foss

Any reader of this site will notice that we often talk about 'Free and Open Source Software' which we usually abbreviate as FOSS. For those who aren't intimately familiar with the history, trajectory, and nuances (warning - they are big topics) of the Free Software and Open Source Software camps - both subsets of information technology, itself a subset of digital technology - its significance is both arcane and something of a barrier to understanding.

At the OER Foundation we host an array of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) services. To keep things manageable, we have established a set of conventions to which we adhere, and I'm describing them here in case it's helpful to others who can either learn from, or improve on, our experience.

Just about any and every server needs to be able to send email - whether it's end-user-email, like password recovery services for a website to emails to system administrators reporting on the status of system backups and errors. The problem is that it's non trivial (understatement) to set up a mail server properly.

In light of the current global pandemic, there's lots of interest out there on "working remotely" or "working from home". We've been doing a for years, and it has a lot of advantages... here's how we do it....