news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Events, and Standards
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University of Toronto ☛ Containers and giving up on expecting good software installation practices
To be specific, it's by and large abandoning the idea of well done installs of software on shared servers. If you're only installing software inside a container, your software can spray itself all over the (container) filesystem, put itself in hard-coded paths wherever it feels like, and so on, even if you have completely automated instructions for how to get it to do that inside a container image that's being built. Some software doesn't do this and is well mannered when installed outside a container, but some software does and you'll find notes to the effect that the only supported way of installing it is 'here is this container image', or 'here is the automated instructions for building a container image'.
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Joshua Blais ☛ How I am deeply integrating emacs
Emacs has holistically become my daily computing environment.
My efforts have been focused on building emacs into the workflow of essentially everything I do, as long as it doesn’t involve heavy video or media, I try my very best to accomplish it in emacs. The idea is to achieve deep integration with everything I do on a computer, to the degree my thoughts are immediately able to be acted upon in the buffer.
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Software Freedom Conservancy ☛ Managing Diabetes in Software Freedom
A blog post from Software Freedom Conservancy.
Blog post by Bradley M. Kühn. Please email any comments on this entry to <bkuhn@sfconservancy.org>.
Our member project representatives and others who collaborate with SFC on projects know that I've been on part-time medical leave this year. As I recently announced publicly on the Fediverse, I was diagnosed in March 2025 with early-stage Type 2 Diabetes. I had no idea that that the diagnosis would become a software freedom and users' rights endeavor.
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Bradley M. Kuhn: Managing Diabetes in Software Freedom
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Events
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FSF ☛ FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, November 14, starting at 12:00 EST (17:00 UTC)
Join the FSF and friends on Friday, November 14 from 12:00 to 15:00 EST (17:00 to 20:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.
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Education
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BSDly ☛ That grumpy BSD guy: What is BSD? Come to a conference to find out!
All three conferences will welcome submissions for talks, tutorials and other types of sessions as well as general participation by people regardless of geographic or other origin.
For further information, browse the conference websites.
We hope to see you there at future events!
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Jeremy Cherfas ☛ IndieWeb Camp Berlin 2025
After far too long, I was once again able to attend an IndieWeb Camp in real life, and it was another great experience. Old friends and new, old problems and new too. And some great adjunct events.
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Standards/Consortia
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Document Foundation ☛ Long-term archiving with ODF: a future-proof strategy
Digital documents in proprietary formats often become inaccessible within a few years due to undocumented changes to the XML schema that are intentionally employed for lock-in purposes. To avoid this problem, it is advisable to use the Open Document Format (ODF) not only for everyday tasks, but also for long-term storage.
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