Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 06, 2026

• Collabora ☛ Collabora at Embedded World 2026: Open Source Hey Hi (AI) and Embedded Innovation

  As champions of open source development in the embedded community, Collabora will be at Booth 4-404 with an impressive lineup of live demonstrations spanning graphics, machine learning, continuous testing, and real-world applications.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Robert Haas ☛ pg_plan_advice: Plan Stability and User Planner Control for PostgreSQL?

    I'm proposing a very ambitious patch set for PostgreSQL 19. Only time will tell whether it ends up in the release, but I can't resist using this space to give you a short demonstration of what it can do. The patch set introduces three new contrib modules, currently called pg_plan_advice, pg_collect_advice, and pg_stash_advice.

    pg_plan_advice allows you to generate a "plan advice" string that describes the overall shape of the plan. You can then use that plan advice string to ensure that the same plan is recreated, or you can vary it to cause a different plan to be generated. Here's an example excerpted from the regression tests: [...]

  • Matt Nunogawa ☛ Just Use Postgres

    One of the more brain-bending articles I’ve read in the past couple years was Stephan Schmidt’s Just Use Postgres for Everything.

    Earlier this year, I spun up a greenfield tech project and realized that as a solo developer / tech co-founder, my limitations were mostly around operational overhead and not code and features. Just Use Postgres let me simplify the Infra and DevOps stack by relying more on code. This is a great trade off for a move-fast, prototype-heavy, super-early stage startup.

    It worked. Really well.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ Request to the European Commission to adhere to its own guidances

    The European Commission has spent years advocating for open standards, vendor neutrality, and digital sovereignty. The European Interoperability Framework explicitly recommends open formats for public sector digital services.

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

  • WordPress ☛ WordPress 7.0 Beta 3

    WordPress 7.0 Beta 3 is available for download and testing! This beta version of the WordPress software is still under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, you should evaluate Beta 3 on a test server and site.

• Licensing / Legal

  • The Register UK ☛ Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing

    Blanchard says he was in the clear to change licenses because he used AI – Anthropic's Claude is now listed as a project contributor – to make what amounts to a clean room implementation of chardet. That's essentially a rewrite done without copying the original code – though it's unclear whether Claude ingested chardet's code during training and, if that occurred, whether Claude's output cloned that training data.

    An individual claiming to be Mark Pilgrim, the original creator of the library, opened an issue in the project's GitHub repo arguing that Blanchard had no right to change the software license, citing the LPGL requirement that the license remain unchanged.

  • Armin Ronacher ☛ AI And The Ship of Theseus

    There are huge consequences to this. When the cost of generating code goes down that much, and we can re-implement it from test suites alone, what does that mean for the future of software? Will we see a lot of software re-emerging under more permissive licenses? Will we see a lot of proprietary software re-emerging as open source? Will we see a lot of software re-emerging as proprietary?

    It’s a new world and we have very little idea of how to navigate it. In the interim we will have some fights about copyrights but I have the feeling very few of those will go to court, because everyone involved will actually be somewhat scared of setting a precedent.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Wrlach ☛ Music updates

    First, I reindexed/retagged some of my older music with beets (a lovely little Python package). Over the years I'd used a number of different (mostly Linux-based) tools to rip CDs, which had various levels of maturity. Pretty sure I ripped a Cocteau Twins CD (Four-Calendar Café) in around 2001 using one of the earliest versions of Ogg Vorbis. There were various levels of quality here, but Beets did a great job of renormalizing tag metadata and writing things into coherent files.

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ Text formats are everywhere. Why?

    But why is text dominant?

    It is not because, back in the 1970s, programmers did not know about binary formats.

    In fact, we did not start with text formats. Initially, we worked with raw binary data. Those of us old enough will remember programming in assembly using raw byte values.

    Why text won?