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

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 30, 2026

• Sacha Chua ☛ Yay Emacs 32: Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs: May I recommend...

  In this livestream, I chatted with Prot about the May 2026 Emacs Carnival theme "May I recommend". It was a joint braindump of quick recommendations for people at different points in their Emacs journey, building on our conversation about newbies/starter kits and the newcomer experience all the way up to power users, Emacs Lisp coders, and package developers.

• Bodo Tasche ☛ I Finally Built It: Bookpile

  The idea is simple. You enter an ISBN and Bookpile shows you nearby independent bookshops, libraries, and book-tracking sites. It deliberately puts small, independent bookstores front and centre. No affiliate links, no cookies, no tracking — just books and the people who love selling or lending them.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Futurism ☛ DuckDuckGo Installs Spike as Google Moves to Replace Search With AI

    And many netizens are seemingly ready to call it quits once and for all, with week over week US installs of search alternative DuckDuckGo soaring 30 percent.

    “People aren’t just complaining about Google’s AI search overhaul, they’re leaving,” the company’s official X account tweeted on Tuesday. “Momentum is growing. It’s time to Fire Google.”

  • Waterfox ☛ Waterfox Android 1.2.4

    At Startpage’s request, Startpage has been removed as a search provider and from the browser options completely. This is out of our control, but we wanted to be transparent about the change rather than having it appear without explanation.

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

  • Joost de Valk ☛ Fixing the plumbing of the web · Joost.blog

    Every framework, CMS, and static-site generator reinvents the same list of defaults from scratch. Most get parts of it wrong. There is no shared target.

    So I shipped one. specification.website is a platform-agnostic specification of the technical features a good website should have. Twelve domains: foundations, SEO, accessibility, security, well-known URIs, agent-readiness, performance, privacy, resilience, internationalization, and more. Open source, written in the open.

    This is the plumbing of the web. And most platforms ship it incomplete.

• Education

  • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Brazilian Internet Forum (FIB16) in Belém, Pará: A visual tour

    I had the opportunity to participate in yet another edition of the Internet Forum in Brazil (FIB16), this time in the Amazon forest region, in Belém, Pará. The event, organized by NIC.br, brings together people from different sectors to debate hot and/or important topics related to the internet in the country.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Who’s Deranged, Exactly?

      But wait, there’s more. YouGov’s surveys subdivide Republicans into those who do and those who don’t support MAGA — and the economic views of these two groups are very different. A remarkable 65 percent of non-MAGA Republicans say that the economy is getting worse, while only 11 percent say that it is getting better: [...]

• Standards/Consortia

  • The New Stack ☛ Vendor neutrality isn’t magic: A hard look at the OpenTelemetry ecosystem

    It’s helpful to understand why — why use the OpenTelemetry standard at all? Why use distributed tracing? Why care about vendor neutrality?

    Let’s start with openness. Observability (and monitoring) begs to be open. Specifically, when we undertake the task of monitoring all the different systems used by an organization, open protocols that can serve as translation layers become invaluable.