29 Aug 2019
LibreOffice monthly recap: August 2019
Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more!
- On August 8, we announced LibreOffice 6.3, a new major release with better performance, a large number of new and improved features, and enhanced interoperability with proprietary document formats. 10 days later, we followed this up with a look at some statistics – there had been 430,000 downloads of the new version, and 54,000 views of the press release. Check out some of the new features in this short video:
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- Meanwhile, we posted reports from the the LibreOffice Asia Conference, which took place earlier in the year. Part 1 looks at how the free and open source software (FOSS) ecosystem is growing in Asia, while part 2 examines how software affects the autonomy of countries. Oh and speaking of conferences, don’t forget that the LibreOffice Conference 2019 is taking place from September 10 – 13 in Almeria, Spain – we hope to see you there!
- Over in Europe, members of the German LibreOffice community attended FrOSCon, one of the largest FOSS events in the country. We had a stand with flyers, stickers and a computer demonstrating LibreOffice Online and its integration in EGroupware. It was great to meet so many passionate free software fans, and all being well, we’ll be back there again next year…
- As part of our regular interviews with community members, we talked to DaeHyun Sung about his activities in the LibreOffice project. DaeHyun helps out with localisation (translation), quality assurance and other areas.
- While we’re gearing up for the aforementioned LibreOffice Conference 2019, we’re also looking ahead to proposals for the 2020 event. The Document Foundation received two different proposals for the organisation of LibOCon 2020, from the Turkish and German communities. TDF members are voting to decide on exactly where it will take place, so stay tuned for the announcement…
- In recent months, we’ve been putting content from our Annual Report 2018 on the blog, and this month we looked back at hackfests last year. These were opportunities for developers to meet face-to-face, work on new ideas, and enjoy good food and drink! In 2018, we had hackfests in Brussels, Hamburg, Tirana and Munich.
- The Document Liberation Project (DLP) is a sister project to LibreOffice, which develops software to read and write data from proprietary and legacy document formats. This helps LibreOffice and other apps to access archives of data, freeing users from vendor lock-in. On August 21, we posted about updates from the DLP. If you have some old documents from legacy office software that you’d like to open in LibreOffice, give the developers a hand!
- Our second community member Monday interview was with Sanjoy Sigdel from Nepal. Sanjog recently became a member of The Document Foundation, and talks about how and why he joined the project.
- Finally, we started a new marketing campaign highlighting the fact that LibreOffice has no forced registration, subscriptions, payments or vendor lock-in. As many software vendors are pushing users towards online subscription models, the LibreOffice community is proud to offer a fully free, no-strings-attached office suite that people can use any time, any place, without worrying about subscriptions or “authentication” servers not working.
