Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 23, 2025,
updated Oct 23, 2025

• Techdirt ☛ Musk Exploits AWS Outage To Unfairly Slam Signal, Promote His Shittier Chat Software

  While Signal isn’t perfect and certainly has some dependencies on centralized infrastructure, the AWS outage didn’t create any specific risk issues related to encrypted Signal communications. Musk simply saw an opportunity to exploit the outage to market his barely-used beta software. Signal President Meredith Whittaker responded to Musk by noting that Signal was at least transparently open source: [...]

• Open Source Initiative ☛ Participate in the 2026 State of Open Source Survey [Ed: OpenLogic is a Microsoft proxy, just like contemporary OSI]

  The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is once again partnering with Perforce OpenLogic...

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Tyler Sticka ☛ AI Browsers, ad nauseam

    For all those reasons, these applications feel less like new browsers to me, and more like those branded browser toolbars I seemed to find installed on every relative’s PC through the early 2010s or so. If history is repeating itself, I hope these won’t stick around quite as long.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice and Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code 2025: The results

    This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program focused on bringing more developers into free and open source software development. Seven projects were finished successfully.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Remkus de Vries ☛ How To Do WordPress & Security

    Security in the context of WordPress is a topic I see being misrepresented often. Misrepresented in the way that “just install our solution” is presented as the golden ticket. It’s not.

    Let’s get this out of the way first: installing a “WordPress security plugin” doesn’t make your site secure.

  • Matthew Weber ☛ Blog Stats

    Now, I have a more complicated script and I’ve moved the processing of the script to Gitlab’s CI/CD. Everytime the repo is updated, the bash script runs, and Hugo will read from the output and put that in the shortcode.

• Education

  • Sandor Dargo ☛ Trip report: Budapest C++ - Breaking & Building C++

    We often spend the French autumn school holidays back in our hometown, Budapest, Hungary — and this year, the timing worked out perfectly for me to attend an event of the Budapest C++ Meetup. I’d like to thank the organizers for putting together such a great evening by sharing a short report from the event.

  • Computer Weekly ☛ OpenInfra Summit Europe: Digital sovereignty in the face of political tension

    Digital sovereignty in Europe was another of the focus areas at the conference. European users and providers such as Telekom Cloud, OVHcloud and VanillaCore demonstrated how open technologies can be used to deliver portability, transparency and control to meet emerging policy and compliance requirements across the region.

  • [Old] PR Newswire ☛ OpenInfra Summit Europe Agenda Features Open Source Innovation in AI, Digital Sovereignty and Workload Migration

    "Over 38% of the global OpenInfra community is in Europe, where the concerns around digital sovereignty are at an all-time high," said Thierry Carrez, general manager of the OpenInfra Foundation. "This adds to security concerns, eroded trust in single-vendor software, and ever-increasing AI demand for accelerated compute capabilities. The OpenInfra ecosystem is uniquely equipped to help organizations in Europe navigate these challenges, with reliable, cost-effective, community-developed open source solutions, while complying with their obligations under incoming EU regulations like the Cyber Resilience Act. These are precisely the issues and solutions we'll discuss at the Summit."

  • [Old] TechCrunch ☛ OpenInfra Foundation opens regional hubs in Europe and Asia

    “The world has changed, and open source needs regional resiliency and action to ensure vital software technologies continue to be developed in the open,” he said. “Key regional issues have emerged, like digital sovereignty in the EU, that have created an opportunity for OpenInfra regional hubs to facilitate collaboration and discussion, coordinate responses, and give a voice to the concerns of the OpenInfra ecosystem.”

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ The use of SAT/ACT for college admissions

      The surveys data frame included in the package provides metadata for the different data files available from the IPEDS website. The AHD data file provides directory information for each institution in the United States.