Given the explosive growth of the Blender 3D modeling software in recent times and with receiving more sponsors/supporters and more organizations beginning to make use of this cross-platform, open-source software, the Blender release team has put out their plans for the next few years.

Prolific open-source developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat who has been responsible for the creation of PackageKit, the ColorHug colorimeter hardware, GNOME Software, and for the past number of years focused on the Fwupd firmware updating utility and Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) has a new open-source project.

The Subversion version control system is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

With Blender 2.82 having released on Friday, this weekend we've begun our benchmarking of this new Blender release as the leading open-source 3D modeling solution currently available. Here are some preliminary v2.81 vs. v2.82 figures on different higher-end Intel and AMD processors.

Following Netflix's AV1 adoption with collaborating with Intel on the SVT-AV1 encoder, now using AV1 streaming for Android users, and others around this advanced royalty-free video codec, Netflix is now exploring AVIF as their next-gen image format.

Blender 2.82 is out as the second update over last year's big Blender 2.80 release.

OpenSSH 8.2 is out this Valentine's Day as the leading SSH suite. Besides working to disable the SSH-RSA public key signature algorithm due to SHA1 collision attacks, OpenSSH 8.2 also comes with new features.

The Outreachy application period opened at the end of January for their summer 2020 internship round while just two weeks remain to get in your applications should you looking to be getting involved with open-source/Linux development.

We previously covered how CERN has moved away from Microsoft products over licensing fees and instead has begun employing various open-source alternatives. Now this European Organization for Nuclear Research is moving away from Facebook Workplace to instead make use of more open-source software packages.

Nearly four years since forking from ownCloud, Nextcloud continues taking on the likes of Dropbox, Google Docs, and Microsoft 365 -- especially more so now with their introduction of Nextcloud Hub. Nextcloud Hub is a completely integrated on-premises content collaboration platform.

For open-source photographers, there is an exciting new present under the Christmas tree... The huge Darktable 3.0 software package with almost three thousand commits over Darktable 2.6. The Darktable 3.0 RAW photography software suite comes with several big improvements to help in managing your holiday photos or for any occasion.

Back in August was the release of the very big CUPS 2.3 update that shifted the source code license, added support for IPP Printer presets, added a new utility, and other improvements for this Apple-controlled Unix/Linux printing system. Available now is CUPS 2.3.1 with various fixes.

For those preferring the Vim text editor, Vim 8.2 is out today and its primary new feature is support for "popup windows" and for demonstrating those new capabilities is even a new Vim-based game called Killer Sheep.

Blender 2.81 is now available as the latest minor yet significant update to this open-source 3D modeling software following the major Blender 2.80 release earlier this year.

Purism has finally published their blog post outlining the software work they accomplished during October on bringing up the Librem 5 smartphone.

Darktable 3.0 is coming soon as the next major release for this open-source RAW photography workflow software.

The Free Software Foundation's "Respect Your Freedom" program has tended to mostly endorse products like old motherboards re-flashed with Coreboot/Libreboot along with dated networking products and obscure products like USB microphones and USB to parallel printer port cables. But today comes the Free Software Foundation's most prominent RYF endorsement.

Released earlier this week was Git 2.24, which pardon for not punctually covering due to being extra busy this week, but this revision control system update is nevertheless an interesting update.

The popular Darktable open-source RAW photography workflow software is closing in on its v3.0 release with the first release candidate having been issued on Sunday.

Rspamd 2.0 has been released as the newest version of this leading open-source spam filtering software and it's coming with plenty of changes.

The Blender 2.81 release cycle has entered its "bcon2" development phase of development with the focus shifting to bug fixing and stabilizing new features with now being past the initial window of merging in the big ticket items.

As was anticipated, PostgreSQL 12.0 is now officially available.

The lossy ASTC texture compression algorithm has been widely adopted in recent years with it being official extensions to both OpenGL and OpenGL ES. While it may not be as messy as the S3TC patent situation of the past, it turns out Arm's license on Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression actually is quite restrictive outside of the context of Khronos' APIs.

Samba 4.11 was just released a few weeks back with big scalability improvements, but looking ahead to Samba 4.12 will be some big performance improvements for those leveraging encryption.

Tomorrow is when PostgreSQL 12.0 should meet the world for this popular open-source SQL database server.

LuxCoreRender, the open-source physically based renderer for execution on CPUs as well as OpenCL accelerators / GPUs, is out with version 2.2 and now integrates Intel's open-source Open Image Denoise.

RPM 4.15 is officially out this week as the newest version of the RPM Package Manager most often associated with Red Hat / Fedora systems.

The Apache Software Foundation today announced that Rya has been promoted as the organization's newest top-level project.

Samba 4.11 is out as the latest big feature update to this SMB/CIFS/AD implementation for offering better Windows interoperability with Linux and other platforms. The changes in Samba 4.11 are aplenty that we are a bit surprised it wasn't called Samba 5.0.

Outreachy's summer round recently wrapped up while their winter round for participants in the southern hemisphere is now open.