Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 23, 2026

• Luis Villa: two questions on software “sovereignty”

  The EU looks to be getting more serious about software independence, often under the branding of “sovereignty”. India has been taking this path for a while. (A Wikipedia article on that needs a lot of love.) I don’t have coherent thoughts on this yet, but prompted by some recent discussions, two big questions: [...]

• LWN ☛ 30 years of ReactOS

  ReactOS, an open-source project to develop an operating system that is compatible with Microsoft Windows NT applications and drivers, is celebrating 30 years since the first commit to its source tree. In that time there have been more than 88,000 commits from 301 contributors, for a total of 14,929,578 lines of code. There is, of course, much left to do.

• OpenSSF (Linux Foundation) ☛ Strengthening Open Source Security Through Community: Introducing OSSAfrica

  Open Source & Security Africa (OSSAfrica) is a community-led initiative bringing together people who care about open source and security across the continent. We're building connections between contributors, software developers, maintainers, researchers, and security professionals.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Rachel ☛ Feedback on the feed, and why posts pop back sometimes

    This is part of why the feed is the past 100 posts and not just the past couple of days or something like that. This way, if I fix something within a reasonable horizon, there's a chance of the fix appearing on the reader side of things.

    If your feed reader notices this, then everything is working as intended. If you're seeing post updates on a reasonable timeframe, then odds are good that your feed reader software is doing the right thing.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ pg_utl_smtp v1.0 released

    PostgreSQL UTL_SMTP compatibility extension

    pg_utl_smtp is a PostgreSQL extension to create, manage and use Oracle-style UTL_SMTP package. The use and behavior is just like with the UTL_SMTP Oracle package. This work is released from the HexaRocket

    This extension allows email notifications to be sent from triggers or stored procedures. By integrating the extension directly into the database, you can trigger data-driven actions without waiting for application intervention.

• Education

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Fostering Kenya’s computing education ecosystem - Raspberry Pi Foundation

    In November, our first-ever Kenya Partner Showcase brought together all our partners from across the country for two days of collaboration, learning, and shared strategy. What stood out to us most from the event was not just the diversity of work that the Kenyan partners are doing in computing education, but also the clear alignment that is emerging across partners, government, and communities.

• Programming/Development

  • Steinar H Gunderson ☛ Steinar H. Gunderson: Rewriting Git merge history, part 2

    In part 1, we discovered the problem of rewriting git history in the presence of nontrivial merges. Today, we'll discuss the workaround I chose.

    As I previously mentioned, and as Julia Evans' excellent data model document explains, a git commit is just a snapshot of a tree (suitably deduplicated by means of content hashes), a commit message and a (possibly empty) set of parents. So fundamentally, we don't really need to mess with diffs; if we can make the changes we want directly to the tree (well, technically, make a new tree that looks like what we want, and a new commit using that tree), we're good.

  • Simon Ser ☛ Simon Ser: Status update, January 2026

    Hi!

    Last week I’ve released Goguma v0.9! This new version brings a lot of niceties, see the release notes for more details. New since last month are audio previews implemented by delthas, images for users, channels & networks, and usage hints when typing a command. Jean THOMAS has been hard at work to update the iOS port and publish Goguma on AltStore PAL.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Artyom Bologov ☛ Against Markdown

    So Markdown is this Lightweight Markup Language. Everyone (relative; among programmers, writers, and other “power-users”) uses it. LLMs use it. So it’s destined to eat the world. But it doesn’t mean Markdown is good.

    I have already dissed Markdown before. But that text didn’t age well, for reasons unrelated to Markdown. So I decided my dislike of Markdown should have a new literary home. Here are reasons why I don’t like this incomplete and leaky markup language: [...]