The activity of this blog has been significantly reduced over the past months. Not because I was not learning anything new, but because the topic I was discovering was so broad I needed some time to digest and make a 180-degree turn on some technical aspects of my life.

I have been familiar with open source for a long time. I have even written a couple ruby gems that went open sourced. In my degree graduation speech I encouraged people to participate in open source projects. My family and I moved from Windows to Linux 10 years ago. But still, I never understood the importance of open source as much as I do now.

Depending on proprietary software

Paradoxically, I did not feel uncomfortable with proprietary software. I would use Linux, but with Ubuntu flavor. On top of that I would install literally anything that I would need for a certain purpose (not even checking if there was an open source alternative).

I used Android, but the vendor-baked image that was installed by default on my device, full of proprietary apps. I happily had my calendar, contacts, email, documents, and pictures stored in Google services. Not only that, my family was also fully dependent on Google as per my suggestion (sorry mom, dad, sis). Yet I didn’t care.

I was also a happy customer of some paid services like Chess.com and Medium.

Tracking and privacy

This blog originally started in Medium, and I’m sorry for that. Not only Medium tracks the number of visits on a blog post, but also the number of reads (based on read time, I guess) and readers’ interests. Having a WordPress site self-hosted but with Google Analytics enabled wouldn’t have been any better. Now I understand that is a violation of privacy. My readers didn’t mean to share any piece of information with me. I should not know what other things they like reading. They didn’t tell me, so I should not know.

This blog is now self-hosted on a VPS managed by myself on the OVH infrastructure. It is generated as static files using Jekyll and served with NginX. No tracking by Google or Medium or anybody else. I won’t be tracking visits, segments of users, etc. Posts with many views (hundreds, nothing too crazy) used to boost my ego and, to be honest, I also don’t need that. If there is some info you think I should know, feel free to contact me using the means in the About Me page. Other than that, I will know nothing about you.

Moving to open source

The blog is just one of many changes I’m doing in my tech stack.

I have deployed an instance of NextCloud where I manage my documents, photos, calendars, contacts, and notes. I’m hosting an instance of Collabora that I use together with NextCloud to edit documents online. Not only that, but I also set up my own Docker Mail Server with a custom domain, and I use Thunderbird as mail client.

In order to slowly replace other messaging apps like WhatsApp or Telegram, I have set up a Matrix homeserver that I am still testing before making it available for friends and family (and maybe fully open in the future). An instance of LanguageTool replaced my Grammarly plugin for spelling and grammar suggestions, which is checking this article as I type.

I also started using Graphene OS as the operating system of my phone, and even though not all software installed is open source, I’m happy to not be using any of Google’s services (no Gmail, Maps, Play Store, etc.). And I couldn’t be happier.

These have definitely been busy months for me.

Why am I doing this?

The reasons I am doing all of this is basically trust, privacy, and governance. I don’t trust private companies. I don’t know what they are using my data for. Even if they try to be transparent about it, it is still a matter of trust—there is no way to know as long as the code is private. There is no way to audit their security (and I bet it is not a priority for most business no mater what they say). Even with the best of intentions, if their systems are insecure someone will eventually break in, steal my data and do anything with it.

I find it deeply unfair to depend on a private company to have basic Internet services like email, online document management, chat, etc. I think it is just not right. The same way I don’t conceive that a mailman reads mail, I just refuse to accept that Google has to. Even if communications are encrypted, I don’t want Meta (WhatsApp) to know who I talk to. Or how often. Or who I don’t talk to anymore. I don’t want them to be able to cut off my communications if they want to. I don’t want Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok to decide what content (and adds!) I see, and what controversial topics are shadow-banned from the platform. Likewise, I also don’t want any of them to provide this information to government agencies when required.

These are my individual complaints, but the same applies for organizations, political parties, foundations, NGOs and social movements. They are specially vulnerable to being banned by decision of private company headquarters.

Free Open Source Software has many costs including mainly time and money (someone has to pay for the servers and/or some core developer teams). But it is no less true that proprietary software always have a cost, be it on direct money or privacy. Just by cancelling my Chess.com account (€87/year) and my Medium subscription ($60/year) I got enough to pay most of the servers I’m running right now. The time I spend on doing all this research is well compensated by the expansion of my learnings and technical skills.

What comes next

I’m well aware that this adventure will probably never have an end, but at least I like to think that I’m getting closer to a scenario where all software I use on a daily basis is open source.

Some of the tools I am still looking an alternative for are TeamViewer, CloudFlare, Notion and Google Wallet to name a few, and I am very excited to keep learning throughout the way.