Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 07, 2024

• Venture Beat ☛ New Apache Cassandra 5.0 gives open source NoSQL database a scalability and performance boost

  Apache Cassandra 5.0 debuts bringing new index, vector and performance gains to the distributed open source database.

• Étienne Pflieger ☛ Various updates to my web authoring and publishing tools

  I just released several updates to the little softwares I created. I built them for my own usage, but I’d be curious to know if another one tried them or even use them.

  Time flies and habbits change. When I began to write code, it was mostly in PHP. Later I switched to ugly shell scripts and more robust python scripts or apps. For the last eight years I gradually, but surelly move to ruby for everything. So don’t be surprised if more and more of my tools are in ruby.

  All the following projects are hosted on my own git server.

• Unicorn Media ☛ MastoGizmos: 11 Free Search Tools for Exploring Mastodon

  If you have to do research online you might want to bookmark this set of online tools that make exploring Mastodon's federated world easy.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ Trusting Open-Source

    The point of Open-Source isn’t and has never been “source available”. That’s just a prerequisite and a nice to have. The purpose has always been giving users the freedom to use for whatever purpose, or to fork the software, which in turn translates to lower development costs for the software makers. Software makers have to give up control, the bargain they have to make to receive contributions. This obviously wouldn’t be a good business model, unless you treat the software as a gift to the world, and as a commoditized complement of other products or services. Beware of companies selling support for Open-Source software, as this creates the perverse incentive to keep the software difficult to use and insecure.

    There are multiple issues with “source available” licensing.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ V Latin American LibreOffice Congress – A meeting point for the entire Latin American community

    Our community in the region writes: After successful previous events in Paraguay, Brazil and Mexico, the largest event of the LibreOffice project in Latin America arrives in Uruguay.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ Proprietary Environments are a Trap

    There is one dimension that this misses – learning the latest and greatest can also be a losing bet. What young programmers should focus on is standards. And de facto standards happen with age, solutions becoming more entrenched and better as time passes, much like good wine.

  • The New Leaf Journal ☛ On Full Archive RSS and ATOM Feeds

    If you are running your website (or considering doing so in the future), I strongly encourage you to not only offer feeds but also make sure that your readers know what they are and how they can be used. Beyond that, I think different feed configurations are appropriate for different sites. I agree entirely with Yukinu in strongly favoring full text feeds, but if one decides for whatever reason that full text feeds are unacceptable as a default option (granting that it is usually not difficult for an end-user to turn a partial feed into a full text feed), partial feeds are better than no feeds at all. As for full archive feeds, I do not think they are the best choice in all cases, but for sites that do not have too many articles or that are likely to have feed subscribers who may expect full archive feeds (or at least not be alarmed by a sudden dump of unread articles), full archive feeds may be the right choice. If you, like me, do not offer full archive feeds – I would still recommend considering the case for said feeds because the benefits of full archive feeds can inform site design decisions for sites such as mine that do not offer them.

  • CycloneDX ☛ CycloneDX: The International Standard for Bill of Materials (ECMA-424)

    OWASP CycloneDX is a full-stack Bill of Materials (BOM) standard that provides advanced supply chain capabilities for cyber risk reduction. The specification supports: [...]