03 Jan 2022
LibreOffice project and community recap: December 2021
Happy new year, everyone! Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks of 2021 – click the links to learn more…
- We started December by announcing the LibreOffice Technology DevRoom Call for Papers for FOSDEM. This year, FOSDEM will take place online once again, and the LibreOffice community will be present with talks and discussions. Join us!
- At the recent Indian SFCamp 2021, Mike Saunders from the LibreOffice community gave a talk about our work, and where we’re going. He also explained how everyone can join the project and help to make LibreOffice even better.
- In December, TDF announced two updates for LibreOffice, for the 7.2 and 7.1 branches. These fix an important security issue and all users are recommended to upgrade.
- Meanwhile, the Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets, a group of more than 50 technology companies from 16 different European countries, sent an open letter to members of the European Parliament to raise awareness about interoperability and to impose stricter rules on big companies – the so-called ‘big tech’ companies – that act as gatekeepers and prevent transparency and openness in digital markets.
- In November, we ran a Month of LibreOffice, crediting contributions all across the project. And in December, we announced the winners – 324 people could claim sticker packs! And we had extra merchandise to give away as well…
- TDF announced a tender to optimize text layout performance for print and PDF export in LibreOffice. There’s still time to apply; the deadline is January 22.
- Over in the documentation project, the docs team announced the Base Guide 7.2. Many thanks to everyone who contributed!
- We talked to Ravi Dwivedi from the Indian LibreOffice community. He’s helping to spread the word about free software in India, and has interesting insights into free software adoption in his country.
- In the second week of December, we had a record number of LibreOffice downloads! The chart says it all:
- The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, recently had an election for its Board of Directors. Well, the preliminary results came in – click the link to see the lists of full and deputy members.
- ODF is the OpenDocument Format, the native format used by LibreOffice (and supported by many other apps too). Then there’s the ODF Toolkit, a set of Java modules that allow programmatic creation, scanning and manipulation of ODF files. Svante Schubert gave us some updates.
- LibreOffice was awarded the Editor’s Pick badge by Software Informer, calling it “stable and fast”.
- One more update from the docs community: 2021 was the year when the LibreOffice Documentation Team really shined. All guide books are updated to match LibreOffice 7.2 now (or are in the process of being updated) – great work, everyone!
- Finally, we wished everyone a good start to 2022 – here’s hoping that we’ll be able to meet more in-person this year, and celebrate good times together.
