Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 26, 2024

• YottaDB ☛ Graphical Monitoring of Statistics Shared by Processes

  Quick Start Monitor the shared database statistics of your existing applications in minutes, starting right now. Ensure that node.js is installed. Use the ydbinstall script to install the YottaDB GUI. (This also installs the YottaDB web server.)

• Licensing / Legal

  • Chad Whitacre ☛ Questioning “The Value of Open Source Software”

    I do not accept the primary result of the “Value of Open Source Software” working paper, that companies would spend 3.5 times more on software if OSS didn’t exist. Based on my reading, companies would spend almost nothing more if OSS didn’t exist. This challenges my own estimates as well. I look forward to wrestling with the implications in a future post.

• BSD

  • Undeadly ☛ KMS for Apple silicon machines

    Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) committed support for Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS) on Apple silicon (arm64) machines: [...]

  • Vermaden ☛ Tiny UPS for Tiny NAS

    I am a big fan of building things by yourself. That also includes my NAS instead of using something prebuilt such as some Synology or QNAP NAS box. Although I must say that these small NAS devices with 2.5 disks slots like Synology DS416SLIM or QNAP TS-453S PRO look really interesting … if I could only put FreeBSD there. In the past these were my attempts at creating my low power NAS systems.

  • FreeBSD ☛ “What’s a Permissive License – and Why Should I Care?”

    Open source is commonly accepted to be a term that describes a computer program with a licensing arrangement that does not restrict modification or usage. Open source technology is commonly positioned against closed source, or proprietary, technology, which is technology that is distributed under a licensing arrangement that restricts usage and/or modification in its totality. For example, if you have Windows or MacOS, you’re using closed source technology for your operating system. Under a closed-source licensing arrangement, you have to pay for a license to use your technology. In addition, you cannot edit the structure, or code, of your operating system, or install your operating system on another computer outside of the terms dictated by your license. With open source technology, you can do both. You are free to edit the source code of your piece of technology, and you are free to redistribute the software as you see fit. Within the world of open source technology, there are multiple varieties of open source licensing agreements that dictate how a program may be used or modified. While software licensing is the subject of never-ending debate, in this blog, we’ll explain the more common examples of software licensing while pointing out their differences

  • Education

    • BSDCan ☛ BSDCan 2024: Call for papers

      12 February 2024: Proposal submissions ends

  Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Mitigating LibreOffice 7 performance issues on MacOS

    Raster means its not hardware accelerated at all. No wonder my 10,000+ line spreadsheets chugged when scrolling.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Tabs give me superpowers

    One of the most powerful habits I've cultivated is to have a group of daily tabs that I open in a new browser every morning. The meat of this tab group is websites I want to check in with every day, either because they don't have RSS feeds, or because I want to make sure I never miss an update.

    This tab-group habit started before RSS was widespread, when most of the websites I wanted to check in on every day didn't have feeds yet, and for many years, this group was just a set of daily reads. But over the years, I started throwing things in the tab-group that I needed to stay on top of.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Ignite Realtime ☛ Creating the XMPP Network Graph

    There’s much to say about what I like about XMPP, but let me focus on one thing in this text: decentralisation. Not only the protocol, but the entire XMPP ecosystem - with all its different server and client implementations - is based on the principle of federation. This allows anyone to set up their own solution for instant messaging, voice and/or video conferencing, data sharing, and much, much more. All of this is done without creating a dependency on any central entity or organisation. At the same time, you’ve created a solution that allows you to communicate with others that are not part of your own domain.