The European Union's Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) has caused a stir in the software-development world. Thanks to advocacy by the Eclipse Foundation, Open Source Initiative, Linux Foundation, Mozilla, and others, open-source software projects generally have minimal requirements under the CRA — but nothing to do with law is ever quite so simple. Marta Rybczyńska spoke at Linaro Connect 2025 about the impact of the CRA on the open-source ecosystem, with an emphasis on the importance of understanding a project's role under the CRA. She later participated in a panel discussion with Joakim Bech, Kate Stewart, and Mike Bursell about how the CRA would impact embedded open-source development.

• Front: OpenH264 in Fedora; Wallabag; Safety certification; 6.16 Merge window; Bounce buffering; Hardening repository problems; Device-initiated I/O; Faster networking; OSPM 2025; Free software in science.
• Briefs: Kea vulnerabilities; Alpine Linux 3.22.0; Fedora strategy; Quotes; ...
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Outgoing Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller has posted an update on Fedora's high-level plan through 2028:

[Fedora] Council members identified potential Initiatives that we believe are important to work on next. We came up with a list of thirteen — which is way more than we can handle at once. We previously set a limit of four Initiatives at a time. We decided to keep to that rule, and are planning to launch four initiatives in the next months

The initiatives are: making Fedora releases block on accessibility issues, experimenting with a "GitOps" workflow for packaging, migrating from Pagure to Forgejo, and "making sure Fedora Linux is ready for people who want to work on machine learning and AI development".

Cong Wang and Daniel Borkmann each led session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit about their respective plans to speed up networking in the Linux kernel. Both sessions described ways to remove unnecessary operations in the networking stack, but they focused on different areas. Wang spoke about using BPF to speed up socket operations, while Borkmann spoke about eliminating the overhead of networking operations on virtual machines.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.15.1, 6.14.10, 6.12.32, 6.6.93, 6.1.141, 5.15.185, 5.10.238, and 5.4.294 stable kernels. As usual, each contains a set of important fixes.

This year's Linaro Connect in Lisbon, Portugal featured a number of talks about the use of open-source components in safety-critical systems. Kate Stewart gave a keynote on the topic on the first day of the conference. In it, she highlighted several projects that have been working to pursue safety certification and spoke about the importance of being able to trace software's origins to safety. In a talk on the second day, Roberto Bagnara shared his experience with working on one of those projects, the Xen hypervisor, to conform to a formal set of rules for safety-critical code.

Version 3.22.0 of the Alpine Linux distribution has been released. Notable changes in this release include the removal of the X11 session for KDE Plasma, a switch to systemd-efistub, and experimental support for user services with the OpenRC init system. See the release notes for a detailed list of changes.

Software patents and workarounds for them are, once again, causing headaches for open-source projects and users. This time around, Fedora users have been vulnerable to a serious flaw in the OpenH264 library for months—not for want of a fix, but because of the Rube Goldberg machine methodology of distributing the library to Fedora users. The software is open source under a two-clause BSD license; the RPMs are built and signed by Fedora, but the final product is distributed by Cisco, so the company can pick up the tab for license fees. Unfortunately, a breakdown in the process of handing RPMs to Cisco for distribution has left Fedora users vulnerable, and inaction on Fedora's part has left users unaware that they are at risk.

Mozilla has decided to throw in the towel on Pocket, a social-bookmarking service that it acquired in 2017. This has left many users scrambling for a replacement for Pocket before its shutdown in July. One possible option is wallabag, a self-hostable, MIT-licensed project for saving web content for later reading. It can import saved data from services like Pocket, share content on the web, export to various formats, and more. Even better, it puts users in control of their data long-term.