Free Software News Archives

XZ Utils 5.6 was released today for this general purpose data compression library that also provides the common XZ command-line utilities for .xz format handling.

Back in August 2022 DreamWorks Animation announced plans to open-source MoonRay as their production-grade renderer used on films like Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and other animated films. Nearly one year ago in March 2023 MoonRay was open-sourced as OpenMoonRay while this week brings the latest iteration of it: OpenMoonRay 1.5.

GIMP 2.99.18 was released today as the last planned development version prior in the long road to GIMP 3.0 that has been a decade in the making for this free software Adobe Photoshop alternative.

Maxim Dounin as one of the longtime core developers of the Nginx web server announced the creation today of a new fork of the project called Freenginx.

TrenchBoot has been in development for several years now by Oracle, 3mdeb, and other stakeholders for providing greater security and integrity to the Linux boot process via measured launch of the OS using a Dynamic Root of Trust Measurement (DRTM) backed by Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) and AMD Secure Startup. Much progress was made over 2023 while more work is ahead in 2024 for furthering the TrenchBoot efforts.

When running Windows vs. Linux performance benchmarks one of the real-world areas where Linux consistently dominates across both AMD and Intel platforms is Blender 3D modeling software's rendering performance. For CPU-based rendering in Blender as well as other 3D modeling software, Linux typically dominates by wide margins. With the upcoming Blender 4.1 release, it looks like Linux's lead will only further expand.

The Servo open-source browser engine originally started by Mozilla has seen renewed development in recent time by Linux Foundation Europe and via developers at firms like Igalia. Last year they drafted plans for focusing on making Servo embed-friendly so that this Rust-written code could be easily leveraged by desktop apps and frameworks. Today more light was shed on this embed initiative and their focus on integrating with Tauri.

Following last month's FreeRDP 3.0 release with many improvements for this Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation, FreeRDP 3.2 is out today with a number of fixes -- especially as it pertains to Wayland support.

Following the recent release of GRUB 2.12, another prominent open-source bootloader project is also out with a new release: Limine 7.0.

OpenJPH as the open-source library implementing JPEG2000 Part-15 (JPH / HTJ2K) support is out with a big feature release.

Out today in kicking off the new year is a new release of Vim, the powerful screen-based text editor.

With all the talk recently around speedy terminal emulator options for Linux, some of you will be pleased to know Alacritty v0.13 has been released to end out the year for this cross-platform OpenGL-powered terminal emulator.

LuxCoreRender as the open-source (Apache 2.0) physically based renderer is working on its next major release. While LuxCore can be used standalone both via its own UI and a console, there is Blender integration too with Blender 4.x support being one of the main focal points of the v2.8 series.

Another open-source project celebrating Christmas Day with a new feature release is Doxygen, the open-source documentation generator and static analysis tool that is widely used by many different open-source projects and supported by numerous programming languages for generating code documentation.

One of the often overlooked pieces of the Linux desktop software stack is Plymouth that for the past 15 years or so has been providing a graphical boot splash screen that succeeded Red Hat's former RHGB software or having no graphical boot splash screen at all on some Linux distributions. This week marked the first new release of Plymouth in nearly two years.

Merged yesterday to the Git code for the PostgreSQL database server is support for facilitating incremental backups.

Box64 and Box86 are out with new releases this weekend for these open-source projects allowing x86_64 and x86 binaries to run on ARM64 Linux systems.

There's been nothing new on the BUS1 front this year for capability-based IPC within the Linux kernel... In fact, the BUS1 out-of-tree kernel module has gone untouched for years now. But out of the BUS1 project has been Dbus-Broker for a high performance D-Bus message broker in user-space that doesn't break existing D-Bus compatibility. Out today is the newest version of that project closely tied to systemd developers.

FreeRDP 3.0 stable was released today as this open-source implementation of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) for allowing nice remote access support.

ONNX in collaboration with AMD have announced TurnkeyML as a new open-source machine learning toolchain focused on agile model development and deployment.

Released last month was OBS Studio 30 with Intel QSV AV1 acceleration on Linux, WHIP/WebRTC output, YouTube Live Control Room Panel support, and a variety of other features for this software popular with game streamers and live-casting. Out today is OBS Studio 30.0.1 with some crash fixes and other refinements for last month's update.

Cloudflare has talked up their success in using the open-source Linux-based OpenBMC software for baseboard management controllers (BMCs) as a replacement to proprietary BMC software stacks.

While Blender is at the forefront of receiving corporate sponsorships and funding for advancing that open-source 3D modeling software, other free software graphics programs haven't all received the same level of support. As good news for further raising the open-source creative/graphics ecosystem, an Austrian video game studio has become one of the new Krita sponsors.

The newest monthly release of FEX is now available for this open-source project that allows running x86_64 games and applications on 64-bit ARM (AArch64) Linux environments.

Following good progress in October and this former-Mozilla browser engine project receiving funding recently for "table" support, Servo developers continued implementing more functionality over the course of November.

The Free Software Foundation this week published their 2023 holiday shopping guide for services and products that comply with their pure free software standards, such as computer hardware devices that "respect your freedom" regardless of hardware age.

The open-source Roundcube webmail software project has "merged" with Nextcloud, the prominent open-source personal cloud software.

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.