Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 05, 2025

• Linux Foundation

  • EBU, Linux Foundation and NABA make Dynamic Media Facilities real with the open source MXL project

    Every technological shift needs foundations to be put in place first. The EBU, together with the Linux Foundation and the North American Broadcasting Association (NABA) are doing that now with the creation of the Media eXchange Layer (MXL), a code package that standardises how media processing functions running in virtualized environments can share and exchange data with each other.

  • Applications

    • Linux Foundation releases Valkey 8.1

      This latest release brings a raft of new capabilities to the product, including better performance and reduced latency. It also includes early versions of three new features that will be released later this year.

• Events

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PGConf.NYC 2025 - Call For Presentations (CFP) and Sponsors!

    PGConf NYC 2025 is back Sept 29 - Oct 1, 2025! Join us in the heart of New York City to connect with engineers, contributors, and decision-makers from across the PostgreSQL ecosystem.

    Have a PostgreSQL victory or challenge to share? The call for papers is open until May 25, 2025!

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Chris Wellons ☛ Lessons learned from my first dive into WebAssembly

    WASM is a specification defining an abstract stack machine with a Harvard architecture, and related formats. There are just four types, i32, i64, f32, and f64. It also has “linear” octet-addressable memory starting at zero, with no alignment restrictions on loads and stores. Address zero is a valid, writable address, which resurfaces some, old school, high level language challenges regarding null pointers. There are 32-bit and 64-bit flavors, though the latter remains experimental. That suits me: I appreciate smaller pointers on 64-bit hosts, and I wish I could opt into more often (e.g. x32).

• Education

  • RIPE ☛ Hands-On the Network: Our Experience with RouterLab

    In the winter semester of 2024, students of Saarland University were able to attend Router Lab - a new course organised by the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPI-INF) that was taught by Taha Albakour, Tiago Heinrich, Q Misell and Sina Rostami, and supervised by Tobias Fiebig.

    Router Lab was a block course that aimed at bringing students closer to the practical side of the concepts they learned in theoretical network courses. Over a period of two weeks, they would learn how set up their own Autonomous System on real hardware using real Internet resources.

  • Maclean's ☛ Schools vs. Screens

    According to Adam, the previous school year had been a gong show. Students arrived every morning with phones out and AirPods in, bleary-eyed from late nights scrolling. They texted during the national anthem and played mobile games under their desks. They shared pictures and videos of each other, of teachers and of after-school fights. They coordinated mid-period vape breaks in group chats. One student went to the bathroom and returned with an Uber Eats delivery. Any time Adam wrote on the board, he’d turn back around to find students glued to their glowing screens. Engagement had plummeted, grades were declining and, because Adam was constantly policing students’ phone use, his bond with them was fraying. “These kids want to do well, but they’re so lost,” says Adam. (I changed his name because he feared retribution from his administration for speaking to me.)

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ datamash @ Savannah: GNU Datamash 1.9 released

    This is to announce datamash-1.9, a stable release.

    Home page: https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash

    GNU Datamash is a command-line program which performs basic numeric, textual and statistical operations on input textual data files. It is designed to be portable and reliable, and aid researchers to easily automate analysis pipelines, without writing code or even short scripts. It is very friendly to GNU Bash and GNU Make pipelines. There have been 52 commits by 5 people in the 141 weeks since 1.8.

• Standards/Consortia

  • APNIC ☛ 'BGP Flowspec doesn't suck. We're just using it wrong'

    Those who have followed me for a while may be aware I am a big proponent of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Flowspec. I’ve published a short book, Day One: Deploying BGP Flowspec, detailing how to configure it on Juniper devices. At the recent APRICOT 2025, I delivered a presentation entitled ‘BGP Flowspec doesn’t suck. We’re just using it wrong‘. I truly believe that BGP Flowspec can be a big help to operators in blocking these attacks. Like most things in IT, BGP Flowspec does not come without drawbacks and must be implemented properly. In this post, I’ll give a refresher on BGP Flowspec and why I believe more operators should test and adopt the technology.