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Free Software, Licensing, Standards, and More
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Marcin Juszkiewicz ☛ Marcin 'hrw' Juszkiewicz: How to start contributing to FOSS projects
I enjoy talking to people during events. Discussions can go in many directions. And recently I spoke about how to start contributing to FOSS projects.
How I started
My first contribution was an update of the official installation guide for Debian on Amiga. Pure documentation, no code involved.
My first source code change came two years later. A few lines of C which were accepted after some changes.
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Daniel Lemire ☛ Open source as a research method
Many people still picture innovation as a line. The professor thinks and publishes. The engineer reads the paper and designs a product. The customer consumes it. It rarely works that way. The industrial revolution was not set off by professors writing papers. It was driven by demand for cheap and better clothing for the masses.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice project and community recap: October 2026
Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in October
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Licensing / Legal
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PC World ☛ Lawyers say vibe-coding your own app is low risk. But there's a catch
PCWorld reports that using AI to “vibe-code” personal apps carries low legal risk, but selling or distributing those apps significantly raises exposure to copyright and patent claims.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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Matt Cool ☛ Monterey Bay Cozy: A Community Experiment
The local map studies use OpenStreetMap for building footprints, roads, paths, and coastline details. That foundation comes from people contributing to a shared map: © OpenStreetMap contributors, with data available under the Open Database License (ODbL).
Public scientific data helps connect the world to the bay, too. The regional seafloor uses coarse NOAA ETOPO1 relief. The map’s conditions panel draws observed water levels and predicted tides from NOAA’s Monterey station, 9413450, through the NOAA Tides & Currents API.
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Standards/Consortia
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Patrick Brosse ☛ Presenter board - Fun never gets old
The web's most important legacy isn't only the old code that still runs today. Although that's definitely part of it. It's the spirit of refusing to accept the limits of what the web can do.
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