Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 03, 2025

• LWN ☛ Lessons from open source in the Mexican government

  The adoption of open-source software in governments has had its ups and downs. While open source seems like a "no-brainer", it turns out that governments can be surprisingly resistant to using FOSS for a variety of reasons. Federico González Waite spoke in the Open Government track at SCALE 22x in Pasadena, California to recount his experiences working with and for the Mexican government. He led multiple projects to switch away from proprietary, often predatory, software companies with some success—and failure.

  González Waite began by noting that he is a Mexican/Kiwi (""there's not many of us"", he said with a grin), who spent nine or ten years in high-level roles in the Mexican government ""promoting open-source implementations"". Among other things, he was the CTO for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; ""I am actually responsible for Mexicans having an electronic passport today."" That was one of the projects that he led and part of it was done with open-source software, which is something that people find to be amazing, González Waite said. He served in the office for national strategy under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, eventually moving into the CEO role at the National Research and Innovation Center for Mexico.

• Libre Arts ☛ LibreArts Weekly recap — 30 March 2025

  Week highlights: new releases of GIMP, PhotoGIMP, Shotcut, Flowblade, and Calf.

• OMG Ubuntu ☛ Linux App Release Roundup (March 2025)

  March was another stellar month for GNU/Linux software updates, with big improvements to essential privacy tools like KeePassXC, creative apps such as Shotcut and DigiKam, and many more — updates that didn’t warrant dedicated articles on this blog. Why? ..Well, sometimes it’s an update making small changes hat it’s hard to say much1 about. Other times I’m just deathly late to hearing about it (which is why new tips via the contact form are super appreciated – you help me catch the things I miss).

• Open Source For U ☛ Why You Should Go for Grafana

  Explore the main characteristics of Grafana, the open source analytics and visualisation tool for application in the Internet of Things, and see how it compares with other similar popular tools.

• LWN ☛ OSI election ends with unsatisfying results [Ed: Microsoft OSI 'election' is just PR exercise; it's a lobbying organisation for proprietary giants]

  The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced the results of its recent board of directors election. Ruth Suehle and McCoy Smith are new to the board, while Carlo Piana will serve another term. The results, however, seem tainted in the eyes of some participants and observers. The election has been plagued by missteps from the beginning. It has culminated with the exclusion of three candidates for failing to meet a requirement to sign the OSI board agreement, which was added after the election was over and before results were tallied or announced.

• Programming/Development

  • Rlang ☛ Nonlinear conformalized Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) with R package ‘rvfl’ (and other models)