Free, Libre, and Open Source Software: Events, Web, and Open Access

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 18, 2026

• Events

  • Volker Krause ☛ Transitous Hack Weekend January 2025

    Last weekend I attended a rather spontaneous Transitous Hack Weekend in Berlin, again hosted at Wikimedia’s WikiBär.

    Elevator data

    Data about current and planned future elevator outages is becoming available in a standardized format (SIRI SX and SIRI FM), in Germany and Switzerland at least. That’s crucial information especially for wheelchair routing, and MOTIS, the routing engine used by Transitous, can take this into consideration. However, it doesn’t support the SIRI format yet.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • GNOME ☛ Sriram Ramkrishna: GNOME OS Hackfest During FOSDEM week

      For those of you who are attending FOSDEM, we’re doing a GNOME OS hackfest and invite those of you who might be interested on our experiments on concepts as the ‘anti-distro’, eg an OS with no distro packaging that integrates GNOME desktop patterns directly.

      The hackfest is from January 28th – January 29th. If you’re interested, feel free to respond on the comments. I don’t have an exact location yet.

      We’ll likely have some kind of BigBlueButton set up so if you’re not available to come in-person you can join us remotely.

      Agenda and attendees are linked here here.

      There is likely a limited capacity so acceptance will be “first come, first served”.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Automation Impediment

    Have you ever spent hours on a so-called customer service call, and come out with the feeling that it was not worth it? Or fighting a web site or a phone app to cancel a service or get a problem fixed, while feeling like the designers of those interfaces meant for you to prefer to be doing something else, anything else whatsoever?

  • Rui Carmo ☛ My Rube Goldberg RSS Pipeline

    RSS remains the best, most noise-free way to keep track of most things I care about, and at one point I peaked at 300+ feeds.

    But the reason it’s been working out for me is not just having a single source of truth, or the apps themselves–it’s the way that I approached having multiple hundreds of new items (sometimes thousands) every morning and whittling everything down to a few meaningful things to read every day.

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ More HTTP/3 focus, one backend less

    Today we cleanup even more and remove support for yet another backend: the OpenSSL-QUIC stack and we are now down to only supporting two different HTTP/3 alternatives: the nghttp2 + nghttp3 combo or quiche. And out of those two, the quiche backend is still considered experimental.

    The first release shipping with this change will be curl 8.19.0.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Wikipedia is now 25 years old — world’s 7th most popular website now has over 7 million English articles and 7 billion monthly visitors

      Wikipedia is 25. Founded on this day in 2001, this community contributor driven site has convincingly usurped what were once the default general reference works of choice, like Encyclopædia Britannica and Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Encarta.