Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 09, 2026

• Ruben Schade ☛ My A–Z toolbox: ExifTool

  That leaves us with Phil Harvey’s excellent ExifTool. It can do a tonne of stuff, but my primary use case is removing EXIF metadata before uploading an image to the interwebs.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • [Repeat] RedMonk ☛ Two Years of Valkey – tecosystems

    Two years ago last month, a group of former contributors to the Redis project announced their intention to collaborate instead on a competitive fork. Triggered by the decision to shift Redis away from the permissive open source BSD license to source available alternatives – the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and Server Side Public License (SSPLv1) – the new fork, Valkey, attracted attention without recent precedent. A lot has happened since, including the return to the project of its original author and the decision by Redis a little over a year after the relicensing to return to an open source license, albeit the copyleft AGPL rather than the more permissive [sic], original BSD. Given the two year anniversary, it’s worth taking stock of the two projects via their commit metrics. This is only one facet of the project’s health, obviously, and does not reflect usage, but as forks typically enter a decline phase shortly after their inception, comparing the two projects contributions should be a useful exercise.

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

  • Andrew Shell ☛ Working on the RSS Cloud WordPress Plugin – Andrew Shell's Weblog

    I’ve been continuing to work on the modern testing infrastructure so I can make sure the RSS Cloud plugin for WordPress is up to date.

    The maintainer rightfully wants to keep it as simple as possible, so I want to respect his wishes.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Ruben Schade ☛ The NMS Ceefax teletext reproduction!

    I’m just old enough to remember Teletext, the standard that encoded text information on standard analogue TV signals. Now thanks to Nathan Media Services and Alistair Cree, we can now interact with it again in the browser: [...]