news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Henrique Dias ☛ Goodbye File Browser, for Real This Time
Yesterday, I published the last planned release of File Browser. It includes a few security fixes and a notice about the wind-down of the project. Alongside it, I announced that this was the last planned release and updated the repository so that it’s ready to be archived on September 1st. For many people this came as a surprise. For those who’ve been following the project from close by, probably not. Either way, I wanted to write a bit about the decision and how we got to this point.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers
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University of Toronto ☛ Trying to stress Apache to 10,000 connections (with no answer yet)
Recently on the Fediverse, someone wondered if an out of the box build of Apache (with minimal tuning) could handle 10,000 simultaneous HTTP requests (the old famous 'C10K' target, which definitely was a challenge back in the days). We happen to have a web server that has hit 4,000 simultaneous requests (well, sort of, see later) with every indication that the people (well, programs) that were hitting it would have gone higher than 4,000 if the connection limit was higher. Since that high-water mark we've put an assortment of limits on the web server that cut the connections right down, but if I removed those connection limits in a spirit of experimentation perhaps we'd get to find out how high our Apache setup could go.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla ☛ Try the New Firefox Design in Nightly – Firefox Nightly News
This past May, we shared our vision for the future of Firefox. Starting today, you can try out the next design evolution of Firefox in Nightly.
It’s still Firefox, now with a more cohesive look and feel across tabs, menus, panels, and other browser surfaces. You’ll notice softer tab shapes, a warmer color palette, updated icons, and – after hearing from many of you – the return of Compact Mode and new theme options to make Firefox your own.
Many of you have already spotted pieces of the new design in Nightly over the past few months. Now they’re coming together into one complete experience.
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OMG Ubuntu ☛ We finally revived our Firefox add-on (10 years late)
The official OMG! Ubuntu add-on for Firefox is back – albeit far later than planned (sorry about that). If you’ve used our Chrome extension over the last decade, this add-on will be familiar as it’s the same thing, just in Firefox. Same look and (almost) the same features because it’s the same code (albeit with API name swaps and manifest tweaks). This isn’t the first time this blog has offered a Firefox add-on. Our old one broke in 2017 and though we intended to fix it, a decade happened to fly straight past us.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Hynek Schlawack ☛ SQLite WAL Mode Can Lock Short-Lived Readers
If you want to reproduce the error, here’s a standard-library-only Python script.
It demonstrates three scenarios by running many processes in parallel with a read-only open-query-close loop each: [...]
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Licensing / Legal
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Tara Tarakiyee ☛ Open Source Is Indefensible
They didn't change a licence. The members of the association that operates Codeberg changed the terms under which Codeberg is willing to host your code. The Open Source Definition governs licences, and clauses five and six constrain what a licence may say about who gets to use software and what for. It doesn't say anything about being forced to host all open source code. I find it very interesting why so many people feel like a rule had been broken when none had been.
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