The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has announced a fellowship program to support "the dedicated individuals who keep our digital infrastructure running":

Over the past two years, STF has successfully contracted over 40 FOSS projects, enhancing their technical sustainability through targeted milestones. However, the activities of maintainers, who often work on multiple FOSS projects, are hard to quantify for funding applications, as the demands and challenges vary and can change quickly. This is where the fellowship for maintainers comes into play.

According to the fellowship page the STF plans to fund five fellowships, beginning in the fourth quarter of this year, for a period of 12 months.

We have received the sad news that Dr. Mel Chua has passed away. Mel was probably best known in the free-software community as a contributor to the Fedora Project in its early days. The Fedora Community blog honored Mel recently after she had moved to hospice care with tributes from several Fedorans. Stephen Jacobs wrote:

I can't find the words to express how much of a positive impact Mel has had on my work, our shared work, my family, the experiences of my students, and the world of FOSS writ large. Nor can I find the words to convey just how much I will miss her.

Mel will be greatly missed.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (kernel, obs-cef, and xen), Mageia (emacs), Oracle (freeradius, freeradius:3.0, and kernel), Red Hat (emacs, httpd, and kpatch-patch-4_18_0-305_120_1), Slackware (curl), SUSE (apache2, cockpit-wicked, glibc, gnutls, gvfs, less, nghttp2, opensc, python-idna, python-requests, qemu, rpm, tpm2-0-tss, tpm2.0-tools, and unbound), and Ubuntu (clickhouse, exim4, libcommons-collections3-java, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, mysql-8.0, openssl, php-cas, prometheus-alertmanager, and snapd).

A few years ago, PyGObject—the Python package that provides bindings for GTK and GNOME applications—was not faring particularly well. Several maintainers had left the project and its development was not keeping pace with changes in GTK. At this year's GUADEC, Dan Yeaw presented a talk about the project's decline, improvements in the last year, and his experience getting involved in an undermaintained project.

Version 8.0 of the Forgejo software-development platform has been released. Notable changes include the removal of non-free software found in the codebase, improved stability, and a reduction in "seemingly random User Interface changes":

A gentle way of describing Forgejo User eXperience is that it is an acquired taste: it grew over the years, driven by the inspiration of the person with the keyboard in their hand. Once implemented it almost never changed. A user who started with Forgejo in 2022 can only see minor changes in 2024 and not all of them make intuitive sense. The solution to this problem is simple and was identified early on: User Research. But only in the making of Forgejo v8.0 did it get some momentum.

See the release notes for a full list of changes.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland), Red Hat (freeradius, freeradius:3.0, git-lfs, httpd, kernel, openssh, and varnish:6), SUSE (cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, git, gtk2, gtk3, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-exportproxy-container, virt-exportserver-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-t, orc, postgresql14, python-dnspython, python-urllib3, shadow, and xen), and Ubuntu (openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, and python3.10, python3.8).

Daniel Robbins, founder of the Gentoo Linux distribution and its spinoff Funtoo Linux, has announced that he has decided to end the Funtoo project:

Funtoo started as a philosophy to create a fun community of contributors building something great together. For me, it's no longer that so I need to move on to other things. There is not a successor BDFL for Funtoo nor am I interested in trying to find one, or hand the project off to someone else. You can expect the project to wind down through August. If you have a Funtoo container, it will continue to be online through the end of August so you have time to find another hosting solution if you need one.

At GUADEC in Denver, Colorado on July 21, the GNOME Foundation held its annual general meeting (AGM) to provide updates from the foundation's board and committees. Topics included work accomplished in the past year, challenges facing the GNOME Foundation–including fundraising and finding a new executive director–and some insight into plans for the next year. And last, but not least, the awarding of the Pants of Thanks.

Linux Mint has announced version 22 of the distribution in three editions: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. Mint 22 is based on Ubuntu 24.04 and uses kernel version 6.8.0:

Linux Mint 22 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2029. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

LWN covered the Linux Mint 22 beta in early July. See the new features page and release notes for more information on this release.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.10.1 stable kernel update. This release contains a small number of seemingly urgent regression fixes. Users of this kernel series are advised to upgrade.

Updated installation images for the OpenMandriva ROME rolling release Linux distribution are now available. Notable features in the 24.07 snapshot include KDE Plasma 6 as the default desktop, the addition of Proton and Proton experimental packages for playing Windows games on Linux, as well as GNOME 46.3 and LXQt 2.0.0 spins.

OpenSSL has announced that it has adopted a new governance framework:

The OpenSSL Management Committee (OMC) has been dissolved, and two boards of directors have been elected for the Foundation and the Corporation. Each organization has ten voting members. These boards share all the responsibilities and authorities of the former OMC co-equally.

To further engage our communities, we are establishing two advisory committees for each entity: a Business Advisory Committee (BAC) and a Technical Advisory Committee (TAC). The communities will elect the members of the BACs and TACs, creating a direct channel for community input in roadmap development and reflecting the diverse perspectives of OpenSSL's communities.

OpenSSL has also announced that two projects have adopted the OpenSSL Mission and become OpenSSL projects: Bouncy Castle, which provides cryptographic APIs for Java and C#, and the cryptlib security software development toolkit. See the announcement for full details.

Ryan Sipes told the audience during his keynote at GUADEC 2024 in Denver, Colorado that the Thunderbird mail client "probably shouldn't still be alive". Thunderbird, however, is not only alive—it is arguably in better shape than ever before. According to Sipes, the project's turnaround is a result of governance, storytelling, and learning to be comfortable asking users for money. He would also like it quite a bit if Linux distributions stopped turning off telemetry.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (ghostscript and xmedcon), Gentoo (Dmidecode, ExifTool, and Freenet), Red Hat (containernetworking-plugins, cups, edk2, httpd, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, krb5, libreoffice, libuv, libvirt, linux-firmware, nghttp2, nodejs, openssh, python3, runc, thunderbird, and tpm2-tss), Slackware (aaa_glibc, bind, and mozilla), SUSE (postgresql14, python-sentry-sdk, and shadow), and Ubuntu (activemq, bind9, haproxy, nova, provd, python-zipp, squid, squid3, and tomcat).

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) board has announced improvements to its grants program that have been enacted as a response to "concerns and frustrations" with the program:

The PSF Board takes the open letter from the pan-African delegation seriously, and we began to draft a plan to address everything in the letter. We also set up improved two-way communications so that we can continue the conversation with the community. The writers of the open letter have now met several times with members of the PSF board. We are thankful for their insight and guidance on how we can work together and be thoroughly and consistently supportive of the pan-African Python community.

So far the PSF has set up office hours to improve communications, published a retrospective on the DjangoCon Africa review, and put out a transparency report on grants from the past two years. The PSF board has also voted to "use the same criteria for all grant requests, no matter their country of origin".

Red Hat, through members of the Fedora Workstation Working Group, has taken another swing at persuading the Fedora Project to allow metrics related to the real-world use of the Workstation edition to be collected. The first proposal, aimed for Fedora 40, was withdrawn to be reworked based on feedback. This time around, the proponents have shifted from asking for opt-out telemetry to opt-in metrics, with more detail about what would be collected and the policies that would govern data collection. The change seems to be on its way to approval by the Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) and is set to take effect for Fedora 42.

Version 4.2 LTS of the Blender open-source 3D creation suite has been released. Major improvements include a rewrite of the EEVEE render engine, faster rendering, and much more. See the showcase reel for examples of work created by the Blender community with this release. See the text release notes for even more about 4.2 LTS, which will be maintained until July 2026.

Version 8.4.0 of the digiKam photo editing and management application has been released. This release includes an update of the LibRaw RAW decoder which brings support for many new cameras, a new version of the LensFun toolkit, a feature for automatic translation of image tags, GMIC-Qt 3.4.0, and many bug fixes. See the announcement for full details.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel), Fedora (golang and krb5), Red Hat (cups, firefox, git, java-21-openjdk, kernel, linux-firmware, nghttp2, nodejs, and podman), SUSE (libndp, nodejs18, nodejs20, tomcat, and xen), and Ubuntu (gtk+2.0, gtk+3.0 and linux-hwe-5.4, linux-oracle-5.4).