Free Software News Archives

The Servo web engine developers have enjoyed a busy April with a number of new features added to this Rust creation.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has been making significant, much-needed investments into various open-source upstream projects from the GNOME desktop to Rust-written Coreutils and more. Today the Sovereign Tech Fund outlined their latest funding for advancing the open-source software ecosystem.

Llamafile has been quite an interesting project out of Mozilla's Ocho group in the era of AI. Llamafile makes it easy to run and distribute large language models (LLMs) that are self-contained within a single file. Llamafile builds off Llama.cpp and makes it easy to ship an entire LLM as a single file with both CPU and GPU execution support. Llamafile 0.8 is out now to join in on the LLaMA3 fun as well as delivering other model support and enhancing the CPU performance.

Nginx 1.26 stable is out as the newest version of this popular alternative to the Apache web server while also able to work as a load balancer, reverse proxy, and HTTP cache. Nginx 1.26 incorporates the great work from the Nginx 1.25 mainline branch such as experimental HTTP/3 support.

It's been nearly one year since the last Tow-Boot release while debuting on Thursday was Tow-Boot 2023.07-007 for this open-source project derived from the U-Boot bootloader.

Last month the Linux Foundation along with industry stakeholders such as AWS, Google Cloud, Snap, Oracle, and others formed Valkey as an open-source Redis fork following Redis moving to Redis Source Available License v2 and SSPL v1 licensing. Today they've released Valkey 7.2.5 as the first stable release for this open-source Redis fork.

The Rust-based Servo web layout engine started by Mozilla that is now stewarded by the Linux Foundation and worked on by several different organizations is eyeing modularity support for its JavaScript integration. Currently Servo is closely tied to Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine but with a modularity push could see other options supported.

For fans of the Vim text editor, the latest development code has landed support for the XDG Base Directory "XDG_BASE_DIR" specification.

The OpenJPH project that provides an open-source implementation of JPEG-2000 Part 15 for High Throughput J2K (HTJ2K) / JPH support is working on extending its abilities to handle low-latency High-Throughput JPEG-2000 images and other capabilities.

David Rheinsberg has released Dbus-Broker 36 as the newest version of this speedy, drop-in DBus implementation for Linux systems.

Sound Open Firmware 2.9 has been released for this open-source project providing audio DSP firmware infrastructure and an adjoining SDK. This effort that started out by Intel for opening up more of their audio hardware firmware has expanded into a multi-vendor project with the likes of AMD and Mediatek also participating around this sound firmware infrastructure, audio driuvers, etc.

The Servo Web Engine under the stewardship of Linux Foundation Europe and with ongoing contributions by the likes of Igalia and other developers continues having a very vibrant year. The open-source developers involved remain very busy getting this Rust-written web layout engine into good shape for possible use as an embed-friendly solution for other software.

Given the recent change by Redis to adopt dual source-available licensing for all their releases moving forward (Redis Source Available License v2 and Server Side Public License v1), the Linux Foundation announced today their fork of Redis.

Blender has long enjoyed faster CPU rendering under Linux compared to using Microsoft Windows. Across many different processors over the years consistently we see faster Linux CPU render performance than under Windows, though that's typically the case for most renderers. With yesterday's release of Blender 4.1, there is even faster Linux CPU render speeds. Here are some initial Blender 4.0 vs. 4.1 benchmarks.

Meta's Yann Collet just released Zstd 1.5.6 as the newest version of this Zstandard compression implementation. This release is driven in part by Google Chrome 123 adding support for Zstd encoding for web traffic. Chrome now allows Zstandard (zstd) for the content-encoding to speed-up page load speeds and bandwidth savings.

Blender 4.1 is officially out today as the newest version of this wildly popular, open-source and cross-platform 3D modeling software.

The latest upstream development code for the Inkscape vector graphics program has transitioned to using the GTK4 toolkit.

While most Linux distributions have long since moved on from SysVinit in favor of systemd for init duties, this weekend SysVinit 3.09 was released for any legacy users and holdouts still enjoying the System V-init style experience.

CoreCtrl 1.4 was released this weekend as the newest version of this open-source, independently-developed GUI utility for managing CPU and GPU performance characteristics and power/thermal monitoring under Linux, among other capabilities. CoreCtrl does a good job at offering basic GUI-driven controls and monitoring for CPUs and GPUs in the absence of any official GUI solutions by the likes of AMD and Intel.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund continues investing significant sums of money for important open-source projects. Among the latest projects receiving funding from the STF are the Rust-written Coreutils implementation and Reproducible Builds.

The Krita open-source graphics editor and digital art program is looking at possibly adding some AI features to its arsenal as well as possible GPU acceleration and other new features in 2024.

The Servo web engine project has put out a new blog post that outlines all of their accomplishments made during the course of February.

KiCad 8.0 has been released as the latest major feature release for this open-source Electronics Design Automation (EDA) software suite. KiCad supports designing PCB layouts, provides a 3D viewer for inspecting PCBs, and other functionality.

XZ Utils 5.6 was released today for this general purpose data compression library that also provides the common XZ command-line utilities for .xz format handling.

Back in August 2022 DreamWorks Animation announced plans to open-source MoonRay as their production-grade renderer used on films like Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and other animated films. Nearly one year ago in March 2023 MoonRay was open-sourced as OpenMoonRay while this week brings the latest iteration of it: OpenMoonRay 1.5.

GIMP 2.99.18 was released today as the last planned development version prior in the long road to GIMP 3.0 that has been a decade in the making for this free software Adobe Photoshop alternative.

Maxim Dounin as one of the longtime core developers of the Nginx web server announced the creation today of a new fork of the project called Freenginx.

TrenchBoot has been in development for several years now by Oracle, 3mdeb, and other stakeholders for providing greater security and integrity to the Linux boot process via measured launch of the OS using a Dynamic Root of Trust Measurement (DRTM) backed by Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and AMD Secure Startup. Much progress was made over 2023 while more work is ahead in 2024 for furthering the TrenchBoot efforts.

When running Windows vs. Linux performance benchmarks one of the real-world areas where Linux consistently dominates across both AMD and Intel platforms is Blender 3D modeling software's rendering performance. For CPU-based rendering in Blender as well as other 3D modeling software, Linux typically dominates by wide margins. With the upcoming Blender 4.1 release, it looks like Linux's lead will only further expand.

The Servo open-source browser engine originally started by Mozilla has seen renewed development in recent time by Linux Foundation Europe and via developers at firms like Igalia. Last year they drafted plans for focusing on making Servo embed-friendly so that this Rust-written code could be easily leveraged by desktop apps and frameworks. Today more light was shed on this embed initiative and their focus on integrating with Tauri.

Following last month's FreeRDP 3.0 release with many improvements for this Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation, FreeRDP 3.2 is out today with a number of fixes -- especially as it pertains to Wayland support.

Following the recent release of GRUB 2.12, another prominent open-source bootloader project is also out with a new release: Limine 7.0.

OpenJPH as the open-source library implementing JPEG2000 Part-15 (JPH / HTJ2K) support is out with a big feature release.

Out today in kicking off the new year is a new release of Vim, the powerful screen-based text editor.

With all the talk recently around speedy terminal emulator options for Linux, some of you will be pleased to know Alacritty v0.13 has been released to end out the year for this cross-platform OpenGL-powered terminal emulator.

LuxCoreRender as the open-source (Apache 2.0) physically based renderer is working on its next major release. While LuxCore can be used standalone both via its own UI and a console, there is Blender integration too with Blender 4.x support being one of the main focal points of the v2.8 series.

Another open-source project celebrating Christmas Day with a new feature release is Doxygen, the open-source documentation generator and static analysis tool that is widely used by many different open-source projects and supported by numerous programming languages for generating code documentation.

One of the often overlooked pieces of the Linux desktop software stack is Plymouth that for the past 15 years or so has been providing a graphical boot splash screen that succeeded Red Hat's former RHGB software or having no graphical boot splash screen at all on some Linux distributions. This week marked the first new release of Plymouth in nearly two years.

Merged yesterday to the Git code for the PostgreSQL database server is support for facilitating incremental backups.

Box64 and Box86 are out with new releases this weekend for these open-source projects allowing x86_64 and x86 binaries to run on ARM64 Linux systems.

There's been nothing new on the BUS1 front this year for capability-based IPC within the Linux kernel... In fact, the BUS1 out-of-tree kernel module has gone untouched for years now. But out of the BUS1 project has been Dbus-Broker for a high performance D-Bus message broker in user-space that doesn't break existing D-Bus compatibility. Out today is the newest version of that project closely tied to systemd developers.

FreeRDP 3.0 stable was released today as this open-source implementation of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) for allowing nice remote access support.

ONNX in collaboration with AMD have announced TurnkeyML as a new open-source machine learning toolchain focused on agile model development and deployment.

Released last month was OBS Studio 30 with Intel QSV AV1 acceleration on Linux, WHIP/WebRTC output, YouTube Live Control Room Panel support, and a variety of other features for this software popular with game streamers and live-casting. Out today is OBS Studio 30.0.1 with some crash fixes and other refinements for last month's update.

Cloudflare has talked up their success in using the open-source Linux-based OpenBMC software for baseboard management controllers (BMCs) as a replacement to proprietary BMC software stacks.

While Blender is at the forefront of receiving corporate sponsorships and funding for advancing that open-source 3D modeling software, other free software graphics programs haven't all received the same level of support. As good news for further raising the open-source creative/graphics ecosystem, an Austrian video game studio has become one of the new Krita sponsors.

The newest monthly release of FEX is now available for this open-source project that allows running x86_64 games and applications on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) Linux environments.

Following good progress in October and this former-Mozilla browser engine project receiving funding recently for "table" support, Servo developers continued implementing more functionality over the course of November.

The Free Software Foundation this week published their 2023 holiday shopping guide for services and products that comply with their pure free software standards, such as computer hardware devices that "respect your freedom" regardless of hardware age.

The open-source Roundcube webmail software project has "merged" with Nextcloud, the prominent open-source personal cloud software.