FOSS, Education, Sharing, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 09, 2025

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • David Rosenthal ☛ Paul Evan Peters Award Lecture

    You can tell this is an extraordinary honor from the list of previous awardees, and the fact that it is the first time it has been awarded in successive years. Part of the award is the opportunity to make an extended presentation to open the meeting. Our talk was entitled Lessons From LOCKSS, and the abstract was:

    "Vicky and David will look back over their two decades with the LOCKSS Program. Vicky will focus on the Program's initial goals and how they evolved as the landscape of academic communication changed. David will focus on the Program's technology, how it evolved, and how this history reveals a set of seducive, persistent but impractical ideas."

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • WebKit ☛ Better typography with text-wrap pretty

      Support for text-wrap: pretty just shipped in Safari Technology Preview, bringing an unprecedented level of polish to typography on the web. Let’s take a look at what the WebKit version of pretty does — it’s probably a lot more than you expect. Then, we’ll compare it to balance to better understand when to use which text-wrap value.

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

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ WordPress is switching from three major releases a year to just one ⁄ Manual do Usuário

      WordPress is switching from three major releases a year to just one. This new cadence kicks in for 2025 — with WordPress 6.8, scheduled for next Tuesday (April 15th), set to be the only release for the year.

  • Education

    • FreeBSD ☛ Advocating for FreeBSD: A FOSDEM 2025 Trip Report

      The first weekend in February of 2025, I took the quick hop across the North Sea and visited Brussels for the third time to experience FOSDEM in a completely new way.

      FOSDEM is arguably the largest open source conference in the world. For one weekend at the end of January each year the ULB campus is opened up and nearly 10,000 developers, users, advocates and curious persons descend on the University campus.

    • Rlang ☛ Supporting rOpenSci Mentors with Practical Tools

      Mentoring is at the heart of what makes rOpenSci a community. Our members mentoring each other at different moments: when someone new joins and needs help navigating the community; when a member steps into a new role, like a reviewer for our software peer review, or project, like become the maintainer of a package, and could use some guidance; during everyday interactions, where people share tips and advice with each other; when someone shares an idea and gets constructive and friendly feedback or when a more experienced member helps others grow into leadership roles. Each of these moments is a chance to share what you know, build connections, and keep the community strong.

    • Rlang ☛ Shiny in Production 2024 Videos

      Considering a ticket for Shiny in Production 2025 but unsure what to expect? Maybe you attended in past years but missed out in 2024, or you simply want a refresher on last year’s highlights. Whatever the case, the video player below has you covered!

      Explore six in-depth talks, four lightning talks, and a bonus talk from Shiny in Production 2024… or binge-watch them all!

    • Pretalx ☛ JuliaCon Local Paris 2025 :: pretalx

      We invite you to submit proposals to give a talk at JuliaCon Local Paris 2025. It will be an in-person conference held in Paris, France, on October 2nd and 3rd 2025.

    • Rlang ☛ A Quick Guide to Getting the Most Out of ShinyConf 2025

      ShinyConf 2025 is almost here! From April 9 to 11, thousands of data scientists, developers, and Shiny fans will come together online to share ideas, build skills, and connect.

  • Funding

    • Alex Gaynor ☛ Putting a Price Tag on Open Source · Alex Gaynor

      I’ve previously written about common reasons that developing open source software is not funded. That post focused mostly on the individual circumstances and choices of open source maintainers and projects. In contrast, this post attempts to apply a more systemic lens to the same question. My conclusion is that by using some of the tools of antitrust economics we find a structural explanation for why so many open source maintainers fail to capture value from their projects (in the form of their work being unfunded).

  • Licensing / Legal

    • Rich Trouton ☛ rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia

      Now with macOS Sequoia, Apple has replaced rsync 2.6.9 with openrsync, an implementation of rsync which is not using any version of the GPL open source license. Instead, openrsync is licensed under the BSD family of licenses, specifically the ISC license. The ISC license is a permissive license, which means it places minimal restrictions on on how the licensed software can be used, modified and distributed, which means Apple decided it is able to comply with the terms of the license for openrsync where it decided it could not comply with the terms of GPLv3 license with regards to rsync 3.x.

    • Undeadly ☛ rsync replaced with openrsync on macOS Sequoia

      We (undeadly.org editors) had not noticed ourselves, but Will Backman wrote in about the news that some OpenBSD code -- openrsync -- had been made available to a wider audience, courtesy of Apple: [...]

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Derek Willis ☛ Political Email Extraction Leaderboard

        What kind of sicko signs up for political fundraising emails from just about every committee? Oh, right, that's me. I've collected thousands of political fundraising emails and challenged various LLMs to extract committee names from their disclaimers (like "Paid for by The Pennsylvania Democratic Party"). This extraction isn't straightforward - disclaimers vary in format and position, with some being simple and others continuing with additional text about contributions and treasurers.

      • [Old] Briefer.cloud ☛ A feel for the data

        That's exactly why you should plot your data before doing anything else. Not for decoration. For understanding. You'll spot weird outliers, duplicated trends, clumps of activity, empty gaps—things you'd never notice in raw numbers.

        In this post, we'll look at the best plots for getting a feel for your data and what to look for in each one.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Jeff Geerling ☛ BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of

      The scope showed a PPS output (Pulse Per Second) demonstrating a pulse sync of +/- 10 ns between GPS and the TV signal output—which so happens to be BPS, an experimental timing standard that may be incorporated into the ATSC 3.0 rollout in the US (there are currently about 1,700 TV stations that could be upgraded).