LibreOffice is a suite of office applications for creating, editing, and viewing text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and databases, among other things. LibreOffice is free and open source software. Anyone can download it, use it, and even examine and modify the source code.
But with version 7.0 set to launch next month, some users have been noticing unusual language in pre-release builds suggesting that LibreOffice “Personal edition” is “intended for individual use.
That’s raised some alarms since it implies that businesses, governments, schools, or other institutions might need a different license to use LibreOffice in the future.
But the Document Foundation, which manages the LibreOffice project, says that’s not the case. The licensing terms will not be changing… but the organization is exploring offering a “LibreOffice enterprise set of products and services provided by the members of our ecosystem” in the future.
Adding the “personal edition” wording is meant to differentiate the marketing between the “free and community supported” version of LibreOffice, and that hypothetical enterprise software which hasn’t yet been released.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
- LibreOffice 7.0 RC1 is available for testing [Document Foundation]
LibreOffice 7.0 RC1 is now ready for testing. The stable version of this free and open source office suite is scheduled to launch in early August, and it should bring new spreadsheet functions, accessibility improvements, GUI and performance tweaks. - Board statement on the LibreOffice 7.0 RC “Personal edition” label [Document Foundation]
Pre-release builds of LibreOffice 7.0 include the words “Personal edition,” but the developers have clarified that this is to differentiate it from a potential Enterprise edition, but it’s just a matter of marketing, with no licensing changes planned. - H.266/VVC brings video transmission to new speeds [Fruanhofer]
Fraunhoefer announces H.266/VVC codec which could cut video file sizes in half while offering the same level of quality as the current-gen H.265/HEVC codec. Instead of 10GB for a 90-minute 4K video stream, we could be looking at 5GB. - PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition smartphone under development [@ManjaroLinux]
We’ve already seen Ubuntu and postmarketOS community editions of this $150 Linux smartphone. Now the developers of Manjaro Linux are working to bring a version of their popular GNU/Linux distribution to the phone and partner with Pine64 on a co-branded device. The software also works on the PineTab tablet. - OneGx1 mini laptop typing test [Liliputing/YouTube]
Sometimes folks ask me about thumb typing on tiny laptops like the One Netbook OneGx1, so I shot a quick video the other day. It’s theoretically possible, but it’s not really comfortable. This is a device that was designed for ten-finger touch typing, not thumb typing.
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