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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • I’d recommend you donate money to those who host open infrastructure. That stuff is expensive and critical to the free and open internet.

    As for free software projects I suggest donating your time with contributions. That’s what they need the most. Helping with bug reports and writing documentation are easy starters and worth much more than money. That’s hard to sell as a gift though… One gift card for confirming and investigating a bug in free software of choice. Merry Christmas Uncle Bob!

    Going from being a cool hacker who does things for fun and share it with his peers to being a poor cyberbeggar does no good to a persons selfworth. Help out by contributing and let Mr. Cool Hacker have time for his day job on the side. We get better software and fewer burnouts.


  • First thing I would ask the ISP to open the port. I’ve done that without problems before.

    If that’s for some reason not a solution, I would, because I’m personally not very attracted to the idea of routing my selfhosting traffic though thirdparties, setup a simple static page with <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=https://web.domain.tld:8080/" />, somewhere and point the bare domain and www subdomain to that page and have it redirect to, like in this example, a web subdomain with the port number.

    As a last remark, I personally would not find it problematic for a different port number to be part of the host scheme and also note that most web traffic now goes to 443 and not 80 because it’s https.

    Happy selfhosting!



















  • WARNING. Everything other than the last paragraph is kind of rude and opinionated, so skip to the bottom if you only want practical advice and not a philosophical rant.

    First of all Free Software don’t need paid developers. We scruffy hackers create software because it’s fun. I have a strong suspicion that the commercialization of Free Software via the businessfriendly clothing “Open Source” is actually creating a lot of shitty software or at least a lot of good software that’ll be obsoleted to keep business going. Capitalization of Free Software doesn’t have an incentive to create good finished software, quite the opposite. The best open source software from commercial entities is in my opinion those that were open sourced when a product was no longer profitable as a proprietary business. As examples I love the ID software game engines and Blender. Others seem happy that Sun dumped the source code of Star Office, which then became OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but then again companies like Collabora are trying to turn it into a shitty webification instead of implementing real collaborative features into the software like what AbiWord has.

    …and back in the real world where you need to buy food. Open Source consultancy, implementation of custom out-of-tree features, support, courses and training, EOL maintainance or products that leaverage Open Source software is my best answer. See Free Software as a commons we all contribute to, so that we can do things with it and built things from it. You should not expect people to pay for Free Software, but you can sell things that take advantage of Free Software as a resource.