Free Software News Archives

XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.18 is out today as the newest stable release for this leading open-source app sandboxing and distribution tech. Flatpak's XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.18 adds yet more features for this cross-distribution solution for software deployment and package management.

The Servo web rendering engine that is written in Rust and started originally by Mozilla while now being developed as a Linux Foundation Europe project has issued a status update around recent changes to this memory-safe and modular web browser engine.

PostgreSQL 16 released today as a very exciting update for this popular open-source SQL server.

The first alpha release of the OpenSSL 3.2 library is now available for testing. With OpenSSL 3.2 there are a number of new features, most notably the client-side work around QUIC support.

OpenColorIO (OCIO) as the open-source color management solution for motion picture production and maintained by the Academy Software Foundation is out with a new feature release that will be part of their 2024 VFX Reference Platform. Notable with this release are new SIMD optimizations with AVX/AVX2 and Arm NEON.

ClamAV 1.2 was released on Monday as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform anti-virus engine currently maintained by Cisco Systems.

The Alliance For Open Media has released libavif 1.0, the reference library for the AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) with image encode and decode support.

Given all the interest this week in Firefox outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider, I decided to run some fresh Linux desktop web browser benchmarks on my end. For today's comparison is a look at the newly-released Chrome 116 up against Firefox 117b8 that will be released as stable in just over one week.

For those still managing to resist systemd, SysVinit 3.08 was released on Thursday as the newest update to this init system.

Following Canonical deciding to pull in control of the LXD project and LXD maintainership being limited to Canonical employees, the Linux Containers project has announced the forking of LXD as Incus.

Sourceware.org that provides the open-source hosting for projects like GCC, Cygwin, and more had long been sponsored by Red Hat and a rather opaque organization. Earlier this year SourceWare.org became part of the Software Freedom Conservancy. In addition to now calling the SFC home, they are planning other changes ahead to expand their hosting services, diversifying hardware and software partners, and other changes.

The open-source FEX-Emu project continues advancing as an emulator to run x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on 64-bit ARM (AArch64), even for games, Valve's Steam Play / Proton, and other complex software. FEX-Emu 2308 is out today with more performance optimizations and other features implemented for this emulator.

For those making use of the open-source, cross-platform ClamAV anti-virus/anti-malware software backed by Cisco, the first release candidate of ClamAV 1.2 is now available for testing.

FreeRDP 3.0 continues getting better for this open-source solution for interoperability with Microsoft RDP for remote desktop purposes.

Just days after the FreeCAD 0.21-rc release, FreeCAD 0.21 is now available for this popular open-source CAD software.

FreeCAD 0.21 is nearing release as this wonderful open-source CAD solution.

Richard Hughes is the Red Hat developer who is most prominently known for leading the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and Fwupd development as well as formerly being behind the ColorHug monitor color calibration hardware effort and PackageKit, among other open-source software. He's recently been developing a new software project called Passim that today he announced to the world.

The first beta is out of FreeRDP 3.0, the open-source Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation of that proprietary Microsoft protocol for remote desktop/GUI handling.

Inkscape 1.3 is now available as the newest feature release ot this open-source software focused on being a vector graphics editor that can rival the likes of Adobe Illustrator.

Meson 1.2 was released on Sunday as the newest feature release for this wildly popular, cross-platform build system that has become widely used by open-source projects as a superior alternative to GNU Automake and other solutions.

GIMP 2.99.16 is out this Sunday as the GIMP 3.0 release candidate finally nears.

Meta has published the Intermediate Graphics Library (IGL) as a new cross-platform library to provide a single low-level interface that works atop native graphics APIs from OpenGL and Vulkan to Apple's Metal.

Tow-Boot has been a "user-friendly" distribution of U-Boot that was seeing regular updates but for nearly one year has been on hiatus without any new releases. That changed overnight with Tow-Boot 2022.07-006 being released and a call for new developers.

Released yesterday was a new version of UPower, the FreeDesktop.org software known long ago as DeviceKit-Power and used as an abstraction layer for enumerating power devices on Linux and other platforms. The new UPower 1.90.1 release is the first update to this software in just shy of one year.

The libjpeg-turbo 3.0 open-source release occurred today for this open-source JPEG image codec implementation focused on SIMD instruction usage for optimized efficiency. While libjpeg-turbo has been a great open-source development success and has seen widespread use, its feature development moving forward may be limited due to funding gaps.

This past week at the Linux Foundation's Embedded Open-Source Summit in Prague, Sony engineer Tim Bird who is prominent in the embedded Linux community provided another insightful presentation to sum up the current state of the embedded Linux ecosystem.

There's been hopes of seeing the GIMP 3.0 release in 2023 or at least release candidates. GIMP developers recently finished a week-long meet-up and it's looking like they may be on track for at least beginning the GIMP 3.0 release candidate phase this year. GIMP 3.0 has remained quite elusive and in the works for the past decade as the much anticipated port to GTK3 and a host of other enhancements to this open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

Blender 3.6 is out today as the latest exciting update for this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software. Exciting with Blender 3.6 is adding Intel hardware ray-tracing support when making use of Arc Graphics. AMD graphics cards on Windows can also enjoy HIP ray-tracing but sadly isn't supported yet for Linux.

The Firewalld open-source firewall daemon has been in development since 2011 while only two years ago did it reach the Firewalld 1.0 milestone. Thus it was a bit surprising to find Firewalld 2.0 being released today.

FLAC 1.4.3 is out today as the first update to this Xiph.Org royalty-free, lossless audio codec since last October.

PoCL 4.0 is out as the latest major update to this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that started out as an OpenCL-on-CPU effort while with time has expanded its sights beyond just OpenCL on processors to providing OpenCL on other accelerators/devices via leveraging different LLVM target back-ends. With PoCL 4.0, there is also now an Intel oneAPI Level Zero driver for using this OpenCL stack on Intel graphics processors.

Neural Magic's DeepSparse AI inference runtime continues to pursue "GPU-class performance on CPUs" and with the new DeepSparse 1.5 release is delivering even faster performance for CPU inference.

For those fond of the Apache NetBeans integrated development environment, NetBeans 18 is now available as the latest version of this programming IE primarily geared for Java, PHP, and HTML5/CSS development.

The embedded Linux experts at Bootlin have released Snagboot as a new open-source project aiming to make it easy to recover and re-flash embedded platforms.

Cloudflare is making it easier for non-profit open-source projects to tap into the premium services offered by the company for speeding up their web infrastructure and protecting against attacks.

Bug bounty programs setup by large corporations to reward and recognize security researchers for properly reporting new bugs and security vulnerabilities is a great concept, but in practice isn't always handled well. Security researcher Adam Zabrocki recently shared the troubles he encountered in the bug bounty handling at Google for Chrome OS and in turn for Intel with it having been an i915 Linux kernel graphics driver vulnerability.

Libproxy as the open-source library providing automatic proxy configuration management on Linux, Windows, and macOS systems has seen a big update thanks to an unlikely contributor.

Following the SFC vote last year for accepting Sourceware.org into the conservancy, everything is all set now and Sourceware.org is now officially part of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Red Hat was traditionally the long-time sponsor of Sourceware.org that hosts many open-source projects like GCC and Cygwin.

A new version of Lighttpd is out today, the BSD-licensed, open-source web server that focuses on being very speedy and lightweight on CPU and memory resources.

Last October marked the release of memtest86+ 6.0 as a rewrite of this long-used, open-source bootable RAM testing software. In February marked memtest86+ 6.10 with UEFI Secure Boot signing and other new features. Out today is now memtest86+ 6.20 where a driving focus for this release is on improving support for older hardware.

FEX-Emu 2305 has been released, the open-source project continuing to work on x86_64 atop 64-bit ARM (AArch64) emulation support for being able to enjoy more games on ARM Linux and other software not otherwise natively available.

The reference AVIF image encoder for the AV1 Image File Format has added experimental support for AV2, the next-generation codec that remains in development by the Alliance for Open Media.

Last year DreamWorks announced they would be open-sourcing their award-winning MoonRay renderer. Back in March that dream was realized with OpenMoonRay being published for this renderer that has been used for films like Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, The Bad Guys, How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and other films. OpenMoonRay 1.1 is now available as the first update to this professional renderer since it was open-sourced last quarter.

Last November ClamAV 1.0 was released for this anti-virus/anti-malware solution currently developed via Cisco and the open-source community. Following ClamAV 1.0 LTS, today marks the availability of ClamAV 1.1 as the first post-1.0 feature release.

After being in development for two years, a new beta release of Zlib-ng as the "next generation" data compression library is available with much faster data decompression.

Git 2.40.1 is out today due to three new security vulnerabilities being disclosed. Due to those security fixes there are also Git updates for prior stable series with v2.39.3, v2.38.5, v2.37.7, v2.36.6, v2.35.8, v2.34.8, v2.33.8, v2.32.7, v2.31.8, and v2.30.9.

The long-awaited port of the GIMP image manipulation program to the GTK3 toolkit is now declared "officially finished".

Moore Threads was established in 2020 to create domestic GPU solutions in China with their first products having been announced last year. Most of the talk around Moore Threads "MThreads" GPUs have been for Windows but they are working on Linux support to at least some extent.

Last October Google engineers decided they would deprecate JPEG-XL support in Chrome over some debated rationale for the move. Even amid the community uproar they went ahead to drop the JPEG-XL support. The Free Software Foundation has finally commented on the matter.

Servo as the browser engine started at Mozilla but now developed as a Linux Foundation project has been maintaining two separate layout engines and moving forward they hope to be able to focus on the newer "Layout 2020" engine and fill in its missing gaps.