This is a long-overdue public thank-you letter to Drew DeVault.

He has been an ethical FOSS steward for as long as I remember. There is a number of examples where he stands for what’s right and upholds his values. Sometimes, perhaps unfortunately, pretty damn often, getting shit for it. Negativity on the internet doesn’t seem to stop him: it obviously makes him feel worse, but he persists and keeps doing what is right.

The most recent example, which pushed me over the line to write this post, is Redict announcement. Quote:

The source code is hosted on Codeberg, a Forgejo instance operated by a German non-profit, which should provide a comfortable and familiar user experience for anyone comfortable with the GitHub-based community of Redis® OSS.

This paragraph amazed me. Drew created and runs SourceHut, a Codeberg competitor. As much as it was tempting to use it he used a competitor’s forge to host the redict, while being the primary driver (and the prime decision maker) for the fork.

Keep going, Drew, and thank you.