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Tech News
Following a proof-of-concept with 172 employees, Switzerland's Federal Council has expanded testing of the German open-source suite openDesk to 3,000 government workstations, about 7% of the federal workforce. The pilot, running alongside Microsoft 365, aims for full migration by end of 2027, while the country's Cyber Command plans to fully replace Microsoft 365 with openDesk by October 2026.
A Tinybird engineer who has operated ClickHouse clusters since version 18.4 nearly six years ago published a detailed retrospective on running the database at petabyte scale. The post walks through the standard shard-and-replica architecture ClickHouse recommends and highlights the operational pitfalls that only surface once a cluster is running in production. Tinybird notes it is an independent contributor to the open-source project and unaffiliated with ClickHouse, Inc.
The Swiss Federal Chancellery is spending CHF 9 million to test the openDesk open-source suite as a replacement for Microsoft 365 across 3,000 federal employees, roughly 7% of the workforce, with migration targeted for completion by end of 2027. The pilot follows a proof-of-concept with 172 employees that rated document editing and email positively but flagged limitations in large-scale video conferencing, and it will run alongside Microsoft 365 rather than replace it immediately.
D2, previously funded as an open-core project by a for-profit company that developed a closed-source IDE and proprietary layout algorithm, is transitioning to independent non-profit status under Hack Club's fiscal sponsorship as the parent company shuts down. Creator Alex will continue maintaining D2 but with reduced time commitment, and is seeking new maintainers who could be paid through donation-funded contracts.
Nitter and XCancel, alternative front-ends for viewing X (formerly Twitter) content, have resumed operating after briefly going offline. The shutdown followed cease-and-desist letters X Corp. sent on 24 August 2026 demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and its code repository.
A developer released Kadō, a free and open-source (MIT license) habit tracker for iPhone and iPad built entirely with native Apple technologies like SwiftUI and SwiftData. Instead of a binary streak counter, it calculates a non-binary habit score using an exponential moving average, an approach borrowed from Android's Loop Habit Tracker, so a single missed day doesn't erase progress. The app requires no account, has no subscription or telemetry, stores data locally, and offers optional iCloud sync plus lossless JSON/CSV export.
Chrono is a free, open-source Android alarm and clock app that offers more customization than Google's or Samsung's default Clock apps, including dark mode, Material styling, alarm tagging, and time-of-day icons. It isn't listed on the Google Play Store, so users must sideload it manually to install and update it.
A developer has launched Cloud in a Bottle, an open-source personal cloud platform that packages containerized apps with unified authentication and a simplified interface, aiming to let anyone run their own private cloud without sysadmin expertise. The creator argues existing self-hosting tools like Sandstorm, Nextcloud, YunoHost, and Coolify all fall short due to abandonment, poor security isolation, or fragmented app management. Cloud in a Bottle is positioned as an alternative that treats self-hosting like using a smartphone rather than managing a server.
The Ladybird browser project shipped a major August update that adds video streaming support for Twitch and more YouTube formats through expanded Media Source Extensions codec support, plus CSS scroll snap, JavaScript debugging tools in DevTools, pausable downloads, and session restore. The team also shifted focus toward performance, introducing a new style engine, layout caching, off-main-thread CSS animations, and moving CSS parsing and painting pipelines to Rust for safety.
A developer released an open-source bike computer that uses an eInk display and can record rides and navigate preloaded routes entirely on its own, without needing a paired phone. The companion app is used only to prepare routes or transfer data before a ride, not for ongoing operation.
Nvidia has confirmed it will acquire Hugging Face, the New York startup behind the leading platform for open-source AI models, in a deal valued at $12.9 billion. CEO Jensen Huang said the price reflected competition from other bidders, making it Nvidia's second-largest acquisition after its $20 billion purchase of Groq's assets. Hugging Face hosts millions of models and datasets used by over 200,000 companies and 18 million developers.
Hugging Face started as a teen chatbot app before pivoting to become a leading hub for open-source AI models and tools. Nvidia has now placed a $13 billion valuation bet on the company, underscoring its shift from novelty app to core AI infrastructure player.