Free Software Funding, Education, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 14, 2024

• Funding

  • Document Foundation ☛ Bring back Free Software funding: Give your feedback to the European Commission

    Free Software (like LibreOffice) is about far more than just zero-cost. It’s about the freedom to use, share and modify the software that we all rely on. Our friends over at the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) write: The European Commission has cut important funds for Free Software.

  • LWN ☛ Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to invest in Samba improvements

    Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has agreed to invest €688,800 to improve the security, stability, and functionality of Samba. The investment will take place over three years and will be managed by SerNet, a company that employs several Samba core developers and offers support for Samba. According to its announcement, work has already begun and is expected to complete in 2026:

    The project's focus is on areas like transparent failover, SMB3 UNIX extensions, and modern security protocols such as SMB over QUIC. These improvements are designed to ensure that Samba remains a robust and secure solution for organizations that rely on a sovereign IT infrastructure that is as independent as possible of proprietary software regimes, but including optimal interoperability.

• Education

  • Document Foundation ☛ Join the LibreOffice Development Workshop at our upcoming conference!

    Hossein Nourikhah, our Developer Community Architect, writes: Learn LibreOffice development and boost your software skills including bug management, coding, version management using Git, code review using Gerrit and much more!

  • History of UNIX ☛ Unix history

    To say that the history of Unix is long and convoluted would be a huge understatement. It started its life as a gaming OS dressed as a typesetting one in a forgotten alley in a research center but soon became the most important idea in modern computing history. No other OS had such a broad impact on how we work with computers. And despite that, it’s mostly a forgotten name. It lives in its ideas and licenses, but very rarely do we think about running Unix.

  • [Old] BSDly ☛ That grumpy BSD guy: ed(1) mastery is a must for a real Unix person

    Now Michael Lucas has written a book to guide the as yet uninitiated to the fundamentals of the original Unix text editor. It is worth keeping in mind that much of Unix and its original standard text editor written back when the standard output and default user interface was more likely than not a printing terminal.

  • Open Data

    • Victor Kropp ☛ Golf and Maps

      However, there was the other thing I also learned that day: the whole golf course terminology (par, handicap, etc.), which I can now put in good use to map some nearby golf courses on OpenStreetMap. For example, this one in Puchheim, which I occasionally run or ride nearby.

  • Content Management Systems (CMS)

    • WordPress ☛ Tour the New Learn WordPress

      The reimagined Learn WordPress experience launched just over a month ago. It introduces Learning Pathways, a new approach to educational content from the Training team.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Ignacio Brasca ☛ InfinityDB: A theorical ideal about a distributed storage

    Despite all our technological advances, we still rely heavily on centralized databases. These are large storage systems protected by complex security measures. But they’re still vulnerable to attacks that can expose huge amounts of information all at once. It struck me that maybe our approach to storing data is flawed. We tend to believe that centralizing data means better control and security, but perhaps that’s not the case.

    What if we took inspiration from the resilience of markets and natural systems?

    Instead of putting all our data in one place, what if we spread it across a network of independent agents? Each agent would operate on its own but still be part of a larger system.

  • Security Week ☛ GitLab Updates Resolve Critical Pipeline Execution Vulnerability

    Tracked as CVE-2024-6678 (CVSS score of 9.9), the critical flaw could allow “an attacker to trigger a pipeline as an arbitrary user under certain circumstances,” GitLab notes in its advisory.