Seems like a good day to remind people that blaming tools that have been maintained by volunteers with little to no support for decades, or blaming those volunteers, without assigning any responsibility or culpability at all to the companies that have made millions or billions or hundreds of billions of dollars from that volunteer work is picking a side.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/117480397353297571
Nothing like working in an attrition-layoff environment. Oh, we're not letting you go, nononono. We're just changing your terms of employment every few months and if some of you fall through the cracks, too bad so sad
Yesterday we got informed that the #DEIB devroom at #fosdem which we pitched with @Gina @_elena got rejected.
The flood of positive messages we've received on mastodon over the past 24h gives me hope for an even more inclusive & diverse future of FOSS projects. FOSDEM is not mirroring the entire FOSS scene. I'm very grateful for all the support many of you are expressing. 🧡
@dentangle summarized it in a perfect way! The devroom *is* happening here because of YOU.
longjmp() Considered Harmful @hikari https://social.noyu.me/@hikari/statuses/01M5FKSAZR531Y1PG1HHBCJ4YJ
PHP is a million or so lines of C code that pervasively used alloc functions that longjmp() on failure, so OOM bailout creates corrupted state. the fix uses fallible allocs and a global please-return-early OOM flag but requires touching Everything. completeness is impossible 😰😰😰
🔴 Brand new comic now up on Boing Boing
-
A Simpsonian look at Putin, Trump, Musk and the Ukraine War!
-
https://boingboing.net/2026/10/21/tom-the-dancing-bug-a-simpsonian-look-at-trump-putin-and-musk.html
Every year the Values of #FOSDEM are put on display. The resistance to having a CoC. The complete lack of health policy or health precautions. The overcrowding and lack of disabled accommodations. The choice of corporate sponsors. The lack of financial transparency. The decision to platform Jack Dorsey etc.
It's not a safe space, and likely never will be for a whole bunch of reasons.
Yeah, it took me a while to see it too. Do you see it yet?
The 'AI' Software Crisis: Software Developers have been promoted into incompetence: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/07-promoted-into-incompetence/
The PHP #security issue shows once again how much our society relies on mostly volunteer work.
Look at PHP Foundation @phpc finances:
https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation#category-BUDGET
- Reimbursed $67K on development work this year
- Received: $642,755 last year
Compare these numbers with the amounts companies have made with products & services built upon #PHP. Our digital foundations are built on the backs of #opensource volunteers. Governments & companies need to invest in our common digital infrastructures.
"President Trump has talked about replacing the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room with an indoor swimming pool."
You can't make this stuff up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/us/politics/trump-white-house-media.html
Good lord the the diff fixing one of the PHP RCEs is enormous https://github.com/php/php-src/commit/31c0ea7d7ff1d1fccb6492e52dab544011628065
That the fix is this complicated is quite the warning sign imo, there might be more bugs lurking around this
Happy Birthday to Ursula Le Guin!
Become a Friend of PM, and support independent radical publishing. We’ll send you books monthly, and you'll get 50% off of everything on our website year-round. You’ll also receive this Ursula Le Guin Tee free! Offer ends 11/1. https://www.pmpress.org/product/friends-of-pm-press-monthly-membership-print-plus
Spyware vendors are using ads to breach mobile devices, even if you never click. New research shows journalists have become targets.
Read our newsletter to learn more — and subscribe:
https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/zero-click-spyware-uses-ads-to-target-reporters/
New Comic Strip found: Carpe Diem by Niklas Eriksson for Tue, 20 Oct 2026 https://www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/carpediem/s-4322680
We have deployed the scheduled security release, the aforementioned services are up again.
3/4
My child is at that age (5 almost 6) when girls start experiencing a confidence gap. I would have been a proud mamma to show her the incredible diversity of presenters in our devroom at FOSDEM.
I’ve been showing her examples of other kinds of excellence (than stereotypical cis white men - sorry no offense) since she was an infant.
But it’s so much more powerful when you discuss people you know IRL and can show actual examples...
#ShlaerMellor, #FunctionPointAnalysis, #punk, #environmentalist, #unionAdvocate, #anarchosocialist #freeSoftwareAdvocate #cooperativeLife #noLLMs
"with a big old lie and a flag and a pie and a mom and a bible most folks are just liable to buy any line, any place, any time" - Frank Zappa