Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Programming, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 26, 2025

• FSFE

  • FSFE ☛ 2025-09-24 [Older] The Digital Markets Act turns 1: one year of pushing for Device Neutrality

• Programming/Development

  • Trail of Bits ☛ Taming 2,500 compiler warnings with CodeQL, an OpenVPN2 case study

    Manual review of 2,500+ findings is impractical, and most warnings highlight benign conversions. The challenge isn’t identifying conversions—it’s determining which ones introduce security vulnerabilities.

  • Chris Wellons ☛ Hierarchical field sort with string interning

    In a recent, real world problem I needed to load a heterogeneous sequence of records from a buffer. Record layout is defined in a header before the sequence. Each field is numeric, with a unique name composed of non-empty alphanumeric period-delimited segments, where segments signify nested structure. Field names are a comma-delimited list, in order of the record layout. The catch motivating this article is that nested structures are not necessarily contiguous. In my transformed representation I needed nested structures to be contiguous. For illustrative purposes here, it will be for JSON output. I came up with what I think is an interesting solution, which I’ve implemented in C using techniques previously discussed.

  • The Register UK ☛ Open source to closed doors: RubyGems control fight erupts

    Ruby Central is said to have quietly snatched control of several flagship Ruby open source projects from their long-time maintainers without their consent, following pressure from Shopify, one of its biggest backers.

    The allegations were detailed by Joel Drapper, a Ruby developer and open source maintainer who previously worked at Shopify. They suggest a coordinated takeover of the RubyGems and Bundler ecosystems, and may deepen fractures in the Ruby community.

• Standards/Consortia

  • University of Toronto ☛ If-None-Match values must come from the actual URL itself

    This means that feed readers can't just store 'an ETag value' for a feed. They need to associate the ETag value with a specific, final URL, which may not be the URL of the feed (because said feed URL may have been redirected). They also need to (only) make conditional requests when they have an ETag for that specific URL, and not copy the If-None-Match header from the initial GET into a redirected GET.