Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 27, 2026

• The Register UK ☛ Vibe coding may be hazardous to open source

  "Traffic to our docs is down about 40 percent from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever," he wrote in a GitHub Issues post earlier this month. "The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework."

  A recent pre-print paper cites the situation at Tailwind Labs as evidence that the increasing adoption of AI coding tools represents a breaking change for the open source community.

• arXiv ☛ [2601.15494] Vibe Coding Kills Open Source

  Generative AI is changing how software is produced and used. In vibe coding, an AI agent builds software by selecting and assembling open-source software (OSS), often without users directly reading documentation, reporting bugs, or otherwise engaging with maintainers. We study the equilibrium effects of vibe coding on the OSS ecosystem. We develop a model with endogenous entry and heterogeneous project quality in which OSS is a scalable input into producing more software. Users choose whether to use OSS directly or through vibe coding. Vibe coding raises productivity by lowering the cost of using and building on existing code, but it also weakens the user engagement through which many maintainers earn returns. When OSS is monetized only through direct user engagement, greater adoption of vibe coding lowers entry and sharing, reduces the availability and quality of OSS, and reduces welfare despite higher productivity. Sustaining OSS at its current scale under widespread vibe coding requires major changes in how maintainers are paid.

• Ivan ☛ The state of Linux music players in 2026

  If you haven’t heard yet, in big 2026 we’re all ditching Microslop for systems that actually respect you, and we’re also breaking up with our ever-pricier Spotify subscriptions in exchange for actual ownership of the media we consume. So, for Fun February, I thought I’d take a look at some of the apps we can use to fill the Spotify-shaped void.

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

  • Bob Monsour ☛ Minify those CSS & JS bundles? Maybe not.

    When building static sites with 11ty, it can be tempting to minify CSS and Javascript files to reduce their size and improve load times. However, I recently discovered that skipping the minification step can significantly speed up the build process without a noticeable impact on site load times...at least for my specific use case. Your mileage may vary.

    TL;DR: In this case, not minifying the CSS and JS bundles reduced build time from over 6 minutes to about 30 seconds.

• FSF / Software Freedom

  • YLE ☛ Expert sounds alarm over risks of US tech dependence

    In Finland, people may be waking up to the fact that American companies control the channels through which they communicate and the tools they use, from Gmail, WhatsApp, Meets and Teams to Facebook and X.

• Fake SFLC or 'FSF'

  • Software Freedom Conservancy ☛ Interview with Tracy Homer about Software Freedom and Maker Spaces

    My name is Tracy and I'm the Operations Manager here at Software Freedom Conservancy. Basically that means I support many different parts of the organization, from writing up contracts for project developers to banking reconciliation. I also manage our annual conference, FOSSY.

  • Software Freedom Conservancy ☛ Some Unfortunate Delays in our Struggle for Copyleft Justice

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ You Can Just Say No to the Data

      Demand can be engineered. “We’re giving them what they want” ignores how desire is shaped, even engineered (algorithms, dark patterns, growth hacking, etc.).

      Appealing to data as the ultimate authority — especially when fueled by engineered desire — isn’t neutrality, it’s an abdication of responsibility.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ RCS, SMS via the internet, is good, but that doesn’t matter

    Excited about the arrival of RCS in Brazil, I decided to do some testing. Not only because I dislike depending on a Meta app, but because WhatsApp is very, very bad. Heavy, invasive, full of extras that don't interest me (Status, channels etc.), as well as being a source of user data used by Meta for who knows what. The desktop app is unbelievably bad; how can a messaging app need 1.5 GB of memory to run?

  • Six Colors ☛ POP goes the email: migrate to IMAP

    POP is now over 40 years old and has been effectively superseded by IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) for decades. The easiest comparison between the two is that POP is like a huge stack of printed messages, while IMAP is a desk organizer with labels in which paper has been sorted for easy retrieval.3