region around Mannheim and Heidelberg.
Most recently, I have begun organizing a local meetup called “Nix Your Bugs & Rust Your Engines”, where we try to get at least one talk about Rust and one about Nix/NixOS respectively. For that purpose I also joined the local non-profit association Hackerstolz e.V. in January, which aims to teach about technology and programming.
Personally I have no “popular” free software projects out in the wild, but I generally open source anything I produce in my free time, and also some of the things I do at work.
I have begun maintaining some packages on the nixpkgs repository, and now and then contribute some pull requests to open source projects I use.
I’ve been using and writing free software for as long as I can remember. I like to develop games, tools, languages and target niche platforms, and also contribute to projects with translations and designs. In the past years I’ve been more interested in software freedom, permissive licenses and also the tooling around that (for example https://reuse.software).
I’m looking forward to the topics and discussions here!
Hi and welcome everyone! Good to see you all here.
Looking over your introductions, I wonder if there are some good ideas in here that could become new threads to help foster some early discussion material. Would any of you care to elaborate on these themes in a new thread?
Should there be a “share your projects” or “what are you working on” thread?
I’m really interested in digital sovereignty and I think there’s a lot to discuss here; I’m particularly interested in this aspect you touch on with respect to how local it can be.
I was wondering if REUSE would make sense as a topic to kick off discussions in the Tools category.
Hi, I’m Pasindu (Brian). I’m a hobbyist programmer. mostly what I do is push everything to its absolute limit or do useless things. I’m also a privacy lover, a data hoarder, and a big fan of self-hosting.
Hello and thank you Drew for creating this forum.
My name is Federico Ceratto, I’m a Debian Developer and I’ve been contributing to various FOSS projects. I care about security, privacy and digital autonomy.
About me: https://people.debian.org/~federico/
I’m webb. Canadian home of sexual that is an expert in writing terrible code, and rarely music and art. I’ll post my site later because I still need to fix it (oops.)
Hi, I’m Vlad. I work on programming and philosophy that contributes to the public good. My current main project is an open-source spreadsheet application for desktop that is better than current options. I’m currently in that phase where I’m grumpy because I’m not getting as much time to work on it as I would like, but I hope to share a beta in the next few months. I also sometimes help maintain Hare.
hi all!
i’m a programmer of some kind. i write open source web things of varying quality because i don’t have anything else going on at the moment.
i also spend an unfortunate amount of time thinking about internet protocols and other forms of interoperability. since every VC-funded corporation on earth seems keen on extracting as much value as possible from the people who rely on their services, it’d be nice to see more software that actually cares about its users for a change.
i also daily drive the haiku operating system
I’m mainly interested in game developing and graphics programming. I’ve done tons of halfway-through engines and tools alike, but I’ve never properly maintained a free software project. I do plan on releasing everything I make on a copyleft license though. :>
I mainly like C and Rust, I dabbled a bit in Odin and I am interested in Hare. I daily drive Void Linux with KDE and ZFS. I have interest in BSD stuff too.
I also love drawing and writing, though I’m much worse at those two.
FLOSS dev. And advocated the use not only of free technologies (hardware and software) but also of free licenses.
Collaborator of several FLOSS projects, including Lemmy, OSM, etc. and member of several communities (in some more active than in others), moderator in instances of the fediverso and lemmy communities. Admin of jeremmy[at]ml instance (currently down).
I have collaborated on code, translations, documentation, bug fixes, features and design.
Much of my activity has been focused on web stuff (sites, wikis, extensions/addons, fediverse) but I am proficient in other fields and technologies/languages (C/C++, Python, Lua, Java). I have a special interest in the functional paradigm, specifically the Lisp ecosystem.
Hi all, gabe. Long time user/advocate of open source software. Been playing with mostly OpenBSD and Linux since around 1999. I do some drive-by contributions to open source projects and worked as a web developer for most of my career though now I manage people.
Hey everyone, I’m Martijn and I’ve been working on open source software for quite a while now and written projects in a lot of programming languages and in various levels of the stack.
I’ve moved from web development languages, to python and for the last years I’ve been getting into systems development, kernel development and embedded development.
Another interesting intersection with free software licences that doesn’t really involve the software parts of FOSS is the hardware designs I’ve been working on in Kicad, so far those projects are technically proprietary since the OSHW licensing seems to be a bit of a mess.
Good to see you, Vlad!