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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Package Manager Sandboxing
Homebrew, which I help maintain, has run macOS formula builds under sandbox-exec since 2015. The last four months turned that from a build-hygiene measure into a stated security programme. 6.0.0 in June brought a Linux build sandbox based on Bubblewrap and made third-party taps require explicit trust before their Ruby is evaluated. By July the Bubblewrap implementation had been replaced with Landlock, which is built into the kernel and works inside unprivileged Docker, and by August Bubblewrap was removed. The 7.0.0 deprecation table lists the Linux sandbox opt-out variable as removed, with “no replacement opt-out”. A pull request opened four days before the release extends the sandbox to archive extraction and disk-image handling, and sandbox rule changes now require security review.
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It's FOSS ☛ How openEuler Is Reinventing the OS Foundation for the Hey Hi (AI) Era with SuperPoD and UnifiedBus
openEuler 24.03 LTS SP3 is the first version built for SuperPoD, and the project says its UnifiedBus interconnect can lift application performance by 30 to 50 percent.
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Licensing / Legal
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Glyph ☛ Who Is Open Source About?
But the exchange of “open source” (or even “free software”) is not as simple as “I have prepared some software for you, please enjoy it, you have no right to complain”, and maintainers ought to have a precise understanding of the costs and benefits — as well as the ethical implications — of that exchange.
Right now we barely even articulate that the exchange exists, let alone that it establishes a long-term, subtle, and implicit relationship between maintainer and user.
Let’s fix that.
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