Linux and open source covers kernel releases and the projects the rest of the stack depends on, from the mailing list thread or the commit.
Linux & open source
On October 23, 2026, Flathub made its Discourse forum read only and pointed people to Matrix and issue trackers. Days later, Discord announced it will put public server messages into web search. Together they show what a forum does that a chat room has never done well.
Linux & open source
On November 7, 2026, Asahi Linux said it is moving every repository to GPL v2 or later. Asahi alleges that unreleased code was lifted from personal forks and that some of it was rewritten with LLM help to hide its origin. The report names no one, and the legal and community questions are still open.
Linux & open source
A progress bar that timed the copy into memory, while the stick lagged far behind, corrupted files for anyone who trusted it and pulled the stick. The fix took 4 merge requests and a Linux call so sharp its own manual calls it extremely dangerous.
Linux & open source
The kernel just took in nearly 20,000 commits in one cycle, a record. The reason is the same force straining its maintainers, AI. The release is the clearest look yet at what that help gives and what it costs.
Linux & open source
Intel and HP spent roughly $10 billion building Itanium, the chip that was supposed to replace x86 forever. Analysts projected $38 billion in sales by 2001. In Linux 6.7, released in January 2024, the kernel deleted about 65,000 lines of Itanium support in one go, because nobody was left to maintain it. I went through why the most expensive bet in CPU history ended as a pile of deletions, and what it taught Linus Torvalds about anyone who promises the future needs a clean break.
Linux & open source
For 30 years the reason you could not simply switch to Linux was the software. Photoshop, Office, the apps you needed and the file formats they locked you into. In October 2026 a single developer used Claude Code to rebuild Adobe’s core creative apps in Rust and gave them away. I think the moat that protected proprietary software just sprang a leak, and the legal fight over whether that is allowed is going to be the real story.
Linux & open source
Going into the 1990s, a serious enterprise server meant a proprietary UNIX system running on custom RISC silicon, and it cost a fortune. By 2005 most of that market had been eaten by cheap Intel boxes running either Windows or Linux. I went back through how that happened, because it is one of the cleanest examples in computing history of a business model getting beaten on economics while its technology stayed ahead.
Linux & open source
On 10 August 2026 a US appeals court threw out the last live appeal in a legal fight that started with a forgotten 1998 UNIX project, ran through a $5 billion lawsuit, a bankruptcy, an asset sale, and a fresh filing in 2021. For 23 years a private company kept claiming it owned code sitting inside the Linux kernel. I went through the whole saga, because it is the closest the open source world ever came to a genuine extinction event, and because the thing that finally killed it was not a ruling on who was right.
Linux & open source
In October 2026, months after buying Altair for $10.6 billion, Siemens retired the OpenRadioss website and deleted its GitHub repository, pointing users to a paid product. The code was under the AGPL, so within days a Rocky Linux founder had forked it into a new project called OpenCourant. I went through what happened, why deleting the repo was the self defeating part, and what the license actually guaranteed.
Linux & open source
For almost 20 years, “macOS is certified Unix” was a real bragging right. I dug into what that certification actually required, and the honest answer is that no Mac anyone uses has ever met it. Here is what disappeared from the Open Group’s list in October 2026, and why it matters less than the headlines suggest.