I was taught table layout in school and had to relearn everything. First place I'd start today is http://diveintohtml5.info/. After that look into CSS3, http://myth.io helps you make sure your styles are cross-browser. Lots of comments talk about static generators and web frameworks already. Use the JavaScript pixie dust sparingly and you'll be fine.
One Erlang project that is rather friendly up-front is the Zotonic[1] web framework. As someone new to Erlang, it's great to be able to get off the ground running with such useful resources.
Developers of open source software may be compensated by employment, contract, donations, sponsorship, and even social standing. Moreover, they benefit from having free access to the tools of a highly lucrative field. Everybody's got to get paid, and free software's “culture" hardly stands in the way.
The purpose of documentation is to describe the software. It's not machismo, it's the complexity inherent in the system. The man page for tar isn't poorly written, tar has just accrued many options. Of course there may be unhelpful answers to requests for help. It may also be that industrial technology (Unix) is not as simple or easy to use as consumer technology.
This is yet another reason why firms ought never hold encryption keys for customers in the first place. Tarsnap would seem unaffected by this law, for example.
Of course, there's a hundred other ways this type of legislation poses problems for an organization, not to mention society in general.
This is quite the handy resource! Great idea and well done. OpenBSD is really quite friendly, just need to be comfortable with reading man pages and Unix basics.
A tip for first-timers: perform the installation with an Ethernet internet connection. On my laptop, wireless firmware was installed and configured automagically on first boot. After that it's all gravy.
While I too would love to see continued development of Persona and Thunderbird by Mozilla, it's important to remember that as open-source projects they're still freely available. I still use both, and see no reason to stop. Development can continue without Mozilla.
OpenBSD is likewise developed by a small number of users. A Linux distribution is arguably easier to maintain for a smaller group because the core components are developed upstream.
Alpine does well at making security measures like SELinux accessible. Meta-distributions like Debian serve a different purpose.
That's essentially it. GitHub has won its role as the (meta)repository of public record. I suspect many stick with it over its competitors for this very reason.
GitLab has a fine interface and offers free private repositories. If it weren't for GitHub's network effect advantage, I'd use it for all my git projects.