news
Sharing, Standards, and Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Robert Haas ☛ Robert Haas: Why pg_dump Is Amazing
I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago entitled Is pg_dump a Backup Tool?. In that post, I argued in the affirmative, but also said that it's probably shouldn't be your primary backup mechanism. For that, you probably shouldn't directly use anything that is included in PostgreSQL itself, but rather a well-maintained third-party backup tool such as barman or pgbackrest. But today, I want to talk a little more about why I believe that pg_dump is both amazingly useful for solving all kinds of PostgreSQL-related problems and also just a great piece of technology.
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Licensing / Legal
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Feld ☛ Why Communication Infrastructure Should Use Permissive [sic] Licenses
First, there are two different meanings of "freedom" in software world. No, I don't mean "free as in speech" vs. "free as in beer". What I mean is freedom as in "freedom to run, inspect the code, redistribute and modify" vs. freedom as in "Internet made us free".
The former is, of course, four essential freedoms as defined by FSF. There's no need for more clarification. The latter is kind of vague, so let's try to define it: [...]
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Data Reuse is the Sincerest Form of Flattery
All of these initiatives run into the same problem: attention gloms onto articles with serious integrity issues, controversial results, or AI generated images of anatomically implausible rats, leaving the vast majority of published work with no assessment signal. Post-publication comments essentially capture ‘excitingness’ rather than more pedestrian features like the robustness of the methods or the validity of the results and conclusions.
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Standards/Consortia
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Tim Bray ☛ XML and JSON in 2026
The best thing about long-lived incumbent technologies like JSON and XML is that nobody really has to think about them much any more. Except for, I do occasionally, because while I’m not the inventor of either, my name’s on the front of both official specifications. Hey, it’s JSON’s 25th birthday, what a run! And what ever happened to XML? Let’s shake off the dust and have a look.
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