Community Member Monday: Jean-Baptiste Faure

Today we’re talking to Jean-Baptiste Faure from the LibreOffice localisation community…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I am Jean-Baptiste, living in a small town near Lyon in France.

I retired in 2021, and until then I was working as a researcher in hydroinformatics in a public research institute. I was developing numerical simulation software for the study of river flows and their dynamics: mainly floods and pollutant transport.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

Currently my main contribution to LibreOffice is the French localization of the UI. So I am less active in Quality Assurance than previously, but I continue to build several versions of LibreOffice for my own use and QA needs.

Note: it is very easy to build LibreOffice on Linux – do not hesitate to try.

Why did you choose to join the project, and how was the experience?

Well, from my point of view, LibreOffice is the natural continuation of the OpenOffice.org project. I started with StarOffice 5.1 in 1998 because I needed a word processor able to write mathematical equations under Microsoft Windows, and I never liked Latex. 😉

In 2008, I was elected to succeed to Sophie as lead of the French speaking community. I managed the QA tests for the French localized versions of OpenOffice.org.

When LibreOffice was launched, it was clear for me that it was the future. Joining the project was proof.

Let’s not lie to ourselves, the experience is not a smooth one. Current debates about LibreOffice Online are an example, but certainly that will not be the last crisis. But LibreOffice is too central and important to be stopped by such crises. I want to believe that the community is strong enough to overcome theses problems.

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need?

The Document Foundation, through LibreOffice and its other projects, has the mission to empower the user. Free software should make the user less dependent on software and service providers, and give him back the power over the computers he uses, more or less without realizing it.

More concretely, I think that the development effort of LibreOffice should focus in particular on the elimination of regressions, and on the frugality of the software to reduce its ecological impact.

Many thanks to Jean-Baptiste for all his contributions. All LibreOffice users are welcome to get involved, learn new skills – and make LibreOffice even better for millions of users!