I also recorded a video version of this post if you’d prefer to watch rather than read: https://youtu.be/VPIf6dUKwKA

Last week I was at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City for UN Open Source Week — a gathering that, even just by its name, tells you something about how far open source has come. This isn’t a developer conference. It’s not a vendor expo. It’s the United Nations convening governments, NGOs, academics, and technologists to talk about open source as a matter of global policy.

The event ran June 22–25 at UN HQ in the ECOSOC Chamber, then moved on June 26 to the IBM Building at 1 Madison Avenue for a community-led “Open Source Community Day” hosted by Red Hat. It’s not the kind of event I usually attend.

The thread that ran through almost every session was technological sovereignty — specifically around AI. Who controls AI infrastructure controls the future.

Alberto Gago, Director General of Spain’s Agency for the Supervision of AI (AESIA), said:

“Decisions affecting all of society are being passed to organizations controlled by a handful of private actors answerable to no electorate. Transparency is not only not guaranteed — it’s not even possible.”

That’s not a developer complaining about vendor lock-in. That’s a government AI regulator saying the architecture of modern AI makes democratic oversight structurally impossible.

One of the more interesting ideas I encountered was the collapse of the distinction between Sovereign AI (nations controlling their own AI infrastructure) and Portfolio AI (diversifying workloads between hyperscalers and local compute). These are the same question at different scales. A country asking “how do we avoid dependence on foreign tech companies?” is asking the same question as an individual asking “can I run some of this locally?” The answer in both cases is open source — open weights, open models, open tooling. It’s the only path to that kind of independence.

The highlight of the event was the “OSPOs for Good” session, opened by Omar Mohsine (UN Open Source Coordinator) and featuring government ministers speaking about open source as a development instrument.

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni (Head of Government in charge of Digital Transition, Morocco) said:

“Open source is the instrument of sovereignty.”

Angellah Jasmine Kairuki (Minister of Communication and Information Technology, Tanzania) talked about a national determination to

“Change from being a passive consumer of technology to an active participant.”

These are government ministers framing open source as national policy — as the tool that prevents their nations from becoming permanent technology colonies of whoever builds the largest proprietary models. The Next Einstein Initiative (“Will the next Einstein come from Africa?”) kept surfacing as a motif — talent exists everywhere; infrastructure and access don’t. Open source is positioned as the equalizer.

Another topic of great interest to me was The RGAF – The Responsible Generative AI Framework (RGAF), developed by the LF AI & Data Foundation, which defines nine dimensions for responsible AI: Human-centered & Aligned, Accessible & Inclusive, Robust & Safe, Transparent & Explainable, Observable & Accountable, Private & Secure, Compliant & Controllable, Ethical & Fair, and Environmentally Sustainable. It aligns with the EU AI Act, NIST, Singapore, and China frameworks and is an attempt to create a shared vocabulary across all of these, specifically for the open source generative AI context.

More info on RGAF:  https://lfaidata.foundation/blog/2024/11/18/responsible-ai-pathways/

UN Open Source Week isn’t a technical conference. You’re not going to learn a new API. What you get is perspective — a window into how the rest of the world sees open source and what they need from it. When Tanzania’s Minister of Communication and Information Technology stands at a podium in the ECOSOC Chamber and says open source is how her country avoids becoming a permanent technology colony, that reframes every commit, every pull request, every licensing decision.

More photos on Flickr.

When figuring out my read order for Bradbury Summer, I discovered a book that not only have I not read, I’ve never even heard of.

Dark Carnival was Bradbury’s first book, in 1947.

It’s a collection of short stories, some of which I’ve read in other collections (Homecoming, and Uncle Einar, are in October Country) but most I have not

I assume there are other things of his that I’ve not read, and I’m really looking forward to discovering them!

The preface to The Martian Chronicles says I should also read Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson. Books that recommend other books is perhaps my largest source of recommendations over the years.

I just finished The Illustrated Man, which I haven’t read in decades. I was worried it wouldn’t stand up, but it was every bit as amazing as I remembered, but with the extra depth of reading it as an adult.

Particularly wonderful was “The Rocket” in which a broke junk dealer arranges for his kids to travel to Mars in a scrap metal rocket.

Bonus, about half of these stories ended up as Twilight Zone episodes!

Next, The Martian Chronicles, which I have read many times over the past 40 years but is always wonderful.

I wrote a new book.

In 2006, I published The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite with Apress. That book is now nearly 20 years old, and the world of Apache HTTP Server configuration has changed enormously since then — new flags, expression engines, security considerations, and two decades of community questions revealing what actually confuses people.

So I wrote a new one from scratch: mod_rewrite And Friends.

It covers everything from regular expressions through RewriteRule, RewriteCond, RewriteMap, every flag, logging and debugging, proxying, virtual hosts, and access control — plus 40+ real-world recipes distilled from 20 years of users@httpd.apache.org questions. The “And Friends” part covers all the other Apache HTTP Server modules that often do the job better than mod_rewrite: mod_alias, mod_dir, mod_proxy, FallbackResource, expressions, and more.

Available now on Amazon:

📘 Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BSV4LO6

📕 Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYKT6ZJ6

📖 Read free online: https://mod-rewrite.org/

If you order a copy *right now* you could bring it to Open Source Summit and I’ll sign it!

#ApacheHTTPServer #mod_rewrite #WebDev #SysAdmin #OpenSource

Whenever I hear Winds of Change, by the Scorpions, I get a little misty-eyed. Not because it’s great music – although it’s definitely catchy and I do like it – but because, for a brief moment in 1989 and 1990, we actually believed that the world was getting smaller, and that there might be a day when “we could be so close, like brothers.”

Of course, when the moment wore off, it turns out that people are still people, and now in 2026 the US is actively working to undo what little progress has been made in the years since 1989.

20 minutes.

From “Golden Apples Of The Sun”. Also appears in “R is for Rocket”.

I have a browser bookmark to OpenDocsBugs, which has been there for many years. It links to a filter on the Apache httpd bugzilla tracker that lists all open httpd bugs that are open in the Documentation component.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I am now Without Hat at the ASF, having not run for the board this year. This leaves my ASF time allotment to other things.

Long ago, I was one of the main participants in the httpd documentation effort. I had almost entirely stepped away from that during my years on the board. That OpenDocsBugs lists crept up from double digits 10 years ago to 173 by the beginning of this year. This was daunting, to say the least.

Over the last 2 or 3 months, I have gradually whittled this down to zero. Or, as it helpfully says, Zarro Boogs.

Much of the grunt work – verifying that the bug still exists in the current versions of the project, synchronizing the patch across the trunk and 2.4 branches, verifying that the xml still validated, crafting a friendly commit message that accurately reflected the change(s) that I had made to the docs – was done by a helpful AI agent. I’m using Amazon Quick, which is a lovely tool that I’m becoming entirely too dependent on.

But the actual work of writing the patch, that was mostly me. I take particular pride in my writing, and have cultivated a particular voice in my writing that I don’t want to become a mass-produced robot voice.

This is the approach that I am taking with pretty much all of my AI interactions – I use the tooling for research, and then I use my own voice. I recognize that this probably makes me move a little slower, and it definitely identifies me as Someone Of A Certain Age. And I’m ok with that. I have the career that I have almost entirely due to my communication and writing skills – if not directly, at least that’s the path that got me here. And I an very, very reluctant to cede that to an algorithm. (No offense intended, all you algorithms that are reading this!)

So now, for the moment, we’re down to Zerro Boogs, and I’m going to endeavor to keep it there.

Next project is rewriting the mod_rewrite documentation to reflect the fact that it’s 2026 now, and not 2008.