Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 06, 2025

• Libre Arts ☛ [librearts] Weekly recap — 2 February 2025

  Week highlights: new releases of Scribus and Krita, a beta release of Pinta.

• Sean Conner ☛ And now some metacommentary on the artisanal code I just wrote

  When I wrote the two programs to retrieve output from syslog from my public server, the thing I did not do use was any AI program (aka Cat) to help with the design nor the code. It was a simple problem with a straightforward solution and it's sad to think that more and more programmers are reaching for Cat for even simple programs.

• Events

  • LWN ☛ FOSDEM keynote causes concerns

    This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) begins on February 1 in Brussels. The event is widely regarded as one of the most important open-source conferences. One of the reasons that FOSDEM is held in high esteem by the community is its non-commercial nature. It does accept sponsors, but sponsorships come with few perks and no "pay-for-play" speaking slots. Thus, the scheduling of a keynote by Jack Dorsey⁠—⁠primarily known for his role in co-founding Twitter, and currently CEO and chairman of FOSDEM sponsor Block, Inc.⁠—⁠raised eyebrows and led to plans for a protest. The keynote has since been removed from the schedule, but there are still a number of lingering questions.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Geoffrey Copin ☛ Build your own SQLite, Part 4: reading tables metadata

    As we saw in the opening post, SQLite stores metadata about tables in a special "schema table" starting on page 1. We've been reading records from this table to list the tables in the current database, but before we can start evaluating SQL queries against user-defined tables, we need to extract more information from the schema table.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Simon Willison ☛ A selfish personal argument for releasing code as Open Source

    I’m the guest for the most recent episode of the Real Python podcast with Christopher Bailey, talking about Using LLMs for Python Development. We covered a lot of other topics as well—most notably my relationship with Open Source development over the years.

    At 5m32s I presented what I think is the best version yet of my selfish personal argument for why it makes sense to default to releasing code as Open Source: [...]

• Standards/Consortia

  • Jussi Pakkanen ☛ The trials and tribulations of supporting CJK text in PDF

    In the past I may have spoken critically on Truetype fonts and their usage in PDF files. Recently I have come to the conclusion that it may have been too harsh and that Truetype fonts are actually somewhat nice. Why? Because I have had to add support for CFF fonts to CapyPDF. This is a font format that comes from Adobe. It encodes textual PostScript drawing operations into binary bytecode. Wikipedia does not give dates, but it seems to have been developed in the late 80s - early 90s. The name CFF part is an abbeviation for "complicated font format".