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Author: Italo Vignoli

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.4

LibreOffice on stage at the Libre Software World Conference in Zaragoza

The Internet, November 9, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.4.4, an improved version of the award-winning free office suite for Windows, Mac and Linux. LibreOffice has recently won InfoWorld’s BOSSIE Award 2011 as Best of Open Source Software, and the Open World Forum Experiment Award of Most-Popular Software.

SUSE’s Andras Timar, who manages the LibreOffice localization effort, says, “Thanks to the contribution of Michael Bauer, a volunteer who took the long-time-abandoned Scottish Gaelic version and produced a complete UI translation in just a few months, LibreOffice 3.4.4 adds yet another native-language version, bringing the total to 105. This shows the unparalleled value of copyleft licenses for end user software, as LibreOffice is now the most-important office suite when it comes to protecting cultural heritage worldwide, especially when the number of native speakers is not sufficiently attractive for large corporations to devote localization resources to.”

Today, TDF and LibreOffice will also be on stage at the Libre Software World Conference (LSWC) in Zaragoza, where Jesus Corrius – a deputy member of the TDF Board of Directors – will keynote about “TDF: the home of LibreOffice”. LSWC is the most-prominent free software event in Spain, and the presence of a member of the TDF Board of Directors is a testimonial of the efforts that the project is devoting to developing a large and diverse Spanish-speaking community, in which each local community in Europe and the Americas can grow and thrive within a single global project.

LibreOffice 3.4.4 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

Change logs are available at http://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/tdf/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-4-release-3.4.4.1.log (fixed in 3.4.4.1) and http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-4-4-release-3.4.4.2.log (fixed in 3.4.4.2).

Document Foundation Board 2011: Preliminary Results

The election results have been processed using OpenSTV by multiple members of the Membership Committee, and I am now confident that we have a result ready for review pending confirmation next week. Full election materials can be found at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/2011/

PRELIMINARY RESULTS
Candidates are sorted here in their order of overall preference after all preferences have been considered according to the Meek STV with Droop-Dynamic-Fractional threshold method. The first seven preferences will be elected as Board members after confirmation; the remaining three will be elected as Deputies.

Board Members:

  • Florian Effenberger
  • Thorsten Behrens
  • Michael Meeks
  • Caolán McNamara
  • Italo Vignoli
  • Olivier Hallot
  • Charles-H Schulz

DEPUTIES:

  • Bjoern Michaelsen
  • Andreas Mantke
  • Jesús Corrius

CONFIRMATION PERIOD:
The detailed results of running OpenSTV can be found at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/results.php?election_id=1 and a list of all votes cast can be found at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/votes.php?election_id=1

You can run the calculation yourself using OpenSTV from http://www.openstv.org/;  the machine-readable votes are at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/blt.php?election_id=1 and the preference ordering is achieved by sorting according to keep factor in the final round of calculation.

Any eligible voter may challenge the preliminary results by e-mailing elections@documentfoundation.org prior to 2011-10-26 at 23:59 UTC with a detailed explanation of their challenge. The decision of the Membership Committee as to any challenge shall be final. Once any challenges have been resolved, the Membership Committee shall announce the final results.

LibreOffice Conference Announcements

During the LibreOffice Conference, The Document Foundation has announced:

  • LibreOffice Online Prototype: you can watch a demo video at the following address:
    http://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2011-10-10-lool-demo.webm. LibreOffice Online is based on GTK+ framework and HTML5’s canvas, and has been developed by SUSE’s Michael Meeks, built on GTK+ broadway from RedHat’s Alex Laarson.

  • LibreOffice port project to Android and iOS, based on the voluntary work of Tor Lillqvist, a SUSE finnish developer know for having ported GIMP to Windows. The LibreOffice Android and iOS port has the objective of bringing the office suite to iPads and Android tablets, and eventually smaller devices. The user interface work has yet to start in earnest but the bulk of the code is compiling.

Please note that these are not products available to end users, but advanced development projects which will become products sometimes in late 2012 or early 2013.

  • 500.000 desktops, mostly Windows, at several French Government entities switching from OpenOffice to LibreOffice (this increases the Windows installed base of LibreOffice by 5% in a single move)

  • 800.000 USB keys with LibreOffice and other free software distributed to students of the Paris Region (Île-de-France)

  • Region Île-de-France becoming a member of TDF Advisory Board

The Document Foundation publishes details of LibreOffice 3.4.3 security fixes

The Internet, October 4, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) publishes some details of the security fixes included with the recently released LibreOffice 3.4.3, and included in the older 3.3.4 version. Following industry best practice, details of security fixes are withheld until users have been given time to migrate to the new version.

RedHat security researcher Huzaifa Sidhpurwala identified a memory corruption vulnerability in the code responsible for loading Microsoft Word documents in LibreOffice. This flaw could have been used for nefarious purposes, such as installing viruses, through a specially-crafted file. The corresponding vulnerability description is CVE-2011-2713,”Out-of-bounds property read in binary .doc filter”.

LibreOffice 3.4.3 also includes various improvements to the loading of Windows Metafile (.wmf) and Windows Enhanced Metafile (.emf) image formats that were found through fuzz testing.

LibreOffice developers have developed some additional security patches and fixes. These are part of a general set of development improvements which are reflected in the overall quality and stability of the software. Most LibreOffice 3.4.3 security fixes have been developed by Caolan McNamara of RedHat and Marc-André Laverdière of Tata Consultancy Services.

“Working on fuzzing LibreOffice import filters has been a great experience, and I am glad I could contribute in securing the computing experience of millions of users,” said Marc-André Laverdière, Scientist, TCS Innovation Labs, Tata Consultancy Services, Ltd. “Working in cooperation with the TDF development team, we have found and fixed serious security and crasher bugs.”

All users are recommended to upgrade to LibreOffice 3.4.3 as soon as possible, in order to benefit from the improved security of the office suite. LibreOffice 3.4.3 can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org.

ODF 1.2 has been approved as an OASIS standard

ODF 1.2, the document format adopted by LibreOffice, has been approved as an OASIS standard. Although we are still waiting the formal OASIS announcement, there have been a dry email by Chet Ensign and a more enthusiastic post by Rob Weir who provide several details about the story. Amongst the TC members who have contributed during the process, Rob lists two TDF founders – Thorsten Behrens and Charles Schulz – and an extremely active and well known LibreOffice core developer: Kohei Yoshida.

Standard document formats are key for liberating the user from the lock in of proprietary formats. ODF has been developed by OASIS based on OOo document format, and is now supported by most personal productivity software and many other computer programs. TDF is committed to supporting ODF and contribute to its development. ODF will be one of four main topics at the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in Paris.

The Document Foundation celebrates its first anniversary

LibreOffice has just been awarded IDG’s InfoWorld BOSSIE Awards 2011 and OWF Experiment Awards 2011 for best of Open Source software

The Internet, September 28, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) celebrates its first anniversary, one year after the unveiling of the project and the release of the first beta of LibreOffice. “What we have achieved in just twelve months is incredible,” says Charles Schulz, a member of the Steering Committee. “Let’s have a look at some numbers: we have 136 members who have been nominated for their contributions to the project; we have some 270 developers and 270 localizers (although we always want to attract more), many of whom are also members; we have over 100 mailing lists, with over 15,000 subscribers, half of whom receive all our announcements; and there have been thousands of articles in the media worldwide”.

LibreOffice is the result of the combined activity of 330 contributors – including former OpenOffice.org developers – having made more than 25,000 commits. The developer community is well balanced between company-sponsored contributors and independent community volunteers: SUSE and community volunteers new to the project have provided around 25% each of the commits, with a further 20% coming from RedHat and another 20% coming from the OpenOffice.org code base. The remaining commits came from pre-TDF contributors, Canonical developers, and organizations like Bobiciel, CodeThink, Lanedo, SIL, and Tata Consultancy Services.

Libreoffice activedevelopersAll that effort is yielding results. Faster, more reliable, with richer features than predecessors, the LibreOffice experience is the best yet in the evolving heritage of the former StarOffice codebase. As InfoWorld said, “The newest features show that much more attention to improving performance and making the product more like a business tool and less me-too effort.”

“Thanks to a very welcoming attitude to newcomers, to the copyleft license, and to the fact that it is not requesting any copyright assignment, The Document Foundation has attracted more developers with commits in the first year than the OpenOffice.org project in the first decade”, says Norbert Thiebaud, a first-day hacker who jumped on LibreOffice code on September 28, 2010, and is now a member of TDF Engineering Steering Committee.

Downloads since January 25, 2011, the day of availability of the first stable release, have just exceeded 6 million from 81 TDF mirrors, and amount to 7.5 million when you add external sites (like Softpedia) offering the same package. In addition, there are many more users who install LibreOffice from a CD burned from the ISO images available online or bundled with a magazine. TDF estimates that there are 10 million users worldwide having installed from downloads and CDs. Over 90% of those are on Windows, with another 5% on MacOS.

Libreoffice downloadspermonthLinux users, in contrast, get LibreOffice from their distribution repository. Based on IDC reckonings for new or updated Linux installations in 2011, TDF estimates a subtotal of 15 million Linux users, as LibreOffice is the office suite of choice for all Linux distributions.

TDF calculates that there is a total of 25 million LibreOffice users worldwide, in line with the expectations and well on the way to the target of 200 million users worldwide before the end of the decade.

“When the community around OpenOffice.org decided to fork into an independent, community-driven project, I was excited and wanted to see it be a success. The best way to ensure that was to actively get involved and, right from the first day, I decided I wanted to be part of the team. I work on LibreOffice documentation and website content development, operate an Alfresco platform for the project, and provide support to the marketing group. LibreOffice is indeed a live, thriving and active project, and we are all determined to ensure it continues to be a great success story,” says David Nelson, another first-day volunteer accepted into the fold as a member of The Document Foundation for his contributions.

The community around TDF will gather in Paris from October 12 to October 15, 2011, for the first LibreOffice Conference (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). Interested people should register at http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/.

LibreOffice can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org/.

NOTE TO READERS: If TDF had used the old OpenOffice.org metrics, counting all hits to the mirror system, the number of downloads would be counted as over 22 million.

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