Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Licensing, and Open Data

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 23, 2026

• RTL-SDR ☛ No-SDR: A New Open Source Multi-User WebSDR for RTL-SDR

  Thank you to George (gbozo), who has just released no-sdr (named from No(de)-sdr), a new open source multi-user WebSDR for the RTL-SDR written in Go and node JS. A WebSDR allows users to run an SDR remotely and access it over a local or internet network connection. This is useful for bringing an SDR closer to an antenna, instead of running a long, lossy coax cable, and for sharing SDRs among multiple networked users.

• Evan Hahn ☛ Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP Shrinker

  I built ZIP Shrinker, a little browser tool to shrink ZIP files. It also works with formats that are secretly ZIPs underneath, like APK, EPUB, JAR, and many more.

• Education

  • FSF ☛ Forty-six free software meetups on six continents — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software

    The FSF invited free software supporters to organize in-person community meetups in their area during May 2026, or LibreLocal month, to bring people together to swap ideas, learn from each other, and celebrate free software. People were encouraged to organize events grounded in freedom to help spread the free software philosophy. Those who are organizing a meetup have listed their event details on a dedicated page. The list of all LibreLocals listed there continues to be updated.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Open-source non-profit claims Bambu Lab violated license — SFC steps in after multi-billion dollar 3D printer giant threatened independent developer, issued cease-and-desist demand on OrcaSlicer fork that restored cloud printing features

    On the other hand, the SFC contends that because bambu_networking is required to run the Bambu Studio, it falls under AGPLv3, which the Bambu Lab’s slicer is licensed under. Bambu Studio itself is a fork of PrusaSlicer, which was also based on Slic3r. The original Slic3r uses AGPLv3, meaning every derivative under it, including Bambu Studio, must use the same license. The fact that bambu_networking is flagged as proprietary breaks the copyleft license and violates several clauses in the license agreement.

    This has been going on for years now, but it’s the company’s actions against Jarczak that finally caused an uproar in the 3D printing community. Joseph Prusa himself, the chief of Prusa Research and the creator of PrusaSlicer on which Bambu Studio is based on, said that it was violating the AGPLv3 license, and that Bambu Lab’s actions raise red flags when it comes to security. Right-to-repair advocates are also rallying behind the developer, with YouTuber Louis Rossman saying that he will support Jarczak up to $10,000 for their legal expenses, with Gamers Nexus matching that amount. Furthermore, Rossman said that he’ll host the fork on his own FULU (Freedom from Unethical Limitations) Foundation GitHub and dared the company to take legal action against him.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Zero Sum Problems

      Knowing who won each measure isn’t nothing. It can be informative about how the game went, maybe especially when a team won the game but “lost” on a number of the measures. If you really wanted to lean in to that aspect, you could sort of justify the zero-sum view, and maybe look for a way to sort and order by “how much” a team “won” each category. But again, what’s the right denominator for those measures? For instance, do we care about a team’s share of all Defensive Rebounds in the game? Or do we care about the share of Defensive Rebounds a team won relative to every opportunity it had to make a Defensive Rebound? How meaningful is ordering our rows by those kinds of shares? Even worse, some measures (notably Fouls) are bad to “win”, so we’d have to do something about those.