Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 09, 2026

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Marisabel Munoz ☛ Updates and Bot Wars

    I’ve been playing with security configurations this month, trying to optimize what I already had. While working with Linked Data and Wikidata, I had the idea to block all unidentified bots. I made exceptions for RSS files and any public files meant to be scanned by bots, like opml and robots.txt.

  • [Old] Marisabel Munoz ☛ Defending my Digital Home

    I am a mama bear. I don’t allow anyone to disrupt my joy. This website is my safe haven, my playground, a reflection of myself. Last month I noticed it crashing a few times while I was updating on my /library data, adding tags or updating some code. Which was frustrating. For a moment, I thought I was breaking the code. Turns out some bots were flooding my server, mainly from Meta origin.

• FSF / Software Freedom

  • The Cyber Show ☛ Freedom from ThE B0llOcKS

    Stallman has a punk way of cutting through the epic miasma of bullshit generated by corporate American tech. You won't hear him mumble words like "AI" or "Cloud". He doesn't use those words because they are meaningless marketing terms designed to subtract clarity from conversation. It's hard not to respect, even admire those who refuse to adopt the language of the enemy.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Unicorn Media ☛ Why OOXML Is Not a Standard Format for Office Documents

    So you think Word’s DOCX format is fine because it carries an ISO standard label? Think again. LibreOffice co‑founder Italo Vignoli explains why Microsoft’s OOXML has never been, and likely never will be, a true standard.

  • Tony Solomonik ☛ Lance table format explained simply

    TLDR (but stay for the animations!): Lance is a successor to Iceberg / Delta Lake, more optimized for random reads, and supports adding ad-hoc columns without needing to copy all the data.