Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 20, 2025

• Freeplane ☛ Freeplane Documentation

  Freeplane is a free and open source software application that supports thinking, sharing information, getting things done at work, in school and at home. It provides you a set of tools for mind mapping (also known as concept mapping or information mapping) and navigating the mapped information. Freeplane's capabilities will appeal to power users, but for the typical user is also a more robust alternative to Xmind, Mindmeister, and similar mind mapping software.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ Bye bye Kerberos FTP

    We are dropping support for this feature in curl 8.17.0. Kerberos5 FTP to be exact. The last Kerberos support we had for FTP.

• Education

  • RIPE ☛ CAPIF 4: Advancing Internet Technologies in Central Asia

    Ahead of CAPIF 4, we once again pause to examine the latest in Central Asia’s digital transformation. Against a backdrop of deepening regional cooperation, we chart improvements in routing security and IPv6 adoption, while also probing interconnection patterns as seen in K-root data.

  • FOSDEM ☛ FOSDEM 2026 - FOSDEM 2026: 31st January and 1st February

    It's that time again! FOSDEM 2026 will take place on Saturday 31st of January and Sunday 1st of February 2026.

    Further details and calls for participation will be announced in the coming days and weeks.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Creative Commons ☛ The Benefits of Open Heritage in the Digital Environment

      In this blog post, we highlight some examples of the benefits of open heritage and show what becomes possible when barriers are removed and heritage in the public domain is openly accessible.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Mark Nottingham ☛ Bridging the Gap Between Standards and Policy

    Internet standards bodies like the IETF and W3C are places where experts can come to agreement about the details of how technology should work. These communities have the deep experience that allows them to guide the evolution of the Internet towards common goals.

    Policymakers have none of that technical expertise, but are the legitimate source of policy decisions in any functioning society. They don’t have the means to develop new technical proposals: while most countries have a national standard body, their products are a poor fit for a global Internet, and those bodies generally lack specific expertise.

    So, it might seem logical for policymakers to turn to Internet standards bodies to develop the technical solutions for their policy goals, trusting the open process and community involvement to produce a good solution. Unfortunately, doing so can create problems that will cause such efforts to fail.

  • [Old] Nemanja Trifunovic ☛ Decoding UTF-8. Part I: Manual Decoding

    In this article, we’ll focus on converting sequences of UTF-8 encoded 8-bit wide octets (we will call them “bytes” from now on) to UTF-32 encoded Unicode code points. Strictly speaking, code points are at most 21-bits wide, but a 32-bit value is used to store a single code point; the highest 11 bits are always zero.

    In practice, decoding UTF-8 often means direct conversion from UTF-8 to UTF-16, or even just validating a UTF-8 sequence.

  • [Old] Nemanja Trifunovic ☛ Decoding UTF-8. Part II: Determining Sequence Length - a Straightforward Approach

    Analysis of a simple algorithm to determine the length of a valid UTF-8 sequence.

  • [Old] Nemanja Trifunovic ☛ Decoding UTF-8. Part III: Determining Sequence Length - A Lookup Table

    The obvious way to avoid branching in the code is to use a lookup table. As we have only 256 possible values for the first byte of a UTF-8 sequence, we can hard-code a simple table that would map values of the lead byte to sequence lengths. And because the possible values of a byte are contiguous (0-255), we can implement the table as a simple array, where the index is the value of the lead byte, and array elements are lengths of the sequence.

  • [Old] Nemanja Trifunovic ☛ Decoding UTF-8. Part IV: Determining Sequence Length - Counting Leading Bits

    Now, we will see how we can use some help from the hardware to accomplish the same task: based on the lead byte, calculate the UTF-8 sequence length. I recommend reading my recent post Counting Leading Zeros in a Byte to get familiar with the standard C and C++ functions for counting leading zeroes in a byte and the assembly instructions they use.