Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 15, 2026

• Events

  • Arun Raghavan ☛ Arun Raghavan: Notes from the PipeWire Hackfest 2026: Part 1

    (these notes are being posted in two parts to make the length more manageable, part 2 is here)

    The PipeWire community organised a hackfest in Nice, France, colocated with Embedded Recipes, the GStreamer hackfest, and a number of other events.

    In attendance were members of the upstream community, as well as folks interested in PipeWire from Collabora, Red Hat, Qualcomm, Stream Unlimited, Texas Instruments, and Valve. In some cases these were the same person wearing upstream and professional hats, as some of us often do! :)

  • Arun Raghavan ☛ Arun Raghavan: Notes from the PipeWire Hackfest 2026: Part 2

    (these notes are being posted in two parts to make the length more manageable, part 1 is here)

    Continuing from where we left off, about topics discussed at the PipeWire hackfest in Nice…

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

  • Robert Birming ☛ Bear lightweight markdown editor

    Personally though, I wanted something simpler. Something that almost feels like it could have shipped with Bear by default. I also wanted to be able to select chunks of text and apply formatting to multiple lines at once.

    So this is what I came up with...

• GNU Projects

  • [Old] GNU ☛ BYTE Interview with Richard Stallman - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation

    We are reproducing below the original interview, which is kept on MIT servers. According to the BYTE editors, the text was made available to subscribers of their BYTEnet and BIX online services [1].

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Seasonal adjustment by @ellis2013nz

      A reasonably straightforward post today. I wanted to look at monthly tourism numbers in Samoa. In fact I started to do this for Pacific islands in general, but the data wrangling challenges were sufficient that I only got as far as Samoa for now. There’s interest in these at the moment because they would be a relatively timely indicator of possible economic damage from the fuel crisis related to the Iran war. Visitor numbers, inflation, and merchandise trade are part of the very select number of monthly published economic statistics in this part of the world (for a select subset of countries).

      There’s two things happening in this post: [...]

• Standards/Consortia

  • University of Toronto ☛ Running a modern email system requires non-trivial staff time

    The reality of modern email is that to run a modern email system you need to know about a lot of stuff, and worse the stuff that you need to know about keeps evolving. You can't set up a mail system and then walk away from it apart from software and hardware upgrades; instead, you have to keep on top of a perpetually changing and evolving landscape of anti-spam systems and especially what you need to keep your outgoing email being delivered. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DMARC alignment, and so on are merely today's names; in a few years there will be more, different things that are necessary to know and deal with, which will require you to modify your mail system as part of its obvious time requirements.

  • Brent Fitsgerald ☛ Appreciating Exif

    I recently was writing some code to apply a mask to an image input. The mask had no Exif metadata, but the image did, so I had to adjust for the orientation of the image by reading it from Exif.

    This isn’t hard with libraries, and I knew the gist of the problem: images can have Exif, Exif is optional, phones and cameras use it for orientation, and you need to account for that when processing pixels directly. But I did not have a clear mental model of how Exif actually is represented in files.

    I was curious. I had questions:

    Where exactly is that orientation value stored? When should I rotate pixels instead of preserving a tag? What else might be hiding in the metadata? When is it typically stripped?

    So this is a little random walk guide to Exif.