This Week in Open Source for July 25, 2025
A look around the world of open source
byWe hope everyone is having a good summer. The world of open source is, with more events and news that caught our attention.
Upcoming Events
- July 31-August 3: FOSSY (Free and Open Source Software Yearly) will be held in Portland, Oregon and is focused on the creation and impact of free and open source software, uplifting contributors of all experience.
- August 14-16: Open Source Festival 2025 (OSCAFest'25) is happening in Lagos, Nigeria. It uses community to help integrate the act of open source contribution to African developers whilst strongly advocating the movement of free and open source software.
- August 25-27: Open Source Summit Europe (OSSEU) is happening in Amsterdam, Netherlands. It is the premier event for the open source community to collaborate, share information, solve problems, and gain knowledge, furthering open source innovation and ensuring a sustainable open source ecosystem. Many Googlers will be there giving talks along with so many others.
Open Source Reads and Links
- [Press Release] Tech Veterans Anne Bertucio and Vinay Rao Join ROOST - A bit of a bittersweet post as our recent, now former Head of Open Source Programs Office, Anne Bertucio, joins ROOST as COO and the previous Head of Safeguards at Anthropic, Vinay Rao, joins as CTO.
- [Article] An open-source SDK for finding dead code - Maintaining dead code is a waste of resources. So, having good tools for finding dead code in your applications is important. The open sourcing of Reaper for iOS and Android applications might be a worthwhile part of your toolbelt.
- [Blog] Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft - Choosing the right license for your open source projects is a very personal choice. A choice that is worth revisiting once in a while to see if your values have shifted and if there are new ideas for what might constitute free software that better align with those new values.
- [Blog] Announcing FOKS: The Federated Open Key Service - Security and authentication are key to the tech world and open source is a good way to get many eyes on the problems to find solutions. A new federated open key service, FOKS, built from the ground up and based on concepts while working with Keybase is available now.
- [Article] Kubernetes Surges in Enterprise, But What Can Take It Mainstream? - Different teams in the development work streams have their own ideas about the tech stack. Many teams using Kubernetes have made it quite popular for use in enterprise work, but some are still using systems that have been tried and tested in their own domains. What work needs to be done to get all teams on-board with using Kubernetes?
- [Blog] Death by a thousand slops - The lead maintainer for the open source project, curl, continues to blog on where low-quality recommendations to curl's Bug Bounty program are increasing the work for the security team.
- [Article] From A2A to MCP, a look at the protocols that might one day help AI automate you out of a job - Click-bait headline aside, a good overview of where these protocols are at, what they do, and a certain view on whether that's useful or not. We have our opinions, but we are probably biased ;)
- [Article] How the Free Software Foundation battles the LLM bots - There are many bots out there crawling the web. In the early days of search, the solution was the robots.txt files and bots crawling the web slow enough for the systems to continue to run smoothly. However, many LLM bots are ignoring robots.txt, being greedy with site resources, and that's on top of other bot traffic to deal with. Looking at how a large organization approaches this current trend has some great shared knowledge.
What exciting open source events and news are you hearing about? Let us know on our @GoogleOSS X account.