I had the opportunity to present at the Linux Symposium on Friday, and talked further about my hope that we can improve the coordination and cadence of the entire free software stack. I tried to present both the obvious benefits and the controversies the idea has thrown up. Afterwards, a number of people came up to [...]

A distribution occupies a very specific niche in the free software ecosystem. Among other things, we need to accept some responsibility for ALL the software defects (”bugs”) that users actually experience across the entire stack. Most users don’t install their apps from upstream source tarballs, they install them from the packages provided by their distribution. [...]

I was delighted to see Thawte’s elegant handling of the recent OpenSSL random number generator flaw in Debian, Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives. They offered a free replacement for anyone who was affected. Years ago, when Thawte was setup, we put a lot of effort into doing things in a way which made sense for [...]