Our 18+ Years of Freedom-Fighting
We always fight back
THE other day we celebrated this site's 18th anniversary. We took some photos (some will be published soon, not yet) and this past weekend we fixed some bugs in the software running the site (we had developed it since 2022). This site is unique in a lot of ways, not just in the sense that it covers topics no other site dares touch. Its IRC community will turn 17 next summer (some of the same people are still in IRC, 24/7) and it also has a Gemini Edition, plain text edition etc.
The technical aspects aren't to be conflated with editorial work. The latter is the real goal, the former are the means.
Fighting for the cause of Software Freedom does not mean the use of weapons. The only weapon is words. And still, that does not mean that the "enemies" won't resort to use of weapons other than words. Some Microsofters are trying really hard to silence us. They act like patent or copyright trolls. They're basically trolls who hate women and sometimes literally assault women.
There are many reasons why most sites only last months or years. Contrariwise, or by contrast, there are also reasons why some sites can go on and on for decades. They establish their reputation, they have a regular audience, and they don't surrender to bullies/bullying.
When this site turns 20 (like Firefox) we expect to make a bigger event than this year's. Being able to write so much for so long is quite an achievement considering the bullying I've personally been subjected to (mostly from Microsofters) since I was a Ph.D. student more than 21 years ago. Each such act or each attempt to take me offline (deplatform me from the Net even 20 years ago) does not discourage but harden the "target", rendering it more insistent and passionate about the cause. Similarly, what the EPO did to me in 2015 (after I had published only a few hundreds of EPO articles) resulted in me publishing many thousands of articles about the EPO. I do not support Donald Trump, but arguably each assassination attempt against him made him somewhat stronger because he played the victim card and there was this growing perception that the only way to confront the person was to kill him. Again, I do not support Donald Trump (it ought to be evident based on Daily Links and IRC), but I'm trying to articulate this phenomenon. If you can dispute or refute something we publish, then we welcome the rebuttals. Any other dirty tricks will always backfire. That's just what happens. █