An excellent client and backgammon experience.

Thanks Trevor for documenting your path, it is quite useful to us all who might want in the future to write an open source multiplayer game.

a long todo.txt, If I knew how to use emacs I would probably try orgmode, but I don’t.

I backup stuff both on a MicroSD and on web storage with duplicity. Hopefully that is enough!

passwords.txt on a full-disk encryption HDD.

If you are comfortable with the command line hledger is a great program which has good tools for importing .csv files from banks and other financial companies.

Scribus is an excellent libre desktop publishing program.

I used to write a small postcard game for the “Wish you were here” jam, but it is suited to any job up to professional level.

Excellent writeup!

I had the pleasure to try the client last week and it felt clean and responsive!

I am happier when I see copyleft but let’s be honest, I would contribute to an interesting, useful project regardless of their choice between MIT and GPL. Same for companies: some prefer MIT, but there is no way they are not going to contribute to the Linux Kernel just because of copyleft. So bottom line is: make something that people enjoy/find useful and see contributors flocking.

CLAs are a different matter: I do not contribute to projects which ask you to assign them copyright unless I 100% trust the organisation behind them.

If some code links to your GPL library, the whole project has to be licenced GPLv3, full stop. This does not “prevent people to use [it] at all”, it just stipulates that they have to make the source available and the source of improvements they make available. Each substantial library I write in my free time is GPLv3. I want to contribute to the ecosystem and I want everyone enjoying my work contributing back to the ecosystem.

A similar licence, called LGPL, allows dynamic linking without having to make the code of the whole project available, just the code of the specific library + improvements. If for some reason you need this, I invite you to check how dynamic linking works in Pharo and read this FAQ by the FSF (and all other FAQs, it is a very clear, informative document).

File an issue in their repos, sometimes people (understandably) do not understand licencing very well — or it might be they were granted an exception.

If that fails you can contact the library author and the repositories who host the code.

Great suggestions in this discussion! Rather than adding my favourites, I will add some resources that list more games.

• Libregamewiki: it is really comprehensive (sometimes too much, including even not-so-good-games). They care about licencing and is is very easy to browse, top-notch for me.
• Open source games: a more relaxed repository, with lots of material.
• bobeff open source list: this is curated, which means that there are not so many games but each and every one is stable, good, maintained.
• Arcane Cache: a fantastic blog with reviews of libre games — or more precisely, underground games, there is a lot of discussion on how gamedevving philosophy too. The reviews are always in-depth and allow you to experience the games on another level, and each game is a small jewel in its category. Strongly recommended!