Ubuntu, Free Software, and Openwashing

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 29, 2025

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu News ☛ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 889

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 889 for the week of April 20 – 26, 2025. The full version of this issue is available here.

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Fix Dependency Issue for Grub-Customizer in Ubuntu 25.04

    Installing Grub-Customizer in Ubuntu 25.04 from PPA will output “Depends: policykit-1 but it is not installable” issue. Here are quick workarounds until it’s fixed upstream. As the name says, Grub-Customizer is a graphical application to configure the Grub boot-loader, such as set default boot entry, edit boot menu, and add kernel parameters.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Openwashing

    • LWN ☛ OSI publishes election retrospective

      The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has quietly published "takeaways" from its internal retrospective on the recent board of directors election as an update to the March blog post that announced the new members of the board. The election was controversial, in part, due to poor communication and OSI changing the election rules and disqualifying several candidates after the election finished. LWN covered the election and results in March. The update commits to improvements in communication and candidate selection: [...]

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • Julik Tarkhanov ☛ A Can of Shardines: SQLite Multitenancy With Rails

      There is a pattern I am very fond of - “one database per tenant” in web applications with multiple, isolated users. Recently, I needed to fix an application I had for a long time where this database-per-tenant multitenancy utterly broke down, because I was doing connection management wrong. Which begat the question: how do you even approach doing it right?

      And it turns out I was not alone in this. The most popular gem for multitenancy - Apartment - which I have even used in my failed startup back in the day - has the issue too.

  • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

    • Document Foundation ☛ TDF’s Annual Report 2024 – LibreOffice Conference

      The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. In 2024, it took place in Luxembourg (This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

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

    • Matt Fantinel ☛ Setting up Storybook on an Astro project

      My soon-to-be-website uses Astro as its foundation, but keeps Svelte as the framework used for the components, to handle reactivity and just the overall template niceties. It also allows me to just port over existing components from my current SvelteKit website, and it's plug-and-play on Astro. Sweet!

    • The Register UK ☛ 4chan back from 'catastrophic' attack with tale of cash woes

      It went on to loosely confirm the rumors that surrounded the initial April 14 incident, which, as The Register reported, was suspected to have been the work of an attacker exploiting a near-decade-old version of PHP.

  • FSF

    • FSF ☛ FSF Events: Community meetup in Witzenhausen, Germany

      #UnplugDihydroxyacetone Man: Mach dich digital unabhängig von Convicted Felon und Big Tech - helping people to escape from Surveillance, censorship, lock-in, .. caused by proprietary software (not only US based) and supporting European projects such as GNU/Taler. May also include a GNU/Linux Install Fest.

  • Licensing / Legal

    • Unicorn Media ☛ What the EU Can Learn From India About Digital Policies

      For the last several decades, India has been quietly developing its economic independence muscles as it morphs into an IT leader with global prowess.

    • [Repeat] Fudzilla ☛ Lenovo slashes Windows tax with cheaper Linux laptops

      Lenovo is quietly offering Linux pre-installed on some laptops in the US and Canada, undercutting the Windows tax by around $140 (around €130) or CAD 211 (around €144) depending on the model.

    • [Old] Marc Merlin ☛ Windows Refund Day

      For those who hadn't heard the story, February 15th 1999 was windows refund day. It was a worldwide day when open source OS users went to microsoft's offices to return their unused licenses of windows that they were forced to acquire since they were bundled with the machine they bought.

      The windows EULA (End User License Agreement) clearly states that the agreement can be refused by the end user, and that windows can be returned to the manufacturer. In real life, however, manufacturers typically say that they can't refund the windows license and tell the user to contact microsoft directly. I can't say I really blame manufacturers for doing that because: [...]

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Rlang ☛ Announcing… schematic

        All R errors that appear in this post are intentional for the purpose of demonstrating schematic’s error messaging.

        Schematic is extremely simple. You only need to do two things: create a schema and then check a data.frame against the schema.