How I wrote and published my novel using only open source tools

Re:How I wrote and published my novel using only open source... by jefurii on Thursday August 18, 2016 @10:53AM (#12312913)

Just to follow this to its logical conclusion, the webserver may be running Apache or Nginx on Linux, but there are likely to be proprietary blobs in the drivers and the firmware is probably closed. Plus, much of the hosting company's networking hardware is probably running proprietary software.

IANANE (I Am Not A Network Engineer) but I imagine with open firmware like Coreboot and networking distros like Cumulus and pfSense (BSD) and the whole Open Compute Project it might be possible to run a completely open-source hosting company. Well, no. Your UPS's and other auxiliary hardware are probably running closed OSes. Darn.

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Re:How I wrote and published my novel using only open source... by mcpherrinm on Friday August 19, 2016 @06:01AM (#12318983)

Cumulus contains a large portion of closed-source code, including all the driver code provided by Broadcom, which is where much of the interesting stuff happens. (I assume their Mellanox products are the same, though I'm not familiar with them)

I'm not aware of any efforts to write open source drivers for any high speed ethernet chips, though I haven't looked much. Intel's (formerly Fulcrum) switch chips have open data sheets (but not the reference code, simulators, etc) so it would at least be plausible to start there.

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Re:How I wrote and published my novel using only open source... by pgeorgi on Thursday August 18, 2016 @11:37AM (#12313311)

someone is (or was?) trying: https://www.vikings.net/

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Re:How I wrote and published my novel using only open source... by Spooky23 on Thursday August 18, 2016 @05:10PM (#12316364)

Perfect is the enemy of the good.

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