Posts

Literature Review #2

How I coined the term 'open source' is a piece by Christine Peterson, published on February 1, 2018.  When Free Software Isn't Better is a piece by Benjamin Mako Hill, published on November 19, 2010. In Peterson's piece, she explains how she introduced the term "open source" as an alternative term for "free software", in order to disambiguate between freedom of charge and the freedoms recognized by institutions such as GNU or the Open Source Initiative.  She notes that she brainstormed a few ideas for the term, eventually settling on "open source" before pitching it to some more influential/technical friends.  She then describes the meeting where the term was introduced and noted that it gained significant influence by being used in the Netscape Navigator project. Hill, on the other hand, writes in support of the term "free software".  He believes the term "open source" has come to mean an open development pattern
Post a Comment
Read more

Windows Subsystem for Linux (on a restricted environment)

I work as a web developer for the School of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  As a team lead I manage our two projects in PHP and handle numerous merge requests per week.  As it currently stands, the lab computers (which we all work on) have Windows installed, which is (particularly for PHP development) a less than ideal environment.  The git solution we have used is the official Git Bash distribution, which is occasionally buggy and slower than a traditional Linux environment.  Additionally, newer versions of PHP have conflicts with the installed C++ runtime on the lab machines.  Therefore, I requested (and was granted) the ability to install Windows Subsystem for Linux on a subset of lab machines that we use for work. Windows Subsystem for Linux is a true Linux kernel along with a choice of GNU/Linux system, wrapped (for v1) or modified (for v2) to interact with the Windows kernel.  In v1, the version we use, a pure Linux kernel is shipped and w
Post a Comment
Read more