The election to replace outgoing openSUSE board members is underway, with four candidates vying for three seats. The election was initially scheduled to be completed in December, but the timeline was extended due to too few candidates standing for the seats. Voting closes on February 2 and the results are expected to be announced on February 3.
It is disappointing that the open source community cannot operate independently of international sanctions programs, but these sanctions are the law of each country and are not optional. Many developers work on open source projects in their spare time, or for fun. Dealing with U.S. and international sanctions was unlikely on the list of things that most (or very likely any) open source developers thought they were signing up for. We hope that in time relevant authorities will clarify that open source and standards activities may continue unabated. Until that time, however, with the direct and indirect sponsorship of developers by companies, the intersection of sanctions on corporate entities leaves us in a place where we cannot ignore the potential risks.
The current cost for the services, much of which is for 50TB of bandwidth data transfer per month and a half-dozen beefy servers for running continuous-integration (CI) jobs, comes to around $24,000 per month. Tissoires believes that the project should start paying for service somewhere, in order to avoid upheaval of this sort, sometimes on short or no notice. "I personally think we better have fd.o pay for its own servers, and then have sponsors chip in. This way, when a sponsor goes away, it's technically much simpler to just replace the money than change datacenter." Various options are being discussed there, but any move is likely to disrupt normal services for a week or more.
The Thunderbird project has announced that it is making its Release channel the default download beginning with the 135.0 release in March. This will move users to major monthly releases instead of the annual major Extended Support Release (ESR) that is the current default.
One of our goals for 2025 is to increase active installations on the release channel to at least 20% of the total installations. At last check, we had 29,543 active installations on the release channel, compared to 20,918 on beta, and 5,941 on daily. The release channel installations currently account for 0.27% of the 10,784,551 total active installations tracked on stats.thunderbird.net.
Version 6.9 of the Incus container and virtual-machine management system has been released. Changes include a command to provide virtual machine memory dumps, ability to set network ACLs for instances on bridged networks, and more.
We will also be creating special EPUB books at times. As an example of what is possible, our complete coverage from Kangrejos 2024 and the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit are available to all readers.
There are surely places where our EPUB books can be improved; please feel free to drop us a note (at lwn@lwn.net) with suggestions.
Security researcher RyotaK has shared a series of vulnerabilities that all have to do with how Git interfaces with external credential managers. In short, while Git guards against newline characters (\n) being injected into a repository's URL, some programming languages also treat carriage return characters (\r) as being newlines. Adding a carriage return to a repository's URL can cause Git and the credential manager to disagree on how the URL should be parsed, ultimately resulting in Git credentials being sent to the wrong host. Malicious repositories could include Git submodules with malformed URLs, triggering the bug. Only password-based authentication with an external credential manager is vulnerable to this attack; SSH-based authentication remains secure. The Git project has chosen to consider this a vulnerability in Git, given the large amount of external software affected. The project has fixed the bug on its end by releasing updates for all supported versions that ban carriage returns in URLs entirely.
Affected software includes GitHub Desktop, Git LFS, and possibly other Git utilities:
Since Git itself doesn't use .lfsconfig file, specifying the URL that contains the newline character in .lfsconfig causes Git LFS to insert the newline character into the message, while bypassing [...] Git's validation.Earthstar is a privacy-oriented, offline-first, LGPL-licensed database intended to support distributed applications. Unlike other distributed storage libraries, it focuses on providing mutable data with human-meaningful names and modification times, which gives it an interface similar to many non-distributed key-value databases. Now, the developers are looking at switching to a new synchronization protocol — one that is general enough that it might see wider adoption.
Ubuntu will be moving its "official realtime communications channels" from IRC to Matrix, beginning March 1, 2025, following a discussion on the ubuntu-devel mailing list.
"Official" communication, such as making realtime requests of privileged Ubuntu developer teams, could be expected to be actioned if requested on Matrix only. Similarly, you can consider your social responsibility to other developers in relation to your work in Ubuntu development to be fulfilled if you are present on that platform. And Canonical will follow in its requirement for its employed Ubuntu developers to be present on that agreed platform during their working hours.This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) begins on February 1 in Brussels. The event is widely regarded as one of the most important open-source conferences. One of the reasons that FOSDEM is held in high esteem by the community is its non-commercial nature. It does accept sponsors, but sponsorships come with few perks and no "pay-for-play" speaking slots. Thus, the scheduling of a keynote by Jack Dorsey—primarily known for his role in co-founding Twitter, and currently CEO and chairman of FOSDEM sponsor Block, Inc.—raised eyebrows and led to plans for a protest. The keynote has since been removed from the schedule, but there are still a number of lingering questions.