Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Open Access Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 16, 2026

• Jamie Zawinski ☛ XScreenSaver 6.14

  XScreenSaver 6.14 is out now, including iOS (soon) and Android. A whopping eighteen new savers this time! As I mentioned last month, I wrote a new XScreenSaver module that is API-compatible with Shadertoy, which means that I am now able to pull demos written that way into the XScreenSaver fold. These 18 savers are the first of that batch.

• Arduino ☛ Meet Larry Bank: the performance whisperer making code faster and open source better

  His specialty? Code optimization. But Bank’s contributions to the open-source community go far beyond making software run faster. He’s spent years creating libraries, tools, and solutions that make difficult things simpler – especially for makers working with Arduino boards and other microcontrollers. His philosophy is refreshingly straightforward: “There’s no value in hoarding knowledge. It’s best just to share it.”

• Pi My Life Up ☛ Setting up Booklore on the Raspberry Pi

  Booklore is a self-hosted web app that is designed to help you organize, manage, and read your eBook library. It has quickly become known for its modern web design and innovative design, and has easily earned its placement as one of the best alternatives to Calibre.

  This software boasts a wide range of functionality to improve your book management. It can quickly and easily fetch metadata for your book library while allowing it to be easily edited through its web interface. To make your organization even better, you can set up a feature called magic shelves that dynamically organizes your eBooks for you.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Robert Haas ☛ Robert Haas: Hacking Workshop for February 2026

    For those who might need a reminder of how the hacking workshop works, this is simply an opportunity for anyone who is interested to have a conversation with a senior PostgreSQL hacker about a talk they gave, usually a talk on their area of specialty. Think of it as an extension of the Q&A period that would normally occur after a conference talk, except that there will only be 15-20 people on the call and we will have a full hour to talk things through with the talk author.

• Education

  • SoCal Linux Expo ☛ Cindy Cohn | SCALE

    Keynote with Cindy Cohn

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Anil Dash ☛ Wikipedia at 25: What the web can be

      When Wikipedia launched 25 years ago today, I heard about it almost immediately, because the Internet was small back then, and I thought “Well… good luck to those guys.” Because there had been online encyclopedias before Wikipedia, and anybody who really cared about this stuff would, of course, buy Microsoft Encarta on CD-ROM, right? I’d been fascinated by the technology of wikis for a good while at that point, but was still not convinced about whether they could be deployed at such a large scale.

      So, once Wikipedia got a little bit of traction, and I met Jimmy Wales the next year, I remember telling him (with all the arrogance that only a dude that age can bring to such an obvious point) “well, the hard part is going to be getting all the people to contribute”. As you may be aware, Jimmy, and a broad worldwide community of volunteers, did pretty well with the hard part.

    • [Old] Wikipedia ☛ Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-01-31/Technology report - Wikipedia

      The source code was maintained and developed in a CVS repository on Sourceforge.net. Gabriel Wicke, a developer and later Principal Software Engineer at the WMF, said in an email, "Getting revision control access (CVS at the time) basically was about winning trust with whoever set up accounts, which I strongly suspect was [Vibber]."

      Tim Starling, an early developer and current Principal Software Architect at the WMF, said in an email he got CVS access from Lee Daniel Crocker as soon as he said he was interested. "There was no pre-commit review, but the code on the server (just one or two servers back then) was not automatically updated, so commits were theoretically reviewed before they went live," he said.