Two Cents on Home Labs and FOSS

For the uninitiated, it is important to understand what a home lab, as well as FOSS or Free and Open Source Software stands for. I believe the second one is self explanatory, yet here are a couple of links to understand in specific home labs, and FOSS.

To put it in writing here:

1. A homelab is practically your home based server/system that you may utilize to host your own set of software, or run a practice instance to play around with.
2. FOSS, on the other hand, are softwares that are open source, that is, have their source codes available to general public for them to read through, utilize, modify and build on top of base codes for personal or commercial uses.

Each of these softwares are generally licensed differently and could be either GPL licensed or MIT licensed. You can look up their particular definitions over the internet for a better understanding on these. The licensing identifies what you can and cannot do with the source code in terms of utilizing them commercially, and whether or not a sub-licensing, or publicly crediting the owner of the source code is required, etc.

If you have had the opportunity to interact with me, personally, you would already know by now that I have been consciously trying to move away from proprietary software, social media, messaging platforms, mailing services, and so on, and move onto a personal platform that is either owned or leased by me for personal use. That being said, I am not entirely against major corporations that are doing some mind-blowing work with whatever they have developed over the years, and continue to do so. I think it is important for them to have the access and knowledge that they foster with billions of users logged into their systems throughout the world.

Personally, I would prefer more control over the data that I share with the world (publicly or anonymously), how and when the data that I provide these companies with is used to synthesize the suggestions that are "best" for me, and the ability to customize what systems I use, and how I use them - a part of which is possible only by paying heavy premiums on these proprietary softwares.

This particular segment on my blog is dedicated to sharing with the world what I have been working on, how I plan to utilize these tools that I discover as part of this pursuit, a tutorial of sorts (written almost as and when I execute) to build onto your own home-lab, in case you are interested, and to learn together. Now, I am not a systems person, and a complete beginner at most things. In case you know better, please do highlight the same to me so that I can improvise along the way.