FreeBSD, Free Software, and Openwashing

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 07, 2025

• BSD

  • Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

    • Feld ☛ FreeBSD Desktop Users Beware of Security Knobs

      These knobs are also available directly in the installer for a while now.

      But I urge you to reconsider these on a desktop-oriented FreeBSD install. It will only end with frustration and tears.

      Simply put, these knobs completely break polkit. You need polkit for a working desktop environment.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • It's FOSS ☛ Ownership of Digital Content Is an Illusion—Unless You Self‑Host

    Prices are rising across Netflix, Spotify, and their peers, and more people are quietly returning to the oldest playbook of the internet: piracy. Is the golden age of streaming over?

  • Feld ☛ Stalwart Wildcard Trusted Domains

    Luckily I'm using PostgreSQL as my directory and store, so I can just leverage Postgres to work around this problem because the Stalwart expressions support a sql_query method.

  • Kevin Boone ☛ Kevin Boone: How to get a dark background on the K-9/Thunderbird e-mail widget for Android

    Unfortunately, the home-screen widget still does not respect the system theme settings, despite the problem being raised six years ago. The widget still displays as a bright white box with black text, even when all the other display elements are dark. This isn’t just a cosmetic matter: I use a dark theme on my handsets with OLED displays to reduce the risk of burn-in, and to save energy. OLED displays are not back-lit – only the bright pixels use energy. So it can save a bit of battery life to use a dark theme, as well as potentially extending the life of the display.

    Still, everybody is very busy, and it’s hard to complain about software we aren’t paying for. I don’t know the K-9 source code well enough to implement proper theme handling, but I know Android well enough to implement a nasty hack, which works well enough for my purposes.

    Unfortunately, the implement the hack, you need to be willing to build K-9 Mail from source.

  • LWN ☛ Mastodon 4.5 released

    Version 4.5 of the Mastodon decentralized social-media platform has been released. Notable features in this release include quote posts, native emoji support, as well as enhanced moderation and blocking features for server administrators. The project also has a post detailing new features in 4.5 for developers of clients and other software that interacts with Mastodon.

  • Openwashing

    • Open Source Initiative ☛ Must-See Recordings Now Available [Ed: All Things Open is Proprietary]

      Members Newsletter – November 2025

      October was punctuated by lots of direct connections with the community.