Free, Libre, and Open Source Software or Sharing Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 15, 2026

• University of Toronto ☛ Prometheus 3.14's (likely) duration functions, especially step()

  An exciting change landed in the development version of Prometheus recently, making PromQL arithmetic expressions in time durations a standard feature instead of an experimental one. For me, duration arithmetic expressions by themselves aren't the truly interesting part. What's really exciting is that as part of this change, Prometheus has added some new PromQL functions, especially step().

• [Old] Gajim ☛ Gajim 2.4.7

  Gajim 2.4.7 brings support for modern OpenPGP encryption and comes with many small improvements and bugfixes. Thank you for all your contributions!

• [Old] ArchLinux ☛ Gajim

  OMEMO Multi-End Message and Object Encryption is an XMPP Extension Protocol (XEP) for secure multi-client end-to-end encryption. It is an open standard based on Axolotl and PEP and Gajim implemented it.

• [Old] Ubuntu ☛ Gajim - Community Help Wiki

  Gajim is a free software, instant messaging client for the Jabber (XMPP) protocol which uses the GTK+ toolkit. It runs on GNU/Linux, BSD and Windows. The name Gajim is a recursive acronym for Gajim (is) a jabber instant messenger.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ Workshop Basel day one

    On this hot summer’s day in Basel, Switzerland, the seventh HTTP workshop started. These events tend to work roughly the same way and the people in the room are also to large extent familiar and known since previous editions.

  • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ OpenAI Is Shutting Down Its Browser That Was Supposed to Change Everything

    But the cracks started to show almost immediately. There were glaring cybersecurity concerns, including a major vulnerability to prompt injection attacks. Its agent worked at a frustratingly glacial pace — it took the browser ten full minutes to add three items to an Amazon shopping cart, as The Verge found out the hard way. It even ignored huge portions of the internet like the plague, highlighting ongoing legal battles over copyright.

    And now OpenAI is pulling the plug on the nonstarter browser, a mere nine months after launching it.

  • Stefan Eissing ☛ curl 8.22 blissful tweaks

    During the curl summer of bliss I found some breathing room again to look at a favourite topic of mine: performance.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ Odyssey 1.5.1 released

    We are excited to announce a new release of the Odyssey — advanced multi-threaded connection pooler for PostgreSQL and Apache Cloudberry.

    A lot of new small features have been implemented, alongside extended protocol support refactoring - many violations fixed, and overall performance of pipelining improved.

• Education

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Name your own price for this Raspberry Pi Press book bundle

    Humble Bundle is once again letting you name your own price for a bundle of Raspberry Pi Press e-books. With this book bundle, you’ll receive DRM-free electronic copies of a selection of our titles. What’s more, your purchase will support the Raspberry Pi Foundation‘s work to help young people realise their potential through computing.

• Licensing / Legal

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling

    By itself, this is bad enough. But wait, there’s more. Microsoft, like any modern blue-blooded software company, would much rather rent you its software than sell it to you. As anyone with the integer math skills of a seven-year-old can tell you, this is a bad deal. Thus, on-premises systems have to die off for this to work, but the sector is alive and well, and Microsoft is stuck with a valuable friend. It can't walk away.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ AI literacy begins with data literacy: An example from healthcare

      In our fourth seminar in our current series on teaching about AI in the arts, humanities, and sciences, Kathy Jessen Eller (The Concord Consortium) introduced the Data Science, AI & You (DSAIY) programme, a high school curriculum that helps students critically evaluate the role of data and AI in healthcare.

    • Chris ☛ Intuition for distribution differences

      Since the curve does not start at the origin but a few percent up on the y axis, we can conclude that a few percent of the population have a score of zero. That doesn’t mean they are bad or miserable people – there may be factors that make zero the best score for them – but on average, a score of zero is worse than a higher score.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Climate.gov was destroyed. Open data saved it.

      This shouldn’t have been necessary, but is still wonderful to see. Climate.gov had been the go-to resource for climate data, but it went offline when the Trump Administration radically cut NOAA’s funding. At that point: [...]

  • Open Access/Content

    • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Thoughts on making zines after 7 months

      Last weekend, I took part in a panel discussion about making zines with Tero, H-P and Jukka at this year’s Finncon. We had a wonderful 45 minute discussion: many good things were said but a lot remained unsaid due to limited time so I wanted to share my thoughts on zines, especially from the perspective of a new zine maker.