Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 11, 2025

• The Replicator in the Garage

  When Jean-Luc Picard approaches a modest alcove and says, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot," the universe of Star Trek reveals one of its most profound philosophical and technological achievements. A small machine hums to life, and within seconds, a steaming cup of tea materializes from shimmering light. This is the quiet, everyday manifestation of a societal revolution. This machine, the replicator, represents the complete and total decoupling of human desire from the traditional constraints of labor, resources, and scarcity.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Firefox expands fingerprint protections: advancing towards a more private web [Ed: Mozilla still spies on Firefox users though]

    • [Old] snafu Gesellschaft für interaktive Netzwerke mbH ☛ The Mozilla Museum

      Welcome to the Mozilla Museum (or the Mozilla zoo, if you prefer). It is a collection of pictures of Mozilla painted by Vincent van Mozh. Mozilla was the mascot of the Netscape company in the early days; he gradually went away, because he was scared of the pinstriped suits.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • The New Stack ☛ How Distributed Databases Power Developer Platforms at Scale

    For automotive applications serving millions of users, database selection carries strategic weight. The wrong choice creates operational bottlenecks, limits deployment flexibility and introduces single points of failure that undermine our entire platform’s resilience.

    We had specific requirements that standard database approaches couldn’t satisfy: [...]

• Education

  • [Old] Stewart C Russell ☛ Tom Pittman’s “A Short Course in Programming” for the RCA 1802

    Tom’s A Short Course In Programming (1980) is a good introduction for new 1802 programmers. Print copies are rare, so someone on the cosmacelf group asked if it existed as a printable PDF. Well, when you put it like that …

• GNU Projects

  • GNU Taler ☛ GNU Taler news: GNU Taler 1.1 released

    We are happy to announce the release of GNU Taler v1.1.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Trustworthy Data Visualization

      This past September I gave the closing keynote at posit::conf; it’s now on YouTube to watch. Keen-eyed observers will note from the title that it’s about trustworthy data visualization. But it’s also about trust a bit more generally, and how we should think about it in a world where researchers are faking results, AIs are enthusiastically confabulating, and government is destroying data infrastructure. When you find yourself giving a talk with a little tiny microphone stuck to the side of your head you have to ask yourself some hard questions, but the talk was partly about that.