2026-01-09 01:56:30
The Fedora Project has announced the results of the Fedora 43 election cycle. Five seats were open on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), and the winners are Kevin Fenzi, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Timothée Ravier, Dave Cantrell, and Máirín Duffy.
2026-01-09 00:06:38
Gentoo Linux has published a 2025 project retrospective that looks at how the community has evolved, changes to the distribution, infrastructure, and finances for the Gentoo Foundation.
Gentoo currently consists of 31663 ebuilds for 19174 different packages. For amd64 (x86-64), there are 89 GBytes of binary packages available on the mirrors. Gentoo each week builds 154 distinct installation stages for different processor architectures and system configurations, with an overwhelming part of these fully up-to-date.
The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2025, with a slight decrease from 123942 to 112927. The number of commits by external contributors was 9396, now across 377 unique external authors.
2026-01-08 23:36:37
The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) is suing VIZIO over smart TVs that include software licensed under the GPL and LGPL (including the Linux kernel, FFmpeg, systemd, and others). VIZIO didn't provide the source code along with the device, and on request they only provided some of it. Unlike a typical lawsuit about enforcing the GPL, the SFC isn't suing as a copyright holder; it's suing as a normal owner of the TV in question. This approach opens some important legal questions, and after years of pre-trial maneuvering (most recently resulting in a ruling related to signing keys that is the subject of a separate article), we might finally obtain some answers when the case goes to trial on January 12. As things stand, it seems likely that the judge in the case will rule that that the GPL-enforcement lawsuits can be a matter of contract law, not just copyright law, which would be a major change to how GPL enforcement works.
2026-01-08 23:36:29
On December 24 2025, Linus Torvalds posted a strongly worded message celebrating a ruling in the ongoing GPL-compliance lawsuit filed against VIZIO by the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). This case and Torvalds's response have put a spotlight on an old debate over the extent to which the source-code requirements of the GNU General Public License (version 2) extend to keys and other data needed to successfully install modified software on a device. It is worth looking at whether this requirement exists, the subtleties in interpretation that cloud the issue, and the extent to which, if any, the SFC is demanding that information.
2026-01-08 23:06:56
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.18.4 and 6.12.64 stable kernels. As always, each contains important fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.
2026-01-08 22:52:34
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gcc-toolset-14-binutils, gcc-toolset-15-binutils, httpd, kernel, libpng, mariadb, mingw-libpng, poppler, python3.12, and ruby:3.3), Debian (foomuuri and libsodium), Fedora (python-pdfminer and wget2), Oracle (audiofile, bind, gcc-toolset-15-binutils, libpng, mariadb, mariadb10.11, mariadb:10.11, mariadb:10.5, mingw-libpng, poppler, and python3.12), Red Hat (git-lfs, kernel, libpng, libpq, mariadb:10.3, osbuild-composer, postgresql, postgresql:13, and postgresql:15), Slackware (curl), SUSE (c-ares-devel, capstone, curl, gpsd, ImageMagick, libpcap, log4j, python311-filelock, and python314), and Ubuntu (libcaca, libxslt, and net-snmp).