May 31, 2025
In the coming couple of weeks I’ll be heading to the Common Europe Congress (CEC2025), Flock 2025, and DevConf.cz 2025, some of the best community-driven events in the ecosystem.
If you’re around, let’s catch up and share stories over coffee!
Common Europe Congress 2025 (Gothenburg, June 2–4)
The Common Europe Congress is the largest educational convention for IBM Power users in Europe.
This year it’s taking place at the Gothia Towers in Gothenburg, Sweden.
I’ll be there from June 2nd through the 4th, and I have two sessions lined up:
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April 30, 2025
If you’ve followed my posts over the years, you know I prefer clean solutions to less clean ones for my home lab (more to come on this!).
Over the past year, I settled on a pattern that gives me the isolation of Kubernetes Namespaces without any of its weight: one private Podman network per application, plus Traefik in a shared “DMZ” network that terminates TLS and forwards traffic where it needs to go.
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March 31, 2025
For a while now, I’ve been looking into optimizing and reorganizing some of the infrastructure that powers my self-hosting services.
After evaluating a few alternatives, Scaleway’s Dedibox lineup caught my attention: it is a European company with good hardware and decent pricing.
However, as with every good solution, it is not perfect.
Scaleway does not provide Fedora as an OS option for their Dedibox machines.
They offer a decent selection, including Rocky Linux, Debian, and Ubuntu — but no Fedora.
Now, if you know me, you know that Fedora is not just my distro of choice — it’s the one I trust for both personal and professional projects.
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January 31, 2025
The next few days are shaping up to be packed with open-source goodness!
I’ll be heading to CentOS Connect, FOSDEM, and CfgMgmtCamp, three of the best events in the ecosystem.
These conferences always include a great mix of technical talks, hallway conversations, and spontaneous meetups with friends—both old and new.
If you’re around, let’s catch up!
CentOS Connect (Brussels, January 31)
Although the event run yesterday and today, I’ll only be able to attend today.
CentOS Connect is a small but incredibly valuable event where the wider CentOS community (Fedora, CentOS, and all the Enterprise Linux distros) meets to discuss the space’s present and future.
It’s a great opportunity to meet contributors, learn about upcoming changes, and exchange ideas with people who shape the CentOS ecosystem.
I really like this event because its atmosphere is similar to Flock: very casual and more like a friends’ gathering than a conference.
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July 31, 2024
Last month, the Ansible Forum had a discussion about potential changes that might be implemented in AWX.
One aspect that immediately hit me was the decision to move from SemVer to CalVer.
More specifically, what struck me was the focus on this change in the initial post and in the comments.
Since it took me a while to formulate a whole reasoning behind my perspective, I created this blog post to explain my thought process better.
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October 10, 2022
Every so often, I have a conversation with someone, and we end up in a sub-conversation around the differences between products and technologies.
This phenomenon frequently happens to me because I consider a product and a technology two completely different things.
At the same time, many people use them interchangeably when discussing IT products and technologies.
I think this distinction’s value is clearly distinguishing the solutions that are resilient to a single entity failure and those that are not.
Suppose the producer of a product goes out of business or, for any reason, will not do additional business with you.
In that case, you lose the ability to buy that product and, sometimes, even use it completely.
This limitation does not apply to a technology since you should be able to access it, regardless of the specific vendor.
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December 31, 2021
In December 2020, the CentOS Project announced a series of changes.
The three most important are:
- the creation of CentOS Stream and the consequent rename of CentOS (the classic Linux distribution the project is known for) in CentOS Linux
- the anticipation to today (31/12/2021) of the End Of Life for CentOS Linux 8
- the fact that CentOS Linux 8 is going to be the last and that from now on, only CentOS Stream will have new releases
That announcement created a lot of different sentiments in the community and even more among the CentOS Linux users.
As many predicted, multiple solutions are now available for the users that used to be on CentOS Linux.
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October 18, 2018
A couple of days ago, Eliot Horowitz, CTO & co-founder of MongoDB announced that MongoDB is moving from the AGPL to the SSPL license.
The SSPL is a new license, just created by MongoDB.
In the post, Eliot points out that they created the SSPL starting from the AGPL, and he affirms that the new license guarantees all the freedoms the AGPL does.
I firmly believe that the SSPL is not a FLOSS license since it limits the possibility of the cloud providers to provide an “as a service” version of it.
This case might seem trivial and an edge case, but the complete freedom of usage is one of the FLOSS movement and licenses pillars.
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December 6, 2011
Gordon Lyon (also known as Fyodor), the creator of Nmap, sent an email yesterday to the Nmap mailing list pointing out that the C|Net Download.com website is altering Nmap downloadable files injecting malware into them.
It’s also possible that other files delivered by C|Net Download.com are also subject to the same problem.
This event is a very problematic one since it will create a complete loss of trust toward Download.com.
It also reminds us of a critical aspect of security: all chain steps need to be secure and trusted.
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November 4, 2006
On the 2nd of November, Microsoft and Novell announced an agreement to share some patents, cross-marketing, and collaborative development.
The deal is very recent, and it is difficult to say what exactly it includes and what consequences (if any) it will have.
From the information currently available, it seems there are multiple parts to the deal:
- Both companies will work on the compatibility between their OSes and the other company’s virtualization solution (Windows on Xen and SLE on Viridian).
- There will be a collaboration between the companies to improve the compatibility between OpenOffice.orf and the Open Office XML Format.
- Novell and Microsoft will provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products.
- Microsoft will officially recommend SuSE Linux Enterprise to their customers that will enquire about Linux options.
I find this deal not favorable for the Open Source community for many reasons.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog