Ampere Computing with their 80-core Ampere Altra processors and Mount Jade reference platform continue making progress on open-source firmware support for interested parties.

Libinput 1.17 is out as the newest version of this Wayland/X.Org input handling library for the Linux desktop.

It's rare to hear of OpenOffice usage these days compared to LibreOffice, but the open-source office suite is still going ahead under its volunteer work at the Apache Software Foundation. This past weekend at FOSDEM 2021 was a status update on Apache OpenOffice.

Following in the footsteps of Apache Superset and Apache ECharts, DataSketches has been promoted to being a top-level project within the Apache Software Foundation.

Just last week Apache Superset was promoted to being a top-level project by the Apache Software Foundation. Apache Superset is around big data visualizations and business intelligence solutions through data exploration while now Apache ECharts has joined it as the latest top-level project.

The Apache Software Foundation that oversees 340+ Apache projects saw a measurable rise in security related issues during the course of 2020.

The open-source/Linux Apple M1 work continues to be quite busy this week... The latest is Alyssa Rosenzweig who has been working on reverse-engineering the M1 graphics processor has been able to write some early and primitive code for rendering a triangle.

The Apache Software Foundation announced on Thursday that Apache Superset reached "top-level" status.

New Year's Eve two years ago I wrote about the open-source / Linux letdowns of 2018. It was well received at the time and sparked some interesting discussions so as we celebrate the start of 2021 I figured it would be interesting to look back and see which of those letdowns were since resolved and what ones are remaining.

Darktable 3.4 is out in time for dealing with any of your RAW holiday photos.

Just one week shy of one year since CUPS founder Michael Sweet left Apple, which in turn seemingly led to the downfall of CUPS, PAPPL 1.0 has been released as his modern alternative printer application framework.

The Webboot project has been in development now for more than one year as an easy means of booting Linux ISO images from the web. From this minimal boot environment users can configure their network connection and download a new ISO or use a pre-existing ISO. From there Webboot allows kexec'ing into that ISO for booting it up.

The BUS1 kernel code for providing an in-kernel, capability-based IPC mechanism hasn't seen much (or any?) activity in well over a year but at least the Dbus-Broker project continues ahead. Dbus-Broker continues ahead as this D-Bus compatible implementation focused on correctness while being optimized for performance.

Outreachy interns have been announced for the winter 2020 round. Selected participants are working on various open-source tasks from December through March in exchange for a $5,500 USD stipend to become involved with open-source.

CUPS printing system founder Michael Sweet who left Apple last year and that left CUPS in a stagnate position (as of writing, still no commits to their Git repository since April) while Sweet continues pushing ahead with his new and modern "PAPPL" effort.

For those with some extra time around the US Thanksgiving holiday, the Arcan display server/environment is out with a new release. This is the interesting project that's powered in part by a game engine, offers X11 and Wayland compatibility, ported to BSDs, and more recently has been exploring VR and other desktop innovations.

Blender has been gaining a lot of ground this year with numerous prominent organizations now backing its development (just most recently, Facebook) and just at the end of summer they delivered Blender 2.90 while out today is Blender 2.91.

It's been twenty-five years to the day since GIMP was started as an open-source image editor and in turn sparked the creation of the GTK tool-kit.

The Inclusive Naming Initiative has been formed by various industry players to make "consistent, responsible choices to remove harmful language" from software.

The open-source, cross-platform LuxCoreRender physically based renderer is closing in on its version 2.5 release and most noticeable is supporting NVIDIA's OptiX library for faster acceleration on NVIDIA RTX GPUs.

As we roll into 2021 the Free Software Foundation is looking to update its high priority free software projects list. These are the software projects that should be incorporating "the most important threats, and most critical opportunities, that free software faces in the modern computing landscape." For now the FSF is looking for help deciding what to include.

The FreeType text rendering library is out with version 2.10.4 today as an important security update.

While the LibreOffice fork is much more popular than OpenOffice these days, the Apache Software Foundation does continue maintaining the OpenOffice codebase born out of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice.

At the end of 2019 the lead developer of CUPS left Apple after he joined Apple and the company purchased the source code a decade prior for this long-standing open-source printing system used by not only macOS but also Linux and other Unix-like platforms. This unfortunately has not bode well for CUPS in 2020.

While GIMP 3.0 development drags on, the GIMP 2.10.x stable series continues seeing new and interesting point releases. Out today is GIMP 2.10.22 that now supports the AV1-based AVIF image format for import and export.

U-Boot 2020.10 released on Monday as the latest quarterly feature update to this open-source bootloader popular with embedded devices.

The Free Software Foundation on Sunday marked thirty five years since its founding by Richard Stallman.

PostgreSQL 13.0 is out this morning as the latest major update to this widely-used relational database server.

Following the major Inkscape 1.0 release happening back in May for this very popular, cross-platform vector graphics program there is the first point release now available.

Open-source consulting firm KDAB has released Hotspot 1.3 as their GUI utility for visualizing Linux perf reports.