Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 16, 2025

• Nikita Prokopov ☛ Needy Programs

  If you’ve been around, you might’ve noticed that our relationships with programs have changed.

  Older programs were all about what you need: you can do this, that, whatever you want, just let me know. You were in control, you were giving orders, and programs obeyed.

  But recently (a decade, more or less), this relationship has subtly changed. Newer programs (which are called apps now, yes, I know) started to want things from you.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • Servo (Linux Foundation) ☛ The Servo Blog: October in Servo: better for the web, better for embedders, better for you

      Servo now supports several new web platform features: [...]

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Mozilla’s latest quagmire

      “Hundreds of millions of users” out of… billions of Internet users? Who’s looking out for the interests of the majority who don’t use “AI”, or who actively don’t want to? Or to put it another way, why is Firefox configured to make it easy to opt in, but not to opt out?

      As a reminder, this is what you have to do if you want to disable “AI” features in the current version of Firefox: [...]

• Education

  • Vox ☛ The US is still a magnet for top foreign students — for now

    It’s important to understand that, in the fields that power the technological frontier — computer science, engineering, math — international students are not a rounding error; they are the majority of new US PhDs. In 2023, temporary-visa holders earned 62 percent of computer and information sciences doctorates, 56 percent of engineering PhDs, and 53 percent of math and statistics doctorates.

  • Tom Shafer ☛ 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.

• GNU Projects

  • GNUnet News: GNUnet 0.26.1

    This is a bugfix release for gnunet 0.26.0.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Creating a London Population Map with D3po

      I appreciate the thanks, but remember the help me to help you rule: “Please provide a minimal, reproducible example when asking for help.” Or at least explain what your question is about.

      Based on the question, it is from the Gini Index post.

      I will try to explain by creating a population map of London using the D3po package.