Alex Oliva, the Potential 'Successor' of RMS, Has a New Web Site
More freedom for Alex (Alexandre) Oliva, whose homepage is now at https://lx.oliva.nom.br/ and whose blog is at https://blog.lx.oliva.nom.br/
Alex Oliva is a champion of freedom and the person whom I've long considered the best successor of RMS*, not that I wish RMS would resign or anything like that. Long live RMS (that's him on the left a couple of days ago in Italy).
Mr. Oliva told me today that he took another stride towards freedom, having left IBM (Red Hat) behind because of "clown computing" dysphoria and other aspects. He's moving everything to his own hosting (sort of like RMS separating his personal site from GNU's and the FSF's). He wants to write about some less technical topics too. Maybe about nutrition, not necessarily political stuff like RMS at stallman.org.
This morning he told me that "my home page and blog have finally moved."
"I wonder how RSS readers will deal with the redirect I put in place," he said, and "I hope it will be entirely transparent".
It seems to work OK, but that depends on the system and application in use.
If you don't use RSS yet (social control media isn't a substitute for RSS), then consider looking into it. Mr. Oliva's new site is at https://blog.lx.oliva.nom.br. It has this RSS feed and Atom feed. Here's what he published earlier today about loving Software Freedom:
Phew! I almost couldn't make it, but here it is: this blog has a new home, on my own virtual server.For now, it runs mainly Trisquel GNU/Linux-libre, Apache HTTPD, Ikiwiki, and snac2.
It's not like I haven't done this before, but it's quite amazing that one can set up a machine running entirely free software, and serve personal web pages, a blog, and even federated social media.
It's not looking fancy or spiffy; it's not supposed to. It's supposed to be as close to plain text as I can manage, and to display best on any browser. Someone inclined to do so could make it look fancy or spiffy. And if you do, you can adjust the client-side CSS and then it will.
That's the beauty of free software: it serves the user, not some third party who controls it.
And that's why I love free software.
Thanks to everyone who is bringing the dream of software freedom into reach.
So blong,
If you want to chat to Mr. Oliva in real-time, he's always in our IRC network (which incidentally had an all-time high for number of connected users yesterday). █
Photo credit: Richard Stallman in Polytechnic University of Turin, Italy
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* Dr. Farnell is another and Professor Moglen made it sort of clear that he wasn't interested (he's also not young). Techrights has always been separate and independent from the FSF; we maintain good relations though as our objectives overlap. We have a broad range of strong allies, the FSF is among them.