The Document Foundation Blog

December 7, 2013

TDF Board Elections 2013 Voting

Filed under: Announcements, Community, Foundation — The Document Foundation @ 22:04

Dear TDF members,

It is nearly time to vote for the next Board of Directors! During the past weeks, members have been nominated or nominated themselves, willing to serve at the Board of our Foundation. People working on all aspects of LibreOffice and in all parts of the community. So now the important task for all of us: voting. The details of this election process have been outlined in the first announcement: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/msg03358.html

IMPORTANT: The election credentials and voting instructions for voting in The Document Foundation Board elections 2013 were just sent to all eligible voters.

The voting period starts 2013-12-10, 00:00 CET/UTC+1 and ends 2013-12-17, 24:00 CET/UTC+1. The statements of the candidates as well as links to the full nomination e-mails can be found at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/2013-board/candidates.html

The detailed rules are available at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/2013-board/rules.html

The Document Foundation uses a modern preference voting system that requires you to vote by selecting as many of the candidates as you would like to see elected, sorted in your order of preference. After you have voted, you will receive an anonymous token that can be used at the end of the elections to verify your vote was counted.

If you are a member – see the page at http://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/members/ – and you have not received your credentials:

  1. Please verify you are actually a member of The Document Foundation. Only members are eligible to vote.
  2. Please check your spam folder. In the past, a few voters discovered their voting credentials were erroneously tagged as spam by their provider.
  3. Please check all your e-mail accounts.

If you are certain you are eligible to vote, and have not received your credentials despite the above steps, please contact the Membership Committee in private at elections@documentfoundation.org for instructions on how to proceed.

IMPORTANT: Please check NOW if you have received your token, so any possible problem can be resolved in time.

If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to ask the Membership Committee in private at elections@documentfoundation.org

Happy voting!

Cor Nouws
– The Document Foundation – Chairman Membership Committee

December 5, 2013

LibreOffice 4.2 International Bug Hunting Session

Filed under: Uncategorized — italovignoli @ 10:50

Berlin, December 5, 2013 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.2 International Bug Hunting Session, which will start on December 6th and will end on December 8th. During the three days, volunteers from all over the world will test the beta of LibreOffice 4.2 to find bugs and regressions.

LibreOffice 4.2 will be released at the end of January 2014, with a large number of new features (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.2) and loads of fixed bugs. The community is working to make this major release the finest in the history of the free office suite.

In order to join the bug hunting session, volunteers should download LibreOffice 4.2 Beta 2, available from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases/.

Mentors will be available at least from 08:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC, and will be reachable through IRC (irc://chat.freenode.net/libreoffice-qa) and the QA mailing list.

Other information on LibreOffice 4.2 International Bug Hunting Session are available at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugHunting_Session_4.2.0.

December 4, 2013

From Brazil to Germany, an Unforgettable LibreOffice Hackfest in Freiburg

Filed under: Community, Development, LibreOffice, Meetings — ohallot @ 23:56

José Guilherme Vanz and Marcos Souza, LibreOffice development in Brazil

Our first contact with the LibreOffice was in FISL 2012 (International Forum of Free Software, held in Porto Alegre, Brazil). Since then, we got quickly involved with the LibreOffice development community. Now we attend events in Brazil advocating to people about the better office suite ever done!

Months ago, after some time contributing to the project and participating in LibreOffice community, we, José Guilherme Vanz and Marcos Paulo de Souza were invited to participate in the Freiburg LibreOffice Hackfest. We were very happy and very excited! This invitation showed us that we were recognized for our humble work in the project and because this is a unique opportunity to work with people that we just know by mailing or IRC chats. So, we started the preparations of travel, such as paperwork, funds and a negotiation with our employers.

f3-1

We arrived in Germany thinking about how to learn more about LibreOffice code base, and learn some tips and tricks to code while contributing with the project. The guys at the hackfest work full time in the project, so we were very excited to improve our skills, including stuffs about how to make a nice hackfest and try setup one in Brazil!

Our journey in Germany began in the beautiful city of Munich, where we stayed for two days. We met Christian Lohmaier, the current release engineer of LibreOffice project. He and Florian Effenberger were patient and generous to show Munich to us and all nice places of this nice city! Thanks a lot guys!

Then we went to Freiburg, where the Hackfest was to start. The event took three days. We had the opportunity to meet some of the most famous mega developers! It was a very nice experience to link faces and names to IRC nicks, and of course, to question the “pythons” of the project in real time! Surely, we learned a lot in these 3 days!

Marcos did some work in LibreOffice Math. The first was about including tooltips in the new Elements Dock. To solve this bug, we basically need to create some strings with the descriptions of each element in the Elements Dock. These strings are stored inside “.src” files. These files are “compiled” and used by translators to translate each string to a specific language used in the user interface of LibreOffice. This fix was not difficult, just painful!

The second bug that Marcos worked was about to implement a scrollbar in the Elements Dock. We did not finish this fix because he had some doubts and some points that need some other fixes. Still in the event, we talked with some others hackers about other issues.

I was focused trying to execute a static checker to detect some error prone code and fix them.f2-1

After three days of hackfest, we started the “Hamburg Home Hacking Marathon”! We stayed four days in Hamburg, coding in the house of LibreOffice enginners! Again, we had the pleasure to work with Eike Ratke, Michael Stahl, Stephan Bergmann and Bjoern Michaelsen. All of them willing to help us teaching about the code base and showing some tips.

Using our precious time with them, Marcos worked in the issue 60698 (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60698). This bug is about unify some shared libraries that are built by few files. Doing this we get a smaller library because these libraries are compiled and built just once, and by this we avoid the dispersion of shared libraries. Working in this bug, Marcos unified all shared libraries of IO module.

Marcos tried yet to solve a bug in Calc, with the help of Eike as mentor. This bug was about ODS files using link to another sheets. By changing the referenced files, Calc was not allowed to update the data inside the file that was referencing. But, this bug was not so easy, and the problem was bigger than we thought. So we couldn’t solve this bug in that time, and Eike removed the bug from the easy hacks.

And I was still working in static checker. I started to look to a bug of Math, about the user interface. After some work, I fixed that bug!

In the third day, we went back to Stephan’s place, trying to solve bugs and learn more! This day Bjoern went to Stephan’s house too, totaling six guys programming in the same table! In this day Marcos worked in a bug(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63020) indicated by Bjoern. That bug was related to removing a class from LibreOffice. With Stephan’s help, Marcos could remove that class and use a better approach in the code.

And in the last day, we went again to Eike’s home, where we enjoyed to last moments with the great developers of LibreOffice! We talked a little about their work and how they work daily.

Two rookies and three masters of LibreOffice

For sure, these days were very fruitful, and we learned a lot of things that we’ll use in the future.

We came back to Brazil and we want to say a big THANK YOU for all of you guys! To the  Brazilian community, that welcomed us and keeps helping us. To The Document Foundation, who gave us this opportunity. To all developers that are helping us since we started in the project, specially YOU we met this wonderful German journey, and all people involved directly or indirectly in this amazing project!

November 27, 2013

Open Document Editors Devroom at FOSDEM 2014

Filed under: Announcements, Community, Development, Meetings — Tags: , — italovignoli @ 10:52

Open document editors are coming again to FOSDEM with a shared
devroom which gives every project in this area a chance to present
ODF related developments and innovations. The devroom is organized
by Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

We invite submission of talks for the Open Document Editors devroom,
to be held on Saturday, February 1st, from 10AM to 6PM.

Length of talks should be limited to 20 minutes, as we would like to
have questions after each presentation, and to fit as many
presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be
explicitly requested and justified.

Technical talks (code, extensions, localization, QA, tools and
significant adoption related cases) about open document editors or
the ODF format are welcome.

Submissions must be done using the Pentabarf system:
https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM14 .

While filing your proposal, please add a few lines about yourself
(although your profile might already be stored at Pentabarf) and
specify what product or topic (Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice, both,
other editor, ODF in general…) your talk is about.

The deadline is Sunday, December 22, 2013. Accepted speakers
will be notified by January 5, 2014.

You can send any questions to the devroom mailing list:
office-devroom@lists.fosdem.org

November 1, 2013

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.1.3

Filed under: Announcements, LibreOffice — italovignoli @ 08:30

Berlin, November 1st, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.1.3, for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This is the third minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, which features a large number of improved interoperability features with proprietary and legacy file formats.

The new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.1. For enterprise adoptions, The Document Foundation suggests LibreOffice 4.0.6, supported by certified professionals.

LibreOffice 4.1.3 arrives just one day before the LibreOffice HackFest in Freiburg, Germany (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest/Freiburg2013), where the community will gather at the ArTik to get started on EasyHacks under the mentoring of experienced certified developers such as Thorsten Behrens, Eilidh McAdam, Bjoern Michaelsen, Markus Mohrhard, Eike Rathke and Michael Stahl.

LibreOffice 4.1.3 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.3/RC1 (fixed in 4.1.3.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.3/RC2 (fixed in 4.1.3.2).

About The Document Foundation (TDF)

The Document Foundation is an open, independent, self-governing, meritocratic organization, which builds on ten years of dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community. TDF was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent foundation brings out the best in corporate and volunteer contributors, and will deliver the best free office suite ever. TDF is open to any individual who agrees with its core values and contributes to its activities, and welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community. As of October 1st, 2013, TDF has 170 members and well over 3.000 volunteers and contributors worldwide.

October 24, 2013

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0.6

Filed under: Announcements, LibreOffice — Tags: , — italovignoli @ 10:00

Berlin, October 24, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.6, for Windows, OS X and Linux, the sixth and probably last minor release of the LibreOffice 4.0 family, targeted to corporate deployments – when backed by professional support – and conservative users.

LibreOffice 4.0.6 solves almost 70 bugs and regressions over the previous release, thanks to the work of an increasing number of QA volunteers.

LibreOffice 4.0.6 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.6/RC1 (fixed in 4.0.6.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.6/RC2 (fixed in 4.0.6.2).

LibreOffice 4.0.6 is not meant to be adopted by users of the more advanced LibreOffice 4.1.x family, which offers additional features. LibreOffice 4.1.3 will be announced soon.

October 23, 2013

TDF Board Elections

Filed under: Announcements — The Document Foundation @ 11:42

Dear Community,

we hereby officially announce the upcoming elections for the next Board of Directors of The Document Foundation.

As per § 7 II of our statues, [1] the Board’s term lasts two years. The Document Foundation has been formally incorporated on February 17, 2012, at which day the current Board of Directors officially was set in place. Therefore, the old board remains in charge until the end of February 17, 2014, so the new board will be in charge the day after that, which is February 18, 2014.

As per § 6 III, only members of the Board of Trustees of The Document Foundation, as well as current members of any of its bodies, are eligible to be elected into the Board of Directors, and the election is overseen by the Membership Comittee (§ 7 II).

The active electoral right is reserved to those who have been members of the Board of Trustees before this announcement (§ 7 II).

§ 6 III also states that members of the Board of Directors or their deputies may not be members of the Membership Committee and vice versa. This means that current members of the Membership Committee are eligible to the elected, but would have to step down from the Membership Committee the minute before accepting to become a member of the Board of Directors.

There is one more notable limitation: Per § 8 IV of the statutes, a maximum of 1/3 members of the Board of Directors is allowed to work on an employment basis for the same company, organization, entities, affiliates or subdivisions.

Nomination of candidates fulfilling the above requirements, as well as self nomination is welcome. In total, at least seven Board of Directors members are required, and given there are enough candidates, up to three deputies can be elected (§ 7 II).

Re-election of current members of the Board of Directors is explicitly permitted (§ 7 II).

Please send nominations and self-nominations via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Membership Committee in private) and also (!) to board-discuss@documentfoundation.org (which is a public mailing list). We kindly ask nominees who would like to stand for elections to provide a 75 words statement on their candidacy as continuous text (so no bullet lists or multiple paragraphs). In addition, please also provide your full name, e-mail address and your corporate affiliation, if any.

Discussions with the candidates and questions to them as well as questions about the elections should take place on the public board-discuss@documentfoundation.org mailing list. For details on how to use the mailing list, see http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/

Eligible voters will receive further details via e-mail prior to the start of elections, including a summary of the candidates, details on how to access the voting system, and instructions on how to independently verify the vote count. Please ensure the Membership Committee has your recent and correct e-mail address on file. For questions, you can reach the Membership Committee in private at elections@documentfoundation.org

Following the timeline set forth in § 7 II, requiring a 45 day advance notice, we hereby announce the following timeline for the elections:

1. 2013-10-23: announcement of the elections (this e-mail); and start of the nomination phase
2. 2013-12-02, 24:00 CET/UTC+1: end of the nomination phase (one week before the election starts, as per § 7 II)
3. 2013-12-10, 00:00 CET/UTC+1: official start of the elections (at least 45 days after #1, as per § 7 II)
4. 2013-12-17, 24:00 CET/UTC+1: end of the elections
5. 2013-12-18: announcement of the preliminary results
6. 2013-12-19, 00:00 CET/UTC+1: start of the challenging phase
7. 2013-12-23, 24:00 CET/UTC+1: end of the challenging phase
8. afterwards: official announcement of the final results

Be advised that the newly elected Board of Directors will only be in charge beginning from February 18, 2014. The current Board of Directors will however include them in the decision making process, to easen up the transition.

Challenges to this announcement with respect to the deadlines outlined have to happen no later than seven (7) days after this announcement, via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Membership Committee in private).

Challenges to the preliminary results of the election have to happen until the deadline set forth above, via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Membership Committee in private).

On behalf of the Membership Committee,
Eike Rathke, Chairman of the Membership Committee

[1] http://www.documentfoundation.org/satzung.pdf (binding version) and http://www.documentfoundation.org/statutes.pdf (non-binding translation)

October 17, 2013

LibreOffice Conference 2014 Call for Location

Filed under: Conference, Meetings — Florian Effenberger @ 12:00

Once a year, the LibreOffice Community hosts its annual, global community event, the LibreOffice Conference. After a successful Paris event in October 2011, in Berlin in October 2012, and just shortly after the great 2013 Milano Conference, the venue for the upcoming year 2014 will be voted on by the community. Traditionally, the LibreOffice Conference takes place between September and November, with a preferred date of October.

The deadline for sending in your proposal is Sunday, December 29th 2013, 23:59 UTC.

After receiving the applications, we will evaluate necessary preconditions, evaluate the validity and give applicants the chance to clarify vague details. In January, the LibreOffice community will vote on their preferred location, so the organizers have enough time for their preparations. Please do not vote on random locations but rather wait for the official announcement of the proposals and the voting mechanism.

For details on the requirements, and the process, please refer to the wiki page on https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/CallforLocation

Again, the deadline is Sunday, December 29th 2013, 23:59 UTC.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST IN HOSTING THE LIBREOFFICE CONFERENCE!

October 4, 2013

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.1.2

Filed under: Announcements, LibreOffice — italovignoli @ 10:30

Several new developers enter the Engineering Steering Committee

Berlin, October 4, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.1.2, for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This is the second minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family, which features a large number of improved interoperability features with proprietary and legacy file formats.

The new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.1. For enterprise adoptions, The Document Foundation suggests LibreOffice 4.0.5 (with 4.0.6 expected soon), supported by certified professionals.

LibreOffice 4.1.2 arrives one week after the LibreOffice Conference in Milan, where the community has gathered from all over the world to discuss software development and quality assurance, in addition to ODF, interoperability with proprietary document formats, community and marketing.

During the conference, several new developers have joined the Engineering Steering Committee, which has now 18 members: Stephan Bergmann – Red Hat, Rene Engelhard – Volunteer, Lionel Mamane – Volunteer, Adam Fyne – CloudOn, Christian Lohmair – TDF, Michael Meeks – Collabora, Bjoern Michaelsen – Canonical, Markus Mohrhard – Collabora (intern), Caolan McNamara – Red Hat, Eike Rathke – Red Hat, David Tardon – Red Hat, Norbert Thiebaud – Volunteer, Andras Timar – Collabora, Robinson Tryon – Volunteer, Eilidh McAdam – Lanedo, Mirek Mazel – Volunteer, Ahmad Hussein Al-Harthi – MOTAH, and Miklos Vajna – Collabora.

LibreOffice 4.1.2 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.2/RC1 (fixed in 4.1.2.1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.2/RC2 (fixed in 4.1.2.2) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.1.2/RC3 (fixed in 4.1.2.3).

September 19, 2013

Studio Storti joins The Document Foundation Advisory Board to Complement the Launch of the LibreOffice Division

Filed under: Uncategorized — italovignoli @ 13:56

Berlin, September 19, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that Studio Storti is now a member of its Advisory Board. Studio Storti is the largest provider of open source solutions to the Italian Public Administration, and is launching a LibreOffice Division to support migrations from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.

“We have been active in the open source environment since 1997, providing added value solutions focused on the needs of the Italian Public Administration. During the last three years, we have seen a growing demand for support of migrations to LibreOffice, and we have then decided to invest in this area by launching a LibreOffice Division”, says Paolo Storti, CEO of Studio Storti. “We want to leverage the conference in Milan, where we can meet the core of the community, to strengthen the connection with developers and other key stakeholders in the LibreOffice project”.

“Studio Storti will bring to TDF Advisory Board over 15 years of experience in migrating the Italian Public Administration to open source solutions”, says Italo Vignoli, Member of TDF Board of Directors. “The announcement is extremely important for the entire ecosystem, because it shows that TDF vision of an independent project can foster the growth of third parties investing in LibreOffice. In Italy, it will be a game changer”.

TDF Advisory Board has grown to 14 members, with six new additions in the first nine months of 2013 – AMD, CloudOn, Collabora, KACST (King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology), MIMO (French Ministries) and Studio Storti – who have joined the former members: FRODEV (Freies Office Deutschland e.V.), FSF (Free Software Foundation), Google, Intel, Lanedo, RedHat, SPI (Software in the Public Interest) and SUSE.

About Studio Storti

Study Storti is active since 1997 in the field of software consultancy, and more specifically in the design and implementation of solutions and systems based on open source technologies for the world of Italian public administrations. Today, it has over 250 customers, and has migrated to free software over 200,000 desktops. Website: http://www.studiostorti.com.

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