Free Software/Open Source Software News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-31 16:09:40 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-31 16:40:21 UTC
Nuxeo
Xen
Army
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has initiated a program to develop approaches for fixing software flaws by using big data analytics principles, GCN reported Monday.
DARPA intends for the Mining and Understanding Software Enclaves program to boost the reliability of building, verifying and maintaining software systems, according to the report.
Security
GlobalSign has offered to give a free wildcard SSL certificate for qualified open source projects, as a way of supporting open source and as a way to encourage adoption of industry best practices.
The project must have an OSI-approved license, be actively maintained, be non-commercial, and pass some simple requirements, all of which are desirable conditions.
Tor
Almost three months after being alerted to its presence, Apple has taken down from the App Store an allegedly fake Tor Browser containing adware and spyware.
It's notable that according to recent statistics available through Tor Metrics Portal there has been a large 1increase in the number of Tor clients used and more than a million users are now connecting to the network. Tor, from the Tor Project, is one of the most powerful and flexible open source solutions for online anonymity, and it's clearly gaining popularity.
Blender
Blender is perhaps open source's biggest poster child for years now. And in every year or two, Blender foundation showcases the product's 3D graphics capabilities by releasing animated movies created exclusively using Blender software. They are called "open movies" and you're free to download and reuse the movies the way you want, standing true to its open source credentials. We have featured each and every Blender "open" movie ever released here and here. Now its time for the fifth one codenamed "Gooseberry", and unlike its predecessors, the project's goal would be to produce a feature length animated film.
Out today is another big update to the open-source Blender 3D animation software.
New features include initial support for volumetrics in Cycles, and faster rendering of hair and textures. The motion tracker now supports weighted tracks and has improved planar tracking. For mesh modeling there are new Laplacian deform and wireframe modifiers, along with more control in the bevel tool. The game engine now supports object levels of detail.
Sony
Sony is making it Authoring Tools Framework product available to programmers for free under the Apache 2.0 open source license.
The Authoring Tools Framework (ATF) will be free to download and use.
Industry commentators have suggested that this may now create an incentive for independent third-party developers to start developing games (or indeed porting existing games) to the PlayStation.
Misc.
The main question behind open source software is: Why would developers want to create software or contribute to another piece of software for free? For a lot of developers the answer is easy. They rely on some piece of open source software for their business so they have an active interest in supporting the community around that software.
If you enjoy making music you might be interested in a new open source midi keyboard kit called the Kyub which offers users a feather touch three-dimensional midi keyboard which is supplied as a kit.
Jacie Buckner and Alexis Wills are teenagers. Both grew up in the same Appalachian region of North Carolina. Jacie describes herself as quiet. Alexis says she is a rebel. They met in middle school, when they ran into each other in the lunchroom. " I looked at Jacie and thought 'oh my goodness, she’s going to hate me!'"Alexis says.
Tajo, a big data open source project predominantly developed by domestic developers, has gotten recognition from developers around the world.
The open source project Tajo, an on-going project led by domestic big data company Gruter, was chosen as a “top level” project on March 23 by the Apache Foundation, the world’s biggest open source organization. Tajo made its introduction in the Apache Foundation in March, last year.
The announcement at the turn of the year that a bunch of seventies and early eighties videogames were being released to play for free in a web browser was met with something of a sneer in some quarters. If you missed it, this is the latest work from the Internet Archive, which kicked off its latest project, The Console Living Room, with games for five different machines. Two of them were Ataris, while titles from the ColecoVision, the Magnavox Odyssey and The Astrocade were also featured. All you now have to do if you want to play one of the available games is to head to Console Living Room, click on your machine of choice, and pick a game – but don’t blame me if you overrun your lunch hour.
Irish 21-year-old who founded CoderDojos after-school clubs tells of huge impact on young worldwide
There’s an ongoing conversation about the shifting role of developers and what that means for IT departments. They’re now shaping product and user experience with such great influence that businesses must understand their importance in order to be as successful as possible.
Which open source software should you consider for your business? Here, Steve Nice from Reconnix reviews three of the leading providers.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Giving 'Free Publicity' to the People You Hate and Attack
- Be careful what you wish for in social control media
- Andrew Lee Has Turned Freenode Into a Slopfarm (Because Who Needs IRC Anyway?)
- The site is churning out slop all day long
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 168 Out of 200: When Choosing Clients Recklessly and Poorly Self-Harm is Inevitable
- "If you're doing something hard and nobody hates it, you probably aren't doing it. If the right people hate it and those people happen to be some of the worst people alive, so much the better."
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- Quit Talking About "AI Layoffs" and Talk About How Chatbots and Other Bots Broke Recruitment Processes by Cheating
- Bots talking to other bots isn't HR; it's a catastrophe
- It's Inevitable Anyway, So...
- of course blame Chinese Communists for the "anti-AI" messages
- Robotics Isn't "Hey Hi", Robotics Isn't New Either
- Is the official Arduino blog becoming shilling platform for Qualcomm's "hey hi" [so-called 'intelligent'] chips?
- Today We'll Focus on Growth of GNU/Linux
- We've meanwhile noticed that Clownflare statistics for north American nations show 19% of requests (CDN) originating from GNU/Linux
- IBM Secret (or Silent) Layoffs in September 2026
- We need whistleblowers
- Gemini Links 02/09/2026: GAFAM's E-mail Cartel, ROOPHLOCH 2026, and Homeworlds
- Links for the day
- Not Only Microsoft and IBM Hide Layoffs (Secret Layoffs) and Fail to Follow the Law (or Bypass It)
- Microsoft's tactics are not so unique
- People Who Participate in the Slop Plagiarism Pyramid Scheme and the Moral Dilemma (What's Acceptable for a Salary?)
- giant pyramid scheme
- State of the Slop, Linux Edition
- Whether slop about "linux" becomes rarer by the end of this year, well... time will tell
- Links 02/09/2026: 'Open' 'AI' (Proprietary Slop Plagiarism) Destroying Evidence, "Data Center Backlash Has Officially Rattled Scam Altman"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 01, 2026
- IRC logs for Tuesday, September 01, 2026
- FSF Staff Uses 'CoC' to Stop Conversation About Autistici/Inventati in Relation to Free Software
- The list is already heavily moderated
- IBM Allegedly Stopped Hiring (This Tends to Coincide With Mass Layoffs)
- Is a hiring freeze an echo of layoffs? Yes, definitely.
- Something Big is Happening at IBM This Week/Month
- Some people at IBM (and Red Hat) are panicking
- Gemini Links 01/09/2026: Biscuits, Epstein Files, Power Users, and Alhena 5.6.8
- Links for the day
- Links 01/09/2026: Almost 5,000 Missing/Dead in Nepal-China Flood and Marijuana Factory Explodes
- Links for the day
- September at IBM: Silent Layoffs on Day 1
- PIPocalypse at IBM
- Last Month IRC Entered Its 39th Year and It's Still Growing (New IRC Networks)
- There are 511+ known IRC networks
- Links 01/09/2026: Climate, Disinformation, Microsoft Overworking People
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman's Site Still Offline (Third Day), But Richard Stallman is Active Online
- he is busy online despite his site not being accessible so far this week
- PIP Layoffs at Microsoft, Even in India
- Microsoft is trying to hide the true scale of the layoffs
- Layoff Trackers Are a Sham, They're Like US 'Unemployment Data'
- Layoff trackers are similarly misleading as they only measure what companies openly admit and register with WARN notices
- The Peculiar Case of OSNews, Which Experiments With Slopfarming
- It wasn't published in error. It has been there for two months.
- Russian Federation is Removing Windows From Computers
- Windows is going "out of fashion"
- XBox CEO Has No Clue What She is Selling
- Some people believe Microsoft will parcel and offload the whole "gaming" unit to some other companies
- analognowhere.com and xkcd.com Selling Physical Copies of Webcomics
- That's one way to support their work
- PIP/GVSA at Microsoft: Mass Layoffs Disguised as Something Else
- Microsoft is trying to cheapen the workforce because the numbers don't add up
- Microsoft Lunduke Uses Twitter ("X") Because It's Algorithmically Designed to Boost His Worldview/s, He Ignores What "X" Is
- Maybe all those people really deserve one another
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, August 31, 2026
- IRC logs for Monday, August 31, 2026
- Censorship by Threats
- It should be noted that the Web site of Richard Stallman will soon enter its third day of downtime
- In Romania, GNU/Linux Reaches 6%, According to Clownflare
- Tomorrow we'll see the latest data from statCounter (for September)
- Gemini Links 01/09/2026: Denali Park Train Trip, Crafts, and Community-Building in smol.pub
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Workers Doing 80 Hours a Week After Microsoft Culled Their Colleagues
- there are days when they work 17 hours a day (barely any time left to sleep and eat) and work starts at 5AM
- IBM Defrauds Shareholders With Fake News (Bribed Press) About "Quantum"
- That says a lot about the state of "Tech Giants" and also the utterly shameless state of the media
- Record Highs for GNU/Linux, Especially in the United States of America
- the "market share" of GNU/Linux is about 9%, still about a third of what Vista 11 stands at
- PIPocalypse at IBM
- Silent layoffs
- Spending Over a Million Bucks on Lawsuits Abroad When There's a Big Mortgage to Pay in America
- Priorities, priorities...
- Gemini Links 31/08/2026: Announcing ROOPHLOCH 2026, smol.pub Discussion, and LLM Plagiarism Engines Target Geminispace
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman's GNU Turns 43 in 4 Weeks, FSF Growing
- In a few weeks GNU turns 43
- IBM's Cuts Are Worsening Security in GNU/Linux
- IBM is still run by the same idiot who proposed taking over Red Hat
- Microsoft: Work Weekends Too
- Microsoft literally working its workers to death
- Links 31/08/2026: Anthropic Sued Again for Copyright Infringement of Massive Scale, 'Tokenmaxxing' Shows Slop is a Worthless Liability
- Links for the day
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- Links for the day
- Stallman Has Explained Slop is "Marketing Hype Campaign" and Torvalds Agreed. The Difference is the Bribes.
- So be like Stallman
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- "[t]he rules of the vote saw community members asked to rank each of the eight proposals. Just under 600 people voted, but Debian’s election team rejected many for unspecified reasons, leaving almost 450 valid votes to count."
- Essentiality of Rest and Killing Oneself for Vicious Companies
- Working for Microsoft is foolish
- In the UK, Bing (Microsoft) Down to Lowest Level Since January
- our tax money being passed to Microsoft via MoUs (back door deals with kickbacks)
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 167 Out of 200: The Court of Appeal Might be the Next Step
- Today is our last vacation day
- German Government Sponsors IBM Because of GNU/Linux
- Flatpak is sponsored by, run, and controlled by IBM
- Richard Stallman Speaks to Christine Hall of FOSS Force, stallman.org is Down for Over a Day
- interview does a good job addressing the hype about LLMs too
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, August 30, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, August 30, 2026
- Gemini Links 31/08/2026: Holidays, Stream of Consciousness, and Posting Online
- Links for the day
