Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 20, 2025

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Balthazar Rouberol ☛ Curating and filtering RSS feeds

    RSS feeds are one of my favorite features of the Internet of Yore. Simply put, they allow you to subscribe to sites you like, into an aggregator. Instead of visiting all these sites in search for something new, you simply subscribe to these sites in your aggregator, and you'll see new articles come in. While RSS aggregators have sadly waned since Google killed Google Reader in 2013, RSS feeds themselves continue to be found throughout the web, if you know where to look. Your favorite podcast app feed is really nothing but a bunch of RSS subsriptions, each containing a list of episodes. Each YouTube channel can be subscribed to as RSS feed, and so does each of is associated podcasts. Your beloved niche subreddit? Add .rss to the URL and subscribe to it in your aggregator.

• Education

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ PyCon Finland 2025 recap

    It was the last PyCon Finland for a long time, until this October when thanks to the great initiative by Plone Conference organisers Rikupekka Oksanen, Asmo Soukka and others who with the support of other local Python communities decided to bring back PyCon Finland and organise it as part of this year’s Plone Conference in Jyväskylä.

    I proposed my talk Debugging Python which was accepted in the Friday morning block.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU Octave Meets JupyterLite: Compute Anywhere, Anytime!

    We are thrilled to announce the newest member of our JupyterLite kernel ecosystem: Xeus-Octave. Xeus-Octave allows you to run GNU Octave code directly on your browser. GNU Octave is a free and open-source Scientific Programming Language that can be used to run Matlab scripts. In this article, we present the challenges encountered when targeting WebAssembly, the current state of the Xeus-Octave kernel, and the future plans for expanding the GNU Octave ecosystem.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ gssrdoc Updates

      Regular readers know that I maintain gssr and gssrdoc, two packages for R. The former makes the General Social Survey’s annual, cumulative and panel datasets available in a way that’s easy to use in R. The latter makes the survey’s codebook available in R’s integrated help system in a way that documents every GSS variable as if it were a function or object in R, so you can query them in exactly the same way as any function from the R console or in the IDE of your choice. As a bonus, because I use pkgdown to document the packages, I get a website as a side-effect. In the case of gssrdoc this means a browsable index of all the GSS variables. The GSS is the Hubble Space Telescope of American social science; our longest-running representative view of many aspects of the character and opinions of American households. The data is freely available from NORC, but they distribute it in SPSS, SAS, and STATA formats. I wrote these packages in an effort to make it more easily available in R. If you want to know the relationship between these various platforms, I have you covered. But the important thing is that R is a free and open-source project, and the others are not.

    • [Old] Spacebar.News ☛ Data hoarding is more important than ever

      The Internet Archive, Library Genesis, the Wikimedia Foundation, local libraries, and countless other organizations are providing an invaluable service by maintaining public access to everything from research papers to 90s PC games to books. Unfortunately, not everything can be archived in time, and the effort is costly and vulnerable to legal attacks. It's a constant battle that demands time, energy, and money.

      We've seen attack after attack on information and media access over the past few years. Social media platforms are locking down. Research papers and public resources are being intentionally destroyed. Movies and TV shows are vanishing from distribution, sometimes before they see the light of day. Books are getting pulled from library shelves. It's more important than ever to be a data hoarder: save everything, back up everything, and share everything.