Free Software: Fediverse, New Study, Ebook, and LibreOffice

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 04, 2023

• Dawn of the Fediverse

  Yet as today’s brand names grew, they made a fateful decision: They rejected interoperability, choosing to remain sealed off from each other. Facebook and Twitter built walled gardens to keep us locked into their services, unable to slide into other applications and platforms. The format ensured the [Internet] of today was dominated by behemoths. A few networks to rule them all.

  This was always a business decision, not a technological one. Had they wanted to, it was possible for emergent networks to “interoperate” and allow users on Facebook to make “friends” with users in other social media networks. But doing so would have limited the benefits of the “network effects” that proved so profitable to the Big Social Media corporations. If they could build features that manipulated people into spending more time on their network, and thus create more ad impressions, they did.

• Linux Foundation Research Shows Economic Value of Open Source Software Rising in Terms of Benefits vs. Costs

• What I've learned making an .epub Ebook with Quarto

  Quarto is a tool made by Posit and is an open-source scientific and technical publishing tool. If you know what LaTeX is, then it should be easy for you to grok Quarto. The idea of Quarto is that you write documents using Markdown, and then compile these source files into either PDFs, Word documents, but also books, web-sites, ebooks (in the Epub format) and so on… It’s quite powerful, and you can also use programming language code chunks for literate programming. Quarto support R, Python, Julia and ObsevableJS chunks.

• 7 New books added to Big Book of R

  Welcome to this new edition of Big Book of R additions! Thanks to Lluis Revilla and Gary for submitting books!

  I also wanted to give a special shout-out to Niels Ohlsen (a long-time RStats twitter mutual!) who helped me review book submissions and add these to the collection.

• Start of multi-page floating tables in [LibreOffice] Writer

  Writer now has the early steps to handle tables that are both floating and span over multiple pages.

  This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but is useful on the desktop as well.