news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Open Access Leftovers
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Undeadly ☛ rpki-client 9.7 released
The rkpi-client project has made a new release, rkpi-client 9-7, available with important new features and bug fixes.
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Events
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Bootlin ☛ Bootlin at FOSDEM 2026
FOSDEM being the biggest and most exciting open-source conference in Europe, it is a must-go every year for a large number of open-source developers, including engineers at Bootlin, and the upcoming 2026 edition on Jan 31 and Feb 1 will be no exception.
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FSF / Software Freedom
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[Repeat] FSF ☛ Our members help secure the future of a free society
Three more days: that's how long we have before our deadline to reach our goal of welcoming 100 new FSF associate members. We can do this: we need just 38 more people to join us to help further software freedom for all.
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Licensing / Legal
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Gergely Nagy ☛ On FLOSS and training LLMs
Proponents of generative AI are parroting that the whole-scale theft the plagiarism machines perform are entirely legal, and they’re well within their rights to scrape and train, because it is legally sound. I came to believe they’re not wrong. But before you stone me for this heresy, please hear me out! I have not joined the ranks of the mindless, there’s no case of outsourcing my thinking to the machines.
They’re not wrong. The law is wrong.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Access/Content
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Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Open Access Policies – The Devil’s in the Details
Many of the technical requirements in the policy can only be achieved or evidenced through metadata such as licensing information, persistent identifiers for items and contributors, links to funding grants, and relationships between versions of articles. However, for a variety of reasons, the current metadata landscape does not support consistent implementation of the technical requirements set out in UKRI’s OA policy, making it difficult for individuals or organizations to fully comply (and show that they have done so). This is especially the case for organizations with fewer resources, such as smaller publishers and less research-intensive institutions.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Wikipedia at 25: Of collective knowledge and its fault lines
Just as human history is often divided into the eras B.C. and A.D., it's not unreasonable to imagine the Internet's story split between B.W. and A.W. — the "W" denoting Wikipedia.
When Wikipedia went online on 15 January 2001, it was the brainchild of two men: Jimmy Wales, an internet entrepreneur with a libertarian streak, and Larry Sanger, a philosopher who became its first editor-in-chief. Their collaboration lasted only a little over a year — but the tension between their visions still shapes the project today.
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