Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 05, 2026

• Events

  • Volker Krause ☛ FOSSGIS Conference 2026

    Last week I attended this year’s FOSSGIS-Konferenz in Göttingen, Germany [...]

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Armin Ronacher ☛ Absurd In Production

    Absurd is a durable execution system that lives entirely inside Postgres. The core is a single SQL file (absurd.sql) that defines stored procedures for task management, checkpoint storage, event handling, and claim-based scheduling. On top of that sit thin SDKs (currently TypeScript, Python and an experimental Go one) that make the system ergonomic in your language of choice.

    The model is straightforward: you register tasks, decompose them into steps, and each step acts as a checkpoint. If anything fails, the task retries from the last completed step. Tasks can sleep, wait for external events, and suspend for days or weeks. All state lives in Postgres.

    If you want the full introduction, the original blog post covers the fundamentals. What follows here is what we’ve learned since.

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

  • Joost de Valk ☛ WordPress needs to refactor, not redecorate

    When Cloudflare launched EmDash CMS on April 1st, the reactions came fast — from Matt Mullenweg himself, from Hendrik Luehrsen at Kraut.press, and from Brian Coords. Each piece approached EmDash differently, but together they crystallized something I’ve been thinking about for years: WordPress’s deepest technical problems aren’t at the surface. They’re architectural. And the WordPress project keeps treating them as cosmetic.

    A Cloudflare piece on application modernization offers a useful way to think about this. When organizations modernize legacy applications, they generally pick from three approaches: cosmetic changes (move to new infrastructure, change nothing underneath), targeted refactoring (rework the architecture in specific areas while preserving what works), or a full rewrite (start from scratch).

    Most successful organizations mix and match, picking the right approach for each component based on risk and business value. The worst thing you can do is mistake cosmetic changes for real modernization.

    WordPress, right now, is doing exactly that. And the responses to EmDash show why.

• FSF / Software Freedom

  • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ What does Open Source mean?

    Every few months someone declares that “X will kill open source” or that “open source is not sustainable” or that “open source won”, and every time the responses split into factions that seem to be having completely different conversations. People have been pointing this out for at least a decade. Replacement terms like “post-open source” never stuck, because the problem isn’t the label. The phrase “open source” carries so many meanings that people routinely talk past each other while using the exact same words, each person confident the other is being obtuse when really they’re just working from a different definition.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Akseli Lahtinen ☛ Frustrations with CalDAV tasks

    The problem with CalDAV tasks is often that every client only implements a portion of the massive spec. Sure, makes sense, nobody wants to implement all the stuff it has.

    But then you try to use different apps with it, and they all expect different things for such simple thing as marking a task done.