Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 10, 2026

• [Old] HaikuOS ☛ Strawberry - a music player and collection organizer

  Strawberry is a cross-platform music player and music collection organizer for music collectors and audiophiles. Strawberry helps you play and manage your digital music collection or stream your favorite radio stations.

• It's FOSS ☛ The Open Source Diary App for Android That Organizes Your Life on a Timeline

  A well-designed diary app that keeps your data private, works offline, and respects your freedom.

• FSF ☛ FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, January 16, starting at 12:00 EST (17:00 UTC)

  Join the FSF and friends on Friday, January 16 from 12:00 to 15:00 EST (17:00 to 20:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • [Old] Rnb37 ☛ RSS is still pretty great

    I think a lot about information and information consumption. The way the Internet made information readily available is phenomenal. Sadly, the signal-to-noise ratio here is pretty low. For me, consuming RSS feeds[1] offers the best way to read the kind of high-quality information that I want with very little noise.

  • Mozilla

    • Don Marti ☛ how to remove ads from Firefox

      Firefox has a few different advertising and related features, and they all have different preferences. There is no one big “kill switch” for ads like there is is supposedly going to be for supposedly going to be for “AI”.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ Updated Conflict of Interest Policy for TDF’s Board of Directors

    The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit entity behind the LibreOffice project. It collects donations from users, and employs a small team to support and coordinate the worldwide community that makes the software.

  • Document Foundation ☛ The Future of Open Standards and the Importance of ODF

    Open standards don’t make headlines. Instead, they work quietly behind the scenes to define how information is created, shared and stored. However, as digital ecosystems become more complex and centralised, open standards are becoming increasingly important.

• FSF / Software Freedom

  • Rui Carmo ☛ How I Manage My Personal Infrastructure in 2026

    As regular readers would know, I’ve been on the homelab bandwagon for a while now. The motivation for that was manifold, starting with the pandemic and a need to have a bit more stuff literally under my thumb.

    But I also have a few services running in the cloud (in more than one cloud, actually), and I’ve seldom written about that or the overlaps between that and my homelab.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Software Freedom Conservancy ☛ A Slight Delay in our Struggle for Copyleft Justice

    A blog post from Software Freedom Conservancy.

    We at Software Freedom Conservancy are disappointed at some surprising news. Yesterday (THU 2026-01-08), we had a pretrial motions hearing scheduled in our historic impact litigation against Vizio. Just about an hour before the hearing's start-time, Judge Sandy Leal issued a minute order that rescheduled the hearing and (effectively) removed the trial (which was set to start this Monday 12 January 2025) from her calendar.

    We have been in this litigation against Vizio since October 2021. Vizio violated both the General Public License (GPL) and Lesser GPL Agreements. Vizio's “Smart” TV products include more than a dozen packages under these copyleft licenses, yet Vizio has continually failed to comply with these agreements in various ways — most notably (and including but not limited to) by (a) not providing complete, corresponding source code, (b) not providing “the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable[s]”, and (c) not providing object code necessary for relinking the LGPLv2.1'd works.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Daniel Estévez ☛ V16 beacon full uplink conversation – Daniel Estévez

    In that post I couldn’t show how the beacon connects to the cellular network and sets up the EPS security context used to encrypt the message, since that would have happened some minutes before I made the recording. I have now made a recording that contains both the NB-IoT uplink and the corresponding NB-IoT downlink and starts before the V16 beacon is switched on. In this post I show the contents of the uplink recording.

  • [Old] Lea Verou ☛ Influence the State of HTML 2025 Survey!

    This is the goal of these surveys: to drive meaningful change in the web platform. Sure, getting a shareable score about what you know and seeing how you compare to the rest of the industry is fun, but the reason browser vendors pour thousands of dollars into funding these surveys is because they provide unique vendor-neutral insights into developer pain points and priorities, which helps them make better decisions about what to work on. And this ultimately helps you: by getting your voice heard, you can directly influence the tools you work with. It’s a win-win: developers get better tools, and browser vendors get better roadmaps.

  • Anil Dash ☛ How Markdown took over the world

    Nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems at the biggest companies, to the casual scraps of code cobbled together by college students, is annotated and described by the same, simple plain text format. Whether you’re trying to give complex instructions to ChatGPT, or you want to be able to exchange a grocery list in Apple Notes or copy someone’s homework in Google Docs, that same format will do the trick. The wild part is, the format wasn’t created by a conglomerate of tech tycoons, it was created by a curmudgeonly guy with a kind heart who right this minute is probably rewatching a Kubrick film while cheering for an absolutely indefensible sports team.

    But it’s worth understanding how these simple little text files were born, not just because I get to brag about how generous and clever my friends are, but also because it reminds us of how the Internet really works: smart people think of good things that are crazy enough that they just might work, and then they give them away, over and over, until they slowly take over the world and make things better for everyone.