Bonum Certa Men Certa

A Year of Doing Techrights 'Full Time'

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 02, 2023

Squirrel On The Run: Squirrel running words outta here

TODAY is the second of December, so exactly a year has passed since I resigned from my job (at around 1AM, same time as now) - probably the best and most important decision I have ever made. The decision didn't come out of nowhere; I had been thinking about it for years already and made up my mind in mid-2022. At the time I didn't even know about the fraud, but suspicions grew around October and I started confronting the CEO about it.

Days after I left I got some supportive messages and my wife noticed others were doing the same (even in other companies). They decided they were fed up with what they were doing. Or, in some cases, what they had gradually become subjected to. Sirius 'Open Source' was gradually getting worse and worse each month.

A few hours ago a French Gemlog published "I'm going to work full-time on free software" and to quote:

I've been involved more and more with open-source and free software lately. I really enjoy the philosophy of my contributions being usable by everyone (and not only for the benefit of a single for-profit company).

[...]

After playing with the idea for a while, I finally informed my biggest customer that starting in January 2024 I will try to exclusively develop free software (which will more or less stop our cooperation).

Doing Free software does not mean making no money. It's possible to do Free software and still live decently (maybe not with 3 cars parked in the garage as a "status symbol"). We're coping OK financially. We're healthier than before (no staying up all night anymore).

This site is partly a development project, system administration tasks and writing/researching aside*. I expect to be doing it for another decade to come, probably a lot longer, having already done this for 17+ years. The sister site turns 19.5 just eight days from now [1, 2]. Its Gemini following has grown a lot and it helps separate GNU/Linux news from the issues we focus on here.

Geminispace has enjoyed lots of attention from us. We justifiably devoted lots of time and effort to Gemini. Many sites fail to understand or to simply accept that the Web is a slowly-perishing platform (slowness or speed of demise in general is a lesser factor when considering the ultimate destination) and "eggs" must be put in more baskets. In the scientific community they say "evolve or die"; in academia they say "publish or perish".

____

* Saying "doing" versus "writing" misses the point that writing is also doing. Even documenting facts of technical steps is doing something important. Don't say "can’t write" or call it a "waste of time". Many coders spend a lot of time writing words, not code (tokens). Comprehension of code - or computer architecture further down the stack- is essential for such a task.

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