Tuesday, August 25th, 2026, 5:49 pm
Explaining AlternativeApproaches.com
Filed under: 
HE other day I was contacted by Christine from FOSS Force. I thought the matter was worth documenting in public and I carefully checked that no personal information would be divulged in the process, not something embarrassing anyway (if told otherwise, I’d modify accordingly). Regarding FOSS Force ownership, she told me, “I notice that you identify articles on FOSS Force as being on Unicorn Media, which is an identity that hasn’t existed in about 10 years down.”
It wasn’t until then that I realised she ran another site, which I took a look at. It turns out to be a very old site.
“It ceased to exist after we shut down The Unicorn Shoppe,” she told me, “a neopagan-focused retail store that we started in 2001 (ten years before FOSS Force existed). The store was an offshoot of AlternativeApproaches.com, a new age website I started in the late nineties that at one time had about 10,000 articles. A much smaller version of that site is still online, although we’re not not doing much of anything with it.”
That site is still active, it looks a bit similar to FOSS Force, and some of the articles are quite decent.
Christine made a polite request: “I would prefer that you reference FOSS Force as “FOSS Force.” If you insist on wanting to reference us by our legal, banking name, that would be AlternativeApproaches. Thanks.”
“Thanks for illuminating this,” I said, “I’ll pass on to the TR person who put “Unicorn” in the Perl module.”
This has since then been corrected, if “correction” or “correction” is the right term rather than rectified or updated or whatever.
The team said: “Thanks. (Though their site does still say Unicorn Media at the bottom of the main page.)”
It has since then been updated.
“I am grateful for the update directly from Christine,” said the team. “And I am doubly glad that Foss Force is still up and running and doing great work.”
It is indeed.
It’s nice to be able to have such exchanges with peer sites, which act amicably. They’re not competition but allies.
