WingetUI: A better UI for your package managers

The main goal of this project is to create an intuitive GUI for the most common CLI package managers for Windows 10 and Windows 11, such as Winget, Scoop, Chocolatey, Pip and Npm With this app, you'll be able to easily download, install, update and uninstall any software that's published on the supported package managers — and so much more.

Company after company has had their start in open source software, and then gone on to dump their open source licenses once they've achieved a measure of success. It's time to stop it. //

"Companies fail to understand that open source is not a business model. As a result, we see this 'rights ratchet' model, pulled off as a defensive move against competitors, instead of building a sustainable business model. Unfortunately, this means that vendor-owned open source is becoming a business risk to users. relicensing is one-way open source that can 'turn to the dark side.'" //

There's nothing wrong with making money. But, I've gotten really tired of projects that use open source for their start and then turn their backs on the philosophy that made them their first hundreds of millions. At the very least, they need to stop pretending they're open source once they've moved to a "Look but don't touch" or "Look but don't profit from it" license.

Free Download Manager for Windows, macOS, Android, and Linux allows you to adjust traffic usage, organize downloads, control file priorities for torrents, efficiently download large files and resume broken downloads.

FDM can boost all your downloads up to 10 times, process media files of various popular formats, drag&drop URLs right from a web browser as well as simultaneously download multiple files! //

GNU General Public License
Free Download Manager is released under GNU Public License!

Creating a website doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. With Publii, the most intuitive static site CMS, you can create a beautiful, safe, and privacy-friendly website quickly and easily; perfect for anyone who wants a fast, secure website in a flash.

The goal of Publii is to make website creation simple and accessible for everyone, regardless of skill level. With an intuitive user interface and built-in privacy tools, Publii combines powerful and flexible options that make it the perfect platform for anyone who wants a hassle-free way to build and manage a blog, portfolio or documentation website.

Desktop application, uploads html and resources

Jellyfin is the volunteer-built media solution that puts you in control of your media. Stream to any device from your own server, with no strings attached. Your media, your server, your way.

Navidrome allows you to enjoy your music collection from anywhere, by making it available through a modern Web UI and through a wide range of third-party compatible mobile apps, for both iOS and Android devices.

Navidrome is open source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU GPL v3 license.

It's no crime in open source to do initial idea development in small groups out of the public gaze. Nor to ask for others to join in a design discussion as you see fit. That should be true for all aspects of any organisation that supplies and depends on open source communities. This is a very different culture to commercial entities, and it's very dangerous to think like one when you're the other.

In the words of Peter Drucker, culture eats strategy for breakfast. It is to open source's great advantage that it can align its organizational cultures to those of its communities far more easily than can shareholder-bidden corporations. When strategies and cultures are in tune, then real magic can happen – and when they don't, things get seriously Rusty. ®

firmware is weirder than we give it credit for. It's even hard to say exactly what it is.

That used to be easy – firmware was software built into hardware (don't mention microcode.) In the days when that meant small expensive ROM chips, only a tiny part of a device's working software could be stored that way, in general just the low-level routines that directly operated the hardware and presented APIs to software that would be loaded in later. Now many devices have enough system flash on board to hold the complete stack, firmware now includes complete operating systems and has come to mean that software at the heart of your technology that controls its behavior and which you can't just load in as an app.

This somewhat shadowy status has consequences. For a start, it has virtually no consumer market. Nobody goes out and buys new firmware; //

No illicit market exists to cream off revenues.

While companies can buy in firmware from other companies, more often, as with MSI, you're a hardware company writing your own firmware. //

So there's no market in stolen firmware, and not much to be gained by keeping it secret anyway. So why lock it down? //

So unlocking firmware makes it more secure, not less. It makes devices more useful, not less. It creates more innovation, not less. And open source firmware is theft-proof; nobody can steal what you're giving away. //

In fact, it's probably time to ditch the idea of firmware as a magical chimaera too dangerous to be freed. The idea only made sense when hardware imposed far more limits on computer architecture. Its continued existence doesn't benefit anyone – manufacturers, users, innovators or the environment. As one of the last ways left to lock people out from their own devices, it's a barrier, not a shield. Publish the code. Open the specs. There's no firm foundation for firmware any more.

Manage all your software, all in one place
Backstage makes it easy for one team to manage 10 services — and makes it possible for your company to manage thousands of them

A uniform overview
Every team can see all the services they own and related resources (deployments, data pipelines, pull request status, etc.)

Metadata on tap
All that information can be shared with plugins inside Backstage to enable other management features, like resource monitoring and testing

Zulip combines the immediacy of real-time chat with an email threading model.

With Zulip, you can catch up on important conversations while ignoring irrelevant ones.

Apps for every platform.

Zulip has modern apps for every major platform, powered by Electron and React Native.

Open source.

Zulip is 100% open source software, built by a vibrant community of over 1000 developers from all around the world. With 160,000 words of developer documentation, a high quality code base, and a welcoming community, it’s easy to extend or tweak Zulip.

AI image synthesis goes open source, with big implications. //

Realistic image synthesis models are potentially dangerous for reasons already mentioned, such as the creation of propaganda or misinformation, tampering with history, accelerating political division, enabling character attacks and impersonation, and destroying the legal value of photo or video evidence. In the AI-powered future, how will we know if any remotely produced piece of media came from an actual camera, or if we are actually communicating with a real human? On these questions, Mostaque is broadly hopeful. "There will be new verification systems in place, and open releases like this will shift the public debate and development of these tools," he said.

That's easier said than done, of course. But it's also easy to be scared of new things. Despite our best efforts, it's difficult to know exactly how image synthesis and other AI-powered technologies will affect us on a societal scale without seeing them in wide use. Ultimately, humanity will adapt, even if our cultural frameworks end up changing radically in the process. It's happened before, which is why the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus reportedly said, "the only constant is change."

In fact, there's a photo of him saying that now, thanks to Stable Diffusion.

Cory Doctorow's book, Radicalized, is up for a CBC award. To celebrate, here's an excerpt.
by Cory Doctorow - Jan 22, 2020 9:05am EST //

entropy_winsArs Scholae Palatinaeet Subscriptorreply3 years agoreportignore user
RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRachael wrote:
I'm not Canadian and I knew what CBC was! :)

Somehow, the movie, Brazil, lends more hindsight in having a character that DeNiro played, showing up to perform an unauthorized repair on the furnace. Eluding the IoT Enforcement Squad...

+1 for the Gilliam movie reference.

We live in a world that has become the embodiment of the imagined absurdity of the past... //

MisterManoArs Praetorianreply3 years agoreportignore user
To think there are many, many powers pushing so we reach exactly that kind of dystopic IoT crapshow because biznizz and money. A great read that leaves me even more worried about the future. //

CuriouslySaneArs Praefectuset Subscriptorreply3 years agoReader Favreportignore user
AusPeter wrote:
I saw the headline and thought "Hmm .. yep jailbreaking IoT devices is a thing now". Then I realized that it was a fictional story.

Cory's writing has a distressing habit of not staying fictional. //

I can't think of anything else with the acronym "CBC".

complete blood count

(Does not apply to Canadians as their 'blood' is actually a mixture of maple syrup and double-double)

Our self-hosted server infrastructure consists of different microservices responsible for varying functionality. The self-hosted server works as the backend that processes and stores your data; it does not include the web application.

The web application is an optional process that you must spin up separately. However, you can use the existing web app or the official Standard Notes desktop app with your self-hosted server.

Bryan Sparks, President of DRDOS, clarified the license of CP/M:

Let this paragraph represent a right to use, distribute, modify, enhance, and otherwise make available in a nonexclusive manner CP/M and its derivatives. This right comes from the company, DRDOS, Inc.'s purchase of Digital Research, the company and all assets, dating back to the mid-1990’s. DRDOS, Inc. and I, Bryan Sparks, President of DRDOS, Inc. as its representative, is the owner of CP/M and the successor in interest of Digital Research assets.
Of course, it was "opened" a long time before, but with an unclear clause, mentioning "Unofficial CP/M Web Site" as a licensed place.

The discussion is not over yet, but we believe this statement is equivalent to the well-known BSD or MIT licenses.

“The open-source ecosystem is one of the grandest enterprises in human history,” says Sergey Bratus, the DARPA program manager behind the project.

“It’s now grown from enthusiasts to a global endeavor forming the basis of global infrastructure, of the internet itself, of critical industries and mission-critical systems pretty much everywhere,” he says. “The systems that run our industry, power grids, shipping, transportation.”

Threats to open source
Much of modern civilization now depends on an ever-expanding corpus of open-source code because it saves money, attracts talent, and makes a lot of work easier. //

But while the open-source movement has spawned a colossal ecosystem that we all depend on, we do not fully understand it, experts like Aitel argue. There are countless software projects, millions of lines of code, numerous mailing lists and forums, and an ocean of contributors whose identities and motivation are often obscure, making it hard to hold them accountable.

That can be dangerous. For example, hackers have quietly inserted malicious code into open-source projects numerous times in recent years. Back doors can long escape detection, and, in the worst case, entire projects have been handed over to bad actors who take advantage of the trust people place in open-source communities and code. Sometimes there are disruptions or even takeovers of the very social networks that these projects depend on. Tracking it all has been mostly—though not entirely—a manual effort, which means it does not match the astronomical size of the problem. //

The researchers want insight into what kinds of events and behavior can disrupt or hurt open-source communities, which members are trustworthy, and whether there are particular groups that justify extra vigilance. These answers are necessarily subjective. But right now there are few ways to find them at all.

Experts are worried that blind spots about the people who run open-source software make the whole edifice ripe for potential manipulation and attacks. For Bratus, the primary threat is the prospect of “untrustworthy code” running America’s critical infrastructure—a situation that could invite unwelcome surprises. //

Margin’s work maps out who is working on what specific parts of open-source projects. For example, Huawei is currently the biggest contributor to the Linux kernel. Another contributor works for Positive Technologies, a Russian cybersecurity firm that—like Huawei—has been sanctioned by the US government, says Aitel. Margin has also mapped code written by NSA employees, many of whom participate in different open-source projects.

“This subject kills me,” says d’Antoine of the quest to better understand the open-source movement, “because, honestly, even the most simple things seem so novel to so many important people. The government is only just realizing that our critical infrastructure is running code that could be literally being written by sanctioned entities. Right now.”

This kind of research also aims to find underinvestment—that is critical software run entirely by one or two volunteers. It’s more common than you might think—so common that one common way software projects currently measure risk is the “bus factor”: Does this whole project fall apart if just one person gets hit by a bus? //

The hope is that greater understanding will make it easier to prevent a future disaster, whether it’s caused by malicious activity or not.

Halibut: yet another free document preparation system
Halibut is a documentation production system, with elements similar to TeX, debiandoc-sgml, TeXinfo, and others. It is primarily targeted at people producing software manuals.

What does it do?
Halibut reads documentation source in a single input format, and produces multiple output formats containing the same text. The supported output formats are:

• Plain ASCII text
• HTML
• PDF
• PostScript
• Unix man pages
• Unix info, generated directly as .info files rather than .texi sources
• Windows HTML Help (.CHM files), generated directly without needing a separate help compiler.
• Windows WinHelp (old-style .HLP files), also generated directly.
• Other notable features include:
  • Hypertext cross-references are ubiquitous where possible. In particular, the HTML and PDF output both have hyperlinks in every reference between sections, and throughout the index and contents sections. (It seems daft to me that so many PDF documents fail to have this; it's one of the most useful features of PDF.)
  • Support for international characters via Unicode, with the ability to fall back to an alternative representation. For example, you can write \u00F6{oe}, and in output formats that support it you will see ‘ö’ whereas in those that don't you will see ‘oe’.
  • Comprehensive indexing support. Indexing is easy in the simple case: as you write the manual, you just wrap a word or two in \i{this wrapper}, and those words will appear in the index.
  • More complex indexing is also supported, such as
    adding references to things you never explicitly said
    rewriting the appearance of index entries for a consistent style
    duplicating index entries to several places because you don't know which concept they'll be looked up under
    merging references to several things into one combined list.
  • Portability. The Halibut source code is portable ANSI C (apart from a dependency on having at least a 32-bit platform), so it should run without change on Unix, Windows, BeOS, MacOS, VMS, or whatever other (non-16-bit) OS you fancy. (Well, you might have trouble outputting PDF under VMS, due to file typing issues. I dunno.)
  • Configurability. Each output format supplies configuration directives, so it is easy to tailor the HTML output (say) to contain a standard header with links to other parts of a site, or to use a style sheet, or whatever.

This project is a lightweight authentication server that provides an opinionated, simplified LDAP interface for authentication. It integrates with many backends, from KeyCloak to Authelia to Nextcloud and more!

The goal is not to provide a full LDAP server; if you're interested in that, check out OpenLDAP. This server is a user management system that is:

• simple to setup (no messing around with slapd),
• simple to manage (friendly web UI),
• low resources,
• opinionated with basic defaults so you don't have to understand the subtleties of LDAP.

It mostly targets self-hosting servers, with open-source components like Nextcloud, Airsonic and so on that only support LDAP as a source of external authentication.

For more features (OAuth/OpenID support, reverse proxy, ...) you can install other components (KeyCloak, Authelia, ...) using this server as the source of truth for users, via LDAP.

As of 2020-11-21 we are pausing development of Arigi and will cease offering new licenses and support contracts. Existing support contracts are honored until the end of their term. The latest version of Arigi, 1.1.9, is free to use with any installation size without a license, in perpetuity.

ARIGI -- manage and monitor multiple Syncthing installations from one dashboard

Unified Patents, Microsoft, the Linux Foundation, and Open Invention Network are beating back open-source patent trolls.

Patent trolls, aka Patent Assertion Entities (PAE)s, have plagued open-source software for ages. Over the years though, other groups have risen up to keep them from stealing from the companies and organizations that actually use patents' intellectual property (IP). One such group, Unified Patents, an international organization of over 200 businesses, has been winning for the last two years. This is their story to date.

Markor is a TextEditor for Android.

This project aims to make an editor that is versatile, flexible, and lightweight. Markor utilizes simple markup formats like Markdown and todo.txt for note-taking and list management. Markor is versatile at working with text, it can also be used for keeping bookmarks, copying to clipboard, fast opening a link from text and lots of more. Created files are interoptable with any other plaintext software on any platform.Markor is using open formats and is free software, openly developed and accepts community contributions.