Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 18, 2025

• Unicorn Media ☛ Ten Reasons (and Five Exceptions) to Choose Open Source Over Freemium

  Weighing the tradeoffs between open source and freemium software reveals why free-as-in-freedom tools are almost always the better option.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Firefox tab groups just got an upgrade, thanks to your feedback

      Tab groups have become one of Firefox’s most loved ways to stay organized — over 18 million people have used the feature since it launched earlier this year. Since then, we’ve been listening closely to feedback from the Mozilla Connect community to make this long-awaited feature even more helpful.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ Month of LibreOffice, November 2025 – Half-way point!

    We’re just over half-way through the Month of LibreOffice, November 2025. And already, 219 contributors have won cool LibreOffice sticker packs!

• FSF / Software Freedom

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Open Source Power

    The suggestion here is that commercial use by large corporations is charged for. I think that makes sense: it’s a way of funding development that also preserves the underlying availability of open software and the sustainability of building it. But I’d honestly go further.

  • Thomas Depierre ☛ How FOSS Won and Why It Matters

    I regularly comment on the Internet on my views on most schemes proposed to fix FOSS problems. They are mostly negative. I think that most of these schemes cannot achieve any meaningful impact. It seems that most of these disagreements come from the fact that I seem to work on different models of how FOSS work. Over the years, I have tried to share parts of my model. This is part of this endeavor.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Quantixed ☛ Choose Your Fighter: data-driven selection of the best marathon – quantixed

      Let’s face it, most marathons market themselves as flat and fast. Which ones can really make that claim

    • Michaël ☛ Maplibre

      Heatmap of the french population

  • Open Access/Content

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ The Global Transition Has Already Happened – It's Just Not the One You Expected (Part 1 of 2)

      For many years now, the dominant discourse around the future of scholarly communication has centered on two assumptions:

      First, that charging people for access to scholarly products is morally unacceptable, and must be eradicated by means of a global transition to open access (OA).

      Second, that this global transition from toll access to OA is inevitable (if not happening as quickly as it should be).

      I’m going to push back on both of those assumptions. In the first part of this two-part essay, I’ll address the second; tomorrow, I’ll address the first, offering (in the form of a “modest manifesto”) a very different vision for the future of our global scholarly communication ecosystem.