Version 7.3 of Texinfo, the GNU documentation-formatting system, has been released. It contains a number of new features, performance improvements, and enhancements.

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.

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 result. Feel free to build it and see if it works for you. There is no license agreement or subscription beyond the open source license of the code (GPLv3). It is yours now, to do with as you please.

According to a blog post on the site, the plan for the editor is to diverge from Zed and proceed slowly.

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.

Update: Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.19.5 and 6.18.15 kernels with a fix for the regression in 6.19.4 and 6.18.14. All users of netfilter are advised to upgrade to those versions.

• Front: New flags for clone3(); Discord replacements; virtual swap spaces; BPF memory protection keys; PostgreSQL's lessons in attracting contributors; 7.0 merge window; Network Time Security.
• Briefs: OpenSUSE governance; Firefox 148.0; GNU Awk 5.4.0; GNU Octave 11.1.0; Rust in Ladybird; LibreOffice Online; Weston 15.0; RIP Robert Kaye; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

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.

The MetaBrainz Foundation has announced the unexpected passing of its founder and executive director, Robert Kaye:

Robert's vision and leadership shaped MetaBrainz and left a lasting mark on the music industry and open source movement. His contributions were significant and his loss is deeply felt across our global community.

The Board is actively overseeing a smooth leadership transition and has measures in place to ensure that MetaBrainz continues to operate without interruption. Further updates will be shared in due course.

We plan to reopen the repository for LibreOffice Online at The Document Foundation for contributions, but provide warnings about the state of the repository until TDF's team agrees that it's safe and usable – while at the same time encourage the community to join in with code, technologies and other contributions that can be used to move forward.

Meanwhile, this post from Michael Meeks suggests that the tension around online versions of LibreOffice has not abated.

Version 5.4.0 of GNU awk (gawk) has been released. This is a major release with a change in gawk's default regular-expression matcher: it now uses MinRX as the default regular-expression engine.

This matcher is fully POSIX compliant, which the current GNU matchers are not. In particular it follows POSIX rules for finding the longest leftmost submatches. It is also more strict as to regular expression syntax, but primarily in a few corner cases that normal, correct, regular expression usage should not encounter.

Because regular expression matching is such a fundamental part of awk/gawk, the original GNU matchers are still included in gawk. In order to use them, give a value to the GAWK_GNU_MATCHERS environment variable before invoking gawk.

[...] The original GNU matchers will eventually be removed from gawk. So, please take the time to notice and report any issues in the MinRX matcher, so that they can be ironed out sooner rather than later.

See the release announcement for additional changes.