Last night, I had the courage to publish the Mojibake C library I’ve worked on for years on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48941123
+15 comments and +15 stars on GitHub after one day? Wow, such a great achievement, you might say. After years of work, a number with two letters?
Well, it is a great one for me.
I don’t care to be the most popular Unicode library out there; I don’t. If even a single person uses it, it will be the best for me.
Open source is one of the most important aspects of my life. I remember I discovered it when I saw that very long GNU General Public License version 2 LICENSE file attached to a software I was using on Linux. I don’t remember exactly which one, probably Emacs, but too many years have passed.
It didn’t make a lot of sense to me the “free” term that was used. But then later I got it when I started using bbPress for the Italian forums.
We don’t make software for free, we make it for freedom
That’s the motto we use at my company (Automattic). And that’s the difference between free candy and free software. Writing software is fun, interesting, and constructive, and it’s always a source of knowledge you’ll carry with you forever.
Until next time.