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Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for people who want to record, edit, mix and master audio and MIDI projects. When you need complete control over your tools, when the limitations of other designs get in the way, when you plan to spend hours or days working on a session, Ardour is there to make things work the way you want them to.

Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge. Easy to install and low maintenance, it just does the job.

Forgejo v9.0 is the first version to be released under a copyleft license, after a year of discussions. Among the motivations for this change is the realization that a pattern emerged over the years, exemplified by Redis, CockroachDB, Terraform and many others. They turned proprietary because people chose their own financial gain over the interest of the general public. Forgejo admins no longer have to worry about this sword of Damocles: relicensing it as a proprietary software is not allowed.

The removal of the go-git backend is part of a larger effort to make Forgejo easier to maintain, more robust and even smaller than it already is (~100MB). When presented with go-git as an alternative to Git, a Forgejo admin may overlook that it has less features and a history of corrupting repositories. It would have been possible to work on documentation and new tests to ensure administrators do not run into these pitfalls, but the effort would have been out of proportion compared to the benefits it provides.

The Forgejo localization community was created early 2024 with the ambitious goal of gaining enough momentum to sustain a long term effort. A daunting task considering there are over 5,000 strings to translate, verify and improve. There has been many calls for help in the past and the community keeps growing steadily. Fortunately, the translation hackathon (translathon) organized by Codeberg in October was exceptional. It attracted an unprecedented number of participants who improved or created thousands of translations.

This full packed release comes with three new staging protocols:

• system bell - allowing e.g. terminal emulators to hand off system bell alerts to the compositor for among other things accessibility purposes

• fifo - for implementing first in first out surface content update behavior

• commit timing - for adding time constraints to surface content update

Other than this, the presentation timing protocol protocol got a version minor bump describing how to deal with variable refresh rate.

Other protocols saw the regular clarifications and bug fixes, and some deprecated events is now properly indicated as such in the XML. Please see individual commits for details.

On Thursday, the Bundestag's Budget Committee decided to increase the funding for the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) with the majority of the parliamentary groups in the traffic light coalition. A total of almost 29 million euros is now available for 2025. This is around 4 million euros or 15 per cent more than initially planned by the Federal Cabinet. Almost 3.4 million euros of this is directly attributable to the STF, whose budget for 2025 was initially set at 15 million euros.

590,000 more than planned will also flow into the ‘Bug Resilience Programme’ coordinated by the STF, for which a total of 2 million euros will now be available in 2025. It is intended to ensure that security vulnerabilities in software are not only found, but also actually fixed. In total, the STF will end up with around 19 million euros, compared to just 17 million in 2024.

The SFT plays a central role in the development of open source software as a basic digital technology. Among other things, the STF managers organised competitions to promote active collaboration on open source infrastructures. The government has so far disappointed free software advocates

‘These investments make us less dependent on large providers, more resilient to digital crises and promote Germany's digital sovereignty,’ emphasised Anna Kassautzki, digital policy rapporteur for the SPD parliamentary group. Maik Außendorf, digital policy spokesperson for the Greens, emphasised that Germany is thus taking on a ‘pioneering role in open source’

The Open Source Business Alliance (OSB) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) had expressed their disappointment with the course taken by the Ampel in 2022. In its coalition agreement, the government had explicitly emphasised the importance of open standards and interfaces as well as open source for digital sovereignty. However, there are no concrete plans for an alternative hyperscaler, especially for cloud projects.

Instead, dependencies on Microsoft, for example, would be further cemented. The federal government's licence costs for proprietary software providers have recently reached a high level in the billions. The OSB Alliance has just called for the administration to switch its IT completely to open source.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)