Saying goodbye to proprietary software

time to read 2 min | 293 words

I have been doing Open Source stuff for five years plus now, you could say that it defines a lot of what I do. Increasingly, but for a long time, I have been feeling uncomfortable in my position as an Open Source developer that works on a proprietary operating system and proprietary platform.

I have been spending more and more time investigating alternative technologies, as you probably noticed, and by now I think that I have accumulated enough knowledge to deal with the shift without causing too much pain for me.

I am writing this post on my new machine, a Linux box running Debian. This seems like a good match for my position, since Debian doesn't allow non free software on their distribution. I repaved my Macs as well. OS X has started life as free software, but is it no longer free.

I had some issues along the way, but nothing that was truly serious. Now, to the development environment. I considered moving to Java, since it is now truly Open Source and is very similar to .Net. However, its roots are non Free, and I would like to make a clean break from non Free software. I considered Ruby as well, but I don't like it very much. Nothing specific beyond the it is too much of a buzzward.

Combining both personal preference and political stance, I decided to go with Erlang, which is Free and Open Source for over a decade. I have been digging in CouchDB's code lately, and it is very interesting.

That is all for now.

Oh, and you might experience some problems with the blog. I am moving it from Subtext (which is OSS, but running on non OSS platform) to Drupal on Linux.