Drew DeVault
drewdevault.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2013
Drew DeVault, an open-source developer behind Sway and SourceHut, writes about software, licensing, browsers, and programming languages.
What HN saysCommenters recommend it as a good programming and tech blog. His AGPL post is cited on how little the license protects against SaaS reuse.
633HN people shared it
394linked it in comments
699stories submitted
33Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2013people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers32 people · 400 points · first shared 2020 · 234 comments on HN
- 2Homepage28 people · first shared 2014
- 3Sway 1.0 is not going to support the Nvidia proprietary driver21 people · 185 points · first shared 2017 · 148 comments on HN
- 4The terms of the AGPL are pretty easy to comply with18 people · 351 points · first shared 2020 · 329 comments on HN
- 5Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face17 people · 258 points · first shared 2025 · 122 comments on HN
- 6Rust is not a good C replacement15 people · 279 points · first shared 2019 · 204 comments on HN
- 7On the profitability of image hosting websites (2014)13 people · 11 points · first shared 2014 · 1 comments on HN
- 8I don't trust Signal12 people · 587 points · first shared 2018 · 455 comments on HN
- 9Analyzing HN moderation and censorship12 people · 290 points · first shared 2017 · 365 comments on HN
- 10What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)12 people · 271 points · first shared 2020 · 208 comments on HN
- 11Developers shouldn't distribute their own software12 people · 37 points · first shared 2019 · 7 comments on HN
- 12Developers: Let distros do their job12 people · 34 points · first shared 2021 · 10 comments on HN
- 13Cryptocurrency Is an Abject Disaster11 people · 275 points · first shared 2021 · 248 comments on HN
- 14A Case Against Dynamic Linking11 people · 32 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 15Sr.ht, the hacker's forge, now open for public alpha9 people · 892 points · first shared 2018 · 217 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
SahAssar · 2022-03-28
> I think more things like the Gemini Protocol will continue to be popular.
Saying "continue" would mean that it is popular now, outside of a very small handful of niche sites I'd say gemini is not popular. I follow this space a bit and I basically only know of https://drewdevault.com/ that actually use it.
weinzierl · 2020-01-01
For programming and tech topics:
Dan Luu's Blog
https://danluu.com/
Drew DeVault's Blog
https://drewdevault.com/
For a broader scope:
Derek Sivers' Blog https://sivers.org/blog
If you love books, Maria Popova's Blog
https://www.brainpickings.org/
spectramax · 2019-12-22
I also agree, these are short blips (a long form tweet) with no research, reference, no real insight besides the obvious. One positive thing is that it invokes some level of discussion and often auxiliary ideas come out of it. Perhaps.
At the other end, it is laborious to go through a well researched long-form articles.
I really like Drew Devaults blog [1] - I think he strikes a great balance between tweet-like articles (pg, daringfireball) and something extremely verbose (Stratechery).
[1] https://drewdevault.com/
eskibars · 2026-05-07
One thing I mention to folks that seem to think AGPL "protects you" against a major corporation incorporating your product into a SaaS product: it mostly doesn't.
It isn't written about often, but it's the reason many "open core" companies moved away from AGPL to protect their revenue from larger SaaS/IaaS/PaaS players from eating their lunch.
Some writings are:
- https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/01/24/Reading-AGPL
- https://katedowninglaw.com/2019/09/08/the-great-open-source-shake-up/
- https://drewdevault.com/blog/Anti-AGPL-propaganda/
mananaysiempre · 2025-10-20
> I mean, we all just accept whatever the project believes is normal right?
Not in this thread we don’t? The whole thing has been about the fact that it wasn’t easy for a distro maintainer to detect the suspicious code even if they looked. Whether anyone actually does look is a worthy question, but it’s not orthogonal to making the process of looking not suck.
Of course, if we trust the developer to put software on our machine with no intermediaries, the whole thing goes out the window. Don’t do that[1]. (Oh hi Flatpak, Snap. Please go away. Also hi NPM, Go, Cargo, PyPI; no, being a “modern programming language” is not an excuse.)
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job.html
theamk · 2025-03-22
The AI slop is definitely less expensive for the author, as all the efforts are expended by CF's infrastructure, while the host sees zero requests.
In the previous discussions, one of the big AI problems was that they follow every link [0], including expensive ones like "git blame" view.. as well as "every commit of every log", which can be easily in millions if you have mirrors of few repos with many branches. It's simply impossible to cache this all at CloudFlare, and solution like AI maze (or outright blocking) seem like the only way.
I feel you about "requests one-liners in python" - I am still running a few of those in crontab on some server.. but their time might be past. The "average guy" does not care about this kind of scripting, so we will get lumped together with evil AI and blocked.
[0] https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-…
tempfile · 2025-03-20
It also linked to https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-… which is another worthwhile read.
belter · 2025-01-21
This is better to understand the context of the protest
""No billionaires at FOSDEM" - https://drewdevault.com/2025/01/16/2025-01-16-No-Billionares-at-FOSDEM…
Also these are the recommended actions:
"To maintain the peaceful nature of our protest and minimize the disruption to FOSDEM generally, we ask participants to strictly adhere to the following instructions:
Do not touch anyone else, or anyone else’s property, for any reason.
Do not engage in intimidation.
Remain quiet and peaceful throughout the demonstration.
When the protest ends, disperse peacefully and in a timely manner.
Leave the room the way you found it. "
gadders · 2025-01-21
"It has also been pointed out that Dorsey does not bear sole responsibility for Twitter’s sale. However, he is complicit and he profited handsomely from the sale and all of its harmful consequences. The sale left the platform at the disposal of the far right, causing a sharp rise in hate speech and harassment and the layoffs of 3,700 of the Twitter employees that made it worth so much in the first place."
https://drewdevault.com/2025/01/20/2025-01-20-FOSDEM-protest.html
adolph · 2024-12-25
The article linked as “W3C specifications are bigger than POSIX.” is also worth reading.
The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing. If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications.
https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html
manx · 2024-11-27
Excellent question. I asked the same question for Movies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41315330
For me it's:
- https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/09/Simple-correct-fast.html
In combination with "Simple Made Easy":
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4
modevs · 2024-08-25
Rewrite it in C. Great idea. Just do not tell it to rust community...
I like to see that programmers like you still exist and belive in what they do.
Remembered this article... https://drewdevault.com/2019/03/25/Rust-is-not-a-good-C-replacement.ht…
AceJohnny2 · 2024-08-13
He is opinionated. Scroll through his blog, and I'm sure you'll find something to disagree on:
https://drewdevault.com/
matlin · 2024-06-25
I'm not a legal expert but my understanding is that your perspective is a common misconception.
I'd recommend reading this: https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html
garof · 2024-06-24
For the lazy who don't know some of these:
https://drewdevault.com
https://fabiensanglard.net
https://danluu.com
Dan's is the only one I recall visiting before. And it's memorable because of the maximally wide text width. Personally I would find Dan's site more usable, and visitable, if there was an ordinary text width. Some reasonable default that is more readable.
johndoe0815 · 2024-05-20
Good start - for inspiration, you can check out Drew DeVault's (https://drewdevault.com) "bunnix", a Unix-like OS implemented in his own "Hare" language in about two weeks:
https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/bunnix
Some suggestions for further projects:
* multi-core support
* portability, e.g. to an ARM or RISC-V machine (assuming you started on x86)
* networking
8organicbits · 2024-05-16
> Apache license 2.0 has to be one of the most business friendly licenses around?
Yes, in my experience it is.
Permissive licenses like Apache, MIT, and BSD are easiest for the corporate lawyers to approve but also easy for the project owner to relicense. Relicencing Monitor isn't measuring how easy it is for companies to use the software; risk is solely measuring how easy it is to relicense the software.
Copyleft licenses are lower risk than permissive licenses in this specific context as they are viral. A CLA or a very small number of contributors can negate that, as happened with Emby [1].
SourceGraph is probably the best example here (I need to add them still). They switched off Apache 2 and prompted this [2] helpful blog post.
[1] https://alexsci.com/relicensing-monitor/projects/emby/
[2] https://drewdevault.com/2023/07/04/Dont-sign-a-CLA-2.html
immibis · 2024-04-10
Start by reading here: https://drewdevault.com/2024/04/09/2024-04-09-FDO-conduct-enforcement.…
Remember to follow hyperlinks. They're there for a reason.
qweqwe14 · 2024-04-09
Also see this blog post, which compares "Hello World" programs in different languages by overhead: https://drewdevault.com/2020/01/04/Slow.html
Follow-up: https://drewdevault.com/2020/01/08/Re-Slow.html
This legendary blogpost makes the smallest Linux program (the program simply exits with status 42): https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html
You can also find the smallest "Hello World" program on that website.
jraph · 2024-02-07
I have hopes it will become a daily usable browser. A new Web engine is great. I hope Servo succeeds at this too.
I would consider contributing but development is coordinated on Discord and I avoid proprietary software… [1]. It's a shame. Can't blame them though, they are doing it for fun.
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infrastructure.h…
OsrsNeedsf2P · 2024-01-19
Unrelated, but TIL Drew DeVault is one of the SourceHut maintainers. His blog[0] is strongly opinionated and always an informative read.
[0] https://drewdevault.com/
bb88 · 2024-01-04
Drew DeVault called it an "internet" language back in 2021. And to that I more or less agree.
Read footnote 1 for context.
https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/02/Go-is-a-great-language.html
njt · 2023-12-04
scdoc is a great tool. It's written by Drew DeVault (sourcehut) and works great, I've used it in a couple of projects.
Here's the blog entry[1] where he talks about the rationale for writing the tool.
The page mentions that it is inspired by Markdown, but is not actually Markdown because it was designed for HTML.
I'm glad to see more projects in this space.
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2018/05/13/scdoc.html
x-complexity · 2023-10-02
There's an argument to be made that the extreme breadth of scope that modern web browsers are obliged to support (in order to gain/retain market share) heavily contributes to there being no worthy contenders against Chromium's web monopoly.
https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html
When you're the leader, you can further widen your lead by bolting on additional functions & features that require at least X amount of effort to implement. Any new contender will have to put in SUM(X effort for each feature) to match feature parity with the existing leader, and existing competitors will have to put in at least X effort to catch up. Existing OSS work can help bridge the gap, but only for what's already been done.
vilunov · 2023-09-02
https://drewdevault.com/2018/07/23/Git-is-already-distributed.html
I understand his reasoning, but there needs not to be a single protocol for federalization. You can support both email and AP and let users choose what is best for them. "Email simply being a better choice" is a controversial opinion (as most of other statements there). Protocols can evolve and compete with each other, but only if software gives them space to do that.
Qwertious · 2023-08-18
Drew Devault (Sway and Sourcehut guy) wrote this on his experience with Linux phones: https://drewdevault.com/2023/06/16/Mobile-linux-retrospective.html
tldr: it works and it's great, but it's not reliable in phone/SMS in the way a phone needs to be reliable.
nicopappl · 2023-08-06
Relevant:
* https://blog.plover.com/Unix/whitespace.html (mentioned at the beginning of the linked post)
* https://drewdevault.com/2023/07/31/The-rc-shell-and-whitespace.html (mentioned at the end of the linked post)
PhilippGille · 2023-08-03
Maybe helpful, but potentially different requirements: https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/19/Mail-service-provider-recommendatio…
statenjason · 2023-07-23
I migrated to Alpine for my laptop this year after an extended attempt of NixOS.
For development, I’ve found I’m more productive in that I don’t go down the rabbit hole of finding the “Nix way” of using a language/tool.
The speed of apk is refreshing for my older machine, and APKBUILDs are intuitive after my past experience with Arch PKGBUILD.
Drew DeVault has a decent write up on Alpine that’s worth a read.
https://drewdevault.com/2021/05/06/Praise-for-Alpine-Linux.html
kkoncevicius · 2023-07-16
> I would recommend anyone who works with websites to look into the way typography influences the reader's subconscious.
To me, paradoxically, it reached a point where my subconscious associates light or poor typography with serious material, and pretty web pages with empty ad-ridden content:
Serious vibe: http://fmwww.bc.edu/repec/bocode/t/transint.html
Intermediate vibe: https://drewdevault.com/2023/06/30/Social-and-parasocial-media.html
Empty content vibe: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/12/23792382/google-notebooklm-tailwind…