Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 26, 2025

• Unicorn Media ☛ FOSS Force Mostly Open Tech News Quiz – April 25, 2025

  Did you have time to keep up with the news this week? Here's your chance to brag… or not. This week there are 11 questions. Good luck!

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • MacStories Inc ☛ Is Electron Really That Bad?

    I think Theo did a great job contextualizing the history of Electron and how we got to this point where the majority of desktop apps are built with it. There are two sections of the video that stood out to me and I want to highlight here. First, this observation – which I strongly agree with – regarding the desktop apps we ended up having thanks to Electron and why we often consider them “buggy”: [...]

  • [Old] Medium ☛ Introduction to Electron for Building Desktop Apps with JavaScript | by Sergio Gonzalez | Medium

    Electron is a framework that allows developers to create native desktop applications using web technologies. It combines the Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js runtime, enabling applications to run on Windows, macOS, and Linux with a single codebase. Electron is used by many popular applications, including Visual Studio Code, Slack, and Discord.

  • Dedoimedo ☛ DuckDuckGo App Tracking Protection review

    DuckDuckGo's browser offers some relief when it comes to online probing and busybodying by companies big and small alike. It comes with a built-in mechanism called App Tracking Protection (ATP), which, if turned on, will then funnel app traffic through its own filters, and try to stop and block various trackers embedded in these apps. This ought to minimize the amount of nonsense assailing your device. There's a bigger philosophical question of how you could perhaps eliminate the problem from the start, but that's a slightly separate topic. Now, let's take a look at this functionality, and see how it works.

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Localization (L10N): L10n report: April 2025 Edition

      Please note some of the information provided in this report may be subject to change as we are sometimes sharing information about projects that are still in early stages and are not final yet. 

    • Ten Four Fox ☛ Cameron Kaiser: A PowerBook G4 reporting the news

      The San Francisco Chronicle had an article today on the retirement of KCBS political reporter Doug Sovern.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Simon Willison ☛ I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice and received the GPLv3 license

    So they wrote to the address (after hunting down the necessary pieces for a self-addressed envelope from the USA back to the UK) and five weeks later received a copy.

    (The copy was the GPLv3, but since they didn't actually specify GPLv2 in their request I don't think that's particularly notable.)

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data or Data Collection

    • Julia Programming Language ☛ Reproduce Scientific Research with JuliaHub’s Time Capsule

      The ability to verify the results of data that has been collected or generated during the course of any drug trial or simulation is paramount to the validity of the study. Often, as biostatistics and pharmaceutical teams become even more reliant on digital tools to record and draw insights from these studies, creating a “digital footprint” of the steps and materials that went into each one becomes more and more important. This is where JuliaHub comes in. The JuliaHub platform was specifically designed for scientific research teams to get access to high performance computing power and provide pharmacology teams a verifiable “single source of truth” for all of the digital activities. That is why our reproducibility feature, called “Time Capsule” has become a cornerstone to how pharmaceutical development research teams reproduce and verify work with their compliance departments.

    • Mozilla ☛ Data@Mozilla: Comparing data-stewardship at Mozilla with Lauren Maffeo’s book “Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up”

      In Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up, author Lauren Maffeo presents data stewardship as a pivotal role in data governance that is focused on maintaining data quality, consistency, and usability. Data stewards, in her view, are operational experts who ensure that data is of the highest quality, aligns with organizational standards, and supports business objectives.

      At Mozilla, rather than taking such a broad role in data governance, a data steward’s responsibilities are deeply intertwined with the organization’s commitment to user privacy and ethical data practices. This approach reflects Mozilla’s mission to promote an open and accessible internet while safeguarding user trust.