Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 08, 2025

• PowerDNS ☛ PowerDNS Recursor Security Advisory 2025-01

  Today we have released PowerDNS Recursor 5.2.1.

  This release fixes PowerDNS Security Advisory 2025-01: A crafted zone can lead to an illegal memory access in the Recursor. This advisory is also published here.

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Emacs Startup Time Doesn’t Matter

  Here’s one hot take from me - none of this really matters. Emacs startup time doesn’t matter.1 Why so? Because of how people normally use Emacs, compared to some other editors: [...]

• LibreNews ☛ Thunderbird is launching its own mail provider

  If you are keen on managing your email locally, you will have certainly used Thunderbird at some point. Thunderbird is a pretty amazing, full-featured mail and calendar client by Mozilla that is available free and open source for every major desktop operating system.

• Events

  • Bootlin ☛ Back from Netdev 0x19

    Around mid-March, Bootlin engineers Köry Maincent and Romain Gantois had the chance to attend edition 0x19 of the Netdev conference, where developers from the Linux kernel networking community assemble for four days of technical presentations and discussions.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ Writing C for curl

    It is a somewhat common question to me: how do we write C in curl to make it safe and secure for billions of installations? Some precautions we take and decisions we make. There is no silver bullet, just guidelines. As I think you can see for yourself below they are also neither strange nor surprising.

    The ‘c’ in curl does not and never did stand for the C programming language, it stands for client.

• Licensing / Legal

  • [Old] GNU ☛ BYTE Interview with Richard Stallman - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

    BYTE: I suppose it's like buying a car. You're not forced to go back to the original manufacturer for support or continued maintenance.

    Stallman: Or buying a house—what would it be like if the only person who could ever fix problems with your house was the contractor who built it originally? That is the kind of imposition that's involved in proprietary software. People tell me about a problem that happens in Unix. Because manufacturers sell improved versions of Unix, they tend to collect fixes and not give them out except in binaries. The result is that the bugs don't really get fixed.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Court House News ☛ Ex-official says he was forced out of FDA after trying to protect vaccine safety data from RFK Jr.

      Shortly before he was forced to resign, the nation’s top vaccine regulator says he refused to grant Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s team unrestricted access to a tightly held vaccine safety database, fearing that the information might be manipulated or even deleted.