Open Source Weekly #5
Welcome for your weekly dose of inspiring open source projects!
Open source is more than ever relevant in these tough times and the world is slowly discovering that centralization and closed ecosystems literally kill people 😷
Projects
Drop-in Minimal CSS
This is THE revelation of the week. We can code websites without using HTML classes by simply styling native HTML elements like nav, footer, main... This is really great because then we can completely change the theme of websites by simply changing the stylesheet. No CSS framework lock-in!
Sourcehut (AGPL v3.0)
This suite of open source tools is the software development platform you've been waiting for. We've taken the wisdom of the most successful open-source communities and turned it into a platform of efficient engineering tools.
It’s like GitLab, but 100% open source and with a focus on efficiency. Today, the different tools are separate webapps but the creators are working on an unified version which looks really great: Sourcehut hub.
Zulip (Apache v2.0)
Zulip is an open source communication tool which is a mix between mailing lists and Slack, with an innovative interface designed to be more productive and less disturbed by a constant flux of messages.
Jitsi Meet (Apache 2.0)
Jitsi Meet is a fully encrypted, 100% open source video conferencing solution that you can use all day, every day, for free with no account needed.
You can use it to replace Zoom. Zoom is malware, I mean literally. As a security enthusiast I’ve never seen such nasty software sold as legit.
Huginn (MIT)
Huggin is an automation tool. Think of it as a hackable version of IFTTT or Zapier on your own server. You always know who has your data. You do.
I used it some time ago to scrap news sites and create automatically curated newsletters for myself. Unfortunately the quality of the curation was not good enough and this is one of the reasons why I created OpenSourceWeekly :)
Hardware
The Open Book (source: MIT, BSD, Expat, schematics: CC-BY-SA)
As a society, we need an open source device for reading. Books are among the most important documents of our culture, yet the most popular and widespread devices we have for reading are closed devices, parts of giant closed platforms whose owners' interests are not aligned with readers'.
OpenLung BVM Ventilator (GPL v3.0)
An [IN PROGRESS] open source, low resource, quick deployment ventilator design that utilizes a bag valve mask (BVM or Ambu-bag) as a core component. It’s an open collaboration with https://opensourceventilator.ie.
Articles
Open Source Textbooks Save Students $1 Billion
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that from 1977 to 2015 the cost of textbooks rose over three times the rate of inflation, totaling a 1,041% increase.
"There are no weeds, and no worthless men. There are only bad farmers.", Victor Hugo
How I maintain FOSS projects
Maintaining open source projects is really not an easy job (if we can call it a job, the majority of people are not paid to do it). In this article, the author explains how he successfully build communities around his projects and how these integrate with the rest of the open source ecosystem.
My FOSS Story
The stories, disappointments and happy moments of a famous open source developer: Andrew Gallant (a.k.a. burntsushi).
Security
A history of end-to-end encryption and the death of PGP
Secure communication is one of the pillars of democracy (or what we call democracy). Here is the story of secure digital text communication, from emails to today’s encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Matrix.
Stay safe ✌️
Sylvain
