Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 09, 2026

• Data Swamp ☛ File transfer made easier with Tailscale

  Tailscale is a network service that allows to enroll devices into a mesh VPN based on WireGuard, this mean every peer connects to every peers, this is not really manageable without some lot of work. It also allows automatic DNS assignment, access control, SSH service and lot of features.

  Tailscale refers to both the service and the client. The service is closed source, but not the client. There is a reimplementation of the server called Headscale that you can use with the tailscale client.

• Connor Tumbleson ☛ Breaking Changes vs Infinite Support

  Even more so when a new PHP version came out - Laravel had it supported before its release date which was no easy task when it depended on a bunch of dependencies. I blogged about that before, but it was such a breath of fresh air to have a framework dragging the industry with it as they dropped older PHP versions on nearly every major release. The benefit also being that every dependency they depended on also got that treatment or an alternative was produced.

• Education

  • BSDCan ☛ Registration — BSDCan

    Registration includes all talks, lunch, and snacks on Friday and Saturday. There are optional add-ons, such as the preceding two days of tutorials and the closing reception (which is free if you register before May 1, 2026).

• Licensing / Legal

  • Simon Willison ☛ Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code?

    Since the rewrite was conducted using Claude Code there are a whole lot of interesting artifacts available in the repo. 2026-02-25-chardet-rewrite-plan.md is particularly detailed, stepping through each stage of the rewrite process in turn—starting with the tests, then fleshing out the planned replacement code.

    There are several twists that make this case particularly hard to confidently resolve: [...]

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Pacific island remittances by @ellis2013nz

      This post is the sixth of a series of seven on population issues in the Pacific, re-generating the charts I used in a keynote speech before the November 2025 meeting of the Pacific Heads of Planning and Statistics in Wellington, New Zealand. The seven pieces of the puzzle are: [...]