Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 07, 2026,
updated Jan 07, 2026

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ PGConf India 2026: Talks, trainings published and early bird registration closes soon

    Hello,

    We're pleased to announce that the selected talks and trainings for PGConf India 2026 are now live on the conference website. Tickets are now available for purchase. The EARLY BIRD ticket sale will end on Jan 10th, 2026, after which prices will increase by more than 20%.

• GNU Projects

  • LWN ☛ GNU ddrescue 1.30 released

    Version 1.30 of the GNU ddrescue data recovery tool has been released. Notable changes in this release include improvements to automatic recovery of a drive with a dead head, addition of a --no-sweep option to disable reading of skipped areas, and more.

  • GNU Taler ☛ GNU Taler news: GNU Taler presented at 39C3

    Mikolai Gütschow and signum gave a talk at the 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) in Hamburg, Germany, where they reported on their good experiences with offering GNU Taler as a local payment system at LugCamp 2024 and Datenspuren 2024 and 2025.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

    • Hackaday ☛ GitHub Disables Rockchip’s Linux MPP Repository After DMCA Request

      Recently GitHub disabled the Rockchip Linux MPP repository, following a DMCA takedown request from the FFmpeg team. As of writing the affected repository remains unavailable. At the core of this issue is the Rockchip MPP framework, which provides hardware-accelerated video operations on Rockchip SoCs. Much of the code for this was lifted verbatim from FFmpeg, with the allegation being that this occurred with the removal of the original copyright notices and authors. The Rockchip MPP framework was further re-licensed from LGPL 2.1 to the Apache license.

      Most egregious of all is perhaps that the FFmpeg team privately contacted Rockchip about this nearly two years ago, with clearly no action taken since. Thus FFmpeg demands that Rockchip either undoes these actions that violate the LGPL, or remove all infringing files.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Hackaday ☛ Messing With JPEGs In A Text Editor Is Fun And Glitchy

    If you’re looking to edit an image, you might open it in Photoshop, GIMP, or even Paint Shop Pro if you’re stuck in 2005. But who needs it — [Patrick Gillespie] explores what can be done when editing a JPEG on a raw, textual level instead.

  • Hackaday ☛ Powering On A 1985 Photophone CP220 Videoconference System

    The concept of remote video calls has been worked on since Bell’s phone company began pitching upgrading from telegrams to real-time voice calls. It wasn’t until the era of digital video and real-time video compression that commercial solutions became feasible, with the 1985 Image Data Corporation Photophone CP220 being an early example. The CP220 is also exceedingly rare due to costing around $25,000 USD when adjusted to inflation. This makes the teardown and repair on the [SpaceTime Junction] channel a rather unique experience.

Update

Also here about GNU Taler:

• 2025-06: P15 CoNetworkingSpace accepts GNU Taler payments in eCHF

  We of course hope that it is just the first of many, and thus will start to track Swiss shops accepting GNU Taler on our map. Please contact us once your shop is also taler-able!