News briefs for December 17, 2018.

Linux 4.20 rc7 was released yesterday. Linus Torvalds writes "This is a *tiny* rc7, just how I like it. Maybe it's because everybody is too busy prepping for the holidays, and maybe it's because we simply are doing well. Regardless, it's been a quiet week, and I hope the trend continues." And, he says he still plans to release 4.20 right before Christmas.

The Skrooge Team announced the 2.17.0 release of its personal finance manager, which is based on KDE Frameworks. This release fixes several bugs and includes a few new features, such as a progress bar in the taskbar, and it supports only Qt >= 5.7.0. You can get it from your distro's package management system, or download it from here.

Confluent, founded by the creators of the open-source Kafka project, has announced a new license called the Confluent Community License, "which would limit the ability of vendors to take its open source software and sell it, in the same way that Amazon did with the core Kafka". According to the Business Insider story, "AWS took Kafka and repackaged it as a paid cloud service—something completely legal, as open source software is free for anyone to use as they wish." Business Insider also notes that the new license applies only to specialized add-ons to Kafka that are developed in-house.

There's a new release of the Pixel Wheels racing game. It now "remembers the best lap and best total time for each track and shows you a congratulation message when you reach the top 3 in either categories", countdown now has sound and has several other new features. The game is available for Linux, Android, Windows and Mac, and you can get it from here.

Debian Installer Buster Alpha 4 was released over the weekend. This release has many improvements and hardware support changes, and it now supports 76 languages. Go here to install.