Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Digital Sovereignty, Sharing Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 05, 2026

• FSF ☛ July GNU Spotlight with Amin Bandali featuring fourteen new GNU releases: Screen, Anastasis, and more!

  Fourteen new GNU releases in the last month (as of July 31, 2026): [...]

• MJ Fransen ☛ jugulans a text mode mind map application

  jugulans a text mode mind map application

  Jugulans is a text mode mind map application.

  It lets the user build a mind map using just the keyboard, and save it in org-mode format.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Ergo IRC Chat Server ☛ v2.19.1, a security patch release

    We’re pleased to announce Ergo v2.19.1, a new stable release. This release fixes newly discovered security vulnerabilities in Ergo, some of which are serious; all deployments are advised to upgrade as soon as possible. For the official binary release and changelog, see our Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub [...]

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Sal ☛ Moved the blog from 11ty to Hugo

    With these thoughts in mind, I dipped a toe back into the Hugo pond this morning, liked the feel of it, and before long was wild-eyed and neck-deep in migration. It’s now about 3:50 pm, and I think most of the core stuff is working in Hugo.

    Here are my very hasty thoughts on what I like better: [...]

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Post-American compute for a post-American Internet (04 Aug 2026)

    But Americans face the same digital sovereignty risk. America is a lawless place now, where a pliable Supreme Court and supine Congress have affirmed that "it's not a crime if the president does it." The same tech giants who sold out to Trump for tax breaks and protection from antitrust enforcement will happily disconnect any member of the American public, any American company, any American official who displeases Trump.

    It's a strange irony that in this moment when so many of us are struggling to "de-Google" our lives, a forcible, sudden de-Googling amounts to a sort of digital death penalty: [...]

  • Ayom Blog ☛ Offpunk Manifesto

    At the end of 2025, French judge Nicolas Guillou of the International Criminal Court lost all access to several American digital services — such as hosting, online shopping, and banking — provided by American companies like Airbnb, Amazon, and PayPal. The United States justified this sanction because Guillou issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, due to Israeli attacks of a genocidal nature in Palestinian territory. The United States is the main country supporting Israel's actions in Central Asia.

    The offpunk stance is born from a simple and uncomfortable observation: the digital realm is fragile. At the same time, all social life is forcibly embedded within this environment. Therefore, this stance takes into account that one must not depend entirely on virtual services, at the risk of one of them being sanctioned or becoming unavailable. Examples like the Microsoft server outage that impacted banking services worldwide in mid-2024, the sanction of Twitter/X by the Brazilian government in late 2024, and the global outage of Amazon and Cloudflare servers in late 2025, which took down numerous domains on the internet, laid bare not only its fragility but also our dependence on these services.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Centering a map projection on the mapped region

      The PROJ format for defining Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS) is becoming deprecated, as PROJ strings cannot accurately store modern datum transformations, coordinate epoch information, or complex axis order rules. However, that format is much easier and more practical for humans to type and read, and it is still often used as a legacy convenience. I, for one, use it often for centering a map projection on the mapped region, thus avoiding the distortion that occurs away from the projection center. For example, imagine I want to map New Zealand in a Lambert Azimuthal Equal-Area projection in R: [...]