Free Software News Archives

For those still managing to avoid systemd use on Linux systems and preferring SysVinit as their init system of choice, SysVinit 3.11 is out today with a new "important feature" addition.

Several Phoronix readers have written in this Sunday over concerns of Bitwarden further moving away from open-source. Bitwarden is a password management service that leverages an encrypted vault and supports multiple clients/platforms. Bitwarden operates on a freemium model and has provided some code as open-source while there are new concerns over Bitwarden further pivoting away from open-source.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) is today celebrating its second anniversary for "empowering public digital infrastructure." In the past two years it has invested more than €23 million (about $24.94M USD) into sixty open technologies.

Inkscape 1.4 released on Sunday as the newest version of this cross-platform, open-source vector graphics editor.

The long-in-development GIMP 3.0 open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop hopes to ship its release candidate in the near future.

The open-source ZLUDA project began life as a drop-in CUDA replacement that ran atop Intel GPUs using the Level Zero API. Then AMD quietly began funding it for several years as a viable CUDA implementation running atop AMD GPUs until discontinued funding earlier this year. ZLUDA for AMD GPUs was then made open-source but then in August the ZLUDA code was removed at AMD's request. Today it's taking on its third incarnation.

Blender 4.3 is available today in beta form to encourage public testing of this next feature release to this leading open-source 3D modeling software.

Zrythm is an interesting open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software package. It's been making use of the GTK toolkit but now the developers have decided to switch to Qt6 instead.

BusyBox 1.37 has been released as the first feature release in one and a half years for this "Swiss Army Knife of embedded Linux" systems. With BusyBox 1.37 comes some new options, many fixes, and other enhancements.

Most of you have fortunately not had to think about Adobe Flash support in years, but for those still having some old assets in Adobe Flash/SWF format or wanting to relive some old games/entertainment based in Flash, the open-source Ruffle project remains one of the leading contenders for dealing with Flash in 2024 and beyond. Ruffle is a Rust-based emulator for Adobe Flash that continues to be actively developed and supporting more features.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund is set to make a €688,800 investment into the Samba open-source project that re-implements the SMB networking protocol and focused on better file and print service interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems.

Last month Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund announced they would be opening a fellowship program for open-source maintainers. The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has been providing great investments into open-source projects while this fellowship is around investing in open-source maintainers that may be working on multiple open-source projects. The application process is now open for those interested open-source maintainers.

With Mozilla having backed away from the Servo web engine years ago and recent open-source development on Servo focused on making it suitable for embed purposes into other applications/software, it's remained to be picked up by any standalone web browser project. But taking shape over the past few months has been Verso as a ground-up build of a new Rust-based web browser making use of Servo.

FEX 2409 has been released for this open-source project that's known for allowing x86_64 Linux binaries -- including both games and applications -- to run rather well on AArch64. It's also been working on enabling x86_64 programs on RISC-V but there due to architectural differences it's more of a challenge than with ARM.

The first alpha release of OpenSSL 3.4 is now available for testing as the next feature update to this widely-used SSL library / cryptography toolkit.

Samba 4.21 is out as the newest version of this SMB networking protocol implementation commonly used on Linux systems for file and print services interaction with Windows systems.

The Rust-based, open-source Servo web engine had a very eventful month as the developers involved continue advancing this browser engine as well as their example/reference web browser.

Today marks the beginning of the string freeze for the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 open-source image editor release as one of the leading free software alternatives to Adobe Photoshop.

For Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Canonical released Netplan 1.0 as their declarative network configuration software spanning now from servers to desktops. In time for Ubuntu 24.10 due out in two months, Netplan 1.1 has been released as the next iteration of this Linux networking configuration software from Canonical.

FEX 2408 has been released as the newest update to this open-source emulator that allows for running x86/x86_64 games and application binaries on AArch64 (64-bit ARM) systems. There are some nice improvements to find with FEX 2408 while already the next release is being teased for even greater performance.

While not as common as GRUB or systemd-boot, a new version of Limine is now available for this open-source, modern-focused and portable multi-protocol bootloader.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has done a wonderful job providing funding to various open-source projects for advancing their work on free software. STF has been a huge success for prominent open-source projects while now it's also preparing a pilot program for STF Fellowships to provide funding to open-source maintainers that may be doing important work across multiple projects.

The Servo project is out with their latest monthly status report to highlight advancements made on this open-source, Rust-written web layout engine.

Two years ago DreamWorks Animation made the exciting decision that they would open-source their MoonRay renderer that's been used in production for a variety of animated feature films. That initial open-source drop took place last year as OpenMoonRay and since then it has continued to be improved as an open-source project.

While most Linux distributions are running on systemd as the init/service manager, SysVinit is continuing to be maintained. SysVinit 3.10 was released today with one new feature and some fixes. Coincidentally the new feature of SysVinit 3.10 is improving compatibility with systemd's machinectl command.

TigerVNC 1.14 released last week as the newest version of this high performance, cross-platform VNC client and server solution. Exciting with TigerVNC 1.14 is adding hardware acceleration support.

For fans of ollama as an open-source means for easily running large language models (LLMs) on your system, ollama v0.3 has been released with support for the newest exciting models.

Yann Collet released LZ4 v1.10 today as a major update to this extremely fast compression algorithm. Most significant with LZ4 1.10 is adding multi-threaded compression support for much faster performance with today's modern multi-core processors.

It's Blender 4.2 release day! Blender 4.2 marks the newest long-term support (LTS) release for this wonderful free software 3D modeling solution that has developed quite a following across the industry.

Libavif 1.1 has arrived as the newest feature release to this library for implementing the AV1 Image File Format with image encode and decode capabilities.

One year ago Meta released IGL as the Intermediate Graphics Library as a cross-platform, low-level graphics interface built atop native graphics APIs like OpenGL, Vulkam, and Metal. This MIT-licensed library has seen its first tagged version in the form of IGL 1.0.

HarfBuzz text shaping engine lead developer Behdad Esfahbod has written a lengthy blog post covering the state of text rendering in 2024. There's a particular focus on text rendering in the open-source world as well as looking ahead to a text stack that will incorporate more of the Rust programming language.

The Rust-written, GPU-accelerated Zed text editor is finally providing official Linux builds!

Box64 v0.3 is now available as the newest feature release to this user-space x86_64 emulator for Linux binaries on AArch64 (ARM64) hosts. Box64 is one of several promising projects in this area for being able to run x86_64 games and applications under ARM64 with great speed.

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine continues progressing for this open-source project now stewarded by the Linux Foundation Europe and seeing code contribution from a range of developers. They have published their June 2024 status update to outline the latest accomplishments for this alternative web engine.

A few days ago was the release of the OpenShot 3.2 open-source video editor while Shotcut 24.06 also released this week as another great cross-platform, free software video editing solution.

Following a more than one year long process, the Free Software Foundation today named three additional board members.

OpenShot 3.2 has been released as the latest feature update to this open-source, non-linear video editor that is popular on Linux systems.

Flathub as the centralized repository for serving Flatpak sandboxed Linux applications crossed the threshold this weekend of serving more than two billion downloads.

While more software piles on AI features these days, today's release of the Darktable 4.8 RAW photography software has removed one of its AI features after realizing it only delivers mediocre quality.

The first release candidate of Zlib-ng 2.2 for this drop-in replacement to the Zlib data compression library is now available for testing. Zlib-ng continues to ship new performance optimizations and other tuning for providing faster Zlib performance on modern processors.

Announced back in March by the Linux Foundation was Valkey as a Redis fork following upstream licensing changes. In the few months since the Valkey in-memory NoSQL data store has put out its first release and has continued attracting more interest from Linux/open-source communities. Today the Linux Foundation announced another handful of organizations now throwing their weight behind Valkey.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has been making sizable investments into various Linux desktop projects, the Rust-based Coreutils implementation, libmicrohttpd, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and other prominent open-source software that could benefit from greater financial resources. Today they have announced they have opened up for a new round of applications for those open-source projects seeking funding from this German government initiative.

FEX is one of the open-source projects working on user-mode x86/x86_64 binary emulation atop ARM64/AArch64 Linux. FEX 2406 is out today as the project's newest monthly feature release.

Out for testing this weekend is the OBS Studio 30.2 beta software for those into live-streaming their desktop and other screen recording purposes. With the OBS Studio 30.2 release there are video encode improvements for Linux, support for multi-track video streaming, hybrid MP4 output, and other new features.

With yesterday marking the 20th birthday of Phoronix, I was curious what the most popular news articles were over these past two decades. There's a lot of compiler fodder, news from the early days of AMD Ryzen, Linus Torvalds commentary, and more.

The latest funding for open-source from Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund is providing €300,000 over the course of the next year for improving GNU libmicrohttpd for building high performance HTTP web servers.

The beta process has begun for the Blender 4.2 open-source 3D modeling software. Making Blender 4.2 all the more significant is that it's a Long Term Support (LTS) release for this widely-used program by 3D artists across platforms.

Controversial free software developer Eric S Raymond has been spending a lot of time recently on the new Autodafe project as a means of free software projects from relying on Autotools. This "De-Autoconfiscation" has now led to the release of Autodafe 1.0 with the tool now being considered production-ready.

The Rust-written Servo web engine as a reminder was started as a Mozilla project but then abandoned and now developed by multiple organizations as part of Linux Foundation Europe. The Servo project has put out a new status update that highlights the work accomplished in recent weeks.