Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Open Data Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 12, 2025,
updated Nov 13, 2025

• Value Types: Reputation and Influence

  This is the forth article of the series describing the open source value flow model. We'll focus on the value types: Reputation and Influence. We'll cover how to measure and report on them.

• Unicorn Media ☛ VLC Project’s Champion Honored with European SFS Award in Italy

  VLC’s core developer and VideoLAN president, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, was awarded the European SFS Award this year at Italy’s premier free software conference.

• Collabora ☛ Font recognition reimagined with FasterViT-2

  Collabora extended the AdobeVFR dataset and trained a FasterViT-2 font recognition model on millions of samples. The result is a state-of-the-art model for fine-grained font identification that can also be used for downstream tasks.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Shayon Mukherjee ☛ A hypothetical search engine on S3 with Tantivy and warm cache on NVMe

    I’ve been curious about how far you can push object storage as a foundation for database-like systems. In previous posts, I explored moving JSON data from PostgreSQL to Parquet on S3 and building MVCC-style tables with constant-time deletes using S3’s conditional writes. These experiments showed that decoupling storage from compute unlocks interesting trade-offs while lowering costs and simpler operations in exchange for higher cold query latency.

  • Peter Eisentraut ☛ Waiting for SQL:202y: GROUP BY ALL

    The SQL standard working group discussed this feature informally at the June 2025 meeting, and there was consensus about going forward with it.

    At the September 2025 meeting, a formal change proposal was brought forward and accepted. (So, technically, it’s just a working draft right now, and it won’t be final until the standard is released.)

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

  • WordPress ☛ WordPress 6.9 Release Candidate 1

    The first Release Candidate (“RC1”) for WordPress 6.9 is ready for download and testing! This version of the WordPress software is still under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended to evaluate RC1 on a test server and site.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Light Blue Touchpaper ☛ A decade of data sharing: Celebrating the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre’s 10-year anniversary

      In the past 10 years, the Centre has shared datasets with almost 500 academics across over 100 universities. Computer scientists, criminologists, sociologists, legal scholars, economists, and psychologists use our datasets to tackle critical questions about cybercrime, fraud, abuse, and online safety.

      To mark this occasion, incoming PhD student Hannah Pankow undertook a comprehensive 10-year review of our work, interviewing and surveying our licensees and analysing the papers that use our datasets. If you would like to learn more about this review, the report is now available.

    • Rlang ☛ Evaluating a New Job Market Data Feed

      I’ve recently been given early access to a service that provides data on job listings published by a wide range of companies. The dataset offers a near real-time view of hiring activity, broken down at the company level. This is a potentially valuable signal for tracking labour market trends, gauging corporate growth or powering job intelligence tools.

Update

More on VLC:

• VLC's keeper of the cone nets European free software gong

  If you don't know what app will open a random media file (or URL), VLC is the answer. It runs on everything, plays anything, and it's free – thanks to Jean-Baptiste Kempf.

  Kempf is the chap who keeps VLC going and he blogged earlier this week that the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) gave him the European SFS Award 2025. The award was handed over at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference, or SFS Con, held in Bolzano, Italy, last week.