Free, Libre, and Open Source Software / Digital Sovereignty Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 16, 2026

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Lowering the Drawbridge

  Drawbridge 0.4 is out! If your reaction is “Draw-what now?”, I can’t really blame you - Drawbridge is easily the most obscure project in the nREPL stable, and it has spent most of its life in a state best described as “technically maintained”. I’ve set out to change that recently, and this post is both a release announcement and the story of a 14-year-old project that never quite lived up to its potential. Hopefully, until now.

• Bozhidar Batsov ☛ CIDER 2.0: Sky is the Limit | Meta Redux

  Two weeks ago I wrote that CIDER 2.0 was brewing. Today the brew is ready - CIDER 2.0 (“Terceira”) is officially out! I promised the release would follow the preview within a week or two if nothing serious surfaced, and for once in my life I’m actually on schedule.

  The preview post covered the big themes in detail - the transient menus, the call-graph browsers, cider-macrostep, the revamped tracing and enlighten, the ClojureScript improvements - so I won’t rehash all of that here. Instead I’ll focus on what changed between the preview and the release, and on the bigger picture of what CIDER 2.0 is actually about.

• Codeberg ☛ aol/trusty-boot-key: Set up a flash drive to "multi-boot" OS images from a menu.

  We were quite impressed with the ease of use of Ventoy, but dismayed by its security posture, especially in light of the not-so recent xz backdoor fiasco. No bad news as of yet, but its hard to imagine a better way to install low-level malware across the globe. :-/

  While looking around for a "Safe-Toy" alternative, we found a number of projects attempting to bring comparable ease of use to a GRUB multi-boot system on a similar removable drive.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Igor Roztropiński ☛ The Order of Data: defaults, performance, determinism & paging

    How does the database decide on the order, when it is not specified? Does it matter and when?

• Education

  • Dartmouth College ☛ Low Resource Computing

    This year, LRC is looking at the past as an inspiration for the future. As mainstream computers hog more and more resources, meaningful computation remains essential at the scale of kilobytes, kilohertz, and nanowatts. This workshop is all about countering the fad of infinite growth, it's about putting processing power back in individuals' hands, and it's about contributing to a more reasonable and sustainable future. How far can today's modest resources really go? Let's find out.

• Digital Sovereignty

  • Europe Wants to Break Free From American and Chinese Technology. But How?

    France and Germany want to quit relying on America and China for key technology like artificial intelligence, but they’re having to choose where to do it.

  • RIPE ☛ Many Sovereignties, One Internet

    Digital sovereignty is used to describe many different policy goals: building local capacity, reducing dependency, strengthening public digital infrastructure, supporting regional development, governing data flows, exercising strategic leverage, or increasing control over digital systems. These approaches are not equivalent. Some can strengthen the Internet commons while others can weaken it.

    What matters is the kind of sovereignty being pursued, the instruments used and their effect on the global Internet commons.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Max Glenister ☛ What's the most popular number in Hacker News titles?

      Two consecutive titles on the HN front page yesterday had a 6 in them. This means nothing. But it’s the sort of nothing that lodges in your brain until you do something about it, so what is the most popular number in Hacker News titles?

      ClickHouse hosts the full HN dataset in their public playground, and I am exactly the kind of person who finds that exciting. The obvious query is barely a query at all: [...]