Free Software News Archives

LZ4 v1.9.4 is out today as the first point release in nearly two years for this BSD-licensed, speedy, lossless compression algorithm.

DreamWorks Animation announced today that they intend to release their MoonRay production renderer as open-source softwate later in 2022. DreamWorks' MoonRay renderer has been used for films such as How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Bad Guys, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, and other animated films.

Dbus-Broker as a drop-in replacement for the reference D-Bus implementation while focused on better performance and reliability is out with a new version. Notable with this new Dbus-Broker 32 is the beginnings of AppArmor support that could open the door for Ubuntu Linux switching over to it in the future.

OBS Studio as the popular, cross-platform, open-source software widely used by live-streamers is working on its next major release.

HarfBuzz is the open-source text shaping engine that is widely used by many different libraries and applications. The HarfBuzz code is critical to the Linux desktop and many open-source applications while this weekend is celebrating its big "5.0" release. With HarfBuzz 5.0 the developers have been working on the "Boring Expansion" font spec support.

It's been nearly 12 years since LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice.org following Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems and then the subsequent creation of Apache OpenOffice in 2011. While LibreOffice has become the dominant open-source office suite, Apache OpenOffice continues limping along and today marks its v4.1.13 release.

Red Hat released Stalld 1.17 this past week as the newest version of this open-source daemon used for thread stall detection and boosting on Linux.

FEX-Emu is an open-source emulator project that has been particularly focused on being able to run x86/x86_64 games on AArch64 with great speed including around Steam and Steam Play (Proton) Windows games.

The Blender open-source 3D modeling software is in the process of working on a new GPU-accelerated, real-time compositor.

The cross-platform wxWidgets GUI toolkit is out today with version 3.2 that represents more than 15,000 commits and comes the better part of a decade since they started their last stable release series.

Darktable 4.0 has debuted today as a major update to this open-source, cross-platform RAW photography software suite.

Firewalld 1.2 was released on Friday as the newest feature release for this Linux firewall daemon. Bug fix releases for existing stable series were released with Firewalld 1.1.2, 1.0.5, and 0.9.9.

Vim 9.0 is out as the first major update in two years for this popular text editor. With Vim 9.0 comes the Vim9 scripting language that offers significantly better performance.

Shotcut remains one of the leading open-source, cross-platform video editors built atop the MLT Multimedia Framework with FFmpeg. Out this week is Shotcut 22.06 as the newest feature update to this non-linear video editing solution.

We have been writing about GIMP 3.0 for nearly a decade and with that stable release still out of sight, GIMP 2.10.32 is out as a six-month update to the aging GIMP 2.10 stable series.

For those interested in open-source CAD solutions, FreeCAD 0.20 is out today as the newest version of this general purpose 3D computer-aided design modeler that has been in development now for nearly twenty years.

After battling Ceph storage issues and related problems for the past day after two solid-state drives failed, the FreeDesktop.org GitLab that is used for the centralized, coordination of the open-source Linux graphics driver development and other open-source software is back online.

Established a few months ago was the Open-Source Firmware Foundation to promote open-source firmware usage throughout the industry. LinuxBoot is now the latest party joining the Open-Source Firmware Foundation.

Blender 3.2 is releasing this morning as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling and animation software package. Blender 3.2 finally adds AMD GPU-accelerated rendering support on Linux and many other refinements.

For those making use of the lighttpd lightweight and speedy web server, a new release is now available of this BSD-licensed open-source software. Most notable with lighttpd 1.4.65 is support for WebSockets over HTTP/2.

While JPEG XL is regarded as the next-generation JPEG standard and JPEG 2000 never quite took off to supersede the original JPEG standard, there are open-source projects continuing to work on this image compression standard. OpenJPH 0.9 was released last week as the open-source high-throughput JPEG 2000 implementation and with this new version comes even more performance gains.

Since last year CUPS development shifted to the OpenPrinting project with Apple no longer pursuing feature development on this long-time open-source Unix print server. That led to the release then of CUPS 2.4 and work on this open-source print server has revived. Out today is CUPS 2.4.2 with a few new features.

Nginx as the lightweight web-server known for its speedy performance is out today with the version 1.22 feature release.

HarfBuzz 4.3 was released on Friday as this open-source library that serves as a text shaping engine used by GNOME/GTK, KDE/Qt, Android, Flutter, Java, all major web browsers, and other software.

System76-Scheduler as the Linux PC vendor's effort to provide a Rust-written daemon to enhance Linux desktop responsiveness and shipping as part of their Pop!_OS distribution is out with a new feature release.

It's been nearly one year since the release of Inkscape 1.1 while today it has been succeeded by Inkscape 1.2 as a major feature update.

Last week marked the first update to the jemalloc memory allocation library since August of 2019. This malloc() implementation focused concurrency and memory fragmentation avoidance has seen more speed optimizations and other improvements in this new jemalloc 5.3 release.

PAPPL as the free software project started by CUPS founder Michael Sweet after departing Apple more than two years ago, this C-based framework/library for creating CUPS Printer Applications is out with a major feature release.

Released on Friday was OpenJPEG 2.5 as the newest update to this open-source JPEG 2000 image library. Notable with this new release for this BSD 2-clause library is now supporting high-throughput "HTJ2K" decoding.

In the absence of the BUS1 in-kernel IPC mechanism that appears stalled that was started after the failed KDBUS effort, Dbus-Broker has been taking off as the high performance, reliability-enhanced Linux message broker in user-space retaining compatibility with the reference D-Bus implementation.

In addition to CUPS back to seeing new feature development for this print server now being managed by OpenPrinting, CUPS founder Michael Sweet also continues being quite busy with working on PAPPL as his modern printer application framework effort.

Longtime Linux users especially those that frequented Linux conferences/events in pre-COVID times are likely familiar with Dirk Hohndel. Dirk has a well known track record with Linux going back to the 90's, good friend and diving buddy with Linus Torvalds, and now somewhat surprisingly has moved on to promoting a blockchain effort.

Box86/Box64 is out with new versions today for this open-source project getting x86/x86_64 binaries running on other architectures like Arm and possibly RISC-V and more moving forward. Exciting with Box86 v0.2.6 and Box64 v0.1.8 is getting Steam and Steam Play working for at least the basics.

OpenSSH 9.0 is available today as the latest version of this widely-used, open-source SSH implementation. With OpenSSH 9.0 comes new features as well as changes like scp using the SFTP protocol by default.

It's been a decade since the calls began for deprecating Linux's frame-buffer drivers "FBDEV" and the push for replacing FBDEV with DRM/KMS drivers. While DRM/KMS drivers are now commonplace even in the embedded space, FBDEV still won't die and with Linux 5.18 is seeing another round of fixes going in.

Samba 4.16 is out as the newest feature release for this leading SMB / CIFS implementation for improving Windows file/print interoperability with Linux-based systems.

Blender 3.1 is out today as the newest feature release to this incredibly powerful, open-source and cross-platform 3D modeling software.

The open-source Tow-Boot project has been in development now for about one year as a "user-friendly" distribution of the U-Boot bootloader.

OpenBLAS recently added support for Russia's Elbrus E2000 processors, however, the OpenBLAS developers are now debating whether to drop support for these Russian domestically-produced CPUs given Russia's invasion into Ukraine.

The HarfBuzz open-source text shaping library that is used by GNOME/GTK, KDE/Qt, Android, Java, Flutter, Firefox, LibreOffice, and numerous other applications and toolkits is out with HarfBuzz 4.0.

It's been four years since the release of Dbus 1.12 (and even 20 months since the last point release [v1.12.20] up until this week when v1.12.22 was tagged) while today Dbus 1.14.0 is being introduced for this user-space IPC solution for Linux systems.

While free software developer Con Kolivas is known for his work on the Linux kernel to improve desktop responsiveness and efforts like BFS and MuQSS, there is also user-space software he has developed. One of those user-space programs under is belt is LRZIP, the Long Range ZIP format, that is focused on providing speedy compression of large files and to do so with lower amounts of memory.

Following last summer's release of Firewalld 1.0, out today is Firewalld 1.1 as the next major update to this Linux firewall daemon.

We are now one step closer to the long overdue GIMP 3.0 release as the GTK3, much improved version of this open-source alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop.

While PostgreSQL has supported compression with its TOAST storage and over the past year has built-up LZ4 compression support for it along with compressing the WAL, backup compression, and other usage, PostgreSQL developers are preparing to further extend their compression capabiities with Zstd support.

One of the recurring FOSDEM talks we have come to enjoy has been Oracle's Daniel Kiper providing an annual update on the GRUB bootloader development efforts. This past weekend at FOSDEM 2022 was the latest on this leading open-source bootloader with recent accomplishments and plans for this year.

The Open-Source Firmware Foundation (OSFF) is getting up and running with hopes of expanding open-source firmware usage throughout the industry.

The DirectFB library had been a popular option for embedded systems in running off the Linux frame-buffer to avoid the full overhead of an X11 server. But a number of years ago DirectFB disappeared and ultimately stopped being maintained. Meanwhile Wayland has been making lots of inroads into mobile/embedded and areas once popular for DirectFB use. But now it turns out DirectFB2 is in development as a fork of the original DirectFB.

Rqlite 7.0 is now available as a lightweight, distributed relational database. This open-source database system for cluster setups is built atop SQLite while aiming to be easy-to-use and fault-tolerant.

While just one part of the overall equation for a system with open-source firmware, the Framework Laptop has joined the ranks of the Linux-focused laptops these days being backed by open-source firmware for its embedded controller (EC).