Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 07, 2026

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

  • Andrei Ciobanu ☛ The blog looks different now | Personal Site of Andrei N. Ciobanu

    This isn’t exactly a spectacular feat. A lot of people are jumping ship nowadays, usually for reasons related to the fragility of the Ruby ecosystem rather than Jekyll’s actual capabilities (which are perfectly fine for most humans). All in all, I like Hugo more. I won’t miss the cryptic failed builds I had to endure while deploying to Netlify.

    My first instinct was to build everything from scratch. Then I realized that my definition of “scratch” is actually the Bear Blog theme. It’s minimalistic enough to let me pretend I did the work while saving me from the existential dread of CSS grids.

    Once the foundation was set, I cooked up a few shortcodes and partials to handle my specific neuroses.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ pspp @ Savannah: PSPP 2.1.1 has been released

    I'm very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP.  PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data.  It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS. Changes from 2.1.0 to 2.1.1: [...]

• Licensing / Legal

  • Simon Willison ☛ Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code?

    This process used to take multiple teams of engineers weeks or months to complete. Coding agents can do a version of this in hours—I experimented with a variant of this pattern against JustHTML back in December.

    There are a lot of open questions about this, both ethically and legally. These appear to be coming to a head in the venerable chardet Python library.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Who Owns Our Knowledge? An African University Press Perspective

      Needless to say, I am currently shopping for another journal for my paper.

      My unfortunate experience illustrates the dynamics that African scholars face in our global knowledge ecosystem. As a publisher, I empathize with the journal publishers, as they must make a profit or perish. At the same time, as a scholar, I cannot access the publication funds from my university, and I did not receive grants for my research; it was self-funded.