Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 01, 2025

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • YottaDB ☛ Critical Section Performance in r2.04

    Efficient access to critical sections is perhaps the single most important factor in determining database performance in high contention environments like large production systems. In our development of r2.04, we are paying a lot of attention to critical section access. This is a summary of our work and results to date (r2.04 is still under development as of this post’s publication date).

    This post comes with the caveat that critical sections are only one determinant of application throughput. Other factors like compute time, or user input time may well be more important to your application. Even within an application, workloads vary: for example, the workload of interest posting in a bank is different from the workload of processing customer transactions.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Nick Heer ☛ International Criminal Court to Switch From Microsoft Office to openDesk

    Good. I hope to see more of this — not from a place of anti-Americanism, but as a recognition of the world’s dependence on U.S. technology and recognizing a need for competition elsewhere. This industry is too important to have so few dependencies mostly headquartered in a single (volatile) country. We re-learn this every time Amazon goes down.

  • Euractive ☛ International Criminal Court to ditch Microsoft Office for European open source alternative | Euractiv

    The International Criminal Court (ICC) will switch its internal work environment away from Microsoft Office to Open Desk, a European open source alternative, the institution confirmed to Euractiv.

    German newspaper Handelsblatt first reported on the plans. The switch comes amid rising concerns about public bodies being reliant on US tech companies to run their services, which have stepped up sharply since the start of US President Donald Trump’s second administration.

• Education

  • Klara ☛ Klara at the OpenZFS User & Developer Summit 2025

    This year, the 13th annual OpenZFS User and Developer summit returned to Portland, Oregon. This is the second year of the expanded conference, with user-focused content over the weekend, and then transitioning to a developer focus for Monday and Tuesday.

    Combining the two audiences yielded unexpected insights for both and sparked many rewarding conversations. It is always extremely valuable to bring together those who develop the software, those who deploy and support the infrastructure, and the end users whose workloads are powered by ZFS. This end-to-end view unlocks new understanding and new possibilities.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0157 Decimal Diary: Confronting mortality and messy passwords

    In May, we left the country on a long trip and we're not sure when we'll return. And what if something bad happens and we never return? We acknowledged that this is a possibility, which triggered a flurry of tedious (and confronting) personal admin.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Trail of Bits ☛ Vulnerabilities in LUKS2 disk encryption for confidential VMs

    Trail of Bits is disclosing vulnerabilities in eight different confidential computing systems that use Linux Unified Key Setup version 2 (LUKS2) for disk encryption. Using these vulnerabilities, a malicious actor with access to storage disks can extract all confidential data stored on that disk and can modify the contents of the disk arbitrarily. The vulnerabilities are caused by malleable metadata headers that allow an attacker to trick a trusted execution environment guest into encrypting secret data with a null cipher. The following CVEs are associated with this disclosure: [...]

  • Federal News Network ☛ The future of federal cybersecurity depends on agencies uniting around one language of risk

    Without this, federal agencies face fragmented insights and restricted situational awareness. Standardizing telemetry across platforms allows for quicker, more precise decision-making and sets the foundation for automation.