21 May 2012
Hackfest in Munich on November 23-25
Dear Community,
we are pleased to announce that the next LibreOffice Hackfest, the event where developers from all over the world gather to work on the code, discuss and have a good time, will take place
November 23-25
in Munich, Germany
For the second time already, the LiMux project team of the city of Munich invited us, and we are proud and honoured to be their guests.
More details on the agenda, the venue and travel information will be published over time.
Looking forward to meeting you there!
And for those attending LinuxTag in Berlin this week, LibreOffice and TDF will have a booth there, and in Friday’s office track, several exciting talks will be held by members of our community.
Great opportunity to work for freedom.
Is there any chance that concerned the issue of OOXML vs ODF interoperability and possible restrictions on competition? I encourage you to ask this for the many problems in file exchange (MS to ODF) especially in presentation documents (pptx) and documents with embedded objects such as drawings (docx). ¿OOXML in Office 2010-2012 is truly an ISO standard? ¿OOXML is truly an open format?
Finally, a chance to follow the event online (streaming video for example)?
OOXML is definitely not implemented as an ISO standard as of today, and there is no evidence of it being implemented as an ISO standard in the foreseeable future. The transitional implementation, which is the OOXML format of MS Office 2007 and 2010, is still including a large chunk of proprietary and poorly documented MS formats, which are the main source of interoperability problems.
Great comment Dennis, I hope that the Foundation has an answer for all of us that work with both open and non-open soft.
Bye bye.
Martin
Yup. I am of the opinion that the only priority for all non-MS suites is to work toward perfecting the ability to open OOXML documents. I am aware that this makes me a heathen, satan-worshipping parasite upon which nothing but the lowest of fleas would nest itself. However I am also a Libre user who needs to exist in this damn real world…
Developers are working daily to improve the quality of import filters, but it is very difficult to get even close to perfection when you are trying to deal with a format which has been intentionally built to lock-in users and make interoperability hard or even impossible. Governments could play a key role in this domain, if they were to standardize on ODF and formally discourage enterprises and people to use MS Office file formats. You should consider, though, that Microsoft spends a large amount of money with lawyers and lobbyists…
I appreciate the efforts made by people from the Foundation and The community, to try to be as compatible as possible, and I am sure that the difficulties are the lack of documentation and Microsoft’s desire to avoid interoperability.
Really are so good community efforts that documents made with older versions of MS (before 2003) are almost 100% compatible, no problem. But the same document, read in a version of MS-Office 2010-2012 and recorded unchanged in the format OOXML (docx, pptx, etc.), now is not 100% compatible. It is clear that the restriction is imposed by MS.
Although this issue may not be strictly technical if it is very important, as it makes very difficult the use of open formats, because of restrictions imposed by the new versions of MS.
For these reasons, we need a “legal hack” meeting or sesion, to collect evidence of these practices that restrict competition and propose a plan to notify the authorities (ISO, Antitrust Authority, etc).
Methods used by Microsoft to lock-in users to a theoretically open standard are very subtle, and therefore quite complex to explain. Just as an example, the documentation for the OOXML format is over 7.200 pages, which makes almost impossible a thorough knowledge by third party implementers, and this is the reason why interoperability is challenging. Anyway, we are willing to help by digging further into the problem, and possibly getting some help from expert lawyers.
Thanks Italovignoli. Ok, I understand the subtleties used by Microsoft to prevent the freedom of users. This is great news that is going to dig more on these problems and better still with the help of lawyers. Any ideas for the community of users to collaborate on this topic? we are willing to help. Thanks again.
I really hope that the hackfest does not just close bugs but brings new love to or even revives subprojects.
It would be nice to finally have Python 2.7 / 3.3 support along with a bunch of small but real world examples to allow replacing BASIC macros and vendor lock-in by enterprise-ready Python scripts and libraries.
Enterprises don’t use more Open-Source software because they 1) don’t know the features, 2) believe their staff is not able to use it, 3) believe there is no vendor support, 4) have legal concerns about licensing:
http://www.unixmen.com/growth-in-companies-migrating-to-open-source-to-beat-vendor-lock-in/
Now that LibreOffice is coming to the browser and Mozilla is coming to mobile devices (Firefox OS), working together would result in the best user experience.
In addition, the LibreOffice community could share Mozillas extraordinary I18N/L10N tools and knowledge to gain more help from users.
And if memory consumption of LibreOffice will not be too high, Ubuntu for Android would be another very important platform:
http://soltesza.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/why-ubuntu-for-android-is-the-most-important-linux-project-today/
And maybe more important than just squashing bugs would be some talks with (potential) institutional and enterprise users.
A central server for 200 occasional LibreOffice-Online could be a game-changer!
At least the German universities could use those online servers to offer LibreOffice and Webmail to non-Linux students, not to mention hundred thousands of government agency members.