Free Software Advocate Jacob Barkdull
Jacob Barkdull What am I to say? I'm a huge dork, a proto-nerd, and I love music and try to make it, too. I write tech, science and political articles for multiple publishers, online and rarely in print.

I am a Web Developer, and Free Software advocate (Free Software is software anyone can use, study, change, and share with others, legally.) In the last few years I've become familiar with Unix, GNU, and Linux. I no longer use proprietary software (software with the sole purpose of restricting the user's computing.)

A web server was my first introduction to Free Software -- at the age of 16 when I received an old web server from my father. I became interested in how the web technologies I used everyday worked, learning HTML, SHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and -- my favorite -- PHP. It was only later that I started learning C/C++, Python, Perl and others, I am, however, not a professional programmer in those languages.

I've always been a political person, and I like supporting social freedom and cooperation. So naturally I find that proprietary software has many political, ethical, and subsequently social problems. I believe it's important to expose these issues and advocate against proprietary software usage in education, business, government, and personal computing. Naturally I believe this can be accomplished with the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) -- which is a Free Software license originally written by Richard Stallman in 1989 for the GNU Project, and now authored by the Free Software Foundation.

Richard Stallman's intentions with the GNU GPL was to eliminate the political and ethical issues found in software, thereby liberating the user of the software. It's important that we all have respect for our computing freedom, especially in this age of increasing dependence on technology. I don't know everything about Free Software, but I believe my views might change the way many people view these issues.

I invite you to contact me for whatever you may wish to ask me (I'm known to write private tutorials for people who need help with something I have knowledge of.) And I ask for your criticism as long as it's constructive.
What Is This Place?
TildeHash is a website for Tech articles revolving around Free Software and Unix/Unix-like operating systems, written by Jacob Barkdull and various contributors, respectively. Meaning, Free Software (or Open Source); and GNU/Linux (or simply Linux), BSD, OpenSolaris, or Haiku; respectively. The main goal of TildeHash is to be different -- the name alone is a little different (explanation here) -- but to do it in a useful way.

TildeHash is about discussing Free Software topics that are beneficial to our community, topics that are largely not discussed nor shown. "Free Software" is also often called "Open Source Software". In practice the requirements are identical, although because the term "open" doesn't call to mind freedom, it misses the point.

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