Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 19, 2026

• GNU Projects

  • GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) ☛ GIMP: Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code Midpoint Progress

    Since the release of GIMP 3.2.4, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes. We’ve been making fixes that will be included in the upcoming 3.2.6 stable release and adding tons of new features for the first 3.4 development version.

    In addition, we’ve been mentoring our four Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students as they’ve been working on their projects. Since we just completed their midpoint evaluation, we wanted to share their progress with you all!

• Licensing / Legal

  • Aethrvmn ☛ valuelessness

    At first look, this seems noble and proper; one can however, quite easily, see that this is not the case, and the reason is that “permissive” licenses³, are only permissive to the developer, and not to the end user.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Mapping U.S. Rents by County in R with tidycensus, sf and ggplot2

      The U.S. Census Bureau publishes the rent that a typical household pays in every county in the country, updated every year, and gives it away through a free API. With the tidycensus package you can pull that data — numbers and the map polygons to draw it — in a single function call, then turn it into a national map in about twenty lines. Here we map median gross rent by county to see where renting is expensive and where it is cheap.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Nick Heer ☛ Permanent Daylight Saving Time

    The United States at least has the advantage of a large population living fairly far south. On the shortest day of the year, Los Angeles still sees nearly 10 hours of daylight and over 14 on the longest day. In somewhere as far north as Calgary, the difference in daylight hours is far greater — from under 8 hours in December to over 16 in June. That means the effects of permanent DST are highly acute. The sun will not rise here before 8:00 am from October 15 through February 8, with the latest sunrises at 9:39 am for several days in a row.

  • Nathan Grigg ☛ Worst case sunrise times in the USA

    Inspired by Dr. Drang’s plots illustrating the potential effects in Chicago of a move to permanent Daylight Saving Time in the US, I wanted to investigate which places would have the hardest time in the dead of winter.

  • Maury ☛ Regressive JPEGs:

    One of the cool features of JPEG files is that there's the option to save low frequency components first. This means that a partially downloaded image will be displayed at low resolution instead of being cut off.

    In the file, this works by breaking up the compressed data into multiple "scans", each prefixed with a header. Here's the first scan of a representive image: [...]