The free and open-source software (FOSS) movements have always been about giving freedom and power to individuals and organizations; throughout that history, though, there have also been actors trying to exploit FOSS to their own advantage. At Configuration Management Camp (CfgMgmtCamp) 2026 in Ghent, Belgium, Richard Fontana described the "exploitation paradox" of open source: the recurring pattern of crises when actors exploit loopholes to restrict freedoms or gain the upper hand over others in the community. He also talked about the attempts to close those loopholes as well as the need to look beyond licenses as a means of keeping freedom alive.
Motorola has announced that it will be working with the GrapheneOS Foundation, a producer of a security-enhanced Android distribution. "Together, Motorola and the GrapheneOS Foundation will work to strengthen smartphone security and collaborate on future devices engineered with GrapheneOS compatibility.". LWN looked at GrapheneOS last July.
Version 1.0 of Gram, an "opinionated fork of the Zed code editor", has been released. Gram removes telemetry, AI features, collaboration features, and more. It adds built-in documentation, support for additional languages, and tab-completion features similar to the Supertab plugin for Vim. The mission statement for the project explains: At first, I tried to build some other efforts I found online to make Zed work without the AI features just so I could check it out, but didn't manage to get them to work. At some point, the curiosity turned into spite. I became determined to not only get the editor to run without all of the misfeatures, but to make it a full-blown fork of the project. Independent of corporate control, in the spirit of Vim and the late Bram Moolenaar who could have added subscription fees and abusive license agreements had he so wanted, but instead gave his work as a gift to the world and asked only for donations to a good cause close to his heart in return. This is the
The 7.0-rc2 kernel prepatch is out for testing. According to Linus: So I'm not super-happy with how big this is, but I'm hoping it's just the random timing noise we see every once in a while where I just happen to get more pull requests one week, only for the next week to then be quieter.
Version 1.24.0 of the groff text-formatting system has been released. Improvements include the ability to insert hyperlinks between man pages, a new polygon command for the pic preprocessor, various PDF-output improvements, and more.
The Python bitwise-inversion (or complement) operator, "~", behaves pretty much as expected when it is applied to integers—it toggles every bit, from one to zero and vice versa. It might be expected that applying the operator to a non-integer, a bool for example, would raise a TypeError, but, because the bool type is really an int in disguise, the complement operator is allowed, at least for now. For nearly 15 years (and perhaps longer), there have been discussions about the oddity of that behavior and whether it should be changed. Eventually, that resulted in the "feature" being deprecated, producing a warning, with removal slated for Python 3.16 (due October 2027). That has led to some reconsideration and the deprecation may itself be deprecated.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the 6.19.4 and 6.18.14 stable kernels. Shortly after 6.19.4 was released Kris Karas reported "getting a repeatable Oops right when networking is initialized, likely when nft is loading its ruleset"; the problem did not appear to be present in 6.18.14. Users of nftables may wish to hold off on upgrades to 6.19.4 for now. We will provide updates as they are available.
The International Image Interoperability Framework, or IIIF ("triple-eye eff"), is a small set of standards that form a basis for serving, displaying, and reusing image data on the web. It consists of a number of API definitions that compose with each other to achieve a standard for providing, for example, presentations of high-resolution images at multiple zoom levels, as well as bundling multiple images together. Presentations may include metadata about details like authorship, dates, references to other representations of the same work, copyright information, bibliographic identifiers, etc. Presentations can be further grouped into collections, and metadata can be added in the form of transcriptions, annotations, or captions. IIIF is most popular with cultural-heritage organizations, such as libraries, universities, and archives.
The stated support periods for the 6.6, 6.12, and 6.18 kernels has been extended. The 6.6 kernel will be supported with stable updates through the end of 2027 (for four years of support total), while 6.12 and 6.18 will get updates through the end of 2028, for four and three years of support.
On February 12, Yeoreum Yun posted a suggestion for an improvement to the security of the kernel's BPF implementation: use memory protection keys to prevent unauthorized access to memory by BPF programs. Yun wanted to put the topic on the list for discussion at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit in May, but the lack of engagement makes that unlikely. They also have a patch set implementing some of the proposed changes, but has not yet shared that with the mailing list. Yun's proposal does not seem likely to be accepted in its current form, but the kernel has added hardware-based hardening options in the past, sometimes after substantial discussion.
The Network Time Protocol (NTP) debuted in 1985; it is a universally used, open specification that is deeply important for all sorts of activities we take for granted. It also, despite a number of efforts, remains stubbornly unsecured. Ruben Nijveld presented work at FOSDEM 2026 to speed adoption of the thus-far largely ignored standard for securing NTP traffic: IETF's RFC-8915 that specifies Network Time Security (NTS) for NTP.
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