The European Commission has opened a "call for evidence" to help shape its European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy. The commission is looking to reduce its dependence on software from non-EU countries:

The EU faces a significant problem of dependence on non-EU countries in the digital sphere. This reduces users' choice, hampers EU companies' competitiveness and can raise supply chain security issues as it makes it difficult to control our digital infrastructure (both physical and software components), potentially creating vulnerabilities including in critical sectors. In the last few years, it has been widely acknowledged that open source – which is a public good to be freely used, modified, and redistributed – has the strong potential to underpin a diverse portfolio of high-quality and secure digital solutions that are valid alternatives to proprietary ones. By doing so, it increases user agency, helps regain control and boost the resilience of our digital infrastructure.

The feedback period runs until midnight (Brussels time) February 3, 2026. The commission seeks input from all interested stakeholders, "in particular the European open-source community (including individual contributors, open-source companies and foundations), public administrations, specialised business sectors, the ICT industry, academia and research institutions".

Last year we revived the tradition of publishing a timeline of notable events from the previous year. Since that seemed to go over well, we decided we should continue the practice and look back on some of the most noteworthy events and releases of 2025.

The IPFire project, an open-source firewall Linux distribution, has released version 2.29 - Core Update 199. Notable changes in this release include an update to Linux 6.12.58, support for WiFi 6 and 7 features on wireless access points, as well as native support for link-local discovery protocol (LLDP) and Cisco discovery protocol (CDP).

Version 26.0 ("Anh-Linh") of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution has been released. Manjaro 26.0 includes Linux 6.18, GNOME 49, KDE Plasma 6.5, Xfce 4.20, and more.

Version 1.30 of the GNU ddrescue data recovery tool has been released. Notable changes in this release include improvements to automatic recovery of a drive with a dead head, addition of a --no-sweep option to disable reading of skipped areas, and more.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.18.3 stable kernel. As always, this update contains important fixes; users of this kernel are advised to upgrade.

Version 4.19.0 of the shadow-utils project has been released. Notable changes in this release include disallowing some usernames that were previously accepted with the --badname option, and removing support for escaped newlines in configuration files. Possibly more interesting is the announcement that the project is deprecating a number of programs, hashing algorithms, and the ability to periodically expire passwords:

Scientific research shows that periodic password expiration leads to predictable password patterns, and that even in a theoretical scenario where that wouldn't happen the gains in security are mathematically negligible (paper link).

Modern security standards, such as NIST SP 800-63B-4 in the USA, prohibit periodic password expiration. [...]

To align with these, we're deprecating the ability to periodically expire passwords. The specifics and long-term roadmap are currently being discussed, and we invite feedback from users, particularly from those in regulated environments. See #1432.

The release announcement notes that the features will remain functional "for a significant period" to minimize disruption.

Daniel Stenberg has written a blog post about the decision to ban the use strcpy() in curl:

The main challenge with strcpy is that when using it we do not specify the length of the target buffer nor of the source string. [...]

To make sure that the size checks cannot be separated from the copy itself we introduced a string copy replacement function the other day that takes the target buffer, target size, source buffer and source string length as arguments and only if the copy can be made and the null terminator also fits there, the operation is done.

Graphite is an effort to unify illustration, raster editing, desktop publishing, and animation in one browser-based application. The project has been in development since 2021 and announced its first alpha release in 2022. According to creator Keavon Chambers, the project's mission is to become "the 2D counterpart to Blender", by bringing a node-based, non-destructive workflow to 2D graphics. The project, currently still in alpha, is a long way from complete; but it is worth testing for anyone involved with open-source-graphics production. Current builds, from September 2025, include vector-illustration tools, a node-based compositor, and early brush tooling, with broader pixel-based- and photo-editing work still in progress.

Once again there is a brand-new release under the tree from the Ruby programming-language project: Ruby 4.0 has been released with many new features and improvements. Notable changes include the experimental Ruby Box feature for in-process isolation of classes and modules, a new just-in-time compiler called ZJIT, and improvements to Ruby's parallel-execution mechanism (Ractor). There are a number of language changes as well. See the documentation for Ruby 4.0 for more.