news
Open Acces, Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, and Standards
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Principia Softwarica ☛ The Journey of ls - Principia Softwarica
What happens when you type ls and press Enter? This simple command travels through almost every layer of the operating system, touching code described in 6 different books of the Principia Softwarica series.
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GNU Projects
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Amin Bandali: Emacs Chat with Sacha Chua
Yesterday I joined Sacha Chua for a new episode of her Emacs Chat podcast, where we talked about Emacs and life. I gave a quick tour of my Emacs configuration, discussing at length my configurations for EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager) among other topics like Emacs's facility for visually indicating buffer boundaries in the fringe by setting
indicate-buffer-boundariesand my convenience configuration macros.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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Coalition for Networked Information ☛ FedHarv—A Python Workflow for Automating Open Access Article Harvesting
FedHarv is a specialized command-line utility designed to automate the discovery, retrieval, and packaging of open access (OA) scholarly outputs for batch ingestion into DSpace repositories. It replaces manual harvesting with a robust, automated pipeline. FedHarv is architected for OA/copyright compliance and high-quality metadata, operating on a “Diamond/Gold/Hybrid Exclusive” policy. It systematically isolates “Green” (self-archived) and “Bronze” (free-to-read) content to ensure the repository only hosts files with clear re-use licenses or explicit open access status. It leverages several APIs to do so, including OpenAlex, CrossRef TDM, FundRef, DOAJ, Unpaywall, and DataCite, and packages metadata and bitstreams into customizable collection folders for an institution’s repository. FedHarv will be available under an MIT license for others to use and modify in Summer 2026.
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Creative Commons ☛ How can Equitable Access to Heritage Help Solve Global Challenges? An Exploratory Dialogue
How can equitable access to heritage help solve global challenges? That is the question we addressed during our Exploratory Dialogue, a major event we hosted on 29 April, 2026, at UNESCO House in Paris, France, to celebrate the Open Heritage Statement and explore its synergies with UNESCO’s priorities in tackling the most urgent problems facing the world today.
In this blog post, we set the event in its wider context, look back at some of the highlights from the discussions, report on our key takeaways, and pave the way for what comes next.
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Standards/Consortia
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Stuart Breckenridge ☛ Moving Feed Discovery to /.well-known
A few weeks ago I wrote about how RSS discovery is hard. In that particular example I used the BBC, who make things notoriously difficult because they don’t even surface their feeds in the <head> element of their site. However, since writing that piece, I’ve been thinking about better ways for RSS readers to discover feeds, and it turns out I’m not the only one.
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IETF ☛ draft-nottingham-feed-menu-00 - Feed Menus
This specification defines Feed Menus, a simplified means of discovering the feeds (e.g., RSS or Atom) offered by a Web site.
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