LibreOffice and Software Freedom Day 2025 in Nepal

Updates from the Nepalese LibreOffice community:

Recent protests and stress in Nepal have disrupted regular activities. Almost everything was affected, including in-person events being canceled rapidly. For open source software users, Software Freedom Day 2025 was a big celebration. But many felt disillusioned about the event.

Despite all this, our community members in Nepal tuned in to an online call and turned Software Freedom Day 2025 into a success. Birendra Open Source Club – one of the student clubs and LibreOffice project contributors in Nepal, with support from Liaison Suraj Bhattarai and other key open source clubs, hopped onto Discord on 20 September. They carried out a series of talks among new and old enthusiasts and learners. The talks ranged from the importance of community and good first contributions, all the way up to open source in cybersecurity and open source pieces of hardware.

Suraj shared a short talk about Open Formats and added a little fun with the Easter hunt available on the LibreOffice Asia site.

Participants learned that a sense of freedom for software is only true when all the components, including formats or what we generally call “extensions,” share the same freedom as speech. It matters most in the case of canvas-based software and What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) software, where there are different options to export or save the work in progress.

He emphasized that open formats are essential to software freedom because they let free software and users interoperate without barriers. Also, he highlighted the difference between open formats and closed formats.

TDF says: thanks to the Nepalese community for all their work! Click here to see Suraj’s presentation slides.