Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Sharing, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 07, 2026

• Rachel Kaufman ☛ 30 Days of coreutils: mkdir

  A very common command - mkdir creates a new directory.

  If you try to create nested directories, you’ll get an error if any of the intermediate directories don’t exist: [...]

• Events

  • Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice at the Augsburger Linux-Infotag 2026

    Most of the work in the LibreOffice project takes place online – in our Git repository, on mailing lists, on IRC and other places.

• Education

  • AccessNow ☛ Digital security in war and conflict: challenges for civil society and tools for resilience

    Join the next webinar organized by the Digital Security Helpline, to discuss key trends and strategies to keep at-risk actors safe online.

  • Miguel Grinberg ☛ SQLAlchemy 2 In Practice - Chapter 7: Asynchronous SQLAlchemy - miguelgrinberg.com

    Starting with release 1.4, SQLAlchemy includes support for asynchronous programming with the asyncio package, for both the Core and ORM modules. This is an exciting improvement that brings the power of SQLAlchemy to modern applications such as those written with the FastAPI web framework.

    For your reference, here is a summary of the book contents: [...]

  • Buttondown LLC ☛ New Logic for Programmers (and the future of this newsletter)

    So first the immediate news: I just released version 0.14 of Logic for Programmers! This release is pretty similar to 0.13. There are a few rewrites but the vast majority of the changes are layout, copyediting, and technical editing. Full notes here.

    In related news, I've started doing test prints of the book: [...]

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • Creative Commons ☛ How can Equitable Access to Heritage Help Solve Global Challenges? An Exploratory Dialogue

      How can equitable access to heritage help solve global challenges? That is the question we addressed during our Exploratory Dialogue, a major event we hosted on 29 April, 2026, at UNESCO House in Paris, France, to celebrate the Open Heritage Statement and explore its synergies with UNESCO’s priorities in tackling the most urgent problems facing the world today. 

• Standards/Consortia

  • Robin Berjon ☛ The Direction of Interoperability

    One red flag is that, in tech policy, the terms are often used to lobby for tech monopolies, as in this report (to give just one example) in which the authors claim that "horizontal interoperability may reduce multihoming" and even that "as interoperability is also possible between gatekeepers, it could even strengthen their position vis-à-vis new entrants by making them more central for users." A very short investigation shows that these worrying claims are supported at best by some armchair musings from non-practitioners and at worst by methodologically jocular papers (like this one in which a lot of serious-sounding words are supported by nothing other than a superficial online survey). I wouldn't go so far as to state with confidence that the distinction was invented to confuse discussions of interoperability, but it certainly seems to be used that way more often than not.

    More worryingly, however, it's not so much that the horizontal/vertical distinction in interoperability can never be useful. Simplistic concepts can be useful. The problem is much more that its power to describe reality is so stringently and arbitrarily limited that it can only lead to a paucity of imagined solutions. We need to do better.

  • Robert Alexander ☛ How an HTTP header caused time.gov to skew from UTC

    In the United States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) maintains the official U.S. time reference. NIST distributes this reference to enable all sorts of applications from meteorology to GPS satellites. Programmers are probably most familiar with distributing time using the network time protocol (NTP), which NIST supports by operating several NTP servers. NIST also runs the beautiful time.gov website which provides an official time reference via a web page. Its an easy way to check the time if you don’t trust the clock on your computer’s taskbar.

    On a recent project I needed a trustworthy clock and time.gov was a convenient option. To validate that the provided reference was accurate, I opened time.gov in two browser windows side-by-side, but found that the provided clock offset estimates disagreed by a margin larger than I could tolerate. When I compared to another source, an NTP client, I found even more disagreement.