Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Wikipedia, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 30, 2026

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Batppuccin: My Take on Catppuccin for Emacs

  Batppuccin is my opinionated take on Catppuccin for Emacs. The name is a play on my last name (Batsov) + Catppuccin.2 I guess you can think of this as @bbatsov’s Catppuccin… or perhaps Batman’s Catppuccin?

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ The Roles of Packages

  Greg Wilson’s recent post An E-Bike for the Mind reminded me of Jorma Sajaniemi’s work on the roles of variables. Sajaniemi found that just eleven roles cover nearly all variables in novice programs: stepper, most-wanted holder, gatherer, one-way flag, and so on. As Wilson puts it, types tell you about a variable’s state at rest while roles tell you about its state in motion. Once you learn the roles, you can look at unfamiliar code and immediately recognize the shape of the algorithm from how data flows through it.

  Every package in a registry plays a particular role, whether it’s a library your application calls, a tool your build pipeline runs, a daemon your infrastructure depends on, or a firmware blob that makes your hardware work. This holds across all kinds of package managers, from npm and RubyGems to Homebrew, apt, Helm, Terraform Registry, and OpenVSX, and the role tells you more about how a package fits into a system than the name or the README. Two packages in completely different domains, managed by completely different tools, can behave identically because they play the same role.

• OpenSSH ☛ Call for testing: openssh-10.3

  OpenSSH 10.3 is almost ready for release, so we would appreciate testing on as many platforms and systems as possible. This is a bugfix release.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • YottaDB ☛ r2.04 - Our Biggest Release Yet

    Although it has been over a year since we released r2.02, we have not been idle. Unlike Santa’s elves, who must be ready in time for Christmas no matter what, r2.02 was such a robust release that we had the luxury of taking our time to get things into r2.04 that we wanted to. We couldn’t get everything in – in the software world, there is always something that has to be deferred – but we believe r2.04 was worth the wait.

    We originally intended r2.04 to focus on performance, and it does. We blogged about critical section performance in Critical Section Performance in r2.04. But performance took on a life of its own, and we did so much more. Every release adds functionality, and the major functionality added in r2.04 is the ability to convert between M and JSON. And, as with performance, there is so much more in the release than that. You can read the draft release notes and see the development details. With everything in it, r2.04 is our biggest release yet, reminiscent of the Antonov An-225 Mriya above, which at 253 metric tons had the largest carrying capacity of any aircraft ever built.

• Funding

  • Unicorn Media ☛ Cloud Czars Treat Open Source Like They Do California

    The cloud czars gorged on free software, starved the projects that sustain it, and are shocked the open source commons is starting to break.

  • Unicorn Media ☛ On Our Way to Independence: We’re $34 Away from Our March Goal

    Our Independence Drive is at 17% of its total goal. A final $34 this month will fully fund our mini-goal for March's coverage of GNU/Linux and open source.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ parallel @ Savannah: GNU Parallel 20260322 ('این آخرین نبرده،') released [stable]

    GNU Parallel 20260322 ('این آخرین نبرده،') has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Futurism ☛ Wikipedia Editors Tried and Tried to Work With AI Content, Eventually Realized It Was Total Trash and Banned It Entirely

      That debate finally came to a vote on March 20, which ended in an overwhelming 40-to-2 decision to place heavy restrictions on how large language models are used to maintain the site.

      “Text generated by large language models (LLMs) often violates several of Wikipedia’s core content policies,” the new policy states. “For this reason, the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited, save for the exceptions given below.”

• Standards/Consortia

  • DomainTools ☛ Understanding IPFS and Web3 Storage Tech

    IPFS (“InterPlanetary File System”) is a key technology in the design and implementation of “Web3,” also known as the “decentralized web.” IPFS is a distributed file system that allows users to store and share files in a peer-to-peer network. It uses a content-addressed storage system, where each file is identified by a unique hash. When a file is added to the IPFS network, it is automatically distributed across nodes in the network, and users can retrieve the file from any node that has a copy. By design, IPFS is more resilient to censorship and network failures than traditional centralized file storage solutions.

  • Hackaday ☛ Laser Ranging Makes GPS Satellites More Accurate

    Although GNSS systems like GPS have made pin-pointing locations on Earth’s sphere-approximating surface significantly easier and more precise, it’s always possible to go a bit further. The latest innovation involves strapping laser retroreflector arrays (LRAs) to newly launched GPS satellites, enabling ground-based lasers to accurately determine the distance to these satellites.

  • Herb Sutter ☛ C++26 is done! — Trip report: March 2026 ISO C++ standards meeting (London Croydon, UK)

    On Saturday, the ISO C++ committee completed technical work on C++26 in (partly) sunny London Croydon, UK. We resolved the remaining international comments on the C++26 draft, and are now producing the final document to be sent out for its international approval ballot (Draft International Standard, or DIS) and final editorial work, to be published in the near future by ISO.