Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 02, 2025

• Libre Arts ☛ LibreArts Weekly recap — 29 June 2025

  This post consolidates events of the last two weeks. Highlights: new releases of GIMP, darktable, Cardinal; new features in FreeCAD and Ardour.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Chromium

    • Security Week ☛ Chrome 138 Update Patches Zero-Day Vulnerability

      Tracked as CVE-2025-6554, the bug is described as a type confusion in the open source V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox Nightly: Highlights from Volunteer Contributors – These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 184

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ Barman 3.14.1 Released

    Barman

    Backup and Recovery Manager (or Barman) is an open-source administration tool for remote backups and disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers in business-critical environments. It relies on PostgreSQL’s robust and reliable point-in-time recovery technology, allowing DBAs to remotely manage a complete catalog of backups and the recovery phase of multiple remote servers – all from one location. Barman is distributed under the GNU GPL 3 license and maintained by EDB.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Federal News Network ☛ Why CMS matters: Giving government the tools to manage its own voice

    For government websites, this is often a problem. Accurate, up-to-date content is key to serving the public. Commonly used content management systems (CMS) are designed for authors. This ensures that the people closest to the content — not just developers — can shape, publish and maintain it. These systems support collaboration across teams, reduce bottlenecks and help agencies meet their mission.

• FSF

  • FSF ☛ FSF Blogs: Call for volunteers: Help us with the GNU Press shop

    People around the world are eagerly waiting to receive their GNU Press

    shop orders, and we need a little help sending everything out. Would

    you be willing to donate a little of your time to support the FSF's

    work while chatting and enjoying snacks with other free software

    supporters?

• Programming/Development

  • Rlang ☛ Building Trust with Code: Validating Shiny Apps in Regulated Environments

    Over the last years Shiny has become a cornerstone in data science applications, from dashboards and review tools to interactive decision making apps. But in regulated environments like pharma, healthcare, or finance, the stakes are higher. A clever visualization isn’t enough. We need to prove the app works reliably, reproducibly, and transparently.

    So, what does it actually mean to validate a Shiny app?

  • Hackaday ☛ C++ Encounters Of The Rusty Zig Kind

    There comes a time in any software developer’s life when they look at their achievements, the lines of code written and the programming languages they have relied on, before wondering whether there may be more out there. A programming language and its associated toolchains begin to feel like familiar, well-used tools after you use them for years, but that is no excuse to remain rusted in place.

  • Go

    • Anton Zhiyanov ☛ Gist of Go: Semaphores

      Having the full power of multi-core hardware is great, but sometimes we prefer to limit concurrency in certain parts of a system. Semaphores are a great way to do this. Let's learn more about them!

• Standards/Consortia

  • APNIC ☛ Bootstrapping HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3

    The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) has come a long way from its humble beginnings on Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT cube at CERN. It went through a number of iterations, has been abused in just about any conceivable way, chained with proxies, tunnels and caches, intercepted by middleboxes, and is, for all intents and purposes, the universal Internet pipe and primary content delivery mechanism.

  • Amit Gawande ☛ Barcodes 101

    Have you ever noticed those striped patterns on nearly everything you buy? From your morning coffee to your latest gadget, barcodes are everywhere. They might seem simple, but these little visual codes play a massive role in our daily lives, making things faster, smarter, and more efficient.

  • APNIC ☛ A first look at the PROXY protocol and its security implications

    A fundamental shortcoming of this configuration is that the backend server becomes oblivious to who is actually visiting the website. From the backend server’s perspective, each request originates from the proxy server, making it difficult, for example, to enforce IP-based access controls or maintain an accurate log. In HTTP, this is trivially solved by including the X-Forwarded-For header, which allows the proxy server to communicate the IP address of the client to the backend server. But what about other protocols?