Lately most of my posts have been pretty dour. Let's set that aside for some positive stuff. This one's about how it's still possible -- in spite of everything going on -- to live the FOSS Academic Lifestyle Dream.

LibreOffice: No AI is A-OK

As I've said many times, LibreOffice -- particularly Writer -- has been a big part of my FOSS-based academic work for a long, long time. What I value about it:

• It works the same every time, with no interface changes
• It integrates with Zotero
• ODT files are increasingly recognized and common
• It's governed by a not-for-profit organization

And now I have one more thing to love: no generative AI integration (unless I want it, which I never will).

LibreOffice has recently had a bit of public relations coup by declaring that its latest version, 26.8, is free of generative AI. In a follow-up post, they noted that the project does not "reject artificial intelligence out of hand, but an office suite used by tens of millions of people... will not add a feature to its default configuration until that feature can be delivered under the conditions defined by the project in accordance with its principles." Those principles include no dependence upon a single source, the data must stay on the machine, and the use of generative AI must be entirely dictated by the end user, not the software. They conclude, "there is no integration that meets all the requirements and that could be deployed, enabled by default, and supported throughout the entire lifecycle of a release."

The result of this is record-breaking downloads of the office suite.

This is such good news. The more people using LibreOffice, the more potential contributors to bug-hunting, patches, and code contributions. And the more people using it means more adoption of the Open Document formats, making interoperability with my colleagues suffering with Microsoft Word. It may even help solve the copyediting problem I identified in an earlier post -- perhaps some publishers could integrate LibreOffice Writer into their workflows instead of Word.

Also in that press release, they note that 26.8 will include a banner showing that it's funded by donations. I welcome such a change -- multiple other FOSS organizations have done such gentle solicitations for donations, and it has resulted in increases in donations. KDE, for example, started asking directly for donations a few years ago, and if you look at their finances, donations are way, way up. I would expect the same for the Document Foundation.

Canadian Digital Sovereignty

A few months ago, I started moving my personal and professional IT infrastructure away from Digital Ocean to a Canadian-run, academic cloud host. The big move was shifting my Nextcloud over, which went relatively smoothly.

At the time, I wrote,

I did this migration to move away from Digital Ocean, not because I don't like Digital Ocean -- I've been using their services for years, and I have paid for it with research funds because it has been central infrastructure for my work.... I'm leaving Digital Ocean because it is a US-based company. I'm now in Canada. That means I'm paying Digital Ocean with Canadian public money, sending it to a US-based company. That does not sit right with me.

While Nextcloud was moved, I still had some vestigial Digital Ocean-based services.

But no more. Digital Ocean has thrown significant financial support to Omarchy, a flavor of Linux that leans heavily on generative AI. I leave it to others to explain the problems, or you can go to the source itself. The TL;DR version is that Omarchy is run by a racist, who's been known to be racist for years now, and yet Digital Ocean is throwing money at Omarchy. Not to mention the creator of Omarchy is also quite wealthy and could self-fund the project.

If you read my latest book, you will see I have no tolerance for racists, transphobes, and fascists. So that lit a bit of a fire under me to move the last vestiges of my infrastructure from Digital Ocean to another place.

This is a good news post, and the good news is: in the FOSS world, it's easy to move things if you put in the work.

Up until a few days ago, I was running a Wireguard node and a Pi-Hole installation on Digital Ocean. Now they're on a Canadian-owned and operated service. (I'm refraining from saying the specifc vendor until I'm confident I can publicly recommend them, but DM me on Mastodon if you want to chat about the vendor.)

Moving a Pi-hole is super easy: I used the Teleporter tool to create a backup -- here's someone's post explaining how this works. I created the new Pi-hole installation, imported the backup file, and in seconds my Pi-hole was migrated. My ad-blocking infrastructure has been maintained.

Moving Wireguard is surprisingly easy: copy the keys and the config file to a new installation, point peers at it, and off you go. Since the Pi-hole was a node on the network, handling DNS and blocking ads and other bad traffic, the Wireguard and Pi-hole migrations went hand-in-hand. With Wireguard, my ad-blocking is available on all my devices, as well as those of my family -- anywhere in the world.

And I also have a router with OpenWRT, which supports Wireguard, so my home wi-fi network also only uses my Pi-hole for DNS (after a bit of firewall work). No DNS requests are going to my ISP. This helps mitigate problems like smart TV spying, and since I have a Roku TV, that's definitely a concern of mine.

While my personal, ad-blocking network has global reach, all of this is running in Canada, with nothing touching US infrastructure.

Zotero Still Rockin'

Zotero has been getting a lot more updates. While this change in update cadence has made me a bit nervous, so far, so good. In fact, since Zotero 8 was released, my workflow with Zotero has increased. I am, once again, using Zotero for nearly all my academic notes. For a while, I was using Zettlr for this, but Zotero's support of Markdown-style formatting, easy tagging and search, and standalone notetaking interface have shifted me back.

My Zotero library has grown to ~35K sources, and yet the mighty Zotero is handling it all quite well.

It's all still possible

So, yes, a lot of bad news in the world lately. But the fundamental aspects of FOSS still appeal to me: the abiliity to open things up, tinker with them, shift them around, control where the data goes, and keep my workflow as I wish... I can still do all this.

And I am, yet again, writing another book using these tools -- a clear indication that in spite of all the madness in tech, one can still get things done in an ethical, autonomous way.