OpenAI, alongside Anthropic and Block, have launched the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, describing it as a neutral home for standards as agentic systems move into real production. It may sound well-meaning, but Slashdot reader and NERDS.xyz founder BrianFagioli isn't buying the narrative. In a report for NERDS.xyz, Fagioli writes: Instead of opening models, training data, or anything that would meaningfully shift power toward the community, the companies involved are donating lightweight artifacts like AGENTS.md, MCP, and goose. They're useful, but they're also the safest, least threatening pieces of their ecosystem to "open." From where I sit, it looks like a strategic attempt to lock in influence over emerging standards before truly open projects get a chance to define the space. I see the entire move as smoke and mirrors. With regulators paying closer attention and developer trust slipping, creating a Linux Foundation directed fund gives these companies convenient cover to say they're being transparent and collaborative. But nothing about this structure forces them to share anything substantial, and nothing about it changes the closed nature of their core technology. To me, it looks like Big Tech trying to set the rules of the game early, using the language of openness without actually embracing it. Slashdot readers have seen this pattern before, and this one feels no different.

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It runs locally, a free/open source home automation platform connecting all your devices together, regardless of brand. And GitHub's senior developer calls it "one of the most active, culturally important, and technically demanding open source ecosystems on the planet," with tens of thousands of contributors and millions of installations. That's confirmed by this year's "Octoverse" developer survey... Home Assistant was one of the fastest-growing open source projects by contributors, ranking alongside AI infrastructure giants like vLLM, Ollama, and Transformers. It also appeared in the top projects attracting first-time contributors, sitting beside massive developer platforms such as VS Code... Home Assistant is now running in more than 2 million households, orchestrating everything from thermostats and door locks to motion sensors and lighting. All on users' own hardware, not the cloud. The contributor base behind that growth is just as remarkable: 21,000 contributors in a single year... At its core, Home Assistant's problem is combinatorial explosion. The platform supports "hundreds, thousands of devices... over 3,000 brands," as [maintainer Franck Nijhof] notes. Each one behaves differently, and the only way to normalize them is to build a general-purpose abstraction layer that can survive vendor churn, bad APIs, and inconsistent firmware. Instead of treating devices as isolated objects behind cloud accounts, everything is represented locally as entities with states and events. A garage door is not just a vendor-specific API; it's a structured device that exposes capabilities to the automation engine. A thermostat is not a cloud endpoint; it's a sensor/actuator pair with metadata that can be reasoned about. That consistency is why people can build wildly advanced automations. Frenck describes one particularly inventive example: "Some people install weight sensors into their couches so they actually know if you're sitting down or standing up again. You're watching a movie, you stand up, and it will pause and then turn on the lights a bit brighter so you can actually see when you get your drink. You get back, sit down, the lights dim, and the movie continues." A system that can orchestrate these interactions is fundamentally a distributed event-driven runtime for physical spaces. Home Assistant may look like a dashboard, but under the hood it behaves more like a real-time OS for the home... The local-first architecture means Home Assistant can run on hardware as small as a Raspberry Pi but must handle workloads that commercial systems offload to the cloud: device discovery, event dispatch, state persistence, automation scheduling, voice pipeline inference (if local), real-time sensor reading, integration updates, and security constraints. This architecture forces optimizations few consumer systems attempt. "If any of this were offloaded to a vendor cloud, the system would be easier to build," the article points out. "But Home Assistant's philosophy reverses the paradigm: the home is the data center..." As Nijhof says of other vendor solutions, "It's crazy that we need the internet nowadays to change your thermostat."

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"Homebrew, the package manager for macOS and Linux, just got a handy new feature in the latest v5.0.4 update," reports How-To Geek. Brewfile install scripts "are now more like a one-stop shop for installing software, as Flatpaks are now supported alongside Brew packages, Mac App Store Apps, and other packages." For those times when you need to install many software packages at once, like when setting up a new PC or virtual machine, you can create a Brewfile with a list of packages and run it with the 'brew bundle' command. However, the Brewfile isn't limited to just Homebrew packages. You can also use it to install Mac App Store apps, graphical apps through Casks, Visual Studio Code extensions, and Go language packages. Starting with this week's Homebrew v5.0.4 release, Flatpaks are now supported in Brewfiles as well... This turns Homebrew into a fantastic setup tool for macOS, Linux, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) environments. You can have one script with all your preferred software, and use 'if' statements with platform variables and existing file checks for added portability.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge's Sean Hollister If you wrote off the Steam Frame as yet another VR headset few will want to wear, I guarantee you're not alone. But the Steam Frame isn't just a headset; it's a Trojan horse that contains the tech gamers need to play Steam games on the next Samsung Galaxy, the next Google Pixel, perhaps Arm gaming notebooks to come. I know, because I'm already using that tech on my Samsung Galaxy. There is no official Android version of Hollow Knight: Silksong, one of the best games of 2025, but that doesn't have to stop you anymore. Thanks to a stack of open-source technologies, including a compatibility layer called Proton and an emulator called Fex, games that were developed for x86-based Windows PCs can now run on Linux-based phones with the Arm processor architecture. With Proton, the Steam Deck could already do the Windows-to-Linux part; now, Fex is bridging x86 and Arm, too. This stack is what powers the Steam Frame's own ability to play Windows games, of course, and it was widely reported that Valve is using the open-source Fex emulator to make it happen. What wasn't widely reported: Valve is behind Fex itself. In an interview, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais, one of the architects behind SteamOS and the Steam Deck, tells The Verge that Valve has been quietly funding almost all the open-source technologies required to play Windows games on Arm. And because they're open-source, Valve is effectively shepherding a future where Arm phones, laptops, and desktops could freely do the same. He says the company believes game developers shouldn't be wasting time porting games if there's a better way. Remember when the Steam Deck handheld showed that a decade of investment in Linux could make Windows gaming portable? Valve paid open-source developers to follow their passions to help achieve that result. Valve has been guiding the effort to bring games to Arm in much the same way: In 2016 and 2017, Griffais tells me, the company began recruiting and funding open-source developers to bring Windows games to Arm chips. Fex lead developer Ryan Houdek tells The Verge he chatted with Griffais himself at conferences those years and whipped up the first prototype in 2018. He tells me Valve pays enough that Fex is his full-time job. "I want to thank the people from Valve for being here from the start and allowing me to kickstart this project," he recently wrote.

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During last month's KubeCon North America in Atlanta, Kubernetes maintainers announced the upcoming retirement of Ingress NGINX. "Best-effort maintenance will continue until March 2026," noted the Kubernetes SIG Network and the Security Response Committee. "Afterward, there will be no further releases, no bugfixes, and no updates to resolve any security vulnerabilities that may be discovered." In a recent op-ed for The Register, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reflects on the decision and speculates about what might have prevented this outcome: Ingress NGINX, for those who don't know it, is an ingress controller in Kubernetes clusters that manages and routes external HTTP and HTTPS traffic to the cluster's internal services based on configurable Ingress rules. It acts as a reverse proxy, ensuring that requests from clients outside the cluster are forwarded to the correct backend services within the cluster according to path, domain, and TLS configuration. As such, it's vital for network traffic management and load balancing. You know, the important stuff. Now this longstanding project, once celebrated for its flexibility and breadth of features, will soon be "abandonware." So what? After all, it won't be the first time a once-popular program shuffled off the stage. Off the top of my head, dBase, Lotus 1-2-3, and VisiCalc spring to my mind. What's different is that there are still thousands of Ingress NGINX controllers in use. Why is it being put down, then, if it's so popular? Well, there is a good reason. As Tabitha Sable, a staff engineer at Datadog who is also co-chair of the Kubernetes special interest group for security, pointed out: "Ingress NGINX has always struggled with insufficient or barely sufficient maintainership. For years, the project has had only one or two people doing development work, on their own time, after work hours, and on weekends. Last year, the Ingress NGINX maintainers announced their plans to wind down Ingress NGINX and develop a replacement controller together with the Gateway API community. Unfortunately, even that announcement failed to generate additional interest in helping maintain Ingress NGINX or develop InGate to replace it." [...] The final nail in the coffin was when security company Wix found a killer Ingress NGINX security hole. How bad was it? Wix declared: "Exploiting this flaw allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code and access all cluster secrets across namespaces, which could lead to complete cluster takeover." [...] You see, the real problem isn't that Ingress NGINX has a major security problem. Heck, hardly a month goes by without another stop-the-presses Windows bug being uncovered. No, the real issue is that here we have yet another example of a mission-critical open source program no one pays to support...

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Core Devices has fully open-sourced the entire Pebble software stack and confirmed the first Pebble Time 2 shipments will start in January. "This is the clearest sign yet that the platform is shifting from a company-led product to a community-backed project that can survive independently," reports Gadgets & Wearables. From the report: The announcement follows weeks of tension between Core Devices and parts of the Pebble community. By moving from 95 to 100 percent open source, the company has essentially removed itself as a bottleneck. Users can now build, run, and maintain every piece of software needed to operate a Pebble watch. That includes firmware for the watch and mobile apps for Android and iOS. This puts the entire software stack into public hands. According to the announcement, Core Devices has released the mobile app source code, enabled decentralized app distribution, and made hardware more repairable with replaceable batteries and published design files.

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Thunderbird Pro has moved its Thundermail email service into production testing as the open-source email client's subscription bundle of additional services prepares for an Early Bird beta launch at $9 per month that will include email hosting, encrypted file sharing through Send, and scheduling via Appointment. Internal team members are now testing Thundermail accounts and the new Thunderbird Pro add-on automatically adds Thundermail accounts for users who sign up through it. The project migrated its data hosting from the Americas to Germany and the EU. Appointment received a major visual redesign being applied across all three services while Send completed an external security review and moved from its standalone add-on into the unified Thunderbird Pro add-on. The new website at tb.pro is live for signups and account management.

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Quand Qualcomm se paye Arduino le 7 octobre dernier, cela se passe plutôt bien. La marque promet d’injecter des ressources, lance une carte de développement Arduino Q et promet de ne pas toucher aux éléments fondateurs qui font le succès de ces produits auprès des utilisateurs.

Il n’aura donc pas fallu deux mois pour que Qualcomm ne modifie largement les conditions d’utilisation d’Arduino ainsi que sa politique de confidentialité. Des changements importants qui vont à l’encontre de toute la philosophie Open Source et Open Hardware de la marque historique. Lors de l’annonce du rachat, je soulignais la différence de politique entre les deux entreprises. Un Qualcomm très fermé sur lui-même et jaloux de ses secrets industriels et un Arduino plus ouvert. Cette dualité technologique a semble-t-il été résolue, à la hache.

Les nouvelles conditions d’utilisation mettent en évidence l’instauration d’une nouvelle licence beaucoup plus restrictive. Celle-ci introduit une licence perpétuelle et irrévocable sur tous les éléments proposés par les utilisateurs sur la plateforme. Chaque bout de code uploadé chez Arduino devient non pas Open Source mais propriété de Qualcomm. Une surveillance complète de toutes les fonctions employées avec l’IA, ce qui signifie que tout élément intéressant pour Qualcomm pourra être récupéré par leurs soins.

« If you cancel your account or we terminate it, we delete your account but retain information relating to your account as explained in this Privacy Policy. »

Qualcomm instaure également un changement empêchant les utilisateurs de vérifier toute violation de brevet et les nouvelles dispositions permettent également à Arduino de conserver des données personnelles pendant plusieurs années. Même si l’on supprime son compte chez eux. Au passage, Qualcomm siphonne la totalité des noms et des informations laissées chez Arduino dans leur propre base de données. Récupérant au passage les informations concernant des milliers de programmes éducatifs et donc des éléments concernant des mineurs.

Qualcomm interdit par ailleurs des pratiques classiques dans les mondes Open Source et Open hardware comme le reverse engineering. Toute tentative d’analyse de la manière dont fonctionnent les solutions Arduino ne doivent se faire qu’après le consentement de la marque. Une position difficilement défendable face à une politique Open source.

Qualcomm s’offre Arduino

Source : Adafruit

Qualcomm tire le frein à main sur l’Open Source d’Arduino © MiniMachines.net. 2025

Microsoft has released the source code for Zork I, II, and III under the MIT License through a collaboration with Team Xbox and Activision that involved submitting pull requests to historical source repositories maintained by digital archivist Jason Scott. Each repository now includes the original source code and accompanying documentation. The games arrived on early home computers in the 1980s as text-based adventures built on the Z-Machine, a virtual machine that allowed the same story files to run across different platforms. Infocom created the Z-Machine after discovering the original mainframe version was too large for home computers. The team split the game into three titles that all ran on the same underlying system. The code release covers only the source files and does not include commercial packaging or trademark rights. The games remain available commercially through The Zork Anthology on Good Old Games and can be compiled locally using ZILF, a modern Z-Machine interpreter.

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FFmpeg, the open source multimedia framework that powers video processing in Google Chrome, Firefox, YouTube and other major platforms, has called on Google to either fund the project or stop burdening its volunteer maintainers with security vulnerabilities found by the company's AI tools. The maintainers patched a bug that Google's AI agent discovered in code for decoding a 1995 video game but described the finding as "CVE slop." The confrontation centered on a Google Project Zero policy announced in July that publicly discloses reported vulnerabilities within a week and starts a ninety-day countdown to full disclosure regardless of patch availability. FFmpeg, written primarily in assembly language, handles format conversion and streaming for VLC, Kodi and Plex but operates without adequate funding from the corporations that depend on it. Nick Wellnhofer resigned as maintainer of libxml2, a library used in all major web browsers, because of the unsustainable workload of addressing security reports without compensation and said he would stop maintaining the project in December.

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C’est via un financement participatif que la Open Book Touch devrait voir le jour. Bientôt lancée sur Crowd Supply, elle pourrait définir une sorte de norme « Open Source » du format lieuse.

Pensée pour être à la fois accessible et facile à construire, la Open Book Touch proposera un écran de 4.26 pouces en 800 x 480 pixels d’encre numérique pilotée par une puce ESP32-S3. La dalle, dans cette diagonale, proposera 219 points par pouce de densité. Pas aussi bon qu’une Kindle Paperwhite qui propose 300 points de densité mais suffisant pour une lecture classique.

La dalle sera tactile et le châssis imprimé en 3D, elle devrait proposer une lecture très classique avec un éclairage frontal très complet. Un système de LEDs permettra de régler l’éclairage avec plusieurs nuances de couleurs. Deux jeux de LEDs chaudes et froides permettant d’ajuster le rétro éclairage aisément. Le genre de luxe fort peu cher mais qui aide à apprécier la lecture numérique.

Le design prévoit une exploitation de l’interface par l’écran tactile, aucun bouton n’étant prévu pour piloter l’engin. Un regret pour ma part qui pourra être corrigé au vu du côté ouvert du projet. Le microcontrôleur choisi permettra de profiter d’une connexion Wi-Fi et Bluetooth pour différents usages, la puce ESP32-S3 pourra compter sur 8 Mo de mémoire SRAM et 16 Mo de mémoire flash pour le système. Une solution qui ira donc à l’essentiel et que l’on pourra accompagner de nombreux documents grâce à un lecteur de cartes MiscroSD.

L’autonomie n’est pas détaillée mais devrait être excellente avec une batterie 1800 mAh et une recharge facile par USB Type-C. Le tout pèsera 85 grammes pour 11.8 cm de haut, 7.7 cm de large et 9.6 mm d’épaisseur. Pour le moment, aucune idée de tarif pour cet objet mais la campagne est encore en pré-lancement.

La Open Book Touch est un terrain de jeu

Ce qu’il y a d’intéressant avec la liseuse Open Book Touch c’est sa philosophie. Vous pourrez participer à sa campagne de financement pour recevoir l’engin. Vous pourrez également aider au financement global du projet sans contrepartie. Une fois que le projet aura été financé, Joey Castillo publiera les éléments nécessaires pour construire votre propre liseuse vous-même. Joey Castillo est un designer qui n’en est pas à sa première expérience. Il a développé notamment la Sensor Watch qui est une électronique de remplacement destinée à occuper le châssis d’une montre CASIO classique. Cette solution commercialisée 35$ permettant d’afficher l’heure locale et internationale, la température et de stocker des mots de passe. Cela permet par ailleurs d’avoir un terrain de jeu pour développer ses propres applications.

Tout l’enjeu est ici. La Open Book Touch ne sera peut-être pas la liseuse de vos rêves, mais elle servira de fondation pour construire quelque chose qui vous satisfera totalement. Envie d’une diagonale plus importante ? Il suffira de l’adapter. Envie d’un bouton pour tourner les pages ? Possible de l’ajouter. Envie de construire une solution en aluminium, en bois ou résistante à l’eau ? Aucun problème. Besoin de la placer derrière une vitre pour des raisons sanitaires ? Ce sera possible.

Par le passé, j’ai eu des demandes de liseuses pour des personnes en situation de handicap ne pouvant pas utiliser de solution tactile. Ajouter un bouton adapté à une morphologie particulière et le connecter en Bluetooth pour une manipulation plus facile sera possible. Idem pour ce violoniste me demandant s’il existait un moyen de tourner les pages de ses partitions avec une pédale ? La Open Book Touch est pensée pour abriter tous les usages et recevoir tout type d’améliorations, c’est ce qui fait tout son charme.

Sensor Watch : transformer sa montre Casio avec un Microcontroleur

Open Book Touch : la liseuse Open Source du futur ? © MiniMachines.net. 2025

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years now, Valve has been slowly improving the capabilities of the Proton compatibility layer that lets thousands of Windows games work seamlessly on the Linux-based SteamOS. But Valve's Windows-to-Linux compatibility layer generally only extends back to games written for Direct3D 8, the proprietary Windows graphics API Microsoft released in late 2000. Now, a new open source project is seeking to extend Linux interoperability further back into PC gaming history. The d7vk project describes itself as "a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 7 [D3D7], which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine." The new project isn't the first attempt to get Direct3D 7 games running on Linux. Wine's own built-in WineD3D compatibility layer has supported D3D7 in some form or another for at least two decades now. But the new d7vk project instead branches off the existing dxvk compatibility layer, which is already used by Valve's Proton for SteamOS and which reportedly offers better performance than WineD3D on many games. D7vk project author WinterSnowfall writes that while they don't expect this new project to be upstreamed into the main dxvk in the future, the new version should have "the same level of per application/targeted configuration profiles and fixes that you're used to seeing in dxvk proper." And though d7vk might not perform universally better than the existing alternatives, WinterSnowfall writes that "having more options on the table is a good thing in my book at least." The report notes that the PC Gaming Wiki lists more than 400 games built on the aging D3D7 APIs, spanning mostly early-2000s releases but with a trickle of new titles still appearing through 2022. Notable classics include Escape from Monkey Island and Hitman: Codename 47.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The International Criminal Court will switch its internal work environment away from Microsoft Office to Open Desk, a European open source alternative, the institution confirmed to Euractiv. The switch comes amid rising concerns about public bodies being reliant on US tech companies to run their services, which have stepped up sharply since the start of US President Donald Trump's second administration. For the ICC, such concerns are not abstract: Trump has repeatedly lashed out at the court and slapped sanctions on its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. Earlier this year, the AP also reported that Microsoft had cancelled Khan's email account, a claim the company denies. "We value our relationship with the ICC as a customer and are convinced that nothing impedes our ability to continue providing services to the ICC in the future," a Microsoft spokesperson told Euractiv.

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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has launched the LibrePhone Project, an initiative to create a fully free and open-source mobile operating system that eliminates proprietary firmware and binary blobs. From the FSF: "Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF with the goal of bringing full freedom to the mobile computing environment. The vast majority of software users around the world use a mobile phone as their primary computing device. After forty years of advocacy for computing freedom, the FSF will now work to bring the right to study, change, share, and modify the programs users depend on in their daily lives to mobile phones. ... Practically, Librephone aims to close the last gaps between existing distributions of the Android operating system and software freedom. The FSF has hired experienced developer Rob Savoye (DejaGNU, Gnash, OpenStreetMap, and more) to lead the technical project. He is currently investigating the state of device firmware and binary blobs in other mobile phone freedom projects, prioritizing the free software work done by the not entirely free software mobile phone operating system LineageOS." The project site can be found here.

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