Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Openwashing

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 17, 2025

• Brian Callahan ☛ I revived pkgsrc on AIX

  I think pkgsrc from NetBSD is great. The idea that one can have a truly portable packaging system that will work on (nearly) any Unix-based operating system is great. And genuinely the proof is in the pudding—pkgsrc has bulk builds for NetBSD, Solaris/SmartOS/Illumos, Linux, and macOS. That covers a huge assortment of Unix systems you might want to use. Additionally, pkgsrc has varying levels of support for other Unix systems, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Haiku, HP-UX, and UnixWare.

• Lean Rada ☛ My own RSS reader

  I started making my own RSS reader webapp (a what reader?). It can be accessed at /tools/rss/. Currently it’s hardcoded to just load my own site feed leanrada.com/rss.xml and that’s totally fine.

• Linux Foundation

  • OpenSSF (Linux Foundation) ☛ What’s in the SOSS? Podcast #30 – S2E07 Scaling Security: Inside the Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub Securing [sic] Open Source Software Fund [Ed: This serves to show to what extent 'Linux' Foundation and in particular OpenSSF has been coopted to promote back doors, proprietary software, and Microsoft]

  • Security Boulevard ☛ Linux Foundation Shares Framework for Building Effective Cybersecurity Teams [Ed: Microsofters in "Linux" clothing]

  • It's FOSS ☛ Linux Foundation's Massive Kubernetes Training Bundles on Discount [Ed: LF sponsored spam, this site cannot criticise the unscrupulous activities of the LF]

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

  • Leon Mika ☛ Serious Maintainers

    I just learnt that Hugo has changed their layout directory structure (via) and has done so without bumping the major version. I was a little peeved by this: this is a breaking change1 and they’re not indicating the “semantic versioning” way by going from 1.x.x to 2.0.0. Surely they know that people are using Hugo, and that an ecosystem of sorts has sprung up around it.

• FSF

  • FSF ☛ FSF Events: Community meetup in Moscow, Russia

  • FSF ☛ FSF Events: Community meetup Tunis, Tunisia and online

    Round table with FSF executive director Zoë Kooyman to celebrate FSF40

• Licensing / Legal

  • Tedium ☛ Controversy Aside, Gumroad’s MIT Licensing Change Matters

    But the licensing decision, if nothing else, is significant. We don’t usually see platforms this mature getting a FOSS license this far along in their life.

  • The Verge ☛ Anthropic blames Claude AI for ‘embarrassing’ legal filing error

    This is one of many growing examples of how using AI tools for legal citations has caused issues in courtrooms. Last week, a California Judge chastised two law firms for failing to disclose that AI was used to create a supplemental brief rife with “bogus” materials that “didn’t exist.” A misinformation expert admitted in December that ChatGPT had hallucinated citations in a legal filing he’d submitted.

  • FSFE ☛ 2025-05-15 [Older] Legal Corner: The threshold of originality for copyrightable source code [Ed: Microsoft-funded front group, a fake 'FSFE']