The Open Source Ward Weekly (26 August 2025)

Airi - You self-hosted Grok Waifu companion

Nothing else to say, everything is in the title. It’s the most trending repository of the week, which isn’t really surprising since waifu-mode virtual companions seem to be very popular. Adding one to Grok helped the AI surge in popularity.

I’m not really into this stuff, so to be honest I didn’t try it, but apparently you can play Minecraft and have voice chats with him/her.

PixieEditor - A 2D graphical editor

An open-source alternative to traditional graphical editors. The interface seems really intuitive and fairly complete. One of my friends picked it up for his indie game, and he seems quite happy with it.

The project appears to go further than GIMP, as it also allows creating animations and shaders. Once again, I’m not very familiar with the field, so let me know if this tool is useful to you.

DINOv3 - Visual foundation model by Facebook research

Meta continues to be an active contributor to the open-source world. DINOv3 is part of a family of versatile vision foundation models that produce high-quality dense features and, according to Meta, outperform specialized state-of-the-art methods across a wide range of settings without fine-tuning. The model is available on Hugging Face.

Agents.md - A simple Open format for guiding coding agents

Following the MCP trend pushed by Anthropic, OpenAI also wants to shape the standards of agentic development with Agent.md, a format designed to guide coding agents so they don’t mess up your repository too easily.

Ubicloud - You own AWS

If you have a datacenter in your backyard and don’t know what to do with it, you can use Ubicloud to build your own self-hosted AWS (power plant not included).

This clearly aims to be an alternative to OpenStack for aspiring cloud providers. Let’s see what the future holds for this one.

In the news

GitHub - ClemensElflein/OpenMower: Let’s upgrade cheap off-the-shelf robotic mowers to modern, smart RTK GPS based lawn mowing robots!

Let’s upgrade cheap off-the-shelf robotic mowers to modern, smart RTK GPS based lawn mowing robots! - ClemensElflein/OpenMower

GitHubClemensElflein

This repository didn’t trend high enough to be included in the section above. But come on—it’s open-source software to upgrade your robotic lawnmower.

OSS Under Attack: Four Lessons in How Trust Gets Exploited

People love free stuff! - Me August 2025 That applies to software as well, and thanks to countless open-source contributors, there’s no shortage of it. A 2024 study by Harvard Business School estimates the value of the Open-Source Software (OSS) ecosystem at over $8.8 trillion [1]. Another study

The Open Source WardArthur Vervaet

An excellent article by me on how trust can be abused in the open-source ecosystem!