Again, a relatively new MS Office replacement project failed in Denmark [1]. It’s not the first, and it will not be the last. In this case, the tentative replacement was Collabora, a variant of LibreOffice with some cloud-oriented improvements and even some shortcomings (e.g., missing database support). As noted, this is not new; past projects failed in exactly the same way, across Europe, for years [2-4].
Yesterday I gave an introductory talk on Guix as a package manager in the context of foreign distributions, specifically Debian. I illustrated the main characteristics of the system for absolute beginners in the context of transactional and functional packaging systems. I returned after some years to the LinuxDay event with a technical presentation.
Many FOSS developers and teams are vocal and critical of AI tooling used in software development and maintenance today. They have some good reasons for that. Development by specification can create a mess of code that nobody can truly read and understand after a while, and the entropy can only increase over time. One can try to restore order by working in a strongly ordered manner, making only small improvements to the existing codebase, all under human control; also, introducing a full-coverage testing codebase can help ensure we don't mess up the existing codebase with every new change. Being extremely analytical and imposing strict rules for code creation/change can also help, etc.
I recently sent a brief answer to @krille on Mastodon about what managing an average FOSS project looks like in 2026. Christian is the main author of a Flutter app (FluffyChat, a Matrix client). Indeed, this deserves a more extensive discussion.
Here at work, we develop a series of tools for geospatial processing with multiple goals, expected maintenance durations, different scopes, generalization needs, and motivations. Note that about 10 years ago, here in Europe, a completely new approach to upstream and downstream services for Earth Observation began: ESA changed its data licenses, and distribution and access modalities entered the Big Data era.
Someone on Mastodon (I’m sorry, but I don’t remember who exactly) published a short post that pointed to a rather technical economic study of the impact of AI on FOSS software development [1]. It is no secret that the AI debate is highly polarized, and the enthusiasts for the current trend in AI applications in the IT domain are at least as numerous as those who are concerned/skeptical. What is certain is that no one can, in the long term, prospectively evaluate the impact of AI on society, particularly in the IT world.
More and more, recent (and not too recent) episodes [1-5] nowadays show a hard truth we already discovered in the Debian project since the end of the 90s. A key security principle in FOSS code development is ensuring the trustworthiness of all parties involved, and that’s unfortunately also the weakest part of the whole chain.
I recently read a post by Jack Poller about the end of FOSS optimism in creating software in recent years. His thesis is that the myth that the more eyes that look at a piece of software, the higher its quality, is indeed a myth, and that nowadays it is also a dangerous illusion when we concentrate the analysis on security. Commercial software, on the other hand, has processes and resources dedicated to managing security, which in these times of active AI use could make the difference.
A few days before today, 21 years ago, I sent this message to the debian-devel-announce mailing list to solicit helpers in packaging and to oversee the geospatial software stack included in the main Debian archive. After so many years, still there.
My last post captured the attention of my old fellow Sandro 'strk' Santilli on Mastodon, who sent a provocation about the whole AIAD thing. So, the challenge is accepted.
I recently read with interest the post where Hector Martin resigned as Asahi Linux leader. As possibly well-known, Asahi Linux is the very first Fedora-based distribution where all the hard work to support the Apple ARM M* chip series in the Linux world found its way.
I have long participated in the FOSS community. My first public contribution was the YardRadius project in 1995, a consolidation of the old Livingston Radius daemon and a series of add-ons written by Christian Gafton (RIP) and me. That was some years before the more significant FreeRadius project. At that time, I ran for a period an ISP just before the dotcom bubble exploded, but that's another story...