Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 30, 2026

• The Walrus ☛ Bestselling Novelist Dropped from Major Prize over Suspected AI Use

  The Thélyson Orélien controversy raises new questions about whether detection software can be trusted

• Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Emacs: status update on the ‘denote-data’ cache for Denote

  A few days ago I announced that I am working on denote-data. The goal is to provide an opt-in, in-memory cache for Denote. It can be used to speed up certain computationally expensive operations. It must be opt-in because there are many users, myself included, who do not need such functionality (I program because the challenge is fun, just how I did with denote-sequence, for example).

  I have a final update on this that I posted on denote.git issue 724 and am copying below. Any future changes will appear in the release notes of the next version of Denote. In short: it is happening.

• Mario Rufus ☛ 30 days writing C++ in Zed – Paul Mairo

  I think I will keep using it more. 1 month is not enough to be very comfortable with a tool to the point of making a definitive judgment.

• Brett Chalupa ☛ The Curious Case of the Helix Editor & Why It’s My Go-To – Brett Codes

  I gave Helix a spin, and it felt great to use right from the get-go. The keybindings are similar to Vim but different in some key ways. I used the built-in tutorial (hx --tutor) to practice using it. After a couple of weeks, I was comfortable and at a level of speed similar to when I used Vim. I’ve been using Helix for five months now and quite like it. It’s not perfect (no editor is), but it meets my needs. Helix is fast and requires minimal configuration.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ Dasha 1.8: index recommendations, I/O analysis, schema checks and log insights

    Dasha is an open source performance dashboard for PostgreSQL fleets. It connects to your clusters with a read-only role, shows what the databases are doing right now, and explains what to do about it. Nothing is installed on the database hosts: no agent, and no extension beyond the ones you already have.

    One instance serves many clusters and all of their replicas. Most PostgreSQL statistics are per-instance and are not replicated, so Dasha reads every host of a cluster and reasons over the combined picture. An index that looks unused on the primary may be serving the entire read workload on a standby.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ Welcome Bogdan Buzea, new LibreOffice QA Analyst

    The LibreOffice project does extensive testing of every major update before release.

• Education

  • Yash Garg ☛ IndiaFOSS 2026

    This was my first time attending IndiaFOSS. It’s an annual conference held by FOSS United which tries to cover a variety of topics and bring together people of all age groups and diversity ;) There should be more such events!

    The 2026 edition took place on 26th and 27th of September at NIMHANS Convention Center and it was amazing! I had a blast talking to people, attending talks, and all the booths — the energy was unmatched 🔥

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • FSF ☛ FSF Blogs: FSF comments on Newsom's executive order on so-called artificial intelligence

    Recently, California governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order to the California Government Operations agency. Gov. Newsom directed the agency to work with a panel of experts to investigate how feasible it would be to amend California state law in order to, among other things, mandate that the so-called artificial intelligence companies based in California include "kill switches" in their models, which would then be verified by an independent organization.

    Having control over the technology we use is a fundamental part of software freedom. Without it, you simply don't have the basic freedoms you deserve when doing any type of computing, large or small. Don't let "artificial intelligence" be an exception: all users everywhere deserve complete control over their own computing.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Zotac denies warranty support to RTX 3060 owner in India after just one year despite offering three years of coverage — company says GPU’s 2023 import date takes precedence over purchase date

    The customer argues that the distributor's original import date is not something an ordinary buyer would necessarily know when making a purchase. They also pointed out that they registered the product within days of purchase and received confirmation from Zotac.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Kelson Vibber ☛ Why Gemini?

    It makes the most sense to look at Gemini and Gemtext in terms of the Gopher revival it came out of. It’s less “what do we want to throw out from the web?” and more “what bits of the web do we really miss when building with Gopher?”

    So it ditches Gopher’s arcane menu syntax and strict menu/document hierarchy in favor of basic hypertext links that can be used anywhere. It adds word wrap, since we’re all using different-sized screens now, but makes it possible to keep ascii art/tables when needed. It welcomes global writing systems. Then it adds TLS for protection against eavesdropping.