Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 11, 2025

• Mitchell Hashimoto ☛ Ghostty Is Now Non-Profit

  Being non-profit clearly demonstrates our commitment to keeping Ghostty free and open source for everyone. It paves the way for a model for sustainable development beyond my personal involvement. And it also provides important legal protections and assurances to the people and communities that adopt and use Ghostty.

• It's FOSS ☛ FOSS Weekly #25.50: GNU/Linux Power Users, Helium Browser, Two New GNU/Linux Phones, Ubuntu Starter and More

  Gearing up for Tuxmas season 🎅

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Firefox Add-on Reviews: 2025 Staff Pick Add-ons

      While nearly half of all Firefox users have installed an add-on, it’s safe to say nearly all Firefox staffers use add-ons. I polled a few of my peers and here are some of our staff favorite add-ons of 2025…

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Simon Späti ☛ Simplicity of a Database, but the Speed of a Cache: OLAP Caches for DuckDB

    One option is to shift the compute of these SQL queries left, moving them to the dbt or data pipeline, and pre-compute. But sometimes this is not possible, as data needs to be aggregated on the fly as the user wants to switch between dimensions like region, date, product lines, companies, clients, and so on, on the fly. That’s why you can’t pre-store everything.

    Another option that usually comes into play is OLAP cubes, which are optimized for these kinds of queries and serve them really well as they have an internal cache layer and pre-aggregation. But that’s another system and another ingestion, combined with engineering work to integrate the pipelines and data on a frequent basis.

  • Simon Späti ☛ Opinionated Data Platforms vs. Open-Source: The Chef’s Choice for Your Data Platform

    Depending on your preferences, an opinionated data platform might have all you need, and you get analytics with a single unified tool. No contract discussions with multiple vendors, talking to major sales teams just to get started. Just sign up, and start doing analytics.

    This article is a deep dive comparing open data platforms and their tools with a closed-source platform approach. We check what the differences are and see when to use which. We talk about the connecting thread such as open standards, pros and cons, current market, and much more.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Barry Kauler ☛ LibreOffice Draw not in menu

    I continue to be surprised when we discover something vital is broken or missing. In this case, LibreOffice Draw is installed, but there is no menu entry.

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

  • Mike Rockwell ☛ Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer

    I haven’t had a chance to give this plugin a try yet, but I have a feeling it will become a permanent part of my setup.

  • Chris Enns ☛ You Should Start a Blog Now (or Later)

    There are a hundred ways to type into your computer or phone and have them appear on the internet. I'm going to recommend two right now, but either will work just fine. And thanks to fancy words like "data portability", you can change to a different way of publishing words on the [Internet] if you decide to later.

• Education

  • FOSDEM ☛ FOSDEM 2026 - /dev/random and lightning talks

    The room formally known as “lightning talks” room is now known as /dev/random.

    Last year we experimented with running a more spontaneous lightning talk format, with a submission deadline closer to the event and strict short time limits (under five minutes) for each speaker.

    The experiment was a success, so we’re going to continue using this format in the upcoming FOSDEM edition and expand it slightly.

  • Olimex ☛ We will run Soldering workshop for RVPC – the Retro Style RISC-V computer on FOSDEM 2026

    It is the largest European event dedicated to Open Source Hardware and Free/Libre Open Source Software, bringing together thousands of developers from around the world each year.