Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, the Web, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 14, 2026

• Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Emacs: doric-themes version 1.2.0

  These are my minimalist themes. They use few colours and will appear mostly monochromatic in many contexts. Styles involve the careful use of typography, such as italics and bold italics.

  If you want maximalist themes in terms of colour, check my ef-themes package. For something in-between, which I would consider the best “default theme” for a text editor, opt for my modus-themes.

• Chris Maiorana ☛ Org mode as a gantt chart generator

  The word Gantt tends to evoke project-management software with bars you can drag and a hefty license fee. The underlying idea, tasks arranged on a horizontal timeline, with owners and effort estimates, is much older and much simpler than the software around it. It is basically a chart. You can draw one with a pencil and a string for a plumb line.

  Org mode already stores everything you need for a Gantt chart: a hierarchy of tasks, SCHEDULED and DEADLINE timestamps, properties for Effort and assignments to various agents. What’s missing is the picture. But org can draw the picture too. Let’s take a look and, one hopes, save you a subscription fee.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Server

    • Mathieu Aumont ☛ Looking for a Nextcloud replacement

      I've been running Nextcloud since years. It works, my family uses it, contacts/calendar sync fine, for the photos I've migrated to Immich recently. WebDAV is there when I need it. And yet, every few months I get this itch : "surely there's something more modern than a giant PHP monolith in 2026 ?"

      So this time I actually took a weekend to look for a replacement. Short version : there isn't one, not really. Long version below.

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox Application Security Team: Firefox Security & Privacy Newsletter 2026 Q2

      Welcome to the Q2 2026 edition of the Firefox Security & Privacy Newsletter.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ powa-archivist 5.2.0 is out!

  • Lobsters ☛ lobste.rs is now running on SQLite

    This past Saturday, @pushcx and I deployed the SQLite pull request to production. We were waiting till this morning to see how it would react to the Monday traffic spike before making this post. Needless to say, SQLite seems to have passed with flying colors: cpu usage is down, memory usage is down, site seems to be snappier at least for me, 1/2 the vps cost once mariadb vps is taken down, and finally "We're having a quiet Monday.". Finally #539 Migrate to SQLite was closed this morning.

    Let us know if you have any questions about the migration.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ Financials and Budget – TDF Annual Report 2025

    This is part of the Annual Report 2025 from The Document Foundation, the non-profit that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community. TDF exists because of a large, dynamic global community — volunteers, ecosystem companies and committed end users who support our work with donations of both time and money.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ screen @ Savannah: GNU Screen v.5.0.2 is released

    Hi everyone, I'm glad to announce the new release of GNU screen.

    Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells. The 5.0.2 release includes the following changes to the previous release 5.0.1: [...]

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Testing racial predictions with BISG

      Regulators expect insurance companies, banks, and others not to discriminate by race, but businesses are not allowed to collect the race of their customers. One solution for testing discrimination in the aggregate is to use U.S. Census data to estimate the probable race of each customer based on the customer’s name and geographic location. (The Census race data is self identified and excludes a multi racial category; I will leave it to the sociologists to discuss issues with these things and whether Hispanic is a race.)

• Standards/Consortia

  • Roman Kashitsyn ☛ Backtrack-free cursive

    I love writing in cursive, shaping each word in one long stroke. If you grew up learning the Latin alphabet, you likely don’t realize how much joy it sucks out of cursive writing. I noticed only because I learned the Cyrillic alphabet first. I think and write primarily in English, yet Russian feels more enjoyable to write.