Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 24, 2025

• Breaking Free from Abusive Software Relationships

  We can recognize the signs of a controlling relationship in our personal lives: one person dictating the terms, making the rules, and holding all the power, leaving the other feeling helpless and trapped. We would tell a friend in that situation to break free. Yet, millions of us accept a similar dynamic every day in our digital lives through our relationship with proprietary software.

  Proprietary software, by its very nature, operates on a model of control. The developer holds unjust power over the user, creating a fundamental imbalance. This isn't just an abstract problem; it's the root of concrete digital abuses. To add insult to injury, this control often manifests in features designed against your interests, such as data surveillance that spies on your activity or digital restrictions (DRM) that limit what you can do with your own files and media. You're not in control of your own computer; the software developer is.

  This system creates a state of digital helplessness, where your tools can be changed, your data can be harvested, and your freedoms denied, all without your consent. Everyone deserves better. To reclaim control over your computing, the first step is to recognize this relationship for what it is: abusive.

• Linux Foundation

  • Hedera COO and Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust Share Insights on Hiero Project

    Daniela Barbosa, Executive Director of Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust, and Shyam Nagarajan, COO of Hedera have shared insights about Hedera’s Hiero project, its governance under the Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust (LFDT), and its implications in the context of the U.S. Clarity Act and decentralized technology.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ Outcome and conclusions of the VI Latin American LibreOffice Congress

    Gustavo Pacheco send us this report on the activities of the sixth edition of the Latin American LibreOffice Congress, held in Habana, Cuba [...]

• Licensing / Legal

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Use of Perplexity, ChatGPT behind error-ridden orders, federal judges say

    Judges Henry T. Wingate and Julien Xavier Neals, who sit on the U.S. District Courts for the Southern District of Mississippi and District of New Jersey, respectively, both stated in letters that their law clerks had used AI tools to draft orders that were then entered into the dockets before they had been reviewed. Both judges also described measures to prevent repeat issues.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Ask the Chefs: Who Owns Our Knowledge?

      In honor of International Open Access (OA) Week, The Scholarly Kitchen Chefs ponder the theme for this year’s event, which states that “communities can reassert control over the knowledge they produce”? In the context of open access publishing, who owns the knowledge generated by scholarly research? Do you agree with the premise of this theme? Why / why not?

• Standards/Consortia

  • André Machado ☛ MP3 Visionaries and Their Lasting Impact on Society

    The design team refined their codec through the nineteen eighties and early nineteen nineties, submitting it as part of the MPEG Audio Layer III standard adopted in 1992. Demonstrations such as the famous Suzanne Vega acapella clip showcased the surprising clarity achievable at low bitrates, convincing skeptical engineers that perceptual coding could rival compact discs.

    When software encoders reached the public in the mid nineteen nineties, developers quickly integrated MP3 support into media players like Winamp and MusicMatch. Hardware makers followed with portable players that stored dozens of albums on flash memory, while record labels experimented with digital catalogs. What began as a research project in Germany became a worldwide medium for everyday listening within a few short years.