Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 15, 2023

• It's FOSS ☛ FOSS Weekly #23.50: BSOD on Linux, Mint 21.3 Beta, Xonsh Shell and More

  Mint 21.3 beta is here with the final release coming around Christmas. That's the highlight of this edition.

• Medevel ☛ 25 Free and Open-source Data Backup Solutions for Windows, Linux, and macOS

  A backup software is a tool or program designed to create copies of important data and store them in a secure location. It helps protect against data loss caused by various factors such as hardware failure, system crashes, accidental deletion, malware attacks, or natural disasters.

• Linux Links ☛ gopeed – modern download manager

  Gopeed is billed as a modern download manager. It supports HTTP, BitTorrent and Magnet protocol download. It's written in Dart and Go.

• 22 Best Free Open Source Cloud File Sharing Platforms

  Cloud file sharing is the process of exchanging files between different user accounts via cloud-based file-sharing platforms.

• Press Gazette ☛ Enterprise WordPress uncovered: 9 out of 10 users plan to keep open-source CMS

  Survey reveals experiences of more than 100 major users of WordPress.

• Education

  • Rlang ☛ Introduction of R activities in Japan

    I would like to introduce the task force of Open-Source Software (OSS) in Data Science Expert Committee, Drug Evaluation Committee of Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (JPMA), which is one of the R activities in Japan.

    This task force has started its activities since 2022 and currently consists of 10 members from pharmaceutical companies. The purpose of this task force is to investigate the use of OSS which is being more actively used in the pharmaceutical industry, especially for the analysis of clinical trial data and work related to regulatory submission, and to compile and publish a report on the expected benefits and issues when OSS is used.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • [Old] Fedor Indutny ☛ Structure of FTS5 Index in SQLite

    Recently Signal has open-sourced a SQLite extension that provides better support for non-latin languages (Chinese, Japanese, etc) in the Full-Text Search (FTS) virtual table. I was one of the engineers who worked on this extension and in the course of this endeavor I got to learn about the structure of the SQLite's FTS implementation. The existing documentation focuses mostly on API and its use patterns, and even though it covers some of the internal storage format, I found it a bit confusing. Thus this article was born. Not as alternative documentation for FTS5, but as a complement for developers who want to dive in past the officially documented bits.

  • Anton Zhiyanov ☛ SQL Polyglot

    Have you ever struggled to find out if a database supports a particular SQL syntax? Or maybe you wanted to compare two DB engines in terms of their support for certain SQL features?

    If so, you might find the SQL Polyglot — an online tool I've built — useful. Write a SQL query and see it executed in multiple DBMSs without leaving your browser: [...]