Free Software, Digital Sovereignty, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 07, 2026

• Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Emacs: the ‘speedbar’ built-in file explorer (Emacs 31)

  In this video I demonstrate the built-in ‘speedbar’ command. This is the file explorer that Emacs ships with. Starting with Emacs 31, the ‘speedbar’ can be configured to appear on the side of the frame. Whereas the default is to show up in a separate frame. To me, the default is impractical, whereas the new option turns ‘speedbar’ into a very useful piece of functionality.

• It's FOSS ☛ FOSS Weekly #26.32: Kittens, Feed Readers, Free Bash Course, No Hey Hi (AI) in Kernel Staging and More

  RSS feed is one way to escape the clutches of algorithms.

  The entire debate in the Linux and open source world these days is if AI generated code should be used or not.

  As Linus told AI critics to fork the project or walk away, GKH took a more surgical approach. AI patches are fine elsewhere in the kernel, but drivers/staging is off limits.

  The GNOME extensions review queue is still flooded with AI slop months after the no-AI rule went in. The latest attempt to slow it down is a guide written directly for the bots doing the generating, covering the bad patterns that keep showing up.

  Keychron's doing for mice what QMK did for keyboards. ZGM is a GPL-3.0 open source firmware built on Zephyr RTOS, coming first to the G6 HE in Q1 2027. If it takes off, Linux users are the ones who gain most since practically no gaming mice ship with official Linux configuration support.

• Ruben Schade ☛ How my homelab storage evolved over time

  I appreciate that I spend a not insignificant amount of time talking about ZFS here, the only volume manager and file system I trust with my important data. ZFS came from my beloved Sun Microsystems, and today FreeBSD has the best ZFS integration outside the illumos ecosystem.

• Codeberg ☛ dlowe/irken: A tiny hackable full-featured IRC client

  Irken is an attempt to build a small, functional, IRC client in Tcl/Tk. It aims to honor as much of IRC as possible while still remaining small enough to understand by tinkerers.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • SQ Magazine ☛ Search Engine Statistics 2026: Market Share, Volume & AI Shift

    Google handled 90.1% of worldwide search across desktop, mobile, tablet, and console in April 2026, according to StatCounter Global Stats. That figure looks like a frozen monopoly. Two numbers underneath it tell a more interesting story.

    Google’s worldwide share has barely moved over the past year, while the bigger threat to traditional search now lives outside the market-share chart, inside AI answer engines. The sections below map where each engine stands worldwide and by region, how the picture differs across desktop and mobile, how often people search, and the measurable shift toward AI Overviews in the latest quarter.

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Addons Blog: How the publicSuffix API was created

      Firefox 153 ships the new publicSuffix WebExtensions Hey Hi (AI) This API lets extensions ask the browser for the registrable domain (eTLD+1) of a hostname. It uses the browser’s built-in, always-up-to-date copy of the Public Suffix List, removing the need for extensions to bundle and maintain a copy of the list.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Database of Databases ☛ YottaDB

    YottaDB is a multi-process embedded NoSQL key-value DBMS.

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • [Old] Deutsche Welle ☛ German public sector keen to end reliance on US tech

    ZenDis, the German Center for Digital Sovereignty in Public Administration, wants to reduce dependency on US tech companies such as Microsoft and is currently developing digital alternatives to US products.

    "All data stored in US databases is potentially at risk," said Lutz Niemeyer, spokesperson for ZenDiS, which is a limited liability company wholly owned by the German government. He added that the state had "a duty to ensure that crucial data entrusted to it by its citizens is kept secure." A picture of a huge building, the former Opel HQ

• Licensing / Legal

  • Techdirt ☛ Ninth Circuit: Your AI Agent Can’t Violate [Cracking] Law. But You Might.

    The rise of AI is bringing a bunch of fascinating legal questions that are harder to answer than many expect. The latest one: who is liable if an agentic system running on its own [cracks] someone? That’s the question a bunch of people have been asking this past week in the wake of multiple stories of agentic tools breaking out of their sandboxes during testing. But it’s also a question that the Ninth Circuit brushed up against this week, in a ruling that says an agentic tool isn’t the one doing the “accessing” under the federal [cracking] law. A person is. The challenging part is figuring out which person.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Document Foundation ☛ The characteristics of a truly open document standard format

    A truly open document format requires free public availability, royalty-free standards, and no usage restrictions. Organizations like the Open Knowledge Foundation and the European Union use several core rules to guarantee long-term data access, system independence, and freedom from single-vendor control.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ South Africa agrees on a shared language for location

    The country now has one agreed way to capture, maintain and share spatial data. Systems can agree on what to call a feature, hold its identity steady as streets are renamed and erven subdivided, and record how current and how accurate a dataset actually is. Name changes, accuracy and every other aspect of data quality can now properly inform decisions.