Making my blog open source (finally)

November 11, 2025 - Written by Andreas

Although I’m advertising myself a proponent of open source on this blog, I realised I hadn’t actually made the code of this blog publicly available. I have finally made a Codeberg git repository ¹ to host the main code that supports this blog. The content is not on there but all code necessary to reproduce this blog is. As my PHP is very rusty, feel free to criticise the quality of my code!

Why is open source important?

Open-source software means that anyone can view, study, modify, and use its source code. This fosters a community and collaborative approach to software development and design and to identifying and fixing problems in the code. Theoretically, if I had a problem with some piece of software, I could create a copy of the code, fix the bug, and submit it back to the original project, benefitting everyone.

Another benefit of open source is that there are more eyes on the project. This means more people can study the code and find issues with it, especially in terms of security. Chances are simply higher when more people can look at the code.

A final, and for me very important point, is that the code truly belongs to the user. If a company has a closed-source product, i.e., the code is not available, they can do with it as they please and you—the user—will have to accept it. This is not the case with open-source software. For example, the open source project Audacity was taken over by a company who was going to add telemetry into it². The project was immediately forked (copied) by users to maintain a copy without spyware. This is just an example to show how open source software allows the user to actually own the software: They can study it, they can copy it, even if the owner of the project decides to go into a different direction.

Anyway, enjoy my blog’s (rather crappy) code!

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