Free Software News Archives

FreeRDP 3.0-rc0 was released this morning as the latest stepping stone toward FreeRDP 3.0 for this open-source implementation of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

GIMP 3.0 could be finally released in a few months if all goes very well.

OpenSSL 3.2 was released this morning as the latest major update to this widely-used cryptography and SSL/TLS project.

The Inkscape open-source graphics editor application that is popular among Linux users and has evolved into a viable alternative to the likes of Adobe Illustrator is celebrating its 20th anniversary.

After a one week delay, Blender 4.0 is now available as the latest major update to this leading open-source and cross platform 3D modeling software.

Kicking off an exciting Supercomputing SC23 week, The Linux Foundation announced this morning that they are forming the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF) to help advance an open-source core software stack for high performance computing (HPC). Already a number of national labs, Intel, NVIDIA, and other stakeholders are involved.

Ahead of Supercomputing SC23 week, a new version of OpenBLAS has been published for this leading open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library. OpenBLAS 0.3.25 brings new improvements for Intel and AMD x86_64 CPUs as well as a number of general improvements, and continued tuning for other architectures like ARM64, POWER, and LoongArch.

Since the release of TuxClocker 1.0 back in September, this open-source and independently-developed overclocking/performance utility for Linux systems has been quick to tack on new features and rolling out new versions. A release candidate for TuxClocker 1.3 was issued a few days ago with yet more AMD graphics card controls.

FEX 2311 is out today as the newest version of this emulator for running x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on AArch64 systems.

GIMP 2.10.36 was released on Tuesday for this long-running stable series of this open-source Adobe Photoshop alternative while GIMP 3.0 has been very slow to materialize.

The Rust-written Servo browser engine that started at Mozilla but now developed by Linux Foundation Europe with contributors from Igalia and other organizations has been enjoying a fruitful 2023.

Blosc (c-blosc2) is a high performance compressor focused on binary data for efficient storage of large binary data-sets in-memory or on-disk and helping to speed-up memory-bound computations.

One of the great open-source achievements for 2023 was DreamWorks Animation open-sourcing their MoonRay renderer as the OpenMoonRay project. Since then DreamWorks along with other open-source stakeholders have continued advancing this open-source renderer and today marks the release of OpenMoonRay 1.4.

OpenSSL 3.2 is now available in beta form as the newest forthcoming feature update to this widely-used cryptographic library.

Zlib-ng 2.1.4 was released this week as the newest version of this Zlib data compression library intended for "next generation" uses. Zlib-ng continues having a lower barrier for new contributions and optimizations than the upstream Zlib repository itself to allow for it to more rapidly evolve on today's systems.

Thursday marked the 18th birthday of the Geany open-source text editor / lightweight integrated development environment (IDE) project. In celebrating Geany turning 18, the Geany 2.0 release was made available. Geany 2.0 continues to strive toward the project goal of being a fast and easy to use text editor for coding.

The newest open-source project hosted by the Linux Foundation is OpenPubkey, which is a collaboration with Docker and BastionZero and will be available for Docker container signing with zero-trust passwordless authentication.

The Servo browser engine has been seeing renewed development activity and interest since it was transferred to the Linux Foundation Europe and has attracted contributions from the likes of the Igalia consulting firm. Last week at the Open Source Summit Europe, an update on Servo was presented.

Version 0.8 of uvg266 as one of the leading Versatile Video Codec (VVC) / H.266 open-source video encoders is now available.

A major update to OCRmyPDF is now available, the open-source project that can work on scanned PDFs and other PDF documents to add an optical character recognition (OCR) text layer to files for allowing them to be searched or copy-pasted. OCRmyPDF makes it a breeze in dealing with scanned PDF text files and now with OCRmyPDF v15 is even better.

Cairo 1.18 was released today as the first major stable release to this 2D graphics library in five years. This vector-based graphics library is widely-used for a variety of purposes from GNOME's GTK toolkit to other apps making use of Cairo for targeting different back-ends from PDFs to OpenGL contexts. Mozilla Firefox, WebKit, Mono, and many other open-source projects are notable users of Cairo.

XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.18 is out today as the newest stable release for this leading open-source app sandboxing and distribution tech. Flatpak's XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.18 adds yet more features for this cross-distribution solution for software deployment and package management.

The Servo web rendering engine that is written in Rust and started originally by Mozilla while now being developed as a Linux Foundation Europe project has issued a status update around recent changes to this memory-safe and modular web browser engine.

PostgreSQL 16 released today as a very exciting update for this popular open-source SQL server.

The first alpha release of the OpenSSL 3.2 library is now available for testing. With OpenSSL 3.2 there are a number of new features, most notably the client-side work around QUIC support.

OpenColorIO (OCIO) as the open-source color management solution for motion picture production and maintained by the Academy Software Foundation is out with a new feature release that will be part of their 2024 VFX Reference Platform. Notable with this release are new SIMD optimizations with AVX/AVX2 and Arm NEON.

ClamAV 1.2 was released on Monday as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform anti-virus engine currently maintained by Cisco Systems.

The Alliance For Open Media has released libavif 1.0, the reference library for the AV1 Image File Format (AVIF) with image encode and decode support.

Given all the interest this week in Firefox outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider, I decided to run some fresh Linux desktop web browser benchmarks on my end. For today's comparison is a look at the newly-released Chrome 116 up against Firefox 117b8 that will be released as stable in just over one week.

For those still managing to resist systemd, SysVinit 3.08 was released on Thursday as the newest update to this init system.

Following Canonical deciding to pull in control of the LXD project and LXD maintainership being limited to Canonical employees, the Linux Containers project has announced the forking of LXD as Incus.

Sourceware.org that provides the open-source hosting for projects like GCC, Cygwin, and more had long been sponsored by Red Hat and a rather opaque organization. Earlier this year SourceWare.org became part of the Software Freedom Conservancy. In addition to now calling the SFC home, they are planning other changes ahead to expand their hosting services, diversifying hardware and software partners, and other changes.

The open-source FEX-Emu project continues advancing as an emulator to run x86/x86_64 Linux binaries on 64-bit ARM (AArch64), even for games, Valve's Steam Play / Proton, and other complex software. FEX-Emu 2308 is out today with more performance optimizations and other features implemented for this emulator.

For those making use of the open-source, cross-platform ClamAV anti-virus/anti-malware software backed by Cisco, the first release candidate of ClamAV 1.2 is now available for testing.

FreeRDP 3.0 continues getting better for this open-source solution for interoperability with Microsoft RDP for remote desktop purposes.

Just days after the FreeCAD 0.21-rc release, FreeCAD 0.21 is now available for this popular open-source CAD software.

FreeCAD 0.21 is nearing release as this wonderful open-source CAD solution.

Richard Hughes is the Red Hat developer who is most prominently known for leading the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and Fwupd development as well as formerly being behind the ColorHug monitor color calibration hardware effort and PackageKit, among other open-source software. He's recently been developing a new software project called Passim that today he announced to the world.

The first beta is out of FreeRDP 3.0, the open-source Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation of that proprietary Microsoft protocol for remote desktop/GUI handling.

Inkscape 1.3 is now available as the newest feature release ot this open-source software focused on being a vector graphics editor that can rival the likes of Adobe Illustrator.

Meson 1.2 was released on Sunday as the newest feature release for this wildly popular, cross-platform build system that has become widely used by open-source projects as a superior alternative to GNU Automake and other solutions.

GIMP 2.99.16 is out this Sunday as the GIMP 3.0 release candidate finally nears.

Meta has published the Intermediate Graphics Library (IGL) as a new cross-platform library to provide a single low-level interface that works atop native graphics APIs from OpenGL and Vulkan to Apple's Metal.

Tow-Boot has been a "user-friendly" distribution of U-Boot that was seeing regular updates but for nearly one year has been on hiatus without any new releases. That changed overnight with Tow-Boot 2022.07-006 being released and a call for new developers.

Released yesterday was a new version of UPower, the FreeDesktop.org software known long ago as DeviceKit-Power and used as an abstraction layer for enumerating power devices on Linux and other platforms. The new UPower 1.90.1 release is the first update to this software in just shy of one year.

The libjpeg-turbo 3.0 open-source release occurred today for this open-source JPEG image codec implementation focused on SIMD instruction usage for optimized efficiency. While libjpeg-turbo has been a great open-source development success and has seen widespread use, its feature development moving forward may be limited due to funding gaps.

This past week at the Linux Foundation's Embedded Open-Source Summit in Prague, Sony engineer Tim Bird who is prominent in the embedded Linux community provided another insightful presentation to sum up the current state of the embedded Linux ecosystem.

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.