The Fedora Project has been wrestling with the question of who should be able to vote in Fedora elections recently, with project membership being a major topic at the Fedora Council face-to-face held in early February. Now the project is considering a new contributor status, "Fedora Verified", and is looking to get input on the idea from the community.

What are the proposed benefits? The primary motivation behind "Fedora Verified" is to build trust-based recognition that grants elevated, privileged rights within the project. Most notably, this status would determine eligibility for strategic governance activities, such as:

• Voting in Fedora community elections.
• Running for leadership or decision-making roles within the project (i.e., Fedora Council, FESCo, Mindshare Committee, EPEL Steering Committee).
• (Potential, unplanned) Accessing specific shared project resources or educational opportunities (e.g., Red Hat training credits).

The blog post includes a list of proposed baseline metrics for "Verified" status as well as open questions to be decided. A survey on the topic will be open until May 5.

Version 150 of the Firefox web browser has been released. Notable changes include local-network-access restrictions being turned on for all users, the ability to reorder, copy, delete, paste, and export pages from a PDF using Firefox's built-in viewer, as well as improvements in its split view feature, and more. See also the release notes for developers and list of security fixes in this release.

(Update: Mozilla seems to have removed the local-network-access restrictions information since the release was published yesterday.)

Git maintainer Junio Hamano has announced Git 2.54.0, which includes contributions from 137 people; 66 of those people are first-time contributors to the project. Changes include the addition of Git history rewriting, Git's web interface (gitweb) "has been taught to be mobile friendly", and much more. See the announcement for all improvements, additions, and bug fixes. Hamano is now taking a short break:

I will go offline for a couple of weeks starting this evening, hopefully after updating 'next' and possibly also pushing out the first batch of the new cycle. There is no designated interim maintainer this time, but I trust that the community can self organize during my absense, if the shape of the release and the tree turns out to be super bad ;-).

See this GitHub blog entry for highlights from this release.

Robin Candau has announced the availability of a bit-for-bit reproducible container image for Arch Linux:

The bit-for-bit reproducibility of the image is confirmed by digest equality across builds (podman inspect --format '{{.Digest}}' <image>) and by running diffoci to compare builds. We provide documentation on how to reproduce this Docker image (as we did for the WSL image as well).

Building the base rootFS for the Docker image in a deterministic way was the main challenge, but it reuses the same process as for our WSL image (as both share the same rootFS build system).

[...] This represents another meaningful achievement in our "reproducible builds" efforts and we're already looking forward to the next step!

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the nonprofit entity behind the LibreOffice productivity suite. Most of the time, the software takes the spotlight, but that has changed in the past few weeks, and not for pleasant reasons. TDF has revoked foundation membership status from about 30 people who work for or have contracting status with Collabora. In response, Collabora has announced plans to focus on a "entirely new, cut-down, differentiated Collabora Office" project and reduce its involvement with LibreOffice. TDF's representatives claim that its actions were necessary to maintain the foundation's nonprofit status, while other community members assert that this is part of a power grab. The facts seem to indicate that there are legitimate issues to be addressed, but it is unclear that TDF needed to go so far as to disenfranchise all Collabora-affiliated contributors.

Debian Project secretary Kurt Roeckx has announced the Debian Project Leader (DPL) election results: the winner of the election is Sruthi Chandran. She will replace two-term DPL Andreas Tille.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.19.13, 6.18.23, 6.12.82, 6.6.135, 6.1.169, 5.15.203, and 5.10.253 stable kernels. Each contains a number of important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

Version 1.95.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include the addition of a cfg_select! macro, the capability to use if let guards to allow conditionals based on pattern matching, and many newly stabilized APIs. See the release notes for a full list of changes.

Version 15.0 of the Forgejo code-collaboration platform has been released. Changes include repository-specific access tokens, a number of improvements to Forgejo Actions, user-interface enhancements, and more. Forgejo 15.0 is considered a long-term-support (LTS) release, and will be supported through July 15, 2027. The previous LTS, version 11.0, will reach end of life on July 16, 2026. See the announcement and release notes for a full list of changes.

Version 26.04 of the KDE Gear collection of applications has been released. Notable changes include improvements in the Merkuro Calendar schedule view and event editor, support for threads in the NeoChat Matrix chat client, as well as the ability to add keyboard shortcuts in the Dolphin file manager "to nearly any option in any menu, plugin or extension". See the changelog for a full list of updates, enhancements, and bug fixes.

OnlyOffice CEO Lev Bannov has recently claimed that the Euro-Office fork of the OnlyOffice suite violates the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3). Krzysztof Siewicz of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published an article on the FSF's position on adding terms to the AGPLv3. In short, Siewicz concludes that OnlyOffice has added restrictions to the license that are not compatible with the AGPLv3, and those restrictions can be removed by recipients of the code.

We urge OnlyOffice to clarify the situation by making it unambiguous that OnlyOffice is licensed under the AGPLv3, and that users who already received copies of the software are allowed to remove any further restrictions. Additionally, if they intend to continue to use the AGPLv3 for future releases, they should state clearly that the program is licensed under the AGPLv3 and make sure they remove any further restrictions from their program documentation and source code. Confusing users by attaching further restrictions to any of the FSF's family of GNU General Public Licenses is not in line with free software.

The Zig project has announced version 0.16.0 of the Zig programming language.

This release features 8 months of work: changes from 244 different contributors, spread among 1183 commits.

Perhaps most notably, this release debuts I/O as an Interface, but don't sleep on the Language Changes or enhancements to the Compiler, Build System, Linker, Fuzzer, and Toolchain which are also included in this release.

LWN last covered Zig in December 2025.

Part of the "fun" that comes with curating a self-hosted music library is tagging music so that it has accurate and uniform metadata, such as the band names, album titles, cover images, and so on. This can be a tedious endeavor, but there are quite a few open-source tools to make this process easier. One of the best, or at least my favorite, is MusicBrainz Picard. It is a cross-platform music-tagging application that pulls information from the well-curated, crowdsourced MusicBrainz database project and writes it to almost any audio file format.

The Servo project has announced the first release of servo as a crate for use as a library.

As you can see from the version number, this release is not a 1.0 release. In fact, we still haven't finished discussing what 1.0 means for Servo. Nevertheless, the increased version number reflects our growing confidence in Servo's embedding API and its ability to meet some users' needs.

In the meantime we also decided to offer a long-term support (LTS) version of Servo, since breaking changes in the regular monthly releases are expected and some embedders might prefer doing major upgrades on a scheduled half-yearly basis while still receiving security updates and (hopefully!) some migration guides. For more details on the LTS release, see the respective section in the Servo book.