news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Rajeesh K Nambiar: Results of RIT-KaChaTaThaPa-Sayahna open font competition 2025
In first of a kind movement to develop free and open source fonts for traditional Malayalam scripts, the Rachana Institute of Technology, KaChaTaThaPa Foundation and Sayahna Foundation had previously announced font design competition in May 2024.
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Libre Arts ☛ LibreArts Weekly recap — 13 April 2025
Week highlights: new releases of Pinta and Elektroid, FreeCAD Project Association announces new grants.
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Otto Kekäläinen: Going Full-Time as an Open Source Developer
After careful consideration, I’ve decided to embark on a new chapter in my professional journey. I’ve left my position at proprietary trap AWS to dedicate at least the next six months to developing open source software and strengthening digital ecosystems. My focus will be on contributing to GNU/Linux distributions (primarily Debian) and other critical infrastructure components that our modern society depends on, but which may not receive adequate attention or resources.
The Evolution of Open Source
Open source won. Over the 25+ years I’ve been involved in the open source movement, I’ve witnessed its remarkable evolution. Today, GNU/Linux powers billions of devices — from tiny embedded systems and Android smartphones to massive cloud datacenters and even space stations. Examine any modern large-scale digital system, and you’ll discover it’s built upon thousands of open source projects.
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Mitchell Baker: The Ethos of Open Source [Ed: "The open source movement was about more than convenience and avoiding payment", says the woman that Google paid tens of millions of dollars to kill Mozilla]
A couple of months ago I started posting about how I want to build a better world through technology and how I’ll be doing that outside of Mozilla going forward. The original post has many references to “open” and “open source.” It’s easy to think that we all understand open source and we just need to apply it to new settings. I feel differently: we need to shape our collective understanding of the ethos of open source.
Open source has become mainstream as a part of the software development process. We can rightly say that the open source movement “won.” However, this isn’t enough for the future.
The open source movement was about more than convenience and avoiding payment.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Security Week ☛ Chrome 135, Firefox 137 Updates Patch Severe Vulnerabilities
While Google has not shared specific details on either of the flaws, both could likely be exploited by attackers with knowledge of memory allocation patterns to execute arbitrary code, typically by convincing a user to visit a crafted webpage.
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Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)
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Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Resisting the urge to rewrite the website
Do you have your own website or blog? Or maybe you have considered starting one but went down the rabbit whole of building your own tooling and giving up before publishing?
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Harry Cresswell ☛ Subscribe to RSS feeds by topic
With this in mind, I’ve listed feeds for each topic I write about over on my feeds page. So you now have the option of only subscribing to the topics that interest you. No more clogging your RSS reader with the stuff I write that doesn’t interest you.
Hugo generates RSS feeds for each taxonomy automatically, so getting this to work is much easier than you might think.
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Dan Q ☛ The call is coming from inside the house
But for a while now it had felt like my reasons for staying were entirely about my love for (a) my team, a full half of whom got laid off at the same time as me anyway, and (b) WordPress and the open source space it represents, which of course Automattic’s been distancing itself from.
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Education
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[Repeat] Rlang ☛ Assessing rating scale dimensionality through bifactor model-based indices in R workshop
Description: In this workshop, we will explore how to determine when it is justifiable to interpret behavior rating scale scores from (1) an overall general factor, (2) group factors (i.e., subscales), or (3) a combination of both through an array of model-based statistical indices derived from bifactor latent measurement models (e.g., omega hierarchical, relative parameter bias, percent uncontaminated correlations). The focus will be on practical demonstration and practice deriving and interpreting such indices in R using the lavaan and BifactorIndicesCalculator packages.
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Olimex ☛ TuxCon 2025 The Open Source Hardware and Software conference in Plovdiv is on May 10-11th
Do not miss this event, it’s one per year and ran by volunteers, so participation if free!
This year we will have guest lector from SeedStudio – Violet Su.
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