Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Licensing, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 15, 2025

• Events

  • Rlang ☛ Recapping posit::conf 2025

    In September I had the opportunity to give a talk in person at posit::conf in Atlanta, and now the video recording, plus annotated slides and other goodies, are generally available.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • David Bushell ☛ Vivaldi, Yea or Nay?

    I just read an opinion piece on a tech company blog. I have a general rule not to do that. Corpo blogs are biased, thinly veiled ads that are too quick to jump the gun with: “And that’s why we built [crapware]”, without justification.

  • Mozilla

    • Thunderbird ☛ Mozilla Thunderbird: VIDEO: An Android Retrospective

      If you can believe it, Thunderbird for Android has been out for just over a year! In this episode of our Community Office Hours, Heather and Monica check back in with the mobile team after our chat with them back in January. Sr. Software Engineer Wolf Montwé and our new Manager of Mobile Apps, Jon Bott look back at what the growing mobile team has been able to accomplish this last year, what we’re still working on, and what’s up ahead. 

      We’ll be back next month, talking with members of the desktop team all about Exchange support landing in Thunderbird 145!

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Crunchy Data Solutions Inc ☛ Postgres Internals Hiding in Plain Sight

    Postgres has an awesome amount of data collected in its own internal tables. Postgres hackers know all about this - but software developers and folks working with day to day Postgres tasks often miss out the good stuff.

    The Postgres catalog is how Postgres keeps track of itself. Of course, Postgres would do this in a relational database with its own schema. Throughout the years several nice features have been added to the internal tables like psql tools and views that make navigating Postgres’ internal tables even easier.

    Today I want to walk through some of the most important Postgres internal data catalog details. What they are, what is in them, and how they might help you understand more about what is happening inside your database.

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

  • Kev Quirk ☛ Giving My Jekyll Site a CDN Front End

    What if I created a Bunny pull zone that uses kevquirk.com as the public domain, then set up a separate domain on my VPS, host the site there, and use that as the pull zone origin?

    My theory was that Bunny would still be requesting content from the VPS, so my .htaccess redirects might still work.

    …turns out, they did.

• Education

  • FOSDEM ☛ FOSDEM 2026 - FOSDEM 2026 Main Track Deadline Reminder

    The deadline for main track submissions is earlier than it usually is (16th November, that’s in a couple of days!), so don’t be caught out.

  • Rlang ☛ Get Involved in the Data Science Community at our Free Meetups

    All of our meetups are run between 6pm and 8pm. The first half hour typically involves casual networking while enjoying some pizza and soft drinks.

    We then have one or two talks from local data science experts. Our previous speakers have come from a wide range of industries including consultancy, government, banking and utilities. Typical talk topics include LLMs, communication in data science, forecasting demand in public health, code review best practices, and setting up machine learning pipelines on platforms such as databricks and AWS.

• Licensing / Legal

  • The Register UK ☛ UK tribunal says reselling Microsoft licenses is A-OK

    The Competition Appeal Tribunal pondered the software giant's claims and disagreed. According to the judgment, there was nothing preventing the subdivision and resale of Windows and Office licenses acquired under Microsoft's Enterprise Agreements, nor was there anything wrong with the resale of licenses.

  • Microsoft to appeal ruling in favor of reselling perpetual backdoored Windows licenses — UK Competition Court says fineprint holds no ground as judges throw out company's 'creative work' argument

    Microsoft has just been dealt a major legal blow as the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal has essentially declared that reselling perpetual licenses is perfectly fine. Microsoft's most recent claim argued that its products qualify for copyright monopoly infringement (which the licenses protect against) since they can be used to create original work, a notion that the judges ruled against.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0168 How to remember the Markdown link syntax

    In Markdown, a universally-handy text formatting language, you create a link like this: [...]

  • Doc Searls ☛ Posting what I can’t email

    The AM-FM radio business is being discussed in a mailing list I’m on, but my mail server has a spam sphincter that won’t allow linky emails to go out, no matter how non-spammy they might be. So I’m posting some of what I’m trying to say here, so I can point to it.

  • Andy Bell ☛ Perfecting Baseline

    For most people, Baseline is filling a gap. To them, the term acts as a simple way to say: this feature is supported across browsers. Even if they don’t always know which browsers are included and for how long the feature has been supported in them, the term acts as a useful shortcut that conveys a sense of stability and broad availability.

    For some other people though, the concept can sometimes be imperfect, for a few different reasons: [...]