Welcome to Yakking.

This is a blog for topics relevant to someone new to free software development. We assume you are already familiar with computers, and are curious about participating in the production of free software. You don't need to be a programmer: software development requires a wide variety of skills, and you can be a valued core contributor to a project without being a programmer.

To get the most out of Yakking, you will need to be curious, and you will need to enjoy doing things with computers, and making computers do things. That's the essence of being a hacker. We'll write more about that some day.

We particularly target development in the free software world. This is different from general software development in various ways, some of them ethical or motivational, others technical or procedural. We'll discuss those too, in a future blog post.

We'll be doing about one post per week, on Wednesdays. Topics we plan to cover include:

• principles and ethics of software freedom
• basics of using Linux (or other Unices) from the command line
• development tools
• development processes

Of course, if you're interested in seeing us write about other topics, please do contact us and let us know.

All in all, think "Boing Boing", except for new free software hackers.

Let's have fun.

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The most recent yakking article is: