With #foss, #floss or #opensource or how you want to call it, it's all about community. With communities, it's of course important to communicate with each other. Communities can communicate live or online. In this blog we are going to delve into developments in both worlds.
Online communication
While you would expect that the foss world would only communicate through free and open source tools, this is not the case. Still proprietary tools like #Discord and #Reddit are huge, but also a repository network like #Github is proprietary. Strange ?
While there are free and open source tools available which can do the same or more. #Mattermost has a lot of functionality like Discord, if you use the community version, don't get fooled with the enterprise version. And Mattermost can also be used as a forum. Github could be replaced by Gitlab.
But there's more communication, right. Let's examine the swamp of the social media. In the stinky swamp of the social media, there is so much proprietary filth, it's difficult to comprehend. For most proprietary social media, there are foss tools to replace them. One of the most interesting discussions could be the fall of 'X'. Since the reelection of NR 47 in the USA and the anger this caused, lots of users have left, and moved to #Mastodon, #Threads and #Bluesky. Where you should take the notion that Threads is proprietary and owned by the vile, evil company Meta. Mastodon and Bluesky are free and open source, where the biggest difference is that Mastodon is decentralized and Bluesky is centralized (although officially its decentralized, but you cannot install your own Bluesky server), which makes Mastodon safer, but Bluesky more user-friendly. If we look at the licensing of both, Mastodon has a GPLv3 license, while Bluesky has a BSD-3 license. The core difference here is essential a product with a GPLv3 license will be open source forever in to eternity, you cannot close it. While a BSD-3 license can be closed. So theoretically the company owning, running Bluesky can make the product proprietary in the future. So if we look at the continuity and sustainability of foss, Mastodon would be the wiser choice. But the market is apparently choosing for Bluesky, because it looks more like X. Then of course we should talk a bit about messaging programs like #messenger, #whatsapp which are both owned by Meta and programs like #Telegram and #Signal, which are both open source. The main thing here seems to be that we need to use Whatsapp because of... In all honesty, I am also using Whatsapp, because my relatives just refuse to use another program, why? Beats me.
Offline Communication - Events
During the Covid Pandemic we all have learned that online communication was a thing, and worked OK. Still we have the human wish to meet people in real life. When you look at the open source world, we don't have a platform where we share events. The amount of events I missed last year, because I simply didn't know they were happening. The market leader in the event business is Meetup.com, which is a proprietary product. While researching online, we couldn't find any good alternative. So let us do an offer to the community, we will add all events to our calendar at our website, as we want to play a central role in the worldwide foss community.
Talking about events, on Saturday 23 November 2024 there is the Open Source Event in the Lochal in Tilburg the Netherlands, where we are also present.