Free Software News Archives

There's been hopes of seeing the GIMP 3.0 release in 2023 or at least release candidates. GIMP developers recently finished a week-long meet-up and it's looking like they may be on track for at least beginning the GIMP 3.0 release candidate phase this year. GIMP 3.0 has remained quite elusive and in the works for the past decade as the much anticipated port to GTK3 and a host of other enhancements to this open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

Blender 3.6 is out today as the latest exciting update for this open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software. Exciting with Blender 3.6 is adding Intel hardware ray-tracing support when making use of Arc Graphics. AMD graphics cards on Windows can also enjoy HIP ray-tracing but sadly isn't supported yet for Linux.

The Firewalld open-source firewall daemon has been in development since 2011 while only two years ago did it reach the Firewalld 1.0 milestone. Thus it was a bit surprising to find Firewalld 2.0 being released today.

FLAC 1.4.3 is out today as the first update to this Xiph.Org royalty-free, lossless audio codec since last October.

PoCL 4.0 is out as the latest major update to this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that started out as an OpenCL-on-CPU effort while with time has expanded its sights beyond just OpenCL on processors to providing OpenCL on other accelerators/devices via leveraging different LLVM target back-ends. With PoCL 4.0, there is also now an Intel oneAPI Level Zero driver for using this OpenCL stack on Intel graphics processors.

Neural Magic's DeepSparse AI inference runtime continues to pursue "GPU-class performance on CPUs" and with the new DeepSparse 1.5 release is delivering even faster performance for CPU inference.

For those fond of the Apache NetBeans integrated development environment, NetBeans 18 is now available as the latest version of this programming IE primarily geared for Java, PHP, and HTML5/CSS development.

The embedded Linux experts at Bootlin have released Snagboot as a new open-source project aiming to make it easy to recover and re-flash embedded platforms.

Cloudflare is making it easier for non-profit open-source projects to tap into the premium services offered by the company for speeding up their web infrastructure and protecting against attacks.

Bug bounty programs setup by large corporations to reward and recognize security researchers for properly reporting new bugs and security vulnerabilities is a great concept, but in practice isn't always handled well. Security researcher Adam Zabrocki recently shared the troubles he encountered in the bug bounty handling at Google for Chrome OS and in turn for Intel with it having been an i915 Linux kernel graphics driver vulnerability.

Libproxy as the open-source library providing automatic proxy configuration management on Linux, Windows, and macOS systems has seen a big update thanks to an unlikely contributor.

Following the SFC vote last year for accepting Sourceware.org into the conservancy, everything is all set now and Sourceware.org is now officially part of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Red Hat was traditionally the long-time sponsor of Sourceware.org that hosts many open-source projects like GCC and Cygwin.

A new version of Lighttpd is out today, the BSD-licensed, open-source web server that focuses on being very speedy and lightweight on CPU and memory resources.

Last October marked the release of memtest86+ 6.0 as a rewrite of this long-used, open-source bootable RAM testing software. In February marked memtest86+ 6.10 with UEFI Secure Boot signing and other new features. Out today is now memtest86+ 6.20 where a driving focus for this release is on improving support for older hardware.

FEX-Emu 2305 has been released, the open-source project continuing to work on x86_64 atop 64-bit ARM (AArch64) emulation support for being able to enjoy more games on ARM Linux and other software not otherwise natively available.

The reference AVIF image encoder for the AV1 Image File Format has added experimental support for AV2, the next-generation codec that remains in development by the Alliance for Open Media.

Last year DreamWorks announced they would be open-sourcing their award-winning MoonRay renderer. Back in March that dream was realized with OpenMoonRay being published for this renderer that has been used for films like Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, The Bad Guys, How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and other films. OpenMoonRay 1.1 is now available as the first update to this professional renderer since it was open-sourced last quarter.

Last November ClamAV 1.0 was released for this anti-virus/anti-malware solution currently developed via Cisco and the open-source community. Following ClamAV 1.0 LTS, today marks the availability of ClamAV 1.1 as the first post-1.0 feature release.

After being in development for two years, a new beta release of Zlib-ng as the "next generation" data compression library is available with much faster data decompression.

Git 2.40.1 is out today due to three new security vulnerabilities being disclosed. Due to those security fixes there are also Git updates for prior stable series with v2.39.3, v2.38.5, v2.37.7, v2.36.6, v2.35.8, v2.34.8, v2.33.8, v2.32.7, v2.31.8, and v2.30.9.

The long-awaited port of the GIMP image manipulation program to the GTK3 toolkit is now declared "officially finished".

Moore Threads was established in 2020 to create domestic GPU solutions in China with their first products having been announced last year. Most of the talk around Moore Threads "MThreads" GPUs have been for Windows but they are working on Linux support to at least some extent.

Last October Google engineers decided they would deprecate JPEG-XL support in Chrome over some debated rationale for the move. Even amid the community uproar they went ahead to drop the JPEG-XL support. The Free Software Foundation has finally commented on the matter.

Servo as the browser engine started at Mozilla but now developed as a Linux Foundation project has been maintaining two separate layout engines and moving forward they hope to be able to focus on the newer "Layout 2020" engine and fill in its missing gaps.

Nginx 1.24 is now available as the newest stable version of this open-source web server and revrse proxy, load balancer, and HTTP caching solution.

Just before Christmas Meson 1.0 was released for this widely-used, open-source software build system. Out today is Meson 1.1 as the newest feature update.

Keith Packard has released Picolibc 1.8.1 as the newest update to his minimal/lightweight libc implementation.

Over the years the Free Software Foundation has certified various devices that to their standards "Respect Your Freedom" from USB to parallel printer cables to re-branded and re-flashed motherboards to the Talos II at the higher-end. They've also certified different network hardware and other devices. The newest that they announced today is backing a $99 mini VPN router that supports WireGuard and other solutions.

Huawei's Bolt project is a deep learning library focused on high performance and heterogeneous flexibility and supporting a variety of neural networks. Bolt claims to outperform other deep learning acceleration libraries while supporting models from TensorFlow, ONNX, Caffe, and more.

Just two months after Zstd 1.5.4 was published, Zstd 1.5.5 has been released as the newest version of this Zstandard compression algorithm implementation. Zstd 1.5.5's release is motivated by addressing a rare corruption bug fix but also has various performance optimizations.

In addition to today marking the release of Qt 6.5 LTS, Slint 1.0 has been released as a Rust-focused graphical toolkit that also supports bindings for other programming languages. Slint aims to deliver efficient and fluid GUIs from embedded to desktop and features its own markup language.

The Bloomberg financial, software, and media company has announced their FOSS Fund as a small step for helping open-source projects they rely on and of interest to their employees.

Blender 3.5 has been released as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source 3D modeling software. Blender 3.5 is another exciting update for this free software that has garnered significant industry interest and support.

Days after landing AV1 and HEVC streaming support over RTMP to allow game streamers and other livecasting with OBS Studio to YouTube to happen via AV1/HEVC as an alternative to H.264, OBS Studio 29.1 Beta 1 has been tagged.

Apache CloudStack 4.18 LTS has been released as the newest version of this open-source cloud computing software that allows building out your own cloud atop various hypervisors and allows easy management for large networks of VMs.

The open-source cURL project providing the widely-used curl CLI program for downloading of data across numerous network protoocols along with its associated library is celebrating 25 years of the project. As part of the celebrations, curl 8.0 was released today.

Dragonfly as what's a high performnace in-memory database compatible with the Memcached and Redis APIs has reached version 1.0.

While Adobe Flash is officially -- and thankfully -- dead, those interested in Adobe Flash Player for nostalgia or archival purposes, Ruffle is working to emulate Adobe Flash support via this open-source project making use of the Rust programming language.

Last summer DreamWorks announced plans to open-source MoonRay, their production renderer used for films like The Bad Guys, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and other animated films. Today they have delivered on that exciting milestone with publishing the open-source code.

Open3D as an open-source library for 3D data processing from 3D machine learning tasks to adaptable viewing of 3D data is out with its newest feature release.

The latest notable high performance computing (HPC) open-source project adding mainline support for AMD HIP with ROCm is SPECFEM3D.

OpenSSL 3.1 is out today as the new stable release for this widely-used cryptographic library. There are a number of performance optimizations to enjoy with OpenSSL 3.1, including some additional AVX-512 tuning.

The ipmitool utility on Linux systems is widely-used for controlling IPMI-enabled servers and other systems. This tool for interacting with the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is extremely common with server administrators while now its development is in a temporary state of limbo due to GitHub.

In addition to this week seeing new releases of FEX-Emu and Hangover for open-source projects aiming to run x86/x86_64 binaries on 64-bit Arm, the Box86 and related Box64 projects are out today with their own feature updates for helping to enable x86 and x86_64 Linux binaries on Arm systems.

Samba 4.18 is out today as the popular open-source implementation of the SMB networking protocol that allows for file and print service interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems in an Active Directory (AD) environment.

While GIMP 3.0 will hopefully release this year after years of waiting, for those using the current GIMP 2.10 stable series the v2.10.34 release is now available to round out the day.

LibreOffice 7.5 released earlier this month as just the latest six-month update to this cross-platform, open-source office suite while today the Apache Software Foundation released OpenOffice 4.1.14. While the prior release, Apache OpenOffice 4.1.13, happened all the way back in July, there isn't much to show for today's update.

While the Blender open-source 3D modeling software decided three years ago that they would aim for quarterly releases and so delivering four releases per year, they have now decided to shift to delivering just three releases per year.

Back in August at SIGGRAPH was the landmark announcement by DreamWorks Animation that they would open-source their MoonRay renderer. MoonRay has been used in feature animated films like How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Bad Guys, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, and others. The open-source code drop is finally set to happen soon.

The latest Blender Eevee and Viewport module meeting minutes have just been posted and outline the latest thinking around Vulkan API support from the perspective of these modules.