Free, Libre, and Open Source Software / Sharing Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 08, 2026

• Carl Schwan ☛ What's new with SAML support in Nextcloud

  Several months ago, as part of my internal move to the “IdP” team at Nextcloud, I started to co-maintain the user_saml application. This application allows Nextcloud users to implement single sign on with the SAML and Kerberos protocol. This protocol is based on XML and is mostly used in combination with Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), Microsoft Entra ID, Authentik, Okta, Google Workspace and more.

• France24 ☛ In pictures: Drought exposes World War II ships, strands boats as Europe’s river levels plunge

  Water levels on the Danube River, the second longest in Europe, have dropped so low due to drought and extreme heat over the summer that the hulls of dozens of German warships from World War II are emerging into view and the remains of an ancient mammoth were uncovered in Romania. In Germany, fishing boats have been stuck near the banks of the Rhine, and sections of France's Loire riverbed are partially dry.

• LWN ☛ The Software Stewardship Lab launches

  The Software Stewardship Lab, a

  nonprofit organization based in Scotland, has announced

  its existence.

• It's FOSS ☛ OpenSearch Is Done Being Called "the Elasticsearch Fork"

  I sat down with Bianca Lewis of OpenSearch at Open Source Summit India, right after the project's second OpenSearch Con in the country. Bianca Lewis is the executive director of the OpenSearch Software Foundation.

  OpenSearch started life in 2021 as a fork of Elasticsearch, born out of Elastic's move away from an open source license. Five years on, I wanted to know how much of that origin story still holds, and how the project sees itself now that it's an AI data infrastructure layer with its own roadmap and its own community.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ Why and how the Austrian Military moved to LibreOffice (Part 1)

    Many government departments around the world are moving away from vendor lock-in by tech giants, and switching to free and open source software like LibreOffice. This helps with privacy, security, and digital sovereignty.

• GNU Projects

  • Unicorn Media ☛ GCC 16.2 Released With More Than 100 Bugs Fixed

    The latest release of the GNU Compiler Collection addresses regressions and serious bugs found in GCC 16.1.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ The Journey of {nycOpenData}: From Classroom to Community

      So, I literally copied and pasted the same exact code 30 different times and adapted it for the 30 most popular datasets on the NYC Open Data Portal.

      Through a lot of blood, sweat, and documentation, the first iteration of nycOpenData was officially created and accepted onto CRAN! I, a person who only installed packages, was now the creator of one? It was amazing to actually give back to the marvelous R community that provided me with so much for so many years.

      This not only made teaching with NYC Open Data easier, but more fun too. The package did exactly what it needed to do: make working with NYC Open Data datasets incredibly easy in R.

• Standards/Consortia

  • John D Cook ☛ Corrupted apostrophes

    Apparently the phone turns the apostrophe (U+0027) into a right single quote (U+2019), then bungles bytes in the UTF-8 encoding of U+2019 as three Windows-1252 characters. The bytes E28099hex are interpreted as â (E2hex), € (80hex), and ™ (99hex).