Rahul gives unsolicited advice

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote that I'll be giving up to 5% of my annual salary to Free and Open Source Software , and one of the projects that I'm donating to is the Python Software Foundation (PSF) . I joined PSF at the Supportimg Member - Sliding Scale tier at 25 USD membership dues + additional contribution of 25 USD per Annum - roughly 5000 INR. This was prompted by the recent decision by the PSF to pause the grants program . Like my decision to become a member of the  the TeX Users Group  (TUG), the right thing to do now is to check what the PSF doing with my money or what they've done with funds/donations in the past. The PSF announced the 2024 annual report in June of this year  - checkout the annual report itself at psf annual-report/2024 . The PSF gets, and spends, a lot more money than TUG. For instance Annual revenue was a little less than 4.3 Million USD in 2024 and annual expenditure was a little more than 5.7 Million USD The PSF awarded 297K USD ...

Last week, I wrote that I'll be giving up to 5% of my annual salary to Free and Open Source Software , and one of the projects that I'm donating to is the TeX Users Group  (TUG). I joined TUG at the "special individual membership" tier at 50 USD  - roughly 5000 INR - per annum. The right thing to do now is to check what they're doing with my money or what they've done with funds/donations in the past. Lemme rewind a little - TUG came into my radar because I came across the TUG 2025 annual conference . I was surprised and saddened to find that it happened in Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram now), Kerala, India because it's an event that we at FOSS United would have loved to support financially. I kept the TUG 2025 tab open for multiple weeks because I wanted to watch a few of the talks . Note to self : Check if anyone from India was a part of the organizing team for TUG 2025, and reach out to them. Maybe we (FOSS United) could support them in future events. ...

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) has a sustainability problem. For those of you who are a part of the FOSS ecosystem, or are fairly familiar with it, Duh. But here's a short intro for the uninitiated - you are relying on Free and Open Source software when you read this blog post. Most commercial software applications are made up primarily of FOSS. Our digital lives are powered by FOSS. Yet, a majority of the people who create, maintain, and sustain the FOSS projects are underfunded, if not completely unfunded. This isn't really news - for more than a decade now, people in the FOSS community have been complaining about the sustainability problem, and people have come up with varying solutions to the problem. A real solution to the FOSS sustainability problem involves systematic support from for-profit enterprises and Nation-State Governments but for the moment, let's focus on what I can do as an individual. And why am I bringing this up now? Because of what's happene...

I put the "reviews" in quotes because it's less review-y and more comment-y. Writing is my "theme" for Q1 2025 and I'm pretty happy about the fact that I've started a new blog about the childrens' books that our lives revolve around thanks to Luffy - rahulandluffyread.blogspot.com . I've written 20 posts this month - some of the books came into our lives this month and others have been in our lives for more than an year. I realize that I'm happy writing "slice of life"-style posts instead of writing strict review-style posts. For reasons I can't describe, I was interested in writing review-y posts about books in my life but I was never able to do justice to the format. To me, a review needs additional work from me to look into critique of the book, and I barely have time to put together a blogpost, so the posts just stay in the "drafts" folder, never to be published. This is a surprising revelation to me and it only oc...