news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Thunderbird ☛ Thunderbird 2025 Review: Building Stronger for the Future - The Thunderbird Blog
2025 was an exciting year for Thunderbird. Many improvements were shipped throughout the year, from faster updates with a new release cadence, to a modernized codebase for the desktop app. We made big strides on our mobile apps and introduced the upcoming Thunderbird Pro to the world.
As we wrap up the year, a huge thank you to our community and volunteer contributors, and to our donors whose financial support keeps the lights on for the dedicated team working on Thunderbird. Here’s what we accomplished in 2025 and what’s to come in the new year.
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Eric MacAdie ☛ Emacs Carnival: People Of Emacs
This month’s Emacs Carnival is “The People Of Emacs” hosted by George Jones (site here, Mastodon here). whirls suburbs typewriting
I know the main thesis is to write about “Emacs people you’ve known,” but I feel that first we should acknowledge the work put in over the years by the Emacs developers and maintainers (as Irreal has done here and here): RMS, Eli Zaretskii, Stefan Kangas and Andrea Corallo are the main runners of the project. There is a list of maintainers in the source code. embosse
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Scoop News Group ☛ Senate defective chip maker Intel chair urges national cyber director to safeguard against open-source software threats [Ed: Trying to blame Free software instead of back doors hidden in proprietary software]
Tom Cotton, R-Okla., cited Chinese and Russian involvement in open-source tech and the risks to government and defense systems.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla ☛ Welcoming John Solomon as Mozilla’s New Chief Marketing Officer [Ed: Mozilla once again hires from GAFAM; monopolists running Mozilla]
Mozilla has always believed that technology should serve people — not the other way around. As we enter a moment of rapid change in how people experience the internet and AI, we’re focused on building products that are private, transparent, and put people in control. Today, we’re excited to take an important step forward in that work by welcoming John Solomon as Mozilla’s new Chief Marketing Officer.
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FSF / Software Freedom
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Ed Kellett ☛ Freedom zero cannot survive a world with attestation
If you accept “doing online banking” and “checking train times” as purposes, attestation is an existential threat to software freedom. It has already divided phones into locked-down capitalism delivery vehicles and useless toys. Please stop trying to bring it to PCs.
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Licensing / Legal
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Ava ☛ i need more freaks in law
Makes sense then that most people think you need to fit into that sort of group to be interested or have a good time in law: be boring, be professional, stone-faced, serious, rich, holier-than-thou, capitalism-lover, wear muted colors and perform gender and sexuality in the approved way, be straight-laced and rule-loving.
But honestly, law needs the opposite! Law needs you. I miss you in law. I miss all you freaks. There is space for you here. Your perspective, your input, your boldness, your intelligence and creativity is needed.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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Rlang ☛ Explore the Pharmaverse Examples: Your Gateway to Clinical Reporting with Open-Source Tools
If you’re navigating the world of clinical reporting with modern tooling or are curious about open-source tooling then the pharmaverse examples site is your one-stop-shop! This living collection of end-to-end examples showcases how open-source packages from the pharmaverse ecosystem work together to solve real clinical reporting challenges.
The site is organized into easy-to-navigate sections: [...]
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Standards/Consortia
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Chris ☛ Military Standard on Software Control Levels
The mil-std-882e standard specifies levels of software control, i.e. how dangerous the software can be based on what it is responsible for. Although the standard is a little more complicated, we can simplify to essentially four levels: [...]
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