I had the honor and pleasure to hand over this prize to its first real laureate during the award gala on Thursday evening in Brussels, Belgium.

This annual award ceremony is one of the primary missions for the European Open Source Academy, of which I am the president since last year.

As an academy, we hand out awards and recognition to multiple excellent individuals who help make Europe the home of excellent Open Source. Fellow esteemed academy members joined me at this joyful event to perform these delightful duties.

As I stood on the stage, after a brief video about Greg was shown I introduced Greg as this year’s worthy laureate. I have included the said words below. Congratulations again Greg. We are lucky to have you.

cross-posted from: https://feditown.com/post/2476902

FreeRDP 3.22 was just released as the newest version of this Apache-licensed open-source Remote Desktop protocol (RDP) implementation for interfacing with another computer over the network.

With FreeRDP 3.22 there is a "complete overhaul" of their SDL3-based client user interface. There is a big rework to their SDL3 client to improve the code quality and one of the end-user benefits focused on is enhancing the high DPI "HiDPI" support. There are a number of cases now where HiDPI is better supported by the FreeRDP user interface, including with the dynamic resolution scaling support for the remote display. All-around the FreeRDP 3.22 user interface should be more robust than in prior releases.

A month and a half after the previous 5.2.14 update, Krita, a popular open-source, cross-platform digital painting app, has just released a bugfix update, v5.2.15.

Several critical crashes have been resolved, including failures triggered by using the smudge brush, undoing liquify operations, and loading documents with faulty embedded color profiles. The update also fixes problems when opening TIFF files that use JPEG compression.

Input handling sees multiple refinements. Shortcut conflicts between the Transform and Move tools and the Timeline have been corrected, touch events are now handled more reliably, and unwanted menu activations caused by touch scrolling have been prevented.

OPNsense, an open-source, FreeBSD-based firewall and routing platform designed for both small and large network environments, has just announced its latest update, version 26.1 “Witty Woodpecker”.

One of the most visible changes is the refinement of firewall management. The live firewall log view has been updated to provide clearer and faster insight into real-time traffic decisions, while a redesigned Firewall Rules interface simplifies both rule creation and inspection.

At the same time, API coverage has expanded to include support for Source NAT tagging and Destination NAT port forwarding. These changes reduce operational complexity and make OPNsense easier to integrate into automated and orchestrated environments.

VirtualBox, a popular open-source virtualization software, has just released its third maintenance update to the 7.2 series, version 7.2.6, which focuses on stability, crash fixes, and reliability improvements across hosts and guests.

The Virtual Machine Manager received extensive fixes, resolving multiple crash scenarios, including failures during RHEL 5 guest boot, crashes triggered by recent Windows updates, and instability affecting AMD-based systems.

Issues related to nested virtualization, incorrect VM-execution control checks, and Guru Meditation errors on VM startup under Windows hosts were also fixed. In addition, shutdown failures on Windows 11 ARM hosts and boot problems with older Red Hat guests on modern AMD Zen 4 systems were corrected.

Blender, the free and open source 3D creation software has pulled in another major supporter, with Netflix now funding future development.

Announced on the official Blender website, the Blender team noted it will go towards general core development, to continuously improved content creation and tooling for individuals and teams working in media and entertainment-related workflows. Everyone benefits from this since Blender is completely free - awesome news.

Netflix have joined as Corporate Patron, the highest level membership for companies. This means at a minimum Netflix will provide Blender with €240k a year.

At the same time, the "World Wide Web," composed of the HTTP protocol and the HTML format, was invented by a British citizen and a Belgian citizen who were working in a European research facility located in Switzerland. But the building was on the border with France, and there’s much historical evidence pointing to the Web and its first server having been invented in France.

It’s hard to be more European than the Web!

[ ... ]

Some are proud because they made a lot of money while cutting down a forest. Others are proud because they are planting trees that will produce the oxygen breathed by their grandchildren. What if success was not privatizing resources but instead contributing to the commons, to make it each day better, richer, stronger?

Roomy is an open-source Discord alternative built on the AT Protocol (ATProto), the same protocol that powers Bluesky, with ActivityPub (the protocol behind Mastodon, Pixelfed, Pleroma, and others) planned for the near future. Currently in alpha, it sits somewhere between Matrix and Discord in terms of its practical position in the broader chat ecosystem.

That said, it aims to fill the niche currently dominated by Discord, while remaining a free, fully federated solution for full user freedom and greater privacy. In this article, we'll look at what Roomy is today, what it’s aiming to become, and what it could bring to this space.

Source code:

https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet

https://github.com/tommybee456/OpenSplitDeck

I just found Hiori. I was wishing for such an app for a long time. Finally, I can take a photo of a product and rate it such that I won't buy it in the future again.

It happens very often that I buy something again because I forget it. E.g. tofu in a carton where you can't see what's inside.

Over the past year, we have been busy to modernize our app. The work supported by the NGI Mobifree has progressed nicely and we are now at a point where we are releasing the first alpha version and ask the community for feedback and testing. Note that for now this release is only for F-Droid Basic as the full version isn’t ready, yet.

Found this while searching - https://farside.link/redlib/r/roblox/comments/1qbxvf9/working/_on/_a/_roblox/_alternative/_its/_open/_source/

Edit: they have a CodeBerg (based on ForgeJoe) org, former link: https://github.com/orgs/OkutuProject/repositories

[4.0.0] - 2026-1-23

API updates

• Major release with new API updates that are not backwards compatible.
• Extended the crf range to 70 reducing the impact or QP scaling allowing the encoder to reach lower bitrates
• Added quarter steps between crf increments to allow for further granularity in qp selection
• Added support for setting a custom global logger for library consumers (!2570 (merged), !2579 (merged))
• Cleaned up public API headers including removal of deprecated macros, structs, and fields (!2565 (merged), !2568 (merged))
• Additionally cleaned up anything marked using SVT_AV1_CHECK_VERSION().
• Added ability to calculate per-frame PSNR and SSIM metrics (!2521 (merged))
• Allow sending more than 1 but less than 4 frames with avif mode (This is not for AVIF image sequence, but for encoding an alpha layer) (!2551 (merged), !2560 (merged))
• Added tune IQ and MS-SSIM for Still Image coding mode

Encoder

• Significant improvements in AVIF and still image modes (!2552 (merged),!2567 (merged)):
• ~5-8x speedup M11-M0 at the same quality levels with tune MS-SSIM
• ~5-8% BD-Rate improvements at the same complexity with tune MS-SSIM
• Tradeoff improvements for the RTC modes (!2558 (merged)):
• ~5-15% speedup at similar quality levels in --rtc mode across presets 7 - 11
• Tradeoff improvements for the Random Access mode (VOD use case) showing a 10-25% speedup across presets M7 down to M0 for --fast-decode 1 and 2 (!2558 (merged))
• Major feature updates for the visual quality mode with the completion porting all SVT-AV1-PSY applicable features for --tune vq for video and --tune iq for avif (!2484 (merged), !2489 (merged), !2491 (merged), !2494 (merged), !2496 (merged), !2503 (merged), !2504 (merged), !2507 (merged), !2514 (merged), !2522 (merged) , !2561 (merged), !2562 (merged), !2576 (merged)):
• Added AC Bias, a psychovisual feature that improves detail preservation and film grain retention
• Update S-Frame support to allow setting it in a specific decode order option and with more qp options (!2477 (merged) !2523 (merged) !2534 (merged))
• Further Arm Neon and SVE2 optimizations that improve high bitdepth encoding by an average of ~5% in low resolutions

Some time ago I started replacing all services and apps that I use with FOSS altnernatives. Most of them were easy to replace but some corpo/big-tech apps had ecosystems too advanced to be conveniently replaced. For example, substituting Google Maps on Android (or I guess Apple Maps on iOS) was a bit of a struggle as the most popular FOSS alternative app was OsmAnd. First of all mad respect and huge kudos to OsmAnd team of contributors but for me the UX was overwhelming and too customizable which is probably a huge bonus to power users but IMO that makes it very unlikely to become a large scale alternative to Google maps. Probably other people realized that too and some 6-7 months ago CoMaps was released, a FOSS app that is also based on OpenStreetMap layer but this time with a simplistic and smooth UX/GUI.

In case somebody is not familiar with OpenStreetMap (OSM) - basically it is a non-profit org, but its heavily maintained by community members and anybody around the world is allowed to contribute and enrich map content. Even if org can theoretically get corrupt I think anybody can make a fork and continue with community contribution. Creating an account is easy, you could start contributing in like 3 minutes. A huge number of services and apps are basing their map layers on OpenStreetMap, such as CoMaps above.

The quality of OpenStreetMap/CoMaps/OsmAnd is as good as the contributions to it are - so the more people use it - the better and more content it will contain. I would like to invite everybody to give it a chance and use openstreetmaps.org on desktop and CoMaps on mobile devices. You should have enough motivation to abandon Google or Apple products, but final piece of motivation is that eventually Google Maps will start censoring content (like Reddit or Instagram) or just share your location history to ICE or perform some other serious violation like that (like Microsoft did recently).

CoMaps has a really nice and simple interface where you can add missing places (business, community services, recreation areas etc) while OpenStreetMap on web browser allows to update anything you imagine (e.g. see a missing street? Add it. A new building was developed - just add it!). If everybody enriched only their local neighborhood with features on the map we could really build something beautiful. Existing layer probably already contains 90% of the stuff you'd ever search for as contributors really did a outstanding job throughout all these years. But that additional 10% makes a real difference for it turning into a much bigger scale tool, and this feels like the right time to kick that off.

It is important not to get demotivated that not many people maintain and contribute as your neighborhood might remain a lonely detailed places for years. OSM existed for a long time now and is very likely to keep existing for decades to come, everything that you update or create remains a legacy that stays forever saved in the map (unless somebody further updates it). Perhaps, in 20 years time people will be grateful. And to tidy up and make max out of your neighborhood you really need one weekend or so.

For example, in my local area I've started adding location marks of recycling bins, dumpsters, parking lots, playgrounds, pathways, building tunnels and monuments, but also I've added missing shops and updated working hours and websites for shops that existed.

Also #1, be responsible when making changes, don't overwrite other people's work unless it is an improvement. Double check everything that you add, and also if you don't have any experience with map editors or GIS software take a watch of some OSM editing tutorial.

Also #2, I most likely omitted some other useful FOSS tools, and it doesn't matter which one you decide to use as long as it is based on OpenStreetMap or any other community driven layer.

Also #3, tell all your friends and family to do the same.

Yeah, this might not be the most important thing to cure the world at this moment but developing community-driven mindset where everybody takes a small or big part in it is the way to go. Cheers!

OC by @frondo@lemmy.ml