Linux Weekly News

Reading an established open-source project's developer mailing list may leave new contributors wishing they had a decoder ring. Greg Sabino Mullane has written up a valuable explainer for those new to the PostgreSQL hackers (pgsql-hackers) mailing list that may also be useful for decoding other lists as well:

The mailing lists are full of acronyms and jargon that might not be familiar to younger people who did not grow up on email (although text messages have inherited many of the abbreviations). If you are a non-native English speaker, or under the age of 30, or not steeped in the world of tech, I offer some solutions below.

To do this, I downloaded the last year's worth of hackers email, wrote a program to strip out all the non-human stuff (headers, code blocks, attachments, etc.), and then did some data analysis on the results.

We never stopped believing and behaving like an open source community after we changed the license. But being able to use the term Open Source, by using AGPL, an OSI approved license, removes any questions, or fud, people might have.

For the wayfinders the process of interacting with maintainers is frustrating and slow, and they don't enjoy it as much as wayfinding, and because they still only care about the hotel at the end, when a maintainer gets into the details of their particular intersection they don't want to do anything but go stay in their hotel.

The road will get built, it will get traffic on it. There will be tunnels where we should have intersections, there will be bridges that need to be built from both sides, but I do think it will get built.

Still, few things last forever, and the market for written tech journalism is not what it once was – nor will it ever be again. So, the time has come for AnandTech to wrap up its work, and let the next generation of tech journalists take their place within the zeitgeist.

The site will surely be missed.

The KDE project plans to directly ask for donations in the Plasma desktop starting with version 6.2. According to this blog post by Nate Graham, users will see a system notification once per year (in December) asking for a donation to the non-profit KDE e.V.:

Version 5.0.0 of GNU Screen has been released. Notable changes in this release include new commands for authentication, input into multiple windows at the same time, and to turn on/off truecolor support.

After almost 4 years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it's best to leave it up to those who still have it in them.

As an example of the sort of "nonsense" he referred to, he provided a link to the video from the Rust for filesystems discussion at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. His work was fundamental to getting the project as far as it has come; he will be missed.

Achieving consensus among Debian Developers on technical topics and procedures can be, to put it mildly, challenging. Nevertheless, that is exactly what Otto Kekäläinen has tried to do with a proposal that would set up "principles all Debian packages should follow to be open for collaboration in package maintenance". In the near term, it seems unlikely that the proposal will be accepted, but the discussion may be effective at improving collaboration nonetheless.

Judge Jon Tigar's ruling, unsealed last week, leaves only two claims standing: one accusing the companies of an open-source license violation and another alleging breach of contract. This decision marks a substantial setback for the developers who argued that GitHub Copilot, which uses OpenAI's technology and is owned by Microsoft, unlawfully trained on their work.

KDE developer Carl Schwan has announced the release of Calligra Office version 4.0. The most significant changes in this release include a "major overhaul" of the office suite's user interface, and a transition to Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6.

Nominations are now open for people interested in joining the Ubuntu Community Council, "the highest governance body of the Ubuntu project". Any Ubuntu Member can apply from now until Sunday, September 22 at 23:59 UTC.

See Merlijn Sebrechts's blog post, "A year in the Ubuntu community council", for an overview of what it's like to serve on the council.