Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Open Data Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 16, 2025

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Neowin ☛ Another blow for MS Office? LibreOffice brings feature MS Office has had for almost 10 years

    LibreOffice, the popular MS Office alternative, has added another feature that brings it closer to full feature parity with Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Office.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • WordPress ☛ WordPress 6.8.2 Maintenance Release

    WordPress 6.8.2 is now available! This minor release includes fixes for 20 Core tickets and 15 Block Editor issues. For a full list of bug fixes, please refer to the release candidate announcement. WordPress 6.8.2 is a short-cycle maintenance release. More maintenance releases may be made available throughout 2025.

• Education

  • RIPE ☛ The RIPE Chair Team Reports - July 2025

    The RIPE Chair Team reports on the latest RIPE community highlights - from RIPE 91 preparation, to mentorship and fellowship programme upgrades, to policy updates and industry event takeaways.

  • EDRI ☛ #PrivacyCamp25: Registrations open

    In 2025, we are excited to host you online and at La Tricoterie, Brussels on 30 September to explore Resilience and Resistance in Times of Deregulation and Authoritarianism. Register now and join us for one of the flagship digital rights gatherings in Europe.

  • Rlang ☛ From Model to Meaning: How to use the marginaleffects R package to interpret results from statistical or machine learning models workshop

    Speaker: Vincent Arel‑Bundock is a Professor of Political Science who conducts research and teaches on political economy and research methods. He is an advocate of transparent and reproducible research, and an active developer of open source software. He maintains several statistical software libraries for R and Python, including marginaleffects, modelsummary, and tinytable.

• Licensing / Legal

  • PHP ☛ PHP: rfc:php_license_update

    PHP has a long history of confusion, concerns, and disagreements regarding its custom open source license, and the Zend Engine License, which covers the sources in the Zend/ directory, adds to this confusion and additionally complicates matters, since it is not an Open Source Initiative Approved License. This RFC proposes a pragmatic simplification to the PHP license that alleviates this confusion, preserves the copyrights owned by all PHP contributors, and grants users the same rights as the original licenses. The proposed license to accomplish this is the Modified BSD License, often referred to as the 3-clause BSD license.

  • Cory Doctorow ☛ Semantic drift versus ethical drift

    As Hill explains, the philosophical differences between “open” (making better code) and “free” (making code to enhance human freedom) may not have mattered at the outset, but they each served as a kind of pole star for its own adherents, leading them down increasingly divergent paths. Each new technology and practice represented a decision-point for the movement: “Is this something we should embrace as compatible with our project, or should we reject it as antithetical to our goals?” If you were an “open source” person, the question you asked yourself at each juncture was, “Does this new thing increase code-quality?” If you were a “free software” person, the question you had to answer was, “Does this make people more free?”

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Paul Krugman ☛ For MAGA, Ignorance is Strength

      I say no good way advisedly. Republicans have long sought to restrict access to National Weather Service data to private companies like AccuWeather, which in turn would provide forecasts only to paying customers. And they may succeed. But this would be obvious profiteering, creating artificial middlemen for access to information generated at taxpayer expense. And it would at best support forecasting, not the research that makes forecasting better.