At FOSSY 2026, several people from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), which organizes the conference, gave a presentation about an ongoing violation of the Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3). Bradley Kühn, Karen Sandler, and Denver Gingerich spoke about different aspects of the violation, which is in regard to 3D-printer software from Bambu Lab, and what is being done to try to provide users with alternatives. One aspect that is particularly interesting is that the circumvention that the company is employing is precisely what the AGPL was written to prevent.

Version 26.8 of the Armbian distribution for Arm hardware has been released.

Most releases are a long list of small improvements. This one had three larger pieces landing at roughly the same time, and all three touch parts of Armbian that people use directly rather than parts they only read about in changelogs.

The installer was rewritten. Armbian Imager reached 2.0. And our CI moved out of the repository it had outgrown into one built for the job. None of these were planned to coincide; they simply reached the point where postponing them again would have cost more than doing them.

The installer rewrite is the one I expect people to notice first. It now ships as an armbian-config module, which means it is unit-tested, the same way the rest of armbian-config is tested, rather than living as a script that everyone was slightly afraid to touch. It can target SPI and MTD, treats eMMC and NVMe as separate flows instead of pretending they are the same thing, can flash a bootloader on its own, and — this one is overdue — reports when a bootloader write fails instead of printing "Done." and leaving you to find out at the next boot.

See the release notes for a full list of changes.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, gstreamer1-plugins-base, kernel, kernel-rt, and sqlite), Debian (freecad, kernel, libvncserver, and openssl), Fedora (apr-util, chromium, nnn, perl-DBI, python-tablib, python3.10, python3.11, python3.12, and sympa), Gentoo (DTrace, GNU screen, UnrealIRCd, and Vinyl Cache), Oracle (389-ds-base, attr, firefox, gegl04, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, httpd, mod_http2, nginx, pam, python-pyasn1, python-urwid, python3.12, python3.14, sqlite, and xorg-x11-server), SUSE (amazon-ecs-init, containerd, curl, distribution, dracut, ffmpeg-7, fuse-overlayfs, gd, git-lfs, go1.25-openssl, go1.26-openssl, govulncheck-vulndb, hauler, himmelblau, kernel, librest, libssh2_org, open-iscsi, openssh, patch, perl-Date-Manip, podman, postgresql14, postgresql16, python-cryptography, python-Pillow, python311, rmt-server, rootlesskit, rpm, rsync, runc, snpguest, sssd, suseconnect-ng, unbound, and util-linux), and Ubuntu (curl, ffmpeg, linux-aws-6.8, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-6.8, linux-azure-fips, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-azure, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure, linux-azure-fde, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fips, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-realtime, openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-25, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, openssl, perl, and vim).

Version 26.8 of the LibreOffice suite has been released.

LibreOffice 26.8 concentrates on three areas: the typographic quality of what the suite produces, the range of writing systems it handles correctly, and the fidelity with which documents survive exchange with other office suites.

The largest single body of work in this release addresses bidirectional and complex text. Writer now detects paragraph direction automatically when documents or plain text are opened or pasted. Line wrapping places end-of-line spaces according to the direction of the paragraph rather than that of the adjacent characters. Object resize handles behave correctly in right-to-left and vertical CJK documents. Bidirectional control characters are now visible alongside other formatting marks. In Calc, typing right-to-left text into an empty cell sets the direction of that cell automatically.

See the release notes for a full list of changes.