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QuestDB, the open-source time-series database company, posted a job listing for a Pre-Sales Engineer based in North America. The role covers technical validation throughout the sales cycle for its Enterprise product. QuestDB says its open-source repository has passed 17,000 GitHub stars and it recently won Best Trading Analytics Platform at the TradingTech Summit Europe.
The Una Watch, previously offered for $350 during its Kickstarter campaign, is now priced at $199. It features a 1.2-inch MIP LCD display, up to 10 days of battery life, and an open-source design covering its SDK, housing, and circuit boards, allowing users to repair or modify it themselves.
Cryptomator is an open-source tool that creates encrypted vaults on a user's device, encrypting individual files and their filenames with AES-256 before they sync to services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, pCloud, Nextcloud and ownCloud. It also works offline for local drives, USB storage and network folders, and has apps for Android and iOS. Users can create a recovery key to reset a lost vault password, since Cryptomator itself cannot decrypt files or recover passwords.
Xiaomi has released MiMo-V2.6 Pro and a lighter Flash variant as open-weight omnimodal AI models handling text, images, video and code. The company says Pro tops open-source rankings on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, trailing only closed models like Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and it showcased a feature called Vibe World that turns prompts into interactive 3D games, Blender assets or robotic arm controls.
As KDE nears its 30th anniversary, contributor Kevin Ottens published community data showing developer participation has climbed back to around 140 people on average, up from a low of about 110 in 2017. Commit activity has also surged, with 2023 setting an all-time weekly record, and the KDE Plasma desktop project nearly doubling its average team size following the 2020 move to GitLab.
A university research lab is publishing a week-long series of open-source releases instead of a traditional paper, arguing that AI agents have made individual research projects fast and cheap, which undermines the value of isolated publications. The author challenges both student pessimism about job prospects and PhD students' rush to join frontier AI labs, claiming academia is positioned for a resurgence precisely because of its resource constraints.
X announced it will now notify users when their posts or accounts have had visibility limited because the company complied with a government's legal demand. This builds on the 'Under the Hood' transparency feature launched in August, letting users with at least 10 monthly posts download a data file showing labels, downranking, and which country requested the restriction.
GDQuest, a game development education group, has published a free tutorial teaching newcomers how to write their first shader in the Godot 4 engine. The lesson is part of the organization's broader library of open-source learning resources for game developers.
Heretic is a new tool designed to remove safety restrictions and refusal behaviors from language models, allowing them to follow user instructions without the typical content filters. It targets the alignment layers that model developers add to prevent certain outputs, effectively 'uncensoring' these systems for users who run them.
A widely shared essay contends that open-source software will never be reliably funded because it behaves like the 'dove' strategy in an evolutionary game theory model, always losing ground to proprietary 'hawk' competitors who withhold code for profit. The author, after years of mulling the problem, proposes creating registries that could compel companies benefiting from free software to pay into it, rather than relying on voluntary donations or goodwill.
Pirate Face is a new decentralized, peer-to-peer network that converts open-source AI models from Hugging Face into checksum-verified torrents, distributed across a global swarm of seeders. The system aims to keep open models permanently accessible even if their original host removes them. Users can browse and download without an account, though creators can claim handles and verify their identity to earn a badge and prevent impersonation.
The European Commission unveiled a plan to bar children under 13 from social media, allowing parent-supervised accounts for ages 13 to 15. To enforce this, Brussels has built its own free, open-source age-verification app, being piloted in Cyprus, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy and Spain, with full EU rollout expected by end of 2026.