Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 01, 2025

• Open Source For U ☛ Using Container Structure Tests for Container Acceptance Testing

  Carrying out container acceptance testing early saves precious time, money and the clown service provider’s reputation, and avoids hard-to-fix infra downtimes. Container Structure Tests have been designed for this purpose.

• Unicorn Media ☛ The FOSS Force Almost Open Tech News Quiz (2/28/25)

  How well did you pay attention to tech news this week? Here's your chance to check in and check yourself out. This week there are 10 questions. How will you score?

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ Adding curl release candidates

    Decades ago we sometimes did release candidates, but we stopped. We have instead shipped daily snapshots, which is basically what a release would look like, packaged every day and made available. In theory this should remove the need and use of release candidates as people can always just get the latest snapshots, try those out and report problems back to us.

    We are also acutely aware of the fact that only releases get tested properly.

  • Joey Hess ☛ Joey Hess: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

    So there are only 2 web browser engines, and it seems likely there will soon only be 1, and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers. Maybe eventually someone will succeed and there will be 2 again. Best case. What a situation.

    So throw out all the web standards. Make a browser that just runs WASM blobs, and gives them a surface to use, sorta like Wayland does. It has tabs, and a throbber, and urls, but no HTML, no javascript, no CSS. Just HTTP of WASM blobs.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ Creating Reusable CVs in LibreOffice Writer – A recent session in Nepal

    The Nepalese community mentored CS50 students in Nepal create their very first resume for securing internships! Our Nepalese community writes… LibreOffice is a powerful open source office suite for many users worldwide. One of the major components is the word processing software, LibreOffice Writer, which is a highly effective tool for all levels of users.

• Education

  • RIPE ☛ Local Hosts for RIPE NCC Training Courses

    With this in mind, a big part of what makes it possible for us to carry out as many in-person training courses as we do is the support we receive from local hosts - organisations from across our service region who provide venues for training events and help us engage much more effectively with members and local communities. It’s thanks to their help that we’re able to offer such a variety of in-person courses without exceeding our training budget.

  • Rlang ☛ Better documentation for R-universe!

    Thanks to funding by Google Season of Docs, we were able to start a new comprehensive documentation project for all users and developers of R-universe. We established a central place where we collect the various sources of information and describe examples and use cases, using popular authoring tools to support collective maintenance.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Wired ☛ DOGE's [sic] Misplaced War on Software Licenses

    In other cases, suppliers may require agencies to buy a bundle of tools to get access to one they really need, according to Ryan Triplette, executive director of the Coalition for Fair Software Licensing, an advocacy group of software developers and private sector purchasers fighting what they view as restrictive terms.