Free, Libre, and Open Source Software News
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Videoconferencing on a personal website
Over the weekend, I worked on adding a new feature to my personal website: videoconfencing. I was motivated to explore this space by Angelo ^1, who used Twilio to run a video conference on his personal website. Twilio is reliable but is not free, so we explored alternatives. Angelo told me about a piece of software called MediaSoup ^2, an open-source project that enables you to run video calls through self-hosted infrastructure.
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Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to more users worldwide
Firefox is rolling out Total Cookie Protection by default to more Firefox users worldwide, making Firefox the most private and secure major browser available across Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. Total Cookie Protection is Firefox’s strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were created, thus preventing tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.
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It Isn’t WebAssembly, But It Is Assembly In Your Browser
You might think assembly language on a PC is passe. After all, we have a host of efficient high-level languages and plenty of resources. But there are times you want to use assembly for some reason. Even if you don’t, the art of writing assembly language is very satisfying for some people — like an intricate logic puzzle. Getting your assembly language fix on a microcontroller is usually pretty simple, but on a PC there are a lot of hoops to jump. So why not use your browser? That’s the point of this snazzy 8086 assembler and emulator that runs in your browser. Actually, it is not native to the browser, but thanks to WebAssembly, it works fine there, too.
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The EU's Proposed CRA Law May Have Unintended Consequences for the Python Ecosystem
After reviewing the proposed Cyber Resilience Act and Product Liability Act, the PSF has found issues that put the mission of our organization and the health of the open-source software community at risk. While we support the stated goals of these policies of increasing security and accountability for European software consumers, we are concerned that overly broad policies will unintentionally harm the users they are intended to protect. We feel that it is important to consider the role vendor-neutral nonprofit organizations—especially public software repositories—play in the modern development of software.
Many modern software companies rely on open-source software from public repositories without notifying the author, and certainly without entering into any kind of commercial or contractual relationship with them. If the proposed law is enforced as currently written, the authors of open-source components might bear legal and financial responsibility for the way their components are applied in someone else’s commercial product. The existing language makes no differentiation between independent authors who have never been paid for the supply of software and corporate tech behemoths selling products in exchange for payments from end-users. We believe that increased liability should be carefully assigned to the entity that has entered into an agreement with the consumer. We join our European open source colleagues at the Eclipse Foundation and NLnet Labs in voicing our concerns over how these policies could affect global open source projects.
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The Free Software Foundation is dying
Their achievements are unmistakable: we must offer them our gratitude and admiration for decades of accomplishments in establishing and advancing our cause. The principles of software freedom are more important than ever, and the products of these institutions remain necessary and useful – the GPL license family, GCC, GNU coreutils, and so on. Nevertheless, the organizations behind this work are floundering.
The Free Software Foundation must concern itself with the following ahead of all else:
1. Disseminating free software philosophy
2. Developing, publishing, and promoting copyleft licenses
3. Overseeing the health of the free software movement
It is failing in each of these regards, and as its core mission fails, the foundation is investing its resources into distractions.
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7 tips to make the most of your next tech conference
I recently had the opportunity to visit two technical conferences in February 2023, both geared towards open source software. I was a presenter at Config Management Camp, in Ghent, Belgium, and an attendee at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium. This article aims to highlight my experiences at the conferences and to provide you with some tips on how to make the most of such an opportunity whenever it arises.
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‘Youtube-dl Hosting Ban Paves the Way to Privatized Censorship’ [Ed: Youtube-dl shows how states and corporations attack Free software wherever it is]
Last week, a German court ruled that Uberspace is liable for hosting the website of youtube-dl, an open-source tool that allows people to download content from YouTube. The owner of the hosting company warns that this "ridiculous" and "devastating" verdict opens the door to privatized censorship.
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Truckla Gets An Open Source Charging Buddy
More than three years have passed since Tesla announced its Cybertruck, and while not a one has been delivered, the first Tesla truck, Truckla, has kept on truckin’. [Simone Giertz] just posted an update of what Truckla has been up to since it was built.