#Tag · bonfire.cafe

@amirbkhan @_elena If you stop using billionaire software, just you, you are depriving them of your revenue, attention, and data. Each of us getting off "platforms" (Window, Mac, Facebook, X, etc.) is a member of the "walk away" revolt. And the continuing work to make Free and Open Source Software more accessible to the rest of them takes power away from the oligarchs AND the government they own. We are #OpenLDAP and #GCC #COBOL, two links in the chain.#

Amir Khan

@amirbkhan@mastodon.social · 6 days ago

If you take just one thing away from #FOSDEM this is it.

“If we lose our democracies, Open Source is irrelevant and goes away”

or putting it another way:

If we don’t apply, enforce, adopt and embrace Open Source in our public and government institutions we risk to lose our democracies.
#OpenSource #SaveDemocracy
Boost if you agree!
👇🏽

A full auditorium top level view of the stage and screen that says in large letters “If we lose our democracies, Open Source is irrelevant and goes away”

Marty Heyman at COBOLworx

@martyh@cobolworx.social replied · 5 days ago

alcinnz boosted

Elizabeth K. Joseph

@pleia2@floss.social · last month

I am either famous or infamous for liking #COBOL 😂

But I'm doubling down and re-posted an archived blog post from 2023 with some additional commentary about taking the the "Learning COBOL Programming with VSCode" course: https://princessleia.com/journal/2026/01/on-cobol/

Featuring @waltman @adventofcomputing (and others who aren't on Mastodon)

https://princessleia.com/journal

On COBOL

I like COBOL. Screenshot from The Open Mainframe Project COBOL Programming Course (source) My exposure to it prior to entering the mainframe world almost seven years ago was quiet limited. My friend Walt Mankowski has worked with COBOL over the years, and I’d been to a few talks of his talks that would recount stories […]

Elizabeth K. Joseph

@pleia2@floss.social · last month

I am either famous or infamous for liking #COBOL 😂

Featuring @waltman @adventofcomputing (and others who aren't on Mastodon)

https://princessleia.com/journal

On COBOL

Cory Doctorow

@pluralistic@mamot.fr · last month

Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code but that means it's producing 10,000 more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

Marty Heyman at COBOLworx

@martyh@cobolworx.social replied · last month

@pluralistic of course, Corey, that makes vast quantitites of "mission" critical lines of code "liabilities." Hundreds of billions of lines of production #COBOL code for example.

But that's a glib misdirction. Lines of code, human or AI generated, that are in production are both a liability and a responsibility. So if you promote slop or carefully engineered code, you own it and it owns you.