Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 24, 2025

• GNU Projects

  • The OpenPGP Schism

    I was looking into post-quantum cryptography (PQC) support in GnuPG, eager to see how we prepare our digital identities for "Q-Day." What I found, however, wasn't a unified front, but a present-day civil war over standards.

    We need to talk about the state of OpenPGP because divergent standards threaten the very foundation of our digital security, risking fragmentation that could undermine trust and interoperability.

    For over two decades, the interoperability of encrypted email and file signing relied on a unified specification - RFC 4880 - which defined the "Version 4" (v4) key format. The "friend" we relied on has split into two personalities, and I'm deeply disappointed to report that they're no longer speaking to each other.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Five Years of GetFTR: A discussion with Librarians on Access, Integrity, and Collaboration

      Get Full Text Research (GetFTR) was launched in 2019 with a simple but important mission: to make it easier for researchers to move easily from discovery of academic content to full-text access. Five years later, the service has expanded to include more publishers, integrators, and technology partners, and strengthened ties with the library community.

      To mark this anniversary, we brought together four librarians for a conversation about how GetFTR is working in practice, its value to libraries and researchers, and what opportunities lie ahead.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ The industry skipped from IPv4 to IPv6, leaving IPv5 and the Internet Stream Protocol to the annals of history — a data streaming experiment rendered unnecessary by broadband

    The Internet's early twisted shoots of growth sometimes led to a dead end, like IPv5.