Efforts to introduce malicious code into the open-source supply chain have been on the rise in recent years, and there is no indication that they will abate anytime soon. These attacks are often found quickly, but not quickly enough to prevent the compromised code from being automatically injected into other projects or code deployed by users where it can wreak havoc. One method of avoiding supply-chain attacks is to add a delay of a few days before pulling upates in what is known as a "dependency cooldown". That tactic is starting to find favor with users and some language ecosystem package managers. While this practice is considered a reasonable response by many, others are complaining that those employing dependency cooldowns are free-riding on the larger community by letting others take the risk.

Version 2.26.0 of the LilyPond music-engraving program has been released. Major changes include the ability to use the Cairo library to generate output and improvements in spacing between clefs and time signatures. See the release notes for a full list of miscellaneous improvements as well as what's new with musical and specialist notation.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.1, 6.19.14, 6.18.24, and 6.12.83 stable kernels. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout the tree. Users are encouraged to upgrade.

Note that the 6.19.x series ends with 6.19.14.

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.