Thoughts about developing free software

Interesting ideas/perspectives. Their inclusion here does not necessarily indicate support or agreement by CMRG.

Software Culture

• ​Why Free Software developers should work on the bleeding edge by Ted Mittelstaedt
• ​Ending the tyranny of unix permissions by Joey Hess
• ​Financing Free Software Projects by Ben Mako Hill
• ​Why Debian is the One True Operating System by Bijan Soleymani
• ​Writing safe code, the perils of backwards-compatibility, and why free software relieves some of those pressures by ​Simon Waters
• ​Postel's Law -- Be conservative in what you emit, be liberal in what you accept (a.k.a. "the robustness principle")
• ​The use of language in framing the issues around software and DRM by Bruce Byfield
• ​World Domination 201 by Eric Raymond
• ​The Family Guide to Digital Freedom by Marco Fioretti
• ​Infrastructures.org A guide to deploying massive computer infrastructure in a reliable and robust way
• ​Free Software as Appropriate Technology and ​Development, Ethical Trading, and Free Software by Danny Yee
• ​The Right to Read -- a science-fiction-ish essay by Richard Stallman about trends in copyright law
• Comments on why New York State should adopt free software, free formats, and free standards by the authors of this site
• ​Letter from a Peruvian congressman to Microsoft about why the government should support free software and open data formats.

Bug Reporting and Feedback

• ​Reporting Problems As If You Want Them Fixed by Roy Tennant
• ​How to report bugs effectively by Simon Tatham
• ​How to ask questions the smart way by Eric Raymond
• ​Commits In Action -- RSS feeds covering a wide range of free software project development

Information Organization

• ​Cool URIs Don't Change by Tim Berners Lee
• ​Intelligent URL design by Steve Kemp
• ​Cool URIs for the Semantic Web from the ​W3C
• ​Best practices for CLI messages
• ​The Anti-Mac Interface -- moving beyond a WIMP GUI by Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen
• ​In Search of FileMaker -- looking for a free replacement to a venerable proprietary tool -- the comments section contains a lot worth investigating.
• ​Choosing a name for your computer
• ​Word Processors -- stupid and inefficient -- an argument for structured markup instead of visual formatting
• ​Articles on IT and Communication by Jukka "Yucca" Korpela
• ​Use of NFS Considered Harmful by Shane Kerr

Debian-specific

• ​Debian mentors FAQ