Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 11, 2025

• Thunderbird ☛ Thunderbird for Android March 2025 Progress Report - The Thunderbird Blog

  Our roadmap board is now available! We’re grateful to the Council for their trust and support in approving it. As the board will reflect any changes in our planning, this is the most up-to-date source for our upcoming development. Each epic will show its objective and what’s in scope – and as importantly, what’s out of scope. The project information on the side will tell you if an epic is in the backlog or work in progress.

• Nzyme.org ☛ nzyme - Nzyme v2.0.0-alpha.16 has been released

  This release introduces an entirely new Nzyme subsystem dedicated to drone detection. Drones are increasingly used in physical intrusions—especially during reconnaissance—and this subsystem lays the foundation for defending against such threats.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ pg_dumpbinary v2.19 released

    Antananarivo, Madagascar - April 08, 2025

    pg_dumpbinary

    pg_dumpbinary dumps a PostgreSQL database to a binary format. The resulting dump must be restored using pg_restorebinary, which is provided.

    This is a maintenance release that fixes a major bug when dumping data from tables with the dollar sign in their name or namespace.

• Education

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ ERN Annual Meeting (Virtual) April 23, 2025

    The virtual Ecosystem for Research Networking (ERN) Summit 2025 will be held on April 23rd from noon until 5PM ET. Our theme this year is Addressing Advanced Technologies, Quantum, AI and Workforce Development. This free conference is open to both researchers and educators at R1 and non-R1 institutions, industry, and government leaders.

    Our keynote speaker will be Dan Stanzione , Ph.D., Associate Vice President For Research, Executive Director, Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC). This will be followed up by three panels discussing the impact of AI and Quantum on regional economic and workforce initiatives, industry academic partnerships for preparing the workforce, and perspectives from non-R1 institutions. We welcome you to hear from industry, domain researchers, and CI professionals, and join the discussions on the impacts these advanced technologies are having in the research community.

  • Rlang ☛ R Dev Days 2025

    R Dev Days are events for novice and experienced contributors to collaborate on contributions to the code, documentation and translations in base R. There are several planned in the coming months with application/registration deadlines in the next couple of weeks – don’t miss out!

• Licensing / Legal

  • ARRL ☛ ARRL Iowa Section Wins Ham Exemption to Handsfree Law

    The texting bill (SF22) passed the Iowa Senate with a vote of 47-1 on March 18, 2025, and the Iowa House passed it on March 26, 2025 with a vote 54-11. On April 2, 2025, it was signed by Governor Kim Reynolds and goes into effect July 1, 2025.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Raymond Camden ☛ Using Chrome's (Preview) Prompt API for Data Summarization

      For my demo, I decided to (once again) make use of the Pirate Weather API. When making a forecast request, you get a large set of data back. Here's a subset of that information: [...]