Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 04, 2026

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • CubicleNate ☛ Linux Saloon 222 | News Flight Night

    The content discusses recent developments in tech and Linux, including news about Discord's age verification, Mozilla Thunderbird for iOS, and Ubuntu's overhaul of its wiki. It highlights the dwindling percentage of Steam users on GNU/Linux and Reddit's removal of RSS feeds. Upcoming topics, housekeeping, and participant project links are also mentioned.

• Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • This Week in GNOME ☛ This Week in GNOME: #268 Improved Agenda

      Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 26 to October 3.

• Funding

  • ChrysCapital, Tata Capital Healthcare Fund invest $70 million in Chennai-based Linux Laboratories

    Chennai-based pharmaceutical formulations company Linux Laboratories has secured $70 million in equity capital from ChrysCapital and Tata Capital Healthcare Fund III (TCHF III), as it looks to expand into new therapeutic areas and invest further in manufacturing and research.

    The transaction comprises a combination of primary capital and a secondary purchase, with ChrysCapital acquiring a significant minority stake in Linux.

    It also includes the full exit of Tata Capital Healthcare Fund II (TCHF II), which is exiting with approximately 4x returns. Tata Capital Healthcare Fund is continuing its investment in Linux through TCHF III.

    Avendus Capital acted as the exclusive financial adviser to Linux on the transaction.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ health @ Savannah: GNU Health as a solution for Europe digital change - Italy Digi-CHange conf

    During the days 6-9 of October will take place the Digi-Change conference in Turin, Piedmont region, Italy.

    Digi-CHange promotes the digital transformation of medical and nursing education, introducing an inter-professional model that connects educators, clinicians, engineers, and industry innovators. Aligned with the Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education priority of Digital Transformation, Digi-Change strengthens the capacity of universities in Georgia, Ukraine, and EU partner countries to modernize curricula and foster digital competencies for a sustainable, innovation-ready healthcare workforce.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Ask the Chefs: What Would You Have Done Differently About Open Access/Open Science if You Predicted the World as it Exists Today? Part 2

      I don’t think the lesson is that we should have done less on open access. We might instead have anticipated what would come after access. Open is now ubiquitous and expected. Simply making information available is no longer, by itself, a distinctive source of value. That changes the question for scholarly publishing: If information is abundant and increasingly available to machines as well as humans, where does value reside?

      I would argue that it lies increasingly in the creation, validation, interpretation, and preservation of knowledge. The valuable thing is the discovery of something new: an insight, observation, method, connection between ideas, or finding that challenges an established paradigm. Equally important is the ability to recognize its significance. For researchers, this means asking meaningful questions, distinguishing signal from noise, identifying patterns, challenging assumptions, and making discoveries. For publishers, it means supporting the integrity and longevity of the scholarly record through rigorous validation, reliable preservation, accurate machine-readable content, provenance, authentication, and effective discovery as the technologies through which research is accessed continue to evolve.

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Ask the Chefs: What Would You Have Done Differently About Open Access/Open Science if You Predicted the World as it Exists Today? Part 1

      The Budapest Open Access Initiative is more than 25 years old. It called for journal content to be “freely accessible online…without expectation of payment.” It also specified that articles be free for use “as data to software.” Publishers moved to adopt OA business models — including defaulting to CC BY licenses — at a time when text- and data-mining (TDM) and AI were not generally part of the conversation. With AI at the fore, some publishers have ceased defaulting to CC BY. This has been driven both by author skepticism and fears of lost revenue.

• Programming/Development

  • LWN ☛ Zig 0.17 released

    Version 0.17 of the Zig programming language has been released.

    This release features 5 months of work: changes from 206 different contributors, spread among 925 commits.

    Originally predicted to be shorter, this release cycle ended up [being] substantial, with the Build System reworked, including the introduction of the Build Server Protocol, and the ELF Linker enhanced to the point where we expect Incremental Compilation to work for everyone on x86_64-linux.