In this fortnight’s edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at the first official release of the Perl 6 language specification, a reading and watching list from the EFF, and more!

Open source news roundup for December 19, 2015-January 1, 2016

Perl 6 released

After 15 years in development, Perl 6 came out in time for Christmas. The final entry in the Perl 6 Advent Calendar announced the availability or the Perl 6.c language specification and the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler that complies with the specification. Further information about Perl 6, the Rakudo implementation of Perl 6, and Perl 6’s relationship to Perl 5 can be found in the Perl 6 FAQ.

Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Reading List

The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a list of books, movies, and televisions shows that entertain and inspire them. You’ll find a wide selection of fiction and non-fiction dealing with issues related to the EFF’s mission of defending rights in the digital world. The EFF states that they do not necessarily endorse all of the ideas contained in the items on the list, but they “add something valuable to the discussion.” Check it out for interesting and thought-provoking things to read and watch in the new year.

Gephi 0.9 released

In an important development for digital humanities and data visualization aficionados, the Gephi network analysis and visualization software package has a new release. While the jump from 0.8 to 0.9 might seem minor, this new release bring some much needed enhancements, such as compatibility with modern versions of Java (versions 7 and 8). Other new features include a redesigned core leading to enhanced performance and better memory usage. The full list of changes is available on the project’s change log.

SD Times reviews what was hot on GitHub in 2015

SD Times looked at all the top projects on GitHub in 2015. This excellent look back at what was hot in 2015 highlights many of the big stories in open source during the past year. From surprises like Apple’s Swift being released as open source projects to big projects from more traditionally open source friendly companies (e.g., Google’s Angular.js and Facebook’s React Native) the list covers a wide variety of projects from old and new open source contributors. If the top projects of 2015 are anything to go by, 2016 is going to be an exciting year for open source.

In other news

Thanks, as always, to Opensource.com staff members and moderators for their help this week. Make sure to check out our event calendar, to see what’s happening next week in open source.