Free, Libre, and Open Source Software: Mozilla Lacks Direction, More FOSS Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 08, 2024

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • Bryan Lunduke ☛ Firefox Maker Rebrands as "Global Crew of Activists"

      Mozilla, facing the loss of 80% of their income and mass layoffs, pays for expensive rebranding.

    • Firefox Nightly: Learning and Improving Every Day – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 173

    • Mozilla ☛ Data@Mozilla: How do we preserve the integrity of business metrics while safeguarding our users privacy choice? [Ed: Mozilla spies on users]

      Abstract. Respecting our user’s privacy choices is at the top of our priorities and it also involves the deletion of their data from our Data Warehouse (DHW) when they request us to do so. For Analytics Engineering, this deletion presents the challenge to maintain business metrics reliable and stable along with the evolution of business analyses. This blog describes our approach to break through this challenge. Reading time: ~5 minutes.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Marc Brooker ☛ DSQL Vignette: Wait! Isn't That Impossible?

    In today’s post, I’m going to look at how Aurora DSQL is designed for availability, and how we work within the constraints of the laws of physics. If you’d like to learn more about the product first, check out the official documentation, which is always a great place to go for the latest information on Aurora DSQL, and how to fit it into your architecture.

    In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that Aurora DSQL is designed to remain available, durable, and strongly consistent even in the face of infrastructure failures and network partitions. In this post, we’re going to dive a little deeper into DSQL’s architecture, focussing on multi-region active-active. Aurora DSQL is designed both for single-region applications (looking for a fast, serverless, scalable, relational database), and multi-region active-active applications (looking for all those things, plus multi-region, synchronous replication, and the ability to support active-active applications).

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice at LinuxDays 2024 in Prague

    Our Czech community provides insights from the LinuxDays 2024 conference, which took place over the weekend of 12 – 13 October in Prague [...]

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • James Stanley ☛ James Stanley - Timeline of Discovery

    It turned out not to be exactly what I wanted, because it makes a page that is "too interactive", and I couldn't work out how to input dates before 0 AD, so I got Cursor to write me a custom static-site generator instead.

    I found that Cursor picked up the input format very well, and sometimes just typing the year was enough for it to guess both the discovery I was going to write and the associated Wikipedia link! Which I then just press tab to insert.

• Education

  • [Repeat] Arduino ☛ Simplifying IoT for smarter manufacturing: Join the chat with Arduino, AWS, and Atlas Machine [Ed: "webinar"? Ads?]

    This session is a unique opportunity to hear from experts at Arduino, AWS, and Atlas Machine as they dive into how industrial IoT is transforming manufacturing operations. Whether you’re just starting to explore IoT or looking for ways to optimize your existing systems, this webinar is for you.

  • Rlang ☛ A Book Dash for the R Development Guide

    This last month of 2024 started with a lot of updates to the R Development (Dev) Guide. It has been almost 4 years since the discussions about having such a guide started during useR! 2020. The guide has come a long way since then, and there some exciting updates to it.

    In the first week of December 2024, Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal visited Heather Turner at the University of Warwick, UK. We spent the week co-working on the R Dev Guide and managed to close quite a few old issues 🎉

  • Archipylago ☛ Hallway track is where the magic happens

    The most visible and recognizable part of meetups are talks. That's what's advertised to get people to join the events and a good chunk of time and attention during the event is given to them. But there's more to meetups than just talks.

    Don't get me wrong: the talks are an integral part of developer events and that's where we learn about new things and get inspired by what others have built and learned. If you haven't been to a lot of tech events, you may have missed the sometimes bit hidden part of them that makes them so beloved. We call it the "hallway track".

    Hallway track is what happens outside the official program - in the hallways outside of the "track rooms" where the scheduled talks occur. In our meetups, that means the mingling before the talks start, between the talks, after the talks at the venue and in the post-meetup discussions at the pub.

    I highly recommend everyone to take part in those discussions to meet new people.

    Here are a couple of things that can help.

• FSF

  • FSF ☛ FSF Blogs: FSD meeting recap 2024 12 06

    Check out the important work our volunteers accomplished at today's Free Software Directory (FSD) IRC meeting.