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

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 01, 2026

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ Inspired

    In appendix A of the book Root cause: Stories and lessons from two decades of Backend Engineering Bugs, author Hussein Nasser has these wonderful words to say about me: [...]

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • [Old] Hypha ☛ Postgres is Your Friend. ORM is Not.

    Surprisingly many people don’t see the difference between a Query Builder and an ORM, so let’s clarify.

    An ORM is an Object–Relational Mapper. It maps database tables to classes and rows to objects. It lets you use a language-specific DSL instead of SQL, “hiding” SQL “complexity“ behind its own abstractions.

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

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Matt Mullenweg thinks WordPress is in decline. He may be right

    So here’s my controversial statement in 2026: on these points, Matt Mullenweg is completely right.

    This bureaucratic, consensus-driven culture has also been a blight on other large open source projects, for example at Mozilla. Contributions should be made quickly, and product design should be opinionated rather than consensus-driven. The more a project seeks consensus, the less able it is to innovate.

FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

• Dan Q ☛ Reply to: locked-open

  But for these more abstract ideas, “locked-open” enforcement becomes a matter for education, optimism, and hearts-and-minds. And there are companies with huge resources that are willing to fight against all of those.

• GNU Projects

  • LWN ☛ GCC 16.1 released

    Version 16.1 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has been released.

    The C++ frontend now defaults to the GNU C++20 dialect and the corresponding parts of the standard library are no longer experimental. Several C++26 features receive experimental support, including Reflection (-freflection), Contracts, expansion statements and std::simd.

    Other changes include the introduction of an experimental compiler frontend for the Algol68 language, ability to output GCC diagnostics in HTML form, and more.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Feld ☛ Open Source Does Not Imply Open Community

    Some projects are so huge and complicated that it requires a team to manage them. But this the exception, not the rule.

    Free yourself. Go back to the old ways. Especially if you're angry about the influx of new people and AI bots stealing your attention.

    Turn off the issues tracker and the pull requests or deploy a bare git server for releasing your code. Find a small group of people you really know and trust and work with them on projects, or do it completely alone.

    You don't need to allow strangers to invade your space. You don't need a performative Code of Conduct or an LLM policy. Open source doesn't need to be developed openly for it to be "open source".

    Write code. Make things you like. Use any tools you want. Do code drops at 2am on Christmas day. Whatever you do, don't get tricked into running an operation that's half tech incubator and half daycare for people whose parents gave them a keyboard and no social skills.

• Standards/Consortia

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency launches Sovereign Tech Standards to support open standards | GamingOnLinux

    Another EU push for open standards here with Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency recently announcing the Sovereign Tech Standards initiative.