Open Source

The light on the robotic lawn mower blinks orange. Not because the battery is flat, not because a perimeter wire snapped. Because a server the owner has never laid eyes on was switched off somewhere…

There is a backstory few people remember anymore. In the eighties, the former Bundespost ran a service called Bildschirmtext — BTX. A closed system, proprietary pages, proprietary tariffs, proprietary…

The most revealing metric for local AI is not printed boldly on the box. It is called memory bandwidth, it is measured in gigabytes per second, and it decides whether a model runs smoothly on your…

Name a platform, and I’ll name its device management. Windows? Microsoft Intune — and before it, SCCM, now called MECM, which nobody pronounces with confidence. macOS? Jamf — so taken for…

It usually stands in the hallway. Or in the cellar. A flat, warm-running device with blinking LEDs that the provider brought along when the contract was signed. You plug it in, join the Wi-Fi, forget…

There are numbers you don’t comprehend — you only marvel at them. The Android smartphone in your pocket runs on Linux. The server delivering this webpage runs on Linux. Your bank’s cash…

There is a moment that arrives in nearly every sizable project sooner or later. Someone — usually a lawyer or a nervous procurement officer — asks: “What licence should this actually carry?"…

There is a moment everyone knows who has ever tried to keep using an older smartphone. The device works. The screen is intact, the battery holds, the hardware would be entirely sufficient for what you…

There is a scene that has played out thousands of times this year. Someone owns a computer. Not old, perhaps three or four years. Decent CPU, enough RAM, an SSD, a perfectly usable machine. And then…

There is software you discover. And there is software you never let go of. Immich belongs to the second category. An open source photo and video service that does what Google Photos or Apple iCloud do…

There is a conversation I have over and over again. Someone asks whether we also work with “real software” — meaning proprietary products from major vendors. The question always carries…