Like any Zoomer, when I'm in bed, I worry about things. I worry if I worked as hard as I could. I worry if I am burning out. I ask "Do I still have impostor syndrome"? But I don't worry about some physically puling my mattress out from under me. Open Source Software is like that: it's cozy.

It's cozy because I know that no matter what open source software I use, no one can ever take features away from me. I will always have this little cozy nook to myself where the software will only change when I want it to. Where I can fluff my metaphorical pillow and get everything just right. I realize how blessed I am to feel this way. I hope all people can experience this one way or another.

And, of course, the Zoomer in me wonders anxiously if I'm giving enough back to this rich wholesome state of affairs.

A Personal History

My very first post on Medium was in 2018 and I dedicated it to the public domain.

Open Letter to my Generalist Friend

It has to be so tough in your place. Your passion for everything you do stretches far and wide. You give it your all no…

medium.com

The oldest "open source" artifact I could find is some class notes for a computer architecture course, also from 2018.

rvente - Repositories

Software Engineer at Audible. rvente has 26 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

github.com

As the years went on, little changed. My latest repo here in 2023 is under the CC0 1.0 Universal License. And that's it. I don't get a lot of stars, and I don't maintain anything critical (I'm not sure I want to, either).

Now that I have an income, I donate to Open Source Foundations software from time to time. [donation links embedded] Wikipedia, The Krita Foundation, Inkscape. There's Pop_OS, the Linux flavor I've used since June 2020. And now I am writing a personal chatbot in Signal, the private messaging app and I donated to them as well.

I'm proud to say I'm a donor, but I still wonder if there's more I can do. Open Source made me who I am. You can call my beginnings modest. I couldn't afford Photoshop so I used Krita. I couldn't afford Illustrator so I used Inkscape. I used Darktable and not Lightroom to run a journalism project in high school called Humans of Brooklyn Latin. I used all of this software to show off my skills. I wouldn't be here if not for these tools. I applied to my very job from this very machine using Open Source. I never had to pay cent for it.

They gave me everything and demanded nothing. There's not very much in life left like that. So as the year ticks up one more…

Long Live Cozy Open Source Long Live the Semantic Web

This work was originally published at my Substack https://empath.substack.com/p/thanks-open-source