Best of Open Source — December 2025

  1. 1
    Article
    Avatar of itsfossIt's Foss·17w

    Denmark Begins Its Exit from Microsoft — and This Is Just the Start

    Denmark's Road Traffic Authority is piloting SIA Open, a government initiative to replace Microsoft Windows and Office applications with open source alternatives. The agency cites data sovereignty and avoiding vendor lock-in as key motivations. This pilot involves a portion of their 600 employees, with plans to expand to 15,000 government users across multiple state agencies. The specific open source alternatives haven't been disclosed yet.

  2. 2
    Article
    Avatar of cassidooCassidy's blog·17w

    I like when apps are "finished"

    Software doesn't always need continuous updates to remain valuable. Many applications can be considered "finished" when they accomplish their intended purpose reliably, yet open source projects with older commit dates are often mistakenly labeled as abandoned or unmaintained. The industry should normalize declaring software as complete rather than treating every project as requiring perpetual development and feature additions.

  3. 3
    Article
    Avatar of itsfossIt's Foss·18w

    No AI Slops! GNOME Now Forbids Vibe Coded Extensions

    GNOME has updated its extension review guidelines to reject AI-generated code submissions. The policy targets low-quality extensions with unnecessary code patterns like excessive try-catch blocks, inconsistent styling, and imaginary API usage. Reviewers were spending over 6 hours daily reviewing 15,000+ lines of code, much of it AI-generated slop. Using AI as a learning tool or for code completions remains allowed; the ban specifically targets developers who generate entire extensions without understanding the code.

  4. 4
    Article
    Avatar of omgubomg! ubuntu!·16w

    Ghostty Terminal Adopts a Non-Profit Funding Model

    Ghostty, a fast GPU-accelerated terminal emulator, now operates under fiscal sponsorship with Hack Club, a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Creator Mitchell Hashimoto believes critical infrastructure should be stewarded by mission-driven entities prioritizing public benefit. The structure enables transparent donation management while Hashimoto remains project lead with full decision authority. Nothing changes technically—Ghostty stays open source (MIT license) with the same roadmap. The move protects against future commercialization and ensures the project can outlive its creator.

  5. 5
    Article
    Avatar of cassidooCassidy's blog·19w

    Goodbye to an 11-year-old Issue

    A reflection on an 11-year-old GitHub issue that was recently closed, prompting thoughts about how much has changed in the software development landscape and the author's career since 2014. The post touches on the evolution of GitHub features like Discussions and GitHub Flavored Markdown, while sharing personal milestones and career growth from early developer evangelism days to working at GitHub itself.

  6. 6
    Article
    Avatar of itsfossIt's Foss·18w

    Is Helium the Browser Brave Was Meant to Be?

    Helium is a privacy-focused web browser built on ungoogled Chromium that aims to deliver privacy by default without unnecessary bloat. It includes built-in uBlock Origin with Manifest V2 support, native DuckDuckGo bangs for quick searches, and Helium services to anonymize external connections. The browser stores everything locally with no sync or password manager, blocks third-party cookies by default, and enforces HTTPS. Notable features include split-view tabs and cleaner customization options. However, it's still beta software with some limitations: login issues with bundled uBlock Origin, no DRM support for streaming services, and users must bring their own solutions for password management and syncing across devices.

  7. 7
    Video
    Avatar of linuxexpThe Linux Experiment·18w

    EU keeps moving to Open Source, New Linux smartphone, KDE fundraising - Linux Weekly news

    France and Germany continue major migrations to open-source software, with French ministries moving hundreds of thousands of users to Nextcloud and Germany's Schleswig-Holstein saving €15 million annually by switching to LibreOffice. System76 released Cosmic desktop and Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS as a stable first version. KDE's fundraising exceeded €280,000, nearly doubling last year's total. A new Linux smartphone running Sailfish OS with Android app support reached crowdfunding goals. Critical infrastructure concerns emerged as libxml2 became unmaintained, and HDMI Forum continues blocking HDMI 2.1 support in open-source AMD drivers. D7VK 1.0 brings DirectX 7 translation to Vulkan for legacy gaming on Linux.

  8. 8
    Article
    Avatar of danielhaxxsedaniel.haxx.se·17w

    20,000 issues on GitHub

    The curl project reached 20,000 issues on GitHub, marking significant growth in community engagement. After migrating from Sourceforge in 2015, the project has seen issue submission rates increase from 3.7 per day (2015-2022) to 9 per day (2022-2025). The project maintains efficiency by closing half of all issues within 6 hours and keeping open issues low despite rising submission frequency.

  9. 9
    Article
    Avatar of lnLaravel News·18w

    Laravel launches an OSS Advent Calendar

    Laravel launched a holiday-themed microsite featuring an Advent Calendar that showcases a different open source package from the Laravel ecosystem each day from December 1-25. Each day reveals a short video, installation instructions, and project health stats for official Laravel packages including Pennant, Prompts, Telescope, Pail, Sail, Pint, Passport, Sanctum, and Octane. The calendar serves as a browsable catalog helping developers discover first-party Laravel tools with quick access to documentation, GitHub repositories, and composer install commands.

  10. 10
    Article
    Avatar of selfhstselfh.st·19w

    FileBrowser Quantum Hits Stable!

    FileBrowser Quantum, a fork of the original FileBrowser project, has released its first stable version after years of development. The project now offers two release tracks: stable for general users and beta for early adopters. Key features include OnlyOffice integration, two-factor authentication, OIDC single sign-on, granular access controls, and advanced file sharing options. The application supports multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and Docker. While it indexes filesystems for fast search (which can increase memory usage), this can be disabled. The project is actively maintained by two core contributors and welcomes community involvement.

  11. 11
    Article
    Avatar of mitchellhMitchell Hashimoto·19w

    Ghostty Is Now Non-Profit

    Ghostty terminal emulator has become fiscally sponsored by Hack Club, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. This structure ensures the project remains free and open source while enabling tax-deductible donations, transparent financial operations, and legal protections against commercialization. The project lead Mitchell Hashimoto will continue technical leadership while establishing sustainable funding through community contributions, with 7% of donations supporting Hack Club's administrative costs. All financial transactions will be publicly visible, and funds will support contributor compensation, upstream dependencies, and operational costs.

  12. 12
    Video
    Avatar of youtubeYouTube·16w

    linus messed up the linux git history (so now there's a new git option)

    Git repositories can have multiple root commits, which can cause problems with history traversal, file tracking, and bisection. This became a notable issue when Linus Torvalds accidentally merged an unrelated GitHub-generated README into the Linux kernel, creating a second root commit. The incident led to Git introducing the `--allow-unrelated-histories` flag, which now prevents accidental merges of unrelated histories by default. You can find root commits using `git log --max-parents=0` and should be cautious when merging pull requests that might introduce new roots.

  13. 13
    Article
    Avatar of devtoDEV·15w

    I Built a Tool to Stop Wasting Time on Toxic Open Source Projects

    A developer built repo-health, a tool that analyzes GitHub repositories to help contributors identify healthy open source projects and avoid toxic ones. The system uses a hybrid scoring approach combining weighted metrics (activity, maintenance, community, documentation) with LLM-based adjustments to account for context like feature-complete projects. Key features include PR metrics analysis, contributor retention visualization, intelligent issue analysis with difficulty scoring, activity pattern detection for spam, and file-issue mapping. The author shares technical implementation details, bug fixes (cache security vulnerability, React hydration mismatch), and lessons learned about focusing on real problems over engineering challenges.

  14. 14
    Article
    Avatar of hnHacker News·18w

    Valve: HDMI Forum Continues to Block HDMI 2.1 for Linux

    The HDMI Forum continues to block open-source HDMI 2.1 driver implementation for Linux, forcing Valve's Steam Machine to be software-limited to HDMI 2.0 despite hardware support. This restriction prevents native 4K at 120Hz without compression and limits VRR functionality. AMD submitted a functional HDMI 2.1 driver in early 2024 but was rejected by the HDMI Forum. Valve confirms they're still working to resolve the issue, while users can work around limitations using chroma subsampling or active DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapters.

  15. 15
    Video
    Avatar of nickchapsasNick Chapsas·18w

    The New Cross Platform C# IDE is INSANE

    SharpIDE is a new open-source, cross-platform C# IDE built using C# and the Godot game engine with Photino Blazor for the UI. Created by Mark Parker, it runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac, offering features like syntax highlighting, debugging with Samsung debugger, NuGet package management, test explorer, and fast project loading. While very early in development and not production-ready, it demonstrates working code editing, building, running, and debugging capabilities. The project is fully open-source on GitHub, encouraging community contributions to add features and improvements.

  16. 16
    Video
    Avatar of linuxcastThe Linux Cast·18w

    This is NOT The Year of the Linux Desktop

    Linux is experiencing renewed interest as Windows 10 reaches end-of-life and Windows 11 hardware restrictions push users to consider alternatives. However, the same fundamental barriers that have historically prevented mainstream Linux adoption remain: driver issues (especially Nvidia), software availability gaps (Adobe, Microsoft Office), distribution fragmentation, and installation complexity. While some growth is expected, particularly from motivated users fleeing Windows limitations, the structural challenges inherent to open-source software make a dramatic shift to mainstream adoption unlikely. A modest 2% market share increase would represent significant progress, but the "year of the Linux desktop" remains an unrealistic expectation.

  17. 17
    Video
    Avatar of awesome-codingAwesome·19w

    Claude buys Bun, and this is really bad for devs...

    Anthropic acquired Bun, the JavaScript runtime built as a faster alternative to Node.js. While Bun will remain open source and MIT licensed, concerns arise about whether future development priorities will serve the JavaScript community or primarily benefit Claude's AI coding capabilities. The acquisition highlights broader tensions around AI companies claiming to replace developers while simultaneously hiring engineers and acquiring development tools. The piece questions the credibility of predictions about AI replacing software engineers within months, comparing them to historically inaccurate tech forecasts.

  18. 18
    Article
    Avatar of selfhstselfh.st·18w

    Building Slink: Lessons from Creating a Self-Hosted Image Hosting Platform

    A developer shares architectural decisions and lessons learned from building Slink, a self-hosted image hosting platform. Key insights include choosing single-container deployment for simplicity despite scalability trade-offs, evolving features based on community feedback from r/selfhosted and GitHub issues, and tackling technical challenges like animated image processing and real-time notifications. The project prioritizes deployment simplicity and performance over feature richness, with development driven by actual user needs rather than predetermined roadmaps.

  19. 19
    Article
    Avatar of dhhDavid Heinemeier Hansson·17w

    The O'Saasy License

    The O'Saasy License is a new open source license modeled after MIT but reserves commercial SaaS rights for the copyright holder. It aims to encourage more production-grade code to be shared publicly for learning purposes while allowing creators to monetize their work through hosted services. The license is available at osaasy.dev and is being used for Fizzy, enabling developers to view, learn from, fix bugs, and self-host the software while the original creators retain exclusive rights to offer it as a commercial service.

  20. 20
    Article
    Avatar of phoronixPhoronix·15w

    Open-Source Crown Game Engine v0.60 Released

    Crown Game Engine version 0.60 has been released. Crown is an open-source game engine that serves as an alternative to more well-known options like Godot Engine in the open-source game development space.

  21. 21
    Article
    Avatar of apacheThe Apache Software Foundation Blog·19w

    The Apache Software Foundation Announces New Top-Level Projects

    Apache Artemis and Apache Wayang have graduated to Top-Level Projects at the Apache Software Foundation. Artemis is a high-performance messaging platform supporting AMQP, MQTT, and STOMP protocols for microservices and cloud-native applications. Wayang is a unifying data processing framework with a cross-platform optimizer that integrates systems like Apache Flink, Apache Spark, and TensorFlow through a three-layer architecture.

  22. 22
    Article
    Avatar of itsfossIt's Foss·17w

    Watch Out Elasticsearch! Tiger Data's PostgreSQL BM25 Search Extension Goes Open Source

    Tiger Data has open-sourced pg_textsearch, a PostgreSQL extension that enables BM25 relevance-ranked keyword searches directly within PostgreSQL. Previously available only on Tiger Cloud, the extension is now released under The PostgreSQL License on GitHub. It supports 29+ languages, works with partitioned tables, and uses a memtable architecture for efficient indexing. The extension allows developers to run modern search capabilities without setting up external systems like Elasticsearch, and can be combined with pgvector for hybrid keyword and semantic search within a single database.

  23. 23
    Article
    Avatar of devtoDEV·17w

    My OSS Stalled for 3 Months Because of Misguided Vibe Coding—This Is the Full Reboot Story

    A developer shares their experience recovering from a 3-month project stall on diffx, a structured-data diff tool. The root causes included monorepo complexity, over-sharing CI/CD infrastructure across multiple projects, premature multilingual documentation, and quality issues from AI-assisted "vibe coding" without proper verification. The recovery process involved quarantining existing code, manually verifying functionality, writing specs from scratch, rebuilding tests based on specs rather than implementation, and splitting the monorepo into separate language-specific repositories. Key lessons include the importance of spec-driven development with AI, two-stage release workflows, and having the courage to delete broken artifacts rather than clinging to sunk costs.

  24. 24
    Article
    Avatar of wordpresscoreMake WordPress Core·18w

    Planning for 7.0

    WordPress 7.0 development is underway following the 6.9 release. Core contributors are focusing on Phase 3 collaboration features, including improvements to the Notes feature with better diffing mechanics and change reconciliation. Navigation workflow simplifications are planned to make menu management more intuitive. The team is exploring streamlined editing experiences for composite blocks and design patterns, plus more intuitive page navigation in the site editor. Additional blocks and tools are being added to expand capabilities for theme builders.

  25. 25
    Article
    Avatar of mozillaMozilla·19w

    When a video codec wins an Emmy

    The AV1 video codec received a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for its impact on video delivery. Developed by the Alliance for Open Media (including Mozilla, Google, and Cisco) to address expensive licensing fees of H.264/H.265, AV1 provides royalty-free, high-quality video compression. Released in 2018, it's now widely deployed across browsers and streaming platforms, and also powers the AVIF image format. The next generation, AV2, promises even better compression and new features while maintaining the open, accessible approach.

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