Boris Hinzer from Erkelenz started it in November 2025, and it’s addressed to the petitions committee of the Bundestag. Today the counter shows 15,884 signatures, 14,866 of which count toward the quorum in Germany. It takes 30,000. In other words, roughly half is still missing, and time is running out: the petition closes on November 23, 2026, in just under three weeks.

What the petition calls for

The demand is quickly explained: open source work should be recognized as volunteering for the common good, on equal footing with club work, youth work or the rescue services. It starts from a contradiction. Even the German government’s coalition agreement names open source as a building block for digital sovereignty. Yet the people who build, maintain and document this software in their spare time get nothing for it. The cooperative WECHANGE put it in a nutshell in its interview with Boris:

The volunteers who build it every day don’t even legally count as volunteers.

WECHANGE, interview with Boris Hinzer (translated)

The petition gives six reasons. First, open source demonstrably serves the common good: internet protocols, security libraries, health IT and education technology rest to a large extent on voluntary contributions. Second, most of the development, maintenance and documentation happens unpaid in people’s free time, much like the work in a non-profit association, just digital. Third, public authorities, schools and companies all depend on it.

Vulnerabilities like Heartbleed and Log4Shell showed just how much: millions of users benefit, while often only a handful of volunteers carry the responsibility. Fourth, recognition would create legal clarity. Fifth, volunteers do work that companies would otherwise have to buy at high hourly rates. And sixth, other countries already support free software with tax breaks and dedicated programs, so Germany risks falling behind.

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

With this line, Eric S. Raymond explained in the late nineties why open code should be more secure: if enough people look at it, every bug gets spotted. Heartbleed showed the catch, because the flaw sat unnoticed in OpenSSL for about two years. Randall Munroe immortalized this in the xkcd comic Dependency: all of modern digital infrastructure balances on one tiny block kept alive for years by one person in Nebraska, without much thanks.

The fourth point is the most concrete. With recognition, projects could pay tax-free expense allowances, just like sports clubs do for their coaches and volunteers. Non-profit projects would find it easier to get charitable status under German tax law. Contributors would be better protected against liability, similar to the board members of registered associations. And projects could reimburse costs and issue donation receipts on solid legal ground.

Why Boris started the petition

Boris runs a web agency in Mönchengladbach and has been active in the TYPO3 community for about 20 years, since 2023 as volunteer vice president of the TYPO3 Association. In a long interview with WECHANGE (in German), he explains that he twice asked a public radio station to mention open source people on Germany’s Volunteer Day on December 5. He never got a reply.

So he started a petition instead. He sums up his core argument in a line I like a lot: open source doesn’t live off “read-only”, it lives off taking part. Free software runs in ticket machines, game consoles and behind every streaming service, mostly without anyone noticing. The big tech companies make a fortune with it, yet contribute comparatively little to its development and funding.

If you’d rather listen than read, Linux Guides explains in a video (in German) what the petition is about and why open source needs your help:

The video is only loaded from YouTube after you click.

More than just code

When people think of open source, they picture developers reviewing pull requests late at night. But a whole landscape of initiatives has grown up around it that brings free software to people. DI.DAY, launched at 39C3 by the Chaos Computer Club, author Marc-Uwe Kling and many others, invites you to swap one big tech service for a free alternative on the first Sunday of every month.

Ready-made “switching recipes” help with the move, from Firefox instead of Chrome and OpenStreetMap instead of Google Maps all the way to Linux instead of Windows. At repair cafés, volunteers don’t just fix toasters and bikes. Since Windows 10 reached its end of support, many also install Linux as part of the End of 10 campaign on computers that would otherwise have ended up at the recycling center. That saves money, e-waste and quite a few nerves.

Then there are coding clubs like CoderDojo or Germany’s Jugend hackt, where kids and teenagers use free tools to write their first programs, build robots or tinker with games. And there are courses for seniors, where volunteers patiently explain how to start a video call with the grandkids, set up a smartphone or spot a phishing email. In Germany, networks like Digital-Kompass support such offers. Without these people, many would simply be left behind by digitalization.

The odd part: helping out at a repair café can often already count as volunteering at a registered non-profit association today. The people who maintain the Linux that ends up on those old computers, or who translate the learning app for the coding club, do their work as a private pastime in the eyes of the law. Yet one depends directly on the other: without the software, there’d be nothing to install.

What I know from my own articles

I run into this topic here on the blog all the time. Just in October, I wrote about Javad Rahmatzadeh’s call for help. He reviews the extensions on extensions.gnome.org, often 4 to 10 hours a day and unpaid, while monthly donations are close to zero. Without his work, there’d be no reviewed GNOME extensions, and by his own account Javad is close to burning out.

It’s a similar story with DDNSS.de: Robert Niedziela has run the free DynDNS service since 2013, countless home servers rely on it, and now he’s looking for a successor. Or take the SELFHTML wiki, where generations of German web developers learned HTML. It had to go offline because of the PHP2Shell vulnerabilities until the team moved it to a new server, jumping 19 MediaWiki versions in four days.

When I launched PlanetFOSS, I also noticed how many of its sources come from people who write their articles in their free time. That’s why blogs can now add a link to their donation page there. And to be honest, I know that side myself: before this blog existed, I wrote around 38,000 posts as “Chrissss” in the forum of ubuntuusers.de, the big German Ubuntu community, and maintained wiki articles.

My take

Sure, there’s a catch, and critics in the petition’s debate point it out too: a large share of open source contributions comes from paid developers or freelancers. Without a clear line, a volunteer allowance could turn into a tax loophole. I agree, and drawing that line won’t be easy. But in my view, that’s a job for the lawmakers, not a reason to reject the recognition altogether.

Sports clubs manage the distinction just fine, after all: the pro coach gets a salary, the youth coach on Saturday morning gets the volunteer allowance. Why shouldn’t that work for a maintainer who patches security holes in a library after work? The petition doesn’t ask the state to pay for every line of code. It asks for the same rules that have long applied to other kinds of volunteering.

Sign and share the petition

So there are about 15,000 signatures from Germany still missing by November 23. That sounds like a lot, but it’s doable: if everyone who has signed convinces just two more people, the quorum is reached. Please tell people who have nothing to do with Linux, too. They use the software this is all about every single day anyway.

If you don’t live in Germany, you can still sign and share it, even though only signatures from Germany count toward the quorum. Anyone who wants to promote it at their club, company or university can download a tear-off flyer with a QR code as a PDF from the petition page and put it up. Have you signed yet, and do you know other initiatives that wouldn’t exist without volunteers?

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At the same time, the site collects more than 600 posts a week from over a hundred sources. If you don’t drop by every day, it’s easy to lose track of what actually mattered. That’s exactly what the new weekly review is for. PlanetFOSS also posts on Bluesky now, next to Mastodon, and the search can finally filter and page through results.

The week as a small magazine

Every Monday, PlanetFOSS sums up the past week on a page of its own. At the top, a few sentences give you the numbers of the week, along with key figures for posts, sources, supernovas and videos. In week 44, 115 sources published 659 posts, seven percent more than the week before. These sentences come from fixed templates and the numbers; no AI writes anything here.

Next comes the cover story, the news that most sources covered. In week 44, that was the return of Ubuntu Core Desktop, which twelve sources wrote about. Next to it, you see the headlines of the other reports, for example from It’s FOSS, GamingOnLinux or Linux-Magazin. After that come the supernovas of the week with an image and a quote, among them Ghostty 1.4 and KDE Plasma 6.8.

Further down, the review lists the other big stories, new releases that several sources wrote about, and the most noticed post in each section. In “The week in numbers”, you see which day was busiest and which sources were the most prolific; Phoronix, for example, came to 75 posts. On top of that, there are the videos of the week, the posts you starred, and an archive.

You’ll find the review at planetfoss.net/en/weekly/, and from Monday to Wednesday a banner on the front page points to it as well. If you’d rather use a feed reader, subscribe to the review’s own RSS feed. And if you follow PlanetFOSS on Mastodon or Bluesky, the review lands in your timeline as a post on Monday mornings anyway. Its link takes you straight to the matching issue.

PlanetFOSS is now on Bluesky too

Until now, PlanetFOSS was only on Mastodon when it came to social networks. Now the site also posts on Bluesky, under the handle @planetfoss.net. The account sends out every supernova about half an hour after it ignites, meaning as soon as many sources cover the same topic at once, and the weekly review on Mondays. As on Mastodon, the posts are in English and come with a link card and an image.

So your timeline doesn’t overflow, there’s a brake: at most two posts in six hours, and the same topic comes back no sooner than a week later. Bluesky marks the account as automated, and here too the texts come from fixed templates. Mastodon, Bluesky and all RSS feeds now sit together in the PlanetFOSS header under the new Follow PlanetFOSS menu.

Search with filters

Until now, the search was rather crude: it showed at most 60 results, with no way to page through them. Now you can narrow the results down to the last 7 days, the last 30 days or the last year and limit them to one section. You can sort them by best match or newest first. PlanetFOSS spreads up to 150 results across pages of 30 posts each.

This comes in handy when you only want to know what has happened lately with a topic, without digging through old news. A Wayland search over the last 30 days, for example, returns 39 results in the English view, with the newest at the top. With a section as a filter, you can also narrow things down to, say, only desktop or self-hosting news.

Hiding sources and sections

Not every source interests everyone, and if you don’t care about games, you may not want to see Steam news at all. That’s why every source and section page now has a Hide source or Hide section button, and the same switch is in the Display menu at the top right. The posts then disappear from the front page and all lists, and a short note at the top tells you how many there were.

You don’t need an account for this. PlanetFOSS only remembers your choice in your browser, without any cookie, so you’ll have to make it again on your phone. Everything you’ve hidden is listed in the solar system, where a click on show brings it back. There you’ll also find the address of a personal RSS feed that leaves out the same sources and sections.

All of this is available on planetfoss.net right now, and from now on the weekly review comes out every Monday. With hiding in particular, I’m curious what you’d like to get rid of, because your choice stays in your browser and never reaches me. What else are you missing on PlanetFOSS? Let me know in the comments or by email at info@planetfoss.net.

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But a click alone doesn’t pay any bills. Behind many sources are people who write their articles in their spare time, or small newsrooms that live on subscriptions, donations and ads. Lots of readers block the ads, though, and if you find an article through an aggregator, you usually never even see the blog’s donation page. A new link on PlanetFOSS is meant to close that gap.

A heart for the source

Starting today, blogs, magazines and publishers can add a link to their subscription or donation page on PlanetFOSS. It appears on their source page as a box of its own, “Support …”, right below the header, complete with a Support button. One click takes you straight to the site owner’s page. PlanetFOSS doesn’t sit in between and doesn’t earn a cent from it; it’s just a plain old link.

In the solar system, the directory of all sources, these sites also get a small heart. On top of that, there’s a separate Support tab that lists only the sources that have added such a link. So if you want to give something back to a blog or magazine you read regularly, you’ll find the right page there with a single click instead of having to hunt for it.

Two sources are on board from day one. GNU/Linux.ch (in German) points to its support page, and Linux und Ich got its heart as well: here the link leads to “Buy me a coffee”. Sure, putting my own blog in first has a certain aftertaste. But somebody had to try out the feature, and in my case I at least knew for sure where the link was supposed to go.

What PlanetFOSS promises publishers

PlanetFOSS already has a few fixed rules for publishers and site owners. Every card links directly to your article, with no framing and no copy. It only takes what your site itself provides for previews, and PlanetFOSS automatically honors settings like noindex or max-snippet in your meta robots tags. For publishers, the teaser is also capped at 200 characters.

Then there’s reach: on request, I’ll tell you how many readers the website sent your way in a month. Only daily totals are counted, with no data about the readers themselves. All of these promises are collected on the About PlanetFOSS page in the section “For publishers and site owners”, in case you want to read through them at your leisure or pass them on to your editorial team.

Get in touch

You run a blog, a magazine, a video channel or a publishing house that’s part of PlanetFOSS, and you have a page for subscriptions or donations, say through Steady, Patreon, Liberapay or Ko-fi? Then drop me a short email at info@planetfoss.net or leave a comment here on the blog. All I need is the address of that page; I’ll take care of the rest.

If you’re not on PlanetFOSS at all yet, you’re just as welcome to get in touch, and the same goes for anyone who would rather not be included: removal happens right away. And to you as readers: if you read a source regularly, take a look at the Support tab. Which blogs and magazines would you like to see there with a heart?

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Shortly afterwards, r/fossdroid followed suit, the go-to place for free Android apps. Its moderation copied the rules word for word into its own announcement, only the name of the subreddit is different. AI was never allowed there anyway, it says. In the comments, the moderation doubles down: nine out of ten new posts are AI slop, and everything gets sorted out by hand.

What the new rules demand

The announcement on r/opensource goes far beyond AI. A project has to be at least a year old and actively maintained, have multiple contributors, and point to an existing community. School projects and software built for AI, such as MCP servers, are out. Anyone who posts needs a Reddit account that is at least a year old and has significant activity. And if you don’t speak English, you are told to find a different community.

The core fits into one sentence: “If it’s obvious you’re using AI in your project, we don’t want it.” It is followed by the side swipe that gave the post its title: “Tokens are cheap, and we don’t care how many you spent to make your amazing project.” Anyone who posts AI content or begs for an exception via modmail is banned for good. Only officially incorporated nonprofit organizations are exempt from the minimum requirements.

On r/fossdroid, the language rule has since been struck through. Instead, the post now says it’s not about language or origin but about AI alone. Classic machine translation is allowed, translation via a language model is not. Whether DeepL or Google Translate still count as classic is anyone’s guess. Both have relied on neural networks for years, and Reddit now translates posts on its own.

How the rules came about is described on the blog of Dan Brown, the developer of BookStack and, until recently, one of the moderators of r/opensource. According to Brown, the rules came from Wolvereness alone, with nothing agreed with the rest of the team. Brown considers the AI rule unenforceable and the language rule hurtful. Brown has since stepped back as a moderator.

Linus Torvalds sees it very differently

The timing is delicate. The Linux kernel is currently going the opposite way. At the Maintainers Summit in Prague on October 8, a majority was in favor of dropping (in German) the “Assisted-by” tag for AI-assisted patches again. Only about ten percent of the 18,533 commits for Linux 7.3 up to -rc7 carry it, yet according to Sasha Levin, AI is used far more often. Developers are supposed to describe their use of AI in the cover letter from now on.

Linus Torvalds himself considers rules along the lines of “don’t use AI for X” idiotic and instead expects developers to understand what they are doing. On October 13, he submitted a series of ten patches that, according to it-daily (in German), he developed with Claude Code. Reviewers promptly found a race condition in them. So the kernel developers use AI quite openly, just with review.

No wonder “Wow r/opensource banning Linux” is among the top-voted comments under the announcement. Asked in all seriousness how the kernel would fare, Wolvereness replied that it would probably be allowed “on the subjective line.” In other words, AI is banned, unless the mods decide to look the other way. Wolvereness admits elsewhere that there is no objective standard.

What the community says

The backlash is fierce. The announcement sits at zero points, the top comment at more than 1,400: “This is orthogonal to open source.” Whether software is free is decided by its license, not by the tool. Another user has maintained a package with more than 300 stars on GitHub for nine years, entirely without AI. It gets thrown out anyway: only one maintainer.

The language rule draws at least as much anger, and many simply call it xenophobic. A user from Japan deliberately writes by hand, in shaky English, that translation services are needed for reading too, just to understand everyone else. And critics read the exemption for incorporated organizations as meaning that large projects may use AI, while individual developers may not.

There is support, too. Many welcome the end of the endless “I got tired of X so I built Y” posts, and some are glad that someone is finally cracking down. One commenter on r/fossdroid argues that prompted-together apps will never get the care developers give their own projects. Others counter that plenty of hand-written FOSS projects quietly die as well.

The opportunity: speed for projects without new blood

I can understand both sides. On the one hand, using language models in software development offers huge opportunities. It is simply incredibly fast, and yes, the code that comes out is often very usable. By the way, “Tokens are cheap” is only partly true: a retired software developer in the thread does the math and pays 200 dollars a month in AI subscriptions for an open source project.

Especially for projects where volunteer developers aren’t exactly lining up, this is a huge opportunity. On r/fossdroid, someone cites their own app ShizuCallRecorder as an example: 2,000 stars on GitHub, more than 103,000 downloads, but only two pull requests with code from outside, both created with AI help. How is a project like that supposed to reach three contributors? A blanket ban hits exactly these people.

More holes found, fewer new ones built in

What AI can do for security is shown by two graphs from Greg Kroah-Hartman’s repository on kernel development. Up to Linux 6.19, each release consistently collected about 500 fixes for CVE vulnerabilities. With 7.0, the number jumps to more than 1,200, and with 7.2 to about 2,300. It’s hardly a coincidence that this happens right when AI tools for development and code analysis are picking up speed.

The second graph counts CVEs by the kernel release in which they were introduced. Since Linux 6.15 the curve has been pointing down, and for the most recent releases it is close to zero. In other words, more and more old holes are being uncovered, while new code brings fewer new ones. Sure, the far right end should be taken with a grain of salt: bugs in fresh code are often only found years later.

To me, that’s still the strongest argument against a blanket ban. A language model that reads existing code and tracks down bugs in it makes free software more secure, not less. Torvalds says he also uses AI to understand patches that are hard to follow. What matters is that in the end a human reviews the fix and takes responsibility for it. That applies to the kernel just as much as to the little Android app.

The flip side: somebody has to read the code

On the other hand, I can understand the mods too. Somebody has to look through the AI code. Passing any code into a project without review somehow goes against the whole idea of open source and security. The point of free software is precisely that anyone can look inside, and that someone actually does. Code that not even its own author has read turns this principle upside down.

If software becomes a black box again, you might as well go back to closed source. Throwing a project together overnight with a language model and then dumping the review on moderators, package maintainers, or project maintainers isn’t exactly good manners. The work doesn’t disappear. It just lands on other people’s desks, and most of them do it as volunteers, too.

An AI opponent on r/fossdroid gets to the heart of it, actually as an argument against the tool comparison: even Torvalds demands that AI output be reviewed, while nobody has to check a compiler. Someone else compares AI to a not-too-bright junior developer. You can ship their work without looking at it, or you can review it thoroughly and steer it until it holds up. For me, the line runs exactly between those two paths.

Responsibility instead of a ban

In my opinion, the kernel gets it more right than r/opensource. Anyone there may use a language model, but a human is responsible for every contribution and has to sign it off personally with Signed-off-by. In other words, it isn’t the tool that decides, but whether someone has understood their code. The fact that reviewers found a race condition in Torvalds’ patches shows exactly why review has to stay.

Sure, a subreddit isn’t a kernel, and the flood of junk projects, ads, and bot accounts is real. But good suggestions can be found in the threads themselves: anyone presenting a project should provide a demo, working installation steps, and a short explanation, or the post gets removed. That takes seconds to check, and junk stands out, no matter whether it comes from a human or a machine. What do you think? Btw: the header image? AI-generated, of course

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That’s exactly what PlanetFOSS is for. The site has been running in a trial phase for a few days, and starting today I’d like to launch it officially. The idea is a planet that isn’t tied to one project but collects across topics: distributions, desktops, the kernel, self-hosting, gaming, security, politics. The sources are publishers, blogs, project sites, and video channels, in German and English, and every visitor decides which language they want to see.

A magazine, not a list

Visually, PlanetFOSS takes its cue from a modern computer magazine rather than the classic Planet list. There’s a lead story, cards with an image and a teaser, categories, and a bar with the topics of the day. The site only takes what the source sites themselves provide for previews, meaning Open Graph data or the content of the RSS feed. Every card links straight to the original article. There are no full texts.

I also put some effort into privacy. The preview images are stored as WebP on PlanetFOSS’s own server, so no visitor IP ends up on third-party servers. There are no cookies, no external scripts, and no tracking. You can still mark articles with a star as worth reading, without an account: instead of a CAPTCHA, your browser solves a small computing puzzle, and the star is only remembered locally in your browser.

Under the hood, it’s good old PHP with MySQL, no framework, on ordinary shared hosting. Every five minutes, a cron job kicks off a cycle: fetch feeds, enrich new articles, sort them, rebuild the front pages. The real work, though, isn’t the fetching but the sorting. A site with more than a hundred sources quickly turns into a wall of text when ten sites report on the same thing.

Same news, one bundle

When a new Firefox version comes out, it feels like everyone writes about it. On a regular Planet site, you’d see Firefox ten times in a row. That’s why PlanetFOSS compares every new article with all articles from other sources published in the last 48 hours. If the title contains the same topic with the same version number, say “Firefox 158” or “Ubuntu 26.10”, the articles end up in a shared bundle, even across the language barrier.

There are two more signals. If two news items link to the same primary source, such as the release notes or a press release, they very likely belong together. Run-of-the-mill targets like GitHub or Wikipedia don’t count. As a last resort, the aggregator compares the titles themselves: stop words get thrown out, and if half of the remaining words match and the titles share a topic, it’s a bundle.

The motto here: better to bundle too little than to bundle wrong. A missing “also at” hardly anyone notices, but two unrelated stories lumped together stand out right away. On the front page, bundles with two sources appear as a card with a source bar underneath. From three sources on, it becomes a story card that’s twice as wide in the grid and lists every additional report with its own headline and its own link to the original.

New topics without a dictionary

PlanetFOSS has a dictionary with terms like GNOME, Plasma, Proxmox, or Steam. It helps with the categories, which a small Naive Bayes classifier also assigns, and with version topics. The thing is, the open source world keeps coming up with new names that aren’t in any dictionary. During the first tests, I noticed ArtCraft, for example: seven articles about a new project, and the site hadn’t picked up on any of it.

Since then, PlanetFOSS looks for new names on its own. A candidate has to appear in the titles of at least three sources within the last 48 hours (four if only one language is involved), but no more than once in the four weeks before. Then there’s a little trick: a name is never written in lowercase. That filters out words like “released” or the German “Sicherheitslücke” (security hole) without endless stop word lists. Whatever is left becomes a new topic.

Comets and supernovas

Now it gets interesting. The name sets the scene: when a topic suddenly gets a flood of coverage, say on the release day of a new Ubuntu version, it becomes a supernova, a sudden, very bright outburst. A topic that’s only just picking up speed is a comet. And once the outburst is over, there’s still an afterglow for a while.

A comet appears as soon as at least three different sources write about a topic within twelve hours. Its cards get a badge, and it moves to the front of the topic bar. So that general catch-all topics like the Linux kernel don’t become permanent comets, they also need twice as many sources as usual. If a comet can’t keep up the momentum, it drops back to a normal topic.

A supernova needs more. Four sources have to report within 24 hours, almost all of them in the last twelve hours. The topic has to be broad, meaning it reaches at least two types of sources (publisher, blog, project, video) or shows up in both languages. On top of that, it needs at least three times as many sources as its average over the last four weeks. Otherwise, every week with some Ubuntu news would be a supernova.

PlanetFOSS knows some things in advance. A release calendar holds the known dates for Ubuntu, GNOME, KDE Plasma, Fedora, Debian, the kernel, and Firefox. If a topic falls within that window, one source fewer is enough to ignite. At the same time, no more than two supernovas may burn at once, so the front page doesn’t drown in nonstop fireworks. If there are more candidates, the strongest ignite and the rest stay comets for the time being.

A supernova burns for at least twelve hours. After that, it cools down once nothing new arrives for six hours or the number of sources drops below half of its peak. If a second wave comes along, such as the first reviews a few days after a release, it can ignite again. After 72 hours, the topic goes to the archive, but its topic page stays online and keeps collecting later posts.

How the front page comes together

When a supernova is burning, it gets its own band at the very top above the lead story, showing the number of posts and sources and a row of cards, sorted by official announcements, news, reviews, how-tos, and videos. Whatever is in that band doesn’t show up again further down. On top of that, PlanetFOSS sends a post to the @planetfoss account on Mastodon half an hour after a supernova ignites.

For everything else, the site hands out points. The score takes into account the size of the bundle, the stars from visitors, an active supernova topic, and the weight of the source. All of that is divided by the age of the article, so older posts gradually slide down. Stories that many sources cover stay up longer, but not forever.

For the lead story, importance beats freshness, but the candidates come from the last 24 hours and preferably bring a large image. The age of a bundle is the age of its second-newest report: if more sources keep writing, it stays up front, but a single latecomer isn’t enough. If a post has already been the lead for more than eight hours, it loses half of its points, and after 14 hours three quarters.

To keep one busy source from filling the whole page, the selection also looks for variety. In the lead story and the top stories next to it, every post comes from a different source, and the “Latest” section shows at most two articles from the same site. That way, smaller blogs get their spot next to the big publishers, and the front page looks a little different every time you visit.

Statistics instead of AI

By the way, there’s no AI in PlanetFOSS that summarizes texts or guesses topics. Everything runs on counting, comparing, and a handful of thresholds. In my opinion, that’s actually the better way: it costs nothing, sends no data anywhere, and stays traceable. When a supernova ignites, you can say exactly why. That said, I did build the site myself with AI assistance.

Of course, it didn’t work without some fine-tuning. Early on, for example, a supernova ignited for Microsoft Defender, even though the four news items were spread over 18 hours. Since then, an outburst has to be genuinely fresh. Ubuntu 26.10 also ignited two hours late on its release day at first, because it was measured against all Ubuntu news. That’s why version topics now get their own baseline.

I keep an eye on cases like these, and for that the site saves a snapshot of topics, bundles, and lead stories every six hours. So the logic will surely keep changing. A wrong bundle or a comet that shouldn’t be one can be corrected by hand in the admin area. The algorithm dutifully respects those corrections on its next run.

Just head over to planetfoss.net and tell me what you think. Which sources are you still missing, and which blogs, magazines, or other publications from the German- or English-speaking Linux and open source world absolutely belong on the planet? I’m happy to take suggestions in the comments. And if you run a blog yourself and would rather not be included, the site of course also offers a way to opt out.

Update: Why the stars on PlanetFOSS no longer use frosted glass, and what that has to do with a memory leak in WebKitGTK, is covered in WebKitGTK 2.54: Tiny Star, Massive Memory Leak.

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Javad joined the team in 2020 because documentation for Shell extensions was missing back then. So YouTube tutorials came first, and later, on invitation from Sriram Ramkrishna and his GNOME Extensions Rebooted project, the Port Guide for GNOME Shell 40. It helped many authors move from GTK3 to GTK4, and according to Javad, plenty of them would have given up without it.

Today all the documentation you need for your own extensions exists. Still, many people vibe-code their extensions and submit them to EGO without ever having looked at the docs. That leaves Javad with the feeling that the documentation feeds LLMs more than human developers. Since early 2025 submissions have exploded, and the vast majority are AI-generated.

For years Javad has answered questions daily and reviewed extensions, often 4 to 10 hours a day. That work is unpaid and easily matches a full-time job, while monthly donations sit close to zero. The result: Javad is close to burnout and writes that without financial support it won’t be possible to keep going at this pace. At least there was the GNOME Pants Award in 2026.

The main problem is quality. Extensions run directly inside the GNOME Shell process, so bad AI code threatens the stability of the whole desktop. According to Javad, LLMs produce needlessly complex, hard-to-read code that takes much longer to review. Some submitters even let an AI write their replies, and once the instructions meant for the model accidentally ended up in the text.

There is a bright spot, though: Javad’s open letter to AI models corrected specific code patterns the models kept getting wrong. Within a few weeks most of those mistakes were gone. Javad sees that as good news, but also as proof of how heavily the documentation feeds the models. That doesn’t solve the review problem itself.

Who Is Needed?

• Reviewers: Developers who know GTK and the GNOME Shell source code. The role is voluntary, and availability during the week should be consistent. Javad offers mentoring and will teach you the review process.
• Shexli helpers: The linter has existed for a few months and is meant to make reviews easier. Reviewers report false negatives and false positives, and whoever helps fixes them in Shexli. The team needs someone who improves the linter.
• Donors: If you want to support the work financially, there is a donation page.

If you want to join the review team or help with Shexli, get in touch on the Matrix channel #extensions:gnome.org. Javad names no deadline, but does give a reason to hurry: without more help, things can’t go on at this pace. So better sooner than later, even for a first question with no commitment.

In my eyes this is a wake-up call for everyone who uses GNOME extensions day to day. Without reviewers there are no vetted extensions, and without those, many of us would be missing a good piece of GNOME. If you have the time and the know-how, think about it seriously. Everyone else can at least throw a few euros into the donation jar.

Ahem. Me Too.

I have to admit I feel called out here myself. With Pulsgeber I wrote a GNOME Shell extension that was built with AI assistance. And yes, I have real respect for the step of submitting it to EGO. The thought that someone has to go through the resulting code line by line makes me a bit uneasy. I don’t want to dump work on anyone, least of all a team that is already running at its limit.

Still, in my eyes you shouldn’t brand every AI contribution as AI slop. Such extensions move a lot of things forward and enable features that used to be out of reach. In the end what counts is the quality of the code, not the tool it came from. The problem is unreviewed masses, not AI itself.

Behind all this lies a question for me: AI code is quickly generated, but someone still has to read and review it. That probably doesn’t only hit EGO, but every project that takes contributions from outside and checks them before release. What do you think: is the flood of AI submissions a problem on other platforms too, and how should projects deal with it?

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