So this issue is brought up by me over 2.5 years ago, and nothing changed since then. The issue is now the in top 3 highest upvoted Issue on this repo. At what point is it still open source, if it downloads without your permission a proprietary component that is used to run the software?

It connects to Google server and downloads Google Chrome. One user reported this process cannot be stopped with Ctrl+c (I didn't try that). It does not ask your permission to do so, and on the README nothing about this was (and still is) disclosed. All I asked is to add an information in the README, so anyone is warned and informed about this before installing. After over 2 years, none of the developers and contributors even acknowledge the issue or any comment whatsoever.

Note: vhs is a terminal application to record input and output of your terminal commands, to replay them later without video recording. Cool project and concept, but this is a no go and to me even malicious.

Plus Messenger is a fork of Telegram for Android with over 50 million Google Play installs. Telegram's Android code is GPL-2.0-or-later. The fork hasn't published a line of source since September 2017, and its current release carries an advertising and billing layer that exists in no public repository. Everything below links to something you can open and check yourself.

The published source stopped in 2017

The developer's GitLab project holds three commits and no tags. You can verify that in a browser right now:

0978c068  2017-09-13  Add readme.md
1d961518  2017-09-13  Update to v4.2.1.1     (the last code commit, ever)
b418c867  2019-02-07  Update README.md       (documentation only)

https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/4142452/repository/commits

Its build.gradle carries versionCode 1047. The current Play release is 12.10.1.0, dated 2026-08-29. Two source requests citing the licence have sat open on that tracker since October 2018.

The shipped binary contains code that appears in no published source

Release 12.10.1.0, obtained 2026-09-01 and checked with apksigner:

base APK SHA-256  d332a1304fc0c0c3daecc8fe7321893f7a6e88ffb59916743d175bf626fbbfef
V3 signer cert    6ebb622268aad319dbe8a1f414837d2843a9b35856aefb7dee2971a3d493f276
signature schemes v1 + v2 + v3: verified

The signer certificate is the developer's own, so this is his build. Inside: current upstream Telegram GPL code, including 2026 features, plus a proprietary layer under org.telegram.plus with ads.AdsController, ads.BillingHelper, helpers.FirebaseHelper and ads.RemoveAdsBottomSheet, bundled with AdMob, Firebase Analytics and the Play billing client. The purchase sheet sells ad removal for 5.99 euros and donation tiers up to 99.99. There is no licence text, no written offer and no source link anywhere in the app. In the published repositories the path org/telegram/plus returns HTTP 404.

The stated reason now describes the developer

The support group's pinned rules, in place since 2019, say the source is withheld to stop third-party developers "using the code for their own benefit by adding advertising", and that the group is not the place to ask about source code. On 2025-10-02 the developer announced advertising and a paid removal himself. Eight months later the group's automated responder was still telling users the app "is not a commercial project".

What happened when this was reported

I posted the record on the F-Droid forum on 1 September. At 03:47 UTC the next morning the forum deleted my account, citing no rule, with the topic still sitting in the new-user moderation queue. Two minutes later, at 03:49, a person whose F-Droid forum title reads "Contributor, F-Droid Board Member" turned up on the Telegram-FOSS tracker on GitHub under my comment there and wrote: "please delete this comment from the bot above. The bot has come and posted on several forums. Just created account and posted this. Banned them. Reporting this as well."

https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/issues/377#issuecomment-5504070601

I asked F-Droid about it on their own admin tracker, which is where their Code of Conduct sends complaints. The issue was closed 80 seconds after my reply with "ah, ok then", followed by "I would have deleted your post and account too". A second issue, about the board member specifically, was closed as a duplicate with no comment on it at all.

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/700

The "off-topic" defence has a hole in it. The developer submitted this exact app to the F-Droid forum in March 2015, describing it in his own words as "GNU GPL v2", and a moderator declined it for bundling play-services. That thread is still up: https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/plus/

Where it stands

Telegram, the copyright holder and the only party that can force a store takedown, has been notified twice and hasn't replied. Its GitHub repository has issues disabled. Google Play's public intellectual-property form refuses the category outright, leaving only the rights-holder DMCA form. The FSF Compliance Lab, the Software Freedom Conservancy, FSFE and the Software Freedom Law Center have the file. A formal section 3 source request sits unanswered on the developer's own tracker: https://gitlab.com/rafalense/plus-messenger/-/issues/84

Full write-up with every hash and citation: https://xdaforums.com/t/plus-messenger-9-years-of-telegram-gpl-code-with-no-source-now-with-an-unpublished-paid-ads-layer.4800334/

I'm one person, writing under a pseudonym because the same developer also made WhatsApp Plus and I'd rather he never learned my name. That new account is what got me called a bot. If the source is published, I'll say so.

Hey guys! I was looking for a open source alternative to reddit. Any suggestions?

I've been working on this on and off for a couple years now. I'd love some feedback and contributions.

Github Link

The quickest way to understand it is:

• Mankind's Search for God is Really a Search for Truth
• Where God Comes From
• What Happens After Death

It's nothing special. The solitudes are crazy out of order and more like shower thoughts. It forbids conversions (seen as destruction of localized Truth), but encourages public discussion.

An interesting blog post about how the AT protocol has it's own cool little ecosystem next to the fediverse.

I've always used X-plore but am now searching for a FOSS alternative.

The new terms of service, which will go into effect for new projects after the usual two week notice period (i.e. September 10th), will now include the following under the list of prohibited content:

• original content written with or which facilitates the use of LLMs (large language models) or other generative AI technologies

The use of LLMs or other generative AI tools to produce or assist with the production of source code, assets, tickets, emails, and so on, will no longer be permitted on SourceHut once these terms take effect.

Hello folks!

I would like to share an update about BentoPDF. It's an open source privacy first PDF toolkit that runs in your browser.

1. You can now actually edit text inside PDFs

BentoPDF now allows you to click existing text, edit it, and have the text reflow while preserving the original fonts and styling.

It also includes:

• Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, font family/size, colours, outlines, character spacing and line spacing
• Left, centre, right and justified alignment
• Bulleted and numbered lists with indentation
• RTL and LTR text alignment
• Find and replace across the document
• Edit images by rotating, flipping, duplicating, resizing or deleting them
• Object alignment, distribution, rotation, flipping, duplication

Please note this is a work in progress. You may encounter bugs, which you can report and I will look into.

2. Hyper Compress

Hyper is an open source PDF compression engine built to solve specific problems.

• Compression sometimes returns a file larger than the original. Hyper's result is always binary: it either produces a smaller PDF or returns the original. This helps create predictable workflows.
• Hyper includes a true lossless mode. It preserves searchable text, document structure and PDF conformance, rather than rebuilding the document from scratch like Ghostscript.
• It runs everywhere: CLI, Node SDK, C API, self hosted service, and WebAssembly build.

Repository and benchmarks: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf-hyper-compress

I also compared it to Adobe's compression API, but only managed around 100 PDFs where results were within 5%. Testing on a bigger corpus got expensive.

3. Kura

Kura is a PDF standards, conversion and preflight engine.

It supports:

• All 11 PDF/A conformance levels: PDF/A-1a, PDF/A-1b, PDF/A-2a, PDF/A-2b, PDF/A-2u, PDF/A-3a, PDF/A-3b, PDF/A-3u, PDF/A-4, PDF/A-4e and PDF/A-4f
• Accessibility: PDF/UA-1 and PDF/UA-2
• Print production: PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3, PDF/X-4, PDF/X-4p, PDF/X-5g, PDF/X-5n and PDF/X-5pg
• Engineering and variable data printing: PDF/E-1 and PDF/VT
• E-invoices: Factur-X, ZUGFeRD, XRechnung and Order-X
• 396 bundled print-preflight profiles

It has been tested against several standards suites, including the veraPDF corpus, Isartor, BFO, Ghent Output Suite 5.0, the PDF/UA Reference Suite and Cal Poly's PDF/VT suite.

Across 30,677 PDF conversions it had zero crashes and zero timeouts, with a 0.05 second median conversion time.

Like Hyper, it ships as a CLI, C library, npm package, Docker image and WebAssembly build.

Repository and benchmarks: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf-kura

The release also contains other improvements and bug fixes: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf/releases/tag/v2.8.8

Thank you and have a great weekend!

TDF and Collabora have been at odds since April, when TDF's Membership Committee kicked out every Collabora staffer and partner in one move, with more than 30 people dropped.

That didn't stop Collabora from shipping a range of new releases, with Collabora Office 26.04 being the most recent one, where AI was introduced as an opt-in feature, letting users pick a model and bring their own credentials.

Now, LibreOffice, and by extension, The Document Foundation, has put its rejection of AI at the very forefront with the LibreOffice 26.8 release, going as far as calling it out in the release announcement title itself.

LibreOffice 26.8: What's New?

There's no AI in LibreOffice 26.8. Nothing about the suite talks to a remote server, and none of it needs an internet connection to work.

This isn't an oversight; it's a promise. TDF says that if your work can't leave the building for legal or privacy reasons, the only way to prove that later (during an audit, for example) is if the software never gave it anywhere to go.

Anyhow, coming back to the editors. 👇

Writer now detects paragraph direction automatically when you open or paste a document, end-of-line spacing follows the paragraph's direction instead of the reading direction, and object resize controls play well with RTL and vertical CJK documents.

It also gets a way to see the baseline grid during editing, and the grid itself now aligns correctly inside text frames. A new Draft View for stripping out the headers, footers, and page margins for distraction-free writing is available too.

Calc picks up the same RTL detection we saw earlier. Typing right-to-left text into an empty cell sets its direction automatically instead of requiring a manual toggle.

With additional improvements like Calculated Fields for pivot tables and a "Shuffle" command for scrambling cell order within a selected range.

Similarly, Math gets new named functions and operators built for two west African writing systems, N'Ko and Adlam, which cover the Manding languages and Fulani, plus left-pointing vector arrows for formulas written right to left.

Chart has basic support for reading and writing back the newer chart formats (chartex) that show up in Microsoft's OOXML files, covering the box-and-whisker, funnel, Pareto, sunburst, treemap, and waterfall types.

Impress and Draw can mix page sizes within one file instead of forcing every slide or page to match, and Impress also picks up presentation sections, letting you group slides under a name instead of scrolling through one long list.

And generally speaking, Calc, Writer, Impress, and Draw now each carry their own background tint in the Notebookbar (the ribbon-style interface on top), so you can tell which app you're in without reading the title bar.

There's also a new Paragraph Composer that balances word spacing across a whole paragraph instead of judging each line by itself, fixing the uneven look that comes from justifying one line at a time.

How to Install/Upgrade?

You will usually find LibreOffice already installed on popular Linux distributions, and it is only a matter of time before this release shows up as part of a routine system upgrade.

If you can't wait, then downloading the DEB or RPM package is the quickest way to get this release installed. Alternatively, you could also opt for the Flatpak, but know that it receives updates a bit late.

The Document Foundation today announced the availability of LibreOffice 26.8, the new major release of the free and open source office suite, for Windows, macOS and Linux. Development began in December 2025, and the release consolidates the work of 206 contributors, of whom 155 are volunteers.

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.

From the article: "This release also introduces Anthropic and Grok backends for Claude and Grok models. (...)

Coming three weeks after Calibre 9.13, the Calibre 9.14 release is here to introduce more AI features, including the ability to generate book covers using AI with different cover styles such as romance, sci-fi, pulp fiction, etc., as well as Anthropic and Grok backends for Claude and Grok models, while removing the GitHub backend."

I don't have it installed at the moment but wonder how easily you can disable that stuff.

Key Points

Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, The Information has reported. A source familiar with the matter told CNBC they could “confirm acquisition [by Nvidia] has been part of ongoing and recent talks.”

*Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face immediately responded to CNBC requests for comment.*

The deal would broaden Nvidia’s position in open-source AI and further across the AI technology stack.

Nvidia has agreed to buy open-source platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, The Information reported, citing a person with knowledge of the deal.

Deal talks began after Hugging Face, an open-source artificial intelligence platform developers use to collaborate, test and share tools, received acquisition interest from another suitor, according to The Information.

Business Insider separately reported that Nvidia had been “in talks” to acquire Hugging Face. The outlet reported last week that Hugging Face has been working with a bank to evaluate bidders’ interest in the startup, citing people familiar with the matter.

A source familiar with the matter told CNBC they could “confirm acquisition [by Nvidia] has been part of ongoing and recent talks.” They spoke anonymously to discuss details that are not public.

Hugging Face and Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If completed, the acquisition would put one of the most widely used platforms for sharing and working with open-source AI models under Nvidia’s ownership, expanding the chipmaker’s reach further into the software and model ecosystem.

Nvidia, whose blockbuster earnings Wednesday prompted shares to rise 4% in after-hours trading, has made a series of deals in the past year, including a $20 billion licensing deal with AI chip startup Groq.

Siddy Jobe, a fund manager at Eonopolis Exponential Technologies funds, said it made sense for Nvidia to target a company like Hugging Face, as Nvidia has made it clear that it is not looking to discriminate between closed and open-source models.

“I think Nvidia is very much a community, a platform-based company, and in that respect, I think Hugging Face fits perfectly within that. There is this five-layer cake from Nvidia, and foundational models are one of them,” Jobe told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday.

“It is clear that Nvidia wants to be integrated in the entire stack vertically, going from energy to foundational models and also to applications,” he added.

Hacking incident

Hugging Face was recently at the center of a hacking incident that raised concerns about the rapid evolution of powerful AI and cybersecurity tools.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue, a proponent of open-source models, blamed engineering mistakes for the recent attack on Hugging Face and said his company used an Nvidia version of a Chinese open model to resolve it.

He told CNBC earlier this month, “AI cybersecurity is going to become a huge market in the U.S. and in the world.”

“In this market, probably open models will be kings,” Delangue added.

Hi,

I finally got around to migrate PdfDing from github to Codeberg. Hopefully, I will see some of you over there.

PdfDing is a PDF manager, viewer and editor that you can host yourself. It offers a seamless user experience on multiple devices. It's designed be to be minimal, fast, and easy to set up using Docker.

Ardour 9.8 has been released as the latest stable version of this powerful, free, cross-platform, and open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems.

Coming two and a half months after Ardour 9.7, the Ardour 9.8 release introduces initial scales support to let you visualize out-of-scale notes and choose if you want to avoid creating them entirely when composing and improvising in a specific musical key, as well as support for the Novation Launchkey 88 Mk4 and Arturia Drumbrute controllers.

Ardour 9.8 also brings improvements to session recovery for audio recordings in case the system crashes while Ardour is recording, improvements to clip recording guaranteeing at least a 2-bar count-in with the countdown displayed on the screen in the clip editor, and a new option in MIDI Tools to create arpeggios.

The Transport Masters dialog has been improved as well to report the position when the linear timecode is not moving, and the session locates to static timecode to minimize sync time. In addition, the Cue page has been updated to reorder processors in the track when recording a clip and using hardware monitoring at the same time to get a signal to record.

On top of that, Ardour 9.8 adds UI support for LV2 string parameters, adds lib64 search paths on Linux for VST3 plugins, adds support for handling LV2 parameter updates of any known type, disables VST micro-edit inline controls by default, and adds an “add_section” OSC method.

Starting with this release, Ardour now includes cross-cursor preference in metadata, properly converts sends from old Ardour 2 sessions, enables scrolling for the route comments box, no longer allows end BBT markers after paste, and uses pixel-based logic to determine where to start the edge where resize/reposition occurs.

It also latches the rec-enable control when using a transport master and allows translation of startup profiling messages. Check out the release notes for more details about the changes included in Ardour 9.8, which you can download from the official website as ready-to-use binaries and a source tarball.

For those unfamiliar, Zotero is a “free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research”. It's very popular in university / academia since it makes it trivial to manage in-text citations and works cited / references sections. There are browser extensions and plugins for popular document processing software (including Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, etc).

It's both open source (AGPLv3), and the most popular choice for that type of software. I recommend it to anyone that I see still doing citations by hand.

From this update, I am looking forward to the following:

Searches are now much more powerful, with support for nested condition groups and automatic mapping of conditions across levels of the hierarchy. It’s now trivial to, say, search for top-level items with a given author AND (a descendant annotation that is either yellow OR red) [...]

It’s now possible to select multiple rows in the collections pane and view items from across all of those views.

For example, you can now select two collections to quickly see all the items from both of those collections, or select a few saved searches to see the combined results from those searches.

You can now easily edit multiple items at once. Simply select multiple items in the items list, click “Edit Multiple Items…” in the item pane, and then make changes, and the changes will be applied to all selected items. Fields that have multiple values will show “Multiple”, and clicking in the field will show the available values (and “Clear all values”).