news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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PowerDNS ☛ PowerDNS DNSdist 1.9.9 released, fixing CVE-2025-30194
Please see the DNSdist website for the changelog and the current documentation.
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Libre Arts ☛ LibreArts Weekly recap — 27 April 2025
Week highlights: new releases of Helio sequencer and ZLEqualizer, new features in GIMP and FreeCAD.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Document Foundation ☛ Germany committing to ODF and open document standards [iophk: That is good news. That also necessitates dropping Microsoft because MSO fails to safeguard information in ODF files and deletes portions of them when opened and if saved those deletions become permanent.]
Digital sovereignty is of vital importance for data freedom. If governments and organisations use proprietary or pseudo-standard formats, they limit the tools that citizens can use to access data.
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Education
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Rlang ☛ surveydown: An Open-Source, Markdown-Based Platform for Interactive and Reproducible Surveys workshop
Description: This workshop introduces the surveydown R package and survey platform. With surveydown, researchers can create reproducible, interactive surveys using markdown and R code chunks, leveraging the Quarto publication system and R shiny web application framework. While most survey platforms rely on graphical interfaces or spreadsheets to define survey content, surveydown uses plain text, enabling version control and collaboration via tools like GitHub. The package renders surveys as interactive shiny web applications, allowing for complex features like conditional skip logic, dynamic question display, and complex randomization. The package supports a diverse set of question types and formatting options and users can leverage shiny’s powerful reactive programming model to create a wide variety of customized interactive features. As an open-source tool, surveydown provides researchers full control over their survey implementation, including the survey application as well as where and how the resulting response data are stored. Workflows are entirely reproducible and integrate seamlessly with existing workflows for data collection and analysis in R. At this workshop, you’ll not only learn how to build and deploy your own interactive surveys using surveydown, but also how you can join the growing community of contributors to the project.
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