Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 08, 2026

• Eric MacAdie ☛ 2025-12 Austin Emacs Meetup

  I am not the official spokesperson for the group. I just got into the habit of summarizing the meetings every month, and adding my own opinions about things. The participants may remember things differently, and may disagree with opinions expressed in this post. Nothing should be construed as views held by anyone’s employers past, present or future. That said, if you like something in this post, I will take credit; for things you don’t like, blame somebody else.

• Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Thinking about email workflows

  This Emacs thing is getting out of hand and eating away all my free time. Now I know what they mean with the saying “diving in a rabbit hole” (and never seeing the bottom of it). We’re at 1k lines of Elisp code and I still add items to the TODO list that don’t work well enough on a daily basis. For some weird reason, I decided to try my hand at using Emacs as an email client as well.

• Martin Hähne ☛ Trying Out Jellyfin

  Well, maintaining a Jellyfin instance allows you to have a centralized access point for all your music, movies, tv shows, etc. that you own. It can also do photos and home videos, but I am only using it (or intent to use it) for non-personal media. So music, movies and shows (for now). Having everything in one spot and then streaming it from there allows you to follow a single source of truth approach to your media: All the files are there and all the clean metadata with it as well: You stream from this media server only. So decay of data and data loss e.g. from moving from one device to the next should be minimal.

• Dyne ☛ Introducing Otari±

  Then I developped the current version 2, and worked hard to make it as readable and easy to maintain as I could. I wrote a lot of documentation to help myself to maintain it, and added a number of little features to polish its behaviour as much as I could. I have been using it very often: at least once per week, for about two years now, either to upload images from my phone, or to put on the phone some documents I wanted to take with me.

  I think I have polished it enough to publish it without too much shame. It is a C application. You only need a C compiler and the GNU version of Make to build it. The principal design goals are: [...]

• Events

  • Nikos Roussos: 39c3 notes

    This is a quick notes post about the recent Chaos Computer Congress. It was nice to participate again after two years.

    Talks

    All Sorted by Machines of Loving Grace? "AI", Cybernetics, and Fascism and how to Intervene
    The talk explores the roots of today's tech fascism and its love for tech. Full of nice rants.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME ☛ Daiki Ueno: GNOME.Asia Summit 2025

      Last month, I attended the GNOME.Asia Summit 2025 held at the IIJ office in Tokyo. This was my fourth time attending the summit, following previous events in Taipei (2010), Beijing (2015), and Delhi (2016).

      As I live near Tokyo, this year’s conference was a unique experience for me: an opportunity to welcome the international GNOME community to my home city rather than traveling abroad. Reconnecting with the community after several years provided a helpful perspective on how our ecosystem has evolved.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Localization (L10N): Mozilla Localization in 2025

      A Year in Data

      As is tradition, we’re wrapping up 2025 for Mozilla’s localization efforts and offering a sneak peek at what’s in store for 2026 (you can find last year’s blog post here).

      Pontoon’s metrics in 2025 show a stable picture for both new sign-ups and monthly active users. While we always hope to see signs of strong growth, this flat trend is a positive achievement when viewed against the challenges surrounding community involvement in Open Source, even beyond Mozilla. Thank you to everyone actively participating on Pontoon, Matrix, and elsewhere for making Mozilla localization such an open and welcoming community.

    • Ludovic Hirlimann ☛ Ludovic Hirlimann: Are mozilla's fork any good?

      To answer that question, we first need to understand how complex, writing or maintaining a web browser is. 

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Shame surrounding spreadsheets

    That most recent post struck a chord. I’ve received more email and DMs from you about this idea than anything else I’ve talked about in a while. Save for a few who tell me I’m doing it wrong (I expected as much), the majority of you admit to using spreadsheets in a similar way.

    I say admit there, because shame was a bit of a common thread throughout these responses. Gabor’s comment was representitive: [...]

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

  • Raymond Camden ☛ Adding Hardcover.app Data to Eleventy

    Ok, you aren't here (I assume) to peruse my books and see how few books I consume (teenage Ray would be embarrassed by the number). The biggest reason I switched to Hardcover was because of their API, which I wanted to use to display it on my Now page. Again, I don't honestly think anyone cares what I'm reading/listening to/watching, but I think it's cool and that's all that matters on my little piece of the Internet.

• FSF / Software Freedom

  • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Your digital life isn’t yours: The hidden battle for software freedom

    I am very sympathetic to free software. (And I regret not using more software of this kind.) On the Free Software Foundation blog, Jason Self reinforces the importance of the four freedoms of FOSS in the face of machine learning — which, in this context, is confused with what is commonly referred to as “artificial intelligence.” He defines it as follows: [...]

• Standards/Consortia

  • Mathieu ☛ XMPP and metadata

    I had the pleasure of giving a talk on "XMPP and Metadata" during the last Chaos Communication Congress, in the Critical Decentralization Cluster area. It was my first public presentation in a very long while (also in english), so the talk went okay-ish at best. The end of the year was also hectic and I did not manage to prepare or rehearse as much as I would have liked to.

    This blog post will be a longer, more complete version of the talk. You can nonetheless find the talk slides on the CDC pretalx. Thanks a lot to the people who proofread the blog post to fix stuff or suggest additional content.

    This was about metadata, but also generally data retention and what the server sees in general.