Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 04, 2025

• Databases

  • Silicon Angle ☛ PostgreSQL database specialist Supabase snags $100M in funding

    Five months after Databricks Inc. acquired one of its main rivals for $1 billion, Supabase has raised $100 million in late-stage funding to build a database tool dubbed Multigres.

  • Shayon Mukherjee ☛ Exploring PostgreSQL to Parquet archival for JSON data with S3 range reads

    PostgreSQL handles large JSON payloads reasonably well until you start updating or deleting them frequently. Once payloads cross the 8 KB TOAST threshold and churn becomes high, autovacuum can dominate your I/O budget and cause other issues. I have been exploring the idea of moving older JSON data (read: cold data) to Parquet on S3 while keeping recent data hot in PostgreSQL daily partitions, then simply dropping those partitions instead of running expensive DELETE operations and subsequent vacuum cycles. What I am about to discuss should be fairly well-known patterns, so lets dive in.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ The artificial complexity of OOXML files (the DOCX case)

    The complexity of the OOXML format is linked to its design and was deliberately created to make the format more difficult for non-Microsoft software developers to implement.

• Education

  • FOSDEM ☛ FOSDEM 2026 - FOSDEM 2026 Call for Stands

    As has become traditional, we offer free and open source projects a stand to display their work to the audience. You can share information, demo software, interact with your users and developers, give away goodies, sell merchandise or accept donations. All is possible!

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Kieran Healy ☛ Iterating some sample data

      I’m teaching my Modern Plain Text Computing course this semester and so I’m on the lookout for small examples that I can use to show some of the ordinary techniques we regularly use when working with tables of data. One of those is just coming up with some example data to illustrate something else, like how to draw a plot or fit a model or what have you. This is partly what the stock datasets that come bundled with packages are for, like the venerable mtcars or the more recent palmerpenguins. Sometimes, though, you end up quickly making up an example yourself. This can be a good way to practice stuff that computers are good at, like doing things repeatedly.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Dingbats > emoji?

    This post is dedicated to Michał.

    Maybe it was growing up with a lot of Japanese friends and an interest in their consumer tech, or maybe its a family thing I got used to, but is a word with three letters. I (ab)use emoji everywhere. Text messages, instant messages, other kinds of messages. Friends and family will know something is wrong when I reply to a message without at least one gracing my text.

    Here comes the proverbial posterior prognostication: but… I also appreciate emoji aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. They’re not their proverbial vessel of aqueous, comestible beverage. They’re not something everyone enjoys or appreciates. Some are outright hostile to them as a technology, or would rather have a way to filter them out.