A more precise term for those in the know: open source software that also has a liberal license, for some definition of liberal.
Ciro Santilli defines liberal as: "can be commercialized without paying anything back" (but possibly subject to other restrictions).
He therefore does not consider Creative Commons licenses with NC to be FOSS.
For the newbs, the term open source software is good enough, since most open source software is also FOSS.
But when it's not, it's crucial to know.
python/sphinx/hello by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Minimal example. Gives a hint at how boilerplate heavy Sphinx can be!
Hofstadter's law by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The trivial takes a few hours.
The easy takes a week.
And what seemed hard takes a few hours.
As "deadlines" approach, feature sets get cut down, then there are delays, and finally a feasible feature set is delivered some time after the deadline.
The only deadlines that can be met are those of tasks which have already been done but not announced.
This is of course Hofstadter's law.
On the other hand, as a colleague of Ciro once mentioned, it is also known that the time it takes for a task to be done expands without limits to match the deadline. And therefore, without deadlines, tasks will take forever and never get done.
And so, in a moment, perceiving this paradox, Ciro was enlightened.
Once upon a time, when Ciro Santilli had a job, he had a programming problem.
A senior developer came over, and rather than trying to run and modify the code like an idiot, which is what Ciro Santilli usually does (see also experimentalism remarks at Section "Ciro Santilli's bad old event memory"), he just stared at the code for about 10 minutes.
We knew that the problem was likely in a particular function, but it was really hard to see why things were going wrong.
After the 10 minutes of examining every line in minute detail, he said:
I think this function call has such or such weird edge case
and truly, that was the cause.
Software engineer by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Poet warriors monkeys? Or Code peasants (码农) according to the Chinese.
Ciro Santilli claims to be one of them.
Much like a pianist plays his piano, a software engineer plays his computer.
This is a good approach. The downside is that while you are developing the implementation and testing interactively you might notice that the requirements are wrong, and then the tests have to change.
One intermediate approach Ciro Santilli likes is to do the implementation and be happy with interactive usage, then create the test, make it pass, then remove the code that would make it pass, and see it fail. This does have a risk that you will forget to test something, but Ciro finds it is a worth it generally. Unless it really is one of those features that you are unable to develop without an automated test, generally more "logical/mathematical" stuff. This is a sort of laziness Driven Development.
Sister transaction of 4373b97e4525be4c2f4b491be9f14ac2b106ba521587dad8f134040d16ff73af with another variant of the XSS but without IF and OP_FROMALTSTACK, thus making it spendable:
OP_ADD OP_ADD 13 OP_EQUAL <large xss constant> OP_DROP
Luke Dashjr by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-12-25
Author of the prayer side of the Prayer wars.
According to LinkedIn he studied at the Benedictine College in Kansas.
TODO is his real birthname "Luke Dash Jr."?
Apparently he had his coins stolen in January 2023, then worth $3.5m: blog.cryptostars.is/luke-dashjr-an-original-bitcoin-developer-loses-all-his-btc-88421c395ce5p...
www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/4936kw/lukejr_is_a_seriously_a_super_crazy_person_quotes/ "Luke-Jr is a seriously a super crazy person quotes gigathread." (2016) on Reddit. Apparently he has some fun views of life.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact