Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 17, 2026

• Evan Hahn ☛ I set all 376 Vim options and I'm still a fool

  I vowed to master this editor but I was slow. When I wasn’t accidentally opening some unknown menu, I was taking an uneconomical path through the code. I pressed j twenty times instead of running 20j, or manually deleted code inside parenthesis instead of running di(. Sometimes I’d open another text editor to give my mind a break from all the key bindings!

  Fast-forward to 2025. After tons of practice, I felt much more capable. Code did feel more like putty. I was working closer to the speed of thought. I could get code where I wanted much more quickly. 13 years of practice paid off!

  But Vim still felt clumsy. I was still accidentally opening menus I didn’t recognize. I would do silly things like converting the whole file to lowercase, or trigger some scary error message. “Surely I shouldn’t be making these mistakes,” I thought. What could be done to finally master this editor?

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ credcheck v4.4 has been released

    Release 4.4 has been published, it fixes a backend crash when current_user is used in ALTER ROLE statement.

    Complete list of changes and acknowledgements are available here

    The credcheck extension is developed and maintained by Gilles Darold at https://hexacluster.ai. If you need more information please https://hexacluster.ai/contact-us/.

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

  • Maury ☛ My new static site generator

    In principle, a static site generator is a good idea: They automatically populate your homepage, index pages and RSS feeds, making it impossible to forget anything.

    Unlike a CMS like Wordpress, they don't add any runtime cost or security vulnerabilities: They run once to generate HTML and are never exposed to the [Internet].

    However, they all put weird restrictions on how you structure your site: [...]

• Education

  • ROS Industrial ☛ First of 2026 ROS-I Developers' Meeting Looks at Upcoming Releases and Collaboration

    The ROS-Industrial Developers’ Meeting provided updates on open-source robotics tools, with a focus on advancements in Tesseract, Helping developers still using MoveIt2, and Trajopt. These updates underscore the global push to innovate motion planning, perception, and tooling systems for industrial automation. Key developments revolved around stabilizing existing frameworks, improving performance, and leveraging modern technologies like GPUs for acceleration.

  • Lars Wikman ☛ Underjord | Goatmire 2, announced

    I say dense. Because massive success would make it sound large. And it wasn’t a large event. 150 attendees, with speakers and volunteers we were around 200 in total. And it went incredibly well. The feedback, the surveys, the outpouring of love and appreciation were all way above what I dared hope for. People have been graciously giving me space to consider a second one but it has also been the single most requested thing ever.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Ruben Schade ☛ The Rubenerd LLM Licencing PAC

    It has come to my attention that the corpus of my public work has been scraped and used to train Large Language Models (LLMs), referred to in academia as “bullshit generators”, and erroneously by marketers and venture capital firms as “AI”.

    This training occurred without my permission, attribution, or compensation (PAC), which represents a violation of my rights, and was Not Nice. Businesses and individuals have therefore raised concerns about their use of LLM tools, and have sought to indemnify themselves.

  • HOPE ☛ Histomat of F/OSS: We should reclaim LLMs, not reject them

    Each step followed the same pattern: new technology revealed a gap in existing licenses, corporations exploited that gap, and the community responded with evolved licensing that closed it. This isn't idealism meeting reality and failing; this is dialectical development, the ongoing process of refining our tools to match changing material conditions.

    Now we face a new gap: the training loophole. Companies can use F/OSS code as training data for proprietary models without any obligation to release those models or even acknowledge the sources of their training. This is exploitation in the classic sense—value extraction without reciprocation.

    The materialist response isn't to reject the new technology. It's to evolve our licenses to encompass it.