Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 04, 2025

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • The New Leaf Journal ☛ RSS Service Subscriber Counts in Server Logs

    I have been checking my server logs semi-regularly of late after an AI bot hit our site hard on two days in March. (Note: I use Cloudron to manage the server running The New Leaf Journal and access our logs from Cloudron’s control panel.) While reviewing the logs — I noticed that certain RSS/ATOM feed subscription services include how many individual feed subscribers they have when they request a feed.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Ethan McCue ☛ Life Altering Postgresql Patterns

    There is a set of things that you can do when working with a Postgres database which I have found made my and my coworker's lives much more pleasant. Each one is by itself small, but in aggregate have a noticeable effect.

  • Drew Breunig ☛ DuckDB is Probably the Most Important Geospatial Software of the Last Decade

    One of the core questions discussed in the breakouts and in the halls was how to broaden the geospatial audience. How can we better communicate geo data’s utility, in all industries and domains? Many tactics and case studies were debated, but the one I kept coming back to is that of DuckDB.

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

  • Roger Comply ☛ Migrating from WordPress to Hugo: 5 years, 9 months later

    I’m already coming up on my sixth anniversary with Hugo. Wow, time really does fly. I feel like sharing some of my experiences with Hugo and how it compares to my previous long run with WordPress.

• Education

  • [Old] Document Foundation ☛ TDF's Annual Report 2024 – LibreOffice Conference

    This was our third in-person conference after the COVID pandemic, following on from the Milan conference in 2022 and Bucharest conference in 2023, but we also lived-streamed sessions so that participants could watch remotely (and ask questions in our chat channels too).

    The conference took place from 10 – 12 October 2024 in Belval, Esch-sur-Alzette, which is around a 20 minute train ride from Luxembourg City. As public transport is free in the whole country, attendees staying in the city didn’t need to buy tickets to attend the event in Belval.

• Licensing / Legal

  • [Old] GNU ☛ Enforcing the GNU GPL

    The essence of copyright law, like other systems of property rules, is the power to exclude. The copyright holder is legally empowered to exclude all others from copying, distributing, and making derivative works.

    This right to exclude implies an equally large power to license—that is, to grant permission to do what would otherwise be forbidden. Licenses are not contracts: the work's user is obliged to remain within the bounds of the license not because she voluntarily promised, but because she doesn't have any right to act at all except as the license permits.

  • [Old] US DOD ☛ Open Source Software FAQ: Q: Are OSS licenses legally enforceable?

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s 2008 ruling on Jacobsen v. Katzer made it clear that OSS licenses are enforceable, even if money is not exchanged. It noted that a copyright holder may dedicate a “certain work to free public use and yet enforce an ‘open source’ copyright license to control the future distribution and modification of that work… Open source licensing has become a widely used method of creative collaboration that serves to advance the arts and sciences in a manner and at a pace that few could have imagined just a few decades ago… Traditionally, copyright owners sold their copyrighted material in exchange for money. The lack of money changing hands in open source licensing should not be presumed to mean that there is no economic consideration, however. There are substantial benefits, including economic benefits, to the creation and distribution of copyrighted works under public licenses that range far beyond traditional license royalties… The choice to exact consideration in the form of compliance with the open source requirements of disclosure and explanation of changes, rather than as a dollar-denominated fee, is entitled to no less legal recognition. Indeed, because a calculation of damages is inherently speculative, these types of license restrictions might well be rendered meaningless absent the ability to enforce through injunctive relief.” In short, it determined that the OSS license at issue in the case (the Artistic license) was indeed an enforceable license.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Cross checking OSM IDs between OSM and Wikidata

      However, sometimes Wikidata entities are missing the OSM ID(s). Here is my workflow to find these entities in a defined area to check and complete them.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Matt Wedel ☛ From 1 July, no embargoes on NIH-funded publications! | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

      Well, this is tremendous news. The NIH is the biggest single funder of health research in the USA, and making all the work that it funds immediately open access is a huge win. We could complain and say that this should have happened years ago — there has never been the slightest justification for Green OA embargoes — but instead let’s just rejoice that it’s happening now.

    • NIH ☛ Accelerating Access to Research Results: New Implementation Date for the 2024 NIH Public Access Policy | National Institutes of Health (NIH)

      I am excited to announce that one of my first actions as NIH Director is pushing the accelerator on policies to make NIH research findings freely and quickly available to the public. The 2024 Public Access Policy, originally slated to go into effect on December 31, 2025, will now be effective as of July 1, 2025.

• Programming/Development

  • Malcom Coles ☛ Decoupling

    This goes back, at least, as for as the 1972 paper On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules by D.L. Parnas. In the paper, Parnas compares a few ways to break a problem into software components. The solution he arrives at is that by using the criteria of "information hiding" we decompose our system such that it is more likely that a change only impacts one or a few modules rather than the whole system. For example, if you change the format of your input, only the input module has to change, rather than your whole program.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ C++20 concepts for nicer compiler errors

    In C++, templates enable generic programming by allowing functions and classes to operate on different data types without sacrificing type safety. Defined using the template keyword, they let developers write reusable, type-agnostic code, such as functions (e.g., template <typename T> max(T a, T b)) or classes (e.g., std::vector), where the type T is specified at compile time.

  • Benoit Daloze ☛ Contributions to ruby/spec

    As a maintainer of ruby/spec I sometimes wonder how much each Ruby implementation contributes to ruby/spec. Without further ado, here it is: [...]

  • Gábor Melis ☛ Adaptive Hashing

    At the 2024 ELS, I gave a talk on adaptive hashing, which focusses on making general purpose hash tables faster and more robust at the same time.

• Standards/Consortia

  • [Repeat] Document Foundation ☛ Celebrating 20 Years of the OASIS Open Document Format (ODF) Standard

    “ODF is much more than a technical specification: it is a symbol of freedom of choice, support for interoperability and protection of users from the commercial strategies of Big Tech,” said Eliane Domingos, Chairwoman of the Document Foundation. “In a world increasingly dominated by proprietary ecosystems, ODF guarantees users complete control over their content, free from restrictions.”

  • [Repeat] Document Foundation ☛ Germany committing to ODF and open document standards

    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.

  • [Repeat] The Register UK ☛ Open Document Format standard turns 20

    Sun believed that the Extensible Markup Language (XML) format used for OpenOffice documents could make a general open standard for office application files, and submitted it to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) in 2002. Rather than rubber-stamping the submission, the OASIS Technical Committee put in a few years of work to refine the spec, eventually approving ODF as an official standard on May 1, 2005.

  • Old VCR ☛ What went wrong with wireless USB

    But what if the USB connection could be made wirelessly? For a few years, real honest-to-goodness wireless USB devices were actually a thing. Competing standards led to market fracture and the technologies fizzled out relatively quickly in the marketplace, but like the parallel universe of FireWire hubs there was another parallel world of wireless USB devices, at least for a few years. As it happens, we now have a couple of them here, so it's worth exploring what wireless USB was and what happened to it, how the competing standards worked (and how well), and if it would have helped.