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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Events, and Programming
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Libre Arts ☛ LibreArts Weekly recap — 21 September 2025
Week highlights: GIMP is getting an SVG exporter; Ton Roosendaal is stepping down as executive director of Blender Foundation; Kdenlive is planning exciting new features, FreeCAD is launching a bughunt for v1.1.
CmykStudent started working on an SVG exporter plugin. Most of the work has been done: the plugin can export both vector, text, and bitmap layers, as well as layer groups. The merge request currently lists exporting options in the user interface and code cleanup as the missing bits. However, the exporting dialog already allows you to choose how you want to deal with bitmap layers.
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Events
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FSF ☛ FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, October 3, starting at 12:00 EDT (16:00 UTC)
Join the FSF and friends on Friday, October 3 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.
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FSF ☛ FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, September 26, starting at 12:00 EDT (16:00 UTC)
Join the FSF and friends on Friday, September 26 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.
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It's FOSS ☛ Open Source Summit Korea [Ed: itsfoss.com seems to be running more paid-for SPAM for LF, so it is part of that problem]
Open Source Summit is a fundamental gathering place for exchanging ideas across projects and meeting all of the people who make open source communities work.
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Programming/Development
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37signals LLC ☛ Calling someone a "nazi" is a permission slip for violence [Ed: Context here]
The last loonies on tech's woke island are getting desperate. It used to be that a wide variety of baseless accusations of racism, misogyny, or white supremacy could inflict grave social and professional consequences for the accused, but that's no longer true. So now they've had to up the ante, and that's why everyone is suddenly a nazi to these people.
Because if you can't intimidate people into silence and compliance with the woke orthodoxies by threatening their job or their social circle, you might be able to threaten them with actual violence or worse. That's what the "nazi" accusation is there to convey: That violence has been authorized.
The slogan has been around for a while: Punch a nazi. It has a sorta quaint, winking phrasing, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe it wasn't actually meant as a real threat. But I think that theory has gone out the window. Just look at what happened to Charlie Kirk.
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Rust
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LWN ☛ Comparing Rust to Carbon
Safe, ergonomic interoperability between Rust and C/C++ was a popular topic at RustConf 2025 in Seattle, Washington. Chandler Carruth gave a presentation about the different approaches to interoperability in Rust and Carbon, the experimental "(C++)++" language. His ultimate conclusion was that while Rust's ability to interface with other languages is expanding over time, it wouldn't offer a complete solution to C++ interoperability anytime soon — and so there is room for Carbon to take a different approach to incrementally upgrading existing C++ projects. His slides are available for readers wishing to study his example code in more detail.
Many of the audience members seemed aware of Carbon, and so Carruth spent relatively little time explaining the motivation for the language. In short, Carbon is a project to create an alternative front-end for C++ that cuts out some of the language's more obscure syntax and enables better annotations for compiler-checked memory safety. Carbon is intended to be completely compatible with C++, so that existing C++ projects can be rewritten into Carbon on a file-by-file basis, ideally without changing the compiler or build system at all. Carbon is not yet usable — the contributors to the project are working on fleshing out some of the more complex details of the language, for reasons that Carruth's talk made clear.
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