news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Gunnar Morling ☛ A Fast Path for Fixed-Length Lists in Parquet
The Parquet community has recognized this problem and is actively working on addressing it. Several options for adding fixed-length list support are currently under discussion, for instance in the form of a new logical type FIXED_SIZE_LIST. Eventually, this should bring decoding performance of fixed-length list data to the level of a fully flat schema. However, until that’s the case, is there anything we can do to narrow or even close the gap by retrieving effectively fixed-length lists in a smarter way?
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[Old] Chris Hardie ☛ Using Nagios for small business infrastructure monitoring
To perhaps state the obvious, I’ve found that monitoring the status of all the systems and services we depend on brings reassurance and faster resolutions.
If there are mumblings spreading among my team about an outage, I usually already know about it and pinpointing the cause.
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Unicorn Media ☛ Nextcloud Names Christian Fu Müller as Hey Hi (AI) Team Lead
The hire points to Nextcloud’s plan to deepen Hey Hi (AI) automation while preserving its privacy- and safety-first model.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers
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ZDNet ☛ What made me finally switch to Vivaldi as my default Linux web browser
Vivaldi is one of those web browsers that I hadn't given much attention to over the years. It always reminded me of my favorite browser, Opera, but with a bit of extra bloat and an aesthetic that didn't quite live up to the considerable standards I'd long ago set.
Vivaldi included so many features that it was almost dizzying. At some point, I concluded that all those features crowded the UI, making it difficult to navigate. In my world, I need efficiency. On top of that, the theming engine had fallen so far behind the likes of Opera and Zen Browser that I couldn't convince myself to use it with any regularity.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Document Foundation ☛ Welcome to our new TDF members!
Members – more formally known as the “Board of Trustees” – are a crucial part of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. They are people from across the globe who contribute time, effort and skills, whether on a voluntary or paid basis.
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Document Foundation ☛ Join the LibreOffice team as a Marketing and Communication Professional (full-time, remote, m/f/d)
Love LibreOffice? Got a passion for marketing, media, public relations and creating great campaigns? We are The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. We’re passionate about free software, the open source culture, and bringing new people with fresh ideas into our project.
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Education
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FreeBSD ☛ BSDCan 2026 Travel Report – Novković
This year, I had the great privilege of receiving the FreeBSD Foundation travel grant to attend BSDCan.
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Raspberry Pi ☛ Robots, games, AI, and more at Coolest Projects UK 2026
Coolest Projects UK returned to Bradford in May, with more than 200 young people showcasing digital projects they had designed and built themselves.
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Rlang ☛ A world still to be mapped: reflections on geocomputation in R: takeaways from the talk and workshop at UseR! 2026
At useR! 2026 in Warsaw, I contributed to a workshop on Geocomputation with R (July 6, 2026) and gave a keynote entitled A world still to be mapped: reflections on geocomputation in R (July 8, 2026). Both were opportunities to consider what the R spatial ecosystem already makes possible, its strengths, limitations, and what remains to be done.
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GNU Projects
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GNU ☛ osip @ Savannah: osip2 [5.3.2]
A new security release was published today! A minor Out-of-bounds Read was discovered. And fixed!
No confidential impact is possible.
A very low risk of crash is possible.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — What Does Commercial Adoption Mean for the Preprint Movement?
Preprints started in the non-profit space and, as Coates notes, some of the most well-known preprint servers are non-profit (Figure 1). But does the growth of commercial publishers into the preprint space really threaten the preprint movement, and if so, how much? Even though Elsevier bought SSRN back in 2016, it remains free to post a preprint and free to read. So even though SSRN is now operated by what is perhaps the most demonized of commercial publishers, it still fulfills the essential function of a preprint repository and hosts over 1.8 million preprints without any author or reader fees.
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