Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 22, 2025

• It's FOSS ☛ FOSS Weekly #25.34: Mint 22.2 Features, FreeVPN Fiasco, backdoored Windows Update Killing SSDs, Hey Hi (AI) in LibreOffice and More

  A week of fiascos by Abusive Monopolist Microsoft and Surveillance Giant Google (sort of).

• Jessica Nickelsen ☛ Writing in Emacs

  I’m writing on Emacs right now. It’s something that I’ve played around with for quite a long time, but usually in an on-again, off-again sort of relationship. I have scores of writing apps, things like Scrivener and Ulysses (even going back to the pre-subscription days), and trials of iAWriter, as well as Obsidian. But right now Emacs is scratching that itch.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • University of Toronto ☛ The current (2025) crawler plague and the fragility of the web

    These days, more and more people are putting more and more obstacles in the way of the plague of crawlers (many of them apparently doing it for LLM 'AI' purposes), me included. Some of these obstacles involve attempting to fingerprint unusual aspects of crawler requests, such as using old browser User-Agents or refusing to accept compressed things in an attempt to avoid gzip bombs; other obstacles may involve forcing visitors to run JavaScript, using CAPTCHAs, or relying on companies like Cloudflare to block bots with various techniques.

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ What I learned when I stopped posting my life online, from a former influencer [Ed: Mozilla using Substack is a bit worrying and contradictory given its supposed "values"]

      This essay was originally published on The Sidebar, Mozilla’s Substack.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • [Old] PC Mag ☛ Denmark Wants to Dump Microsoft Software for Linux, LibreOffice

    The Danish Ministry for Digital Affairs will move half of its employees off Windows and Microsoft 365 next month as part of a four-year 'digital sovereignty' push.

  • [Old] HowTo Geek ☛ LibreOffice Is Replacing Microsoft 365 in Denmark's Government

    Denmark is moving one of its government ministries from Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 to the open-source LibreOffice. It’s another sign that large organizations, especially ones in Europe, are trying to move away from locked-down digital services.

    Caroline Stage Olsen, the minister for Digital Affairs in Denmark, confirmed that the country’s Ministry of Digitalization is switching to LibreOffice. The migration from Microsoft 365 and Office will begin in July, and it’s expected to be complete within a few months.

• FSFE

  • FSFE ☛ 2025-08-20 [Older] Legal Corner: Bringing SumUp to compliance: a case study of license enforcement [Ed: While their top sponsor is the biggest GPL violator, Microsoft]

  • FSFE ☛ 2025-08-15 [Older] SFP#37: Policy and EU: The most famous of them all – we are talking about the CRA

  • FSFE ☛ 2025-08-14 [Older] After 100 days: Germany’s government still lacks a Free Software push [Ed: So says a group funded by Microsoft]