Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Web Habits, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 13, 2026

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Port: a minimalist prepl client for Emacs

    The exercise did leave me thinking though. What if, instead of bolting prepl onto CIDER, I built a small standalone client in the spirit of inf-clojure and monroe? Something tiny and focused that doesn’t have to pretend to be CIDER, and where prepl’s quirks would be the design rather than something to work around.

  • Daniel Fichtinger ☛ kakoune is a text editor

    My goal with this article is to help you develop a comprehensive understanding of the Kakoune text editor: what it is, how it works, and why it has that design.

    Although this is not exactly a tutorial, we build up these concepts gradually, and plenty concrete usage examples and demo videos are provided to supplement the discussion.

    This piece is quite long, and densely loaded with information. I suggest treating it like a long-term learning resource you can chip away at, rather than trying to tackle it all in one session.

  • Help Net Security ☛ Rustinel: Open-source endpoint detection for Windows and Linux

    Open-source endpoint detection has long been split between Windows-focused tools built around Sysmon and Linux tools built around eBPF or auditd. Defenders running mixed environments have had to stitch together separate pipelines, separate rule sets, and separate maintenance burdens. Rustinel, a Rust-based endpoint agent, is an attempt to collapse that work into a single codebase.

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

    • Six Colors ☛ How I restarted using RSS, and actually noticed!

      Couple that with the emergence, by that time, of the expectation of very low prices for single-purpose apps, and little chance yet of convincing people to pay for a recurring subscription. RSS readers persisted, but it seemed like their time had come and gone.

      But I was too pessimistic! Today, I’m back to daily—or multiple-times-per-day—use of a newsreader, the same one that got me addicted back in the early 2000s. Hurray, I’m an RSS news junkie again!?

    • Dan Q ☛ Dynamically-Deployed Static Site Subdomains on Caddy

      I’ve recently been experimenting with where I host my small and open-source static sites. In my latest experiment, I wanted to try a low-maintenance selfhosting solution. Here’s what I wanted: [...]

    • Mozilla

      • The Register UK ☛ EU law bestows 6M more Firefox users upon us, Moz says

        The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) has been kind to Mozilla, which says Firefox use is on the up as Europeans are given a choice of default browser on mobile.

        Through these browser selection screens, the company reckons 6 million users have opted for Firefox instead of what would otherwise have been Safari or Chrome, depending on whether they used an iPhone or Android device.

  • SaaS/Back End/Databases

    • Charles Leifer ☛ Redis and the Cost of Ambition

      What happened to dear old Redis, I wondered. And the more I thought about it, a satisfying explanation started to coalesce which explains all the above phenomena. To me, the picture that emerges is that of a solution that lost its identity through ambition.

  • Education

    • Hackaday ☛ 2026 Hackaday Europe: Pre-party, More Workshops, And Everything Else

      With Hackaday Europe no more than two days away, we want to help you wrap up all of the last loose ends. And that means last-minute changes in the workshop schedule, details on the Friday night pre-party, and more! Some tickets for the event itself, the workshops, and the pre-party (reservations required) are still available right here.

  • GNU Projects

    • GNU ☛ GNU Guix: Time travel without borders

      When offered the option to run other people's code, a prime consideration is often ease of deployment. While much progress has been made in support of rapid deployment, the security implications of those quick deployments is often overlooked. In this post, we look at a new feature of guix time-machine and guix pull in support of one-line deployment commands: the ability to download channel files, but without compromising on security.

      Sharing code

      The normal workflow to share software and make it easily deployable with Guix goes like this: someone puts their packager hat on and writes a package definition, adds it to Guix proper or to a separate channel, at which point anyone can fetch the relevant channel(s) and deploy the software.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Matt Birchler ☛ Apple uses WebP images in the App Store

      I saved the image to my computer to post something snarky, but it was actually something else that stood out once I had it in my downloads folder. This was a WebP image.

    • Kevin McDonald ☛ Let's Learn About BGP

      My favorite interview question for software engineers is wonderfully simple: “How does the [Internet] work?”

      If a candidate walks me through DHCP, DNS, TCP, TLS, and HTTP, I know I am talking to someone with solid real-world experience. But there is almost always a glaring omission in their answer. A shockingly small number of people ever mention the role of BGP.

      It makes sense why so many engineers miss it. Most software development today is incredibly abstracted. An engineer building microservices in AWS or configuring a Kubernetes cluster spends their whole day thinking about application-layer protocols. BGP operates at a layer of the infrastructure that is almost entirely invisible to them; it is treated as “the network’s problem” or something only ISPs and cloud providers need to worry about.

      But without BGP, the [Internet] as we know it would literally not exist.