Italo Vignoli, Author at TDF Community Blog

Home » Archives for Italo Vignoli » Page 124

The Document Foundation celebrates its first anniversary

2011-09-28

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.

All 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.

Linux 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.

LibreOffice Conference Program

2011-09-19

Paris, October 13 to October 15, 2011

Over 200 people – members of The Document Foundation and free software advocates – will gather in Paris to celebrate the first anniversary of the project and discuss ideas and new plans for the future

The Document Foundation announces the program of the first LibreOffice Conference, which will gather over 200 people – members of the project and free software advocates – in Paris from October 13 to October 15, 2011. The conference – which will be held in two locations: La Cantine de Silicon Sentier and the IRILL (Institut de Recherche du Logiciel Libre, or free software research institute) – is sponsored by: Cap Digital, IRILL and Région Île-de-France (Premium Sponsors); Canonical, Google, La Mouette, Novell/SUSE and RedHat (Gold Sponsors); AF83, Ars Aperta and Lanedo (Silver Sponsors). Logos and links to sponsors are available here.

On October 12, La Cantine will be open in the afternoon for registration and for a meeting of TDF Steering Committee, followed by a public Q&A session open to members of The Document Foundation and conference attendees. In the evening at 7 pm, Cap Digital will organize a welcome cocktail at their headquarters near the Bastille.

On October 13, the conference will start with a welcome address from the region authorities and the organizing committee, followed by TDF keynote speech summarizing the project achievements during the first year: development, infrastructure, community and marketing. The following presentations will be split into four different tracks, focused – again – on development, community, marketing and ODF, plus a technical “bird-of-feather” session. The program is available here.

The conference will continue in the evenings with get-together events, where the international community will have the opportunity to meet and mingle: on October 13 at 7 pm, there will be the Île-de-France Region special evening, with several keynotes and announcements; while on October 14 at 7 pm, there will be the AF83 Beer & Music evening.

Participation in the LibreOffice Conference is free of charge; all you need to do is to register here before the end of September.

InfoWorld awards Best of Open Source to LibreOffice

2011-09-17

LibreOffice is one of the winners of InfoWorld BOSSIE – Best of Open Source – Awards 2011.

LibreOffice

OpenOffice.org desperately needed a rejuvenating shot in the arm, and it’s come in the form of the LibreOffice project, a variant of OO.o developed by the Document Foundation (the folks behind the ODF standard).

LibreOffice launches faster, runs more reliably, and sports an incrementally better set of features than OpenOffice.org – but what’s most important is the accelerated pace of development for the product.

The newest features show that much more attention to improving performance and making the product more like a business tool and less a me-too effort.

The latest version, LibreOffice 3.4.3, adds many useful functions: improved HTML export; better text rendering in Linux; better support for OLE links when importing an Excel document (crucial if you’re migrating away from Microsoft Office); fewer dependencies on Java for import/export and other tasks (another annoying shortcoming in OpenOffice.org); and a nonmodal Firefox/Chrome-like “Find” dialog.

They’re good additions all around.

LibreOffice’s spelling/grammar checking is still primitive compared to Microsoft Office, and there’s still a lot of clunkiness to the program.

But the whole package is finally headed in the right direction.

Doug Dineley, Executive Editor/Test Center, InfoWorld:

In every software category worth mentioning, you’ll find a competitive open source solution. And in some cases, open source is the only solution. Our 2011 Bossie Award winners represent the best that open source has to offer in application development, desktop productivity, mobile computing, and the data center.

By the way, behind the ODF standard there is OASIS and not TDF, which is a supporter of the standard and will soon apply for OASIS membership.

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.3

2011-08-31

The Internet, August 31, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) maintains the speedy pace of LibreOffice development with the announcement of version 3.4.3, intended for enterprise deployments. The new release arrives two weeks after version 3.3.4 (intended for more-conservative users) and one month after the previous release of the 3.4 family, which provides a larger feature set based on cleaner and leaner code.

TDF maintains two editions of LibreOffice to satisfy the needs of a large and diverse user base, although we strongly recommend everyone to update to the 3.4 series in the near future. LibreOffice 3.4.2 has already been deployed by users at Itaipu Binacional in Brazil, the largest electrical power plant in the world, and has been key for the launch of a large migration project involving 25,000 desktops by Copenhagen hospitals in Denmark.

From September 2nd to September 4th, the LibreOffice community will host this year’s Hackfest together with the Linux Migration Project of the city of Munich in Germany (http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest2011). The meeting has the objective of improving the collaboration between TDF and corporate users of LibreOffice, in order to better match the time based release schedule with the needs of organizations with very large deployments of the office suite.

LibreOffice 3.4.3 is immediately available for download in over 100 language versions from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-4-release-3.4.3.1.log and http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/commit-log-libreoffice-3-4-release-3.4.3.1.log.

In October, the community around TDF and LibreOffice will gather in Paris for the first LibreOffice Conference (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). The keynotes and the agenda of the event will be announced soon, together with a program of workshops and trainings for TDF members. Participation in the event is free of charge, and only requires you to register at http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users

2011-08-01

Thanks to the work of 300 contributors, the new LibreOffice comes with substantial improvements

The Internet, August 1, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.4.2, the third version of the 3.4 family, targeting both private individuals and enterprises. LibreOffice 3.4.2 fixes the majority of the most-important bugs identified by users in the previous version, and can be deployed for production needs by most enterprises.

The Document Foundation encourages large organizations deploying LibreOffice to do so in conjunction with a support partner, who can carefully assess specific requirements, help manage migration and provide bespoke fixes for identified issues. Purchasing LibreOffice support from a TDF partner also provides enterprises with an indirect means to contribute financially to the project, thereby funding its development, improving its stability, and accelerating its growth. Users should always refer to the release notes before deploying the new version.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 is the result of the combined activity of 300 contributors having made more than 23,000 commits, with the addition, deletion or modification of around five million lines of code. The developer community is well balanced between company-sponsored contributors and independent community volunteers: Oracle and SUSE have each provided around 25% of the commits, with a further 25% coming from community volunteers new to the project since our inception, and with a further 20% from RedHat. The remaining commits came from a combination of pre-TDF contributors, Canonical developers, and organizations like Bobiciel, CodeThink, Lanedo, SIL, and Tata Consultancy Services.

If we look at the same data for individual developers, the top 12 by number of commits since the inception of LibreOffice is composed of a mixture of corporate-sponsored contributors (from 4 companies: Canonical, Oracle, RedHat and SUSE) and a number of private individual contributors, indicating a balanced situation and a healthy community.

“TDF was born with the aim of evolving the OpenOffice.org code to develop a cleaner and leaner free office suite and, after ten months, we are right on track to achieve this objective,” says Bjoern Michaelsen, one of the four Canonical contributors, and a key member of the Engineering Steering Committee. “Of course, with such a large code renovation effort, we are aware of the short-term risk of reduced stability, but this is counterbalanced by the long-term improvement in features, speed and – again – stability.”

Other news is that the number of TDF official contributors and LibreOffice users is increasing. Youbing Jin, President of RedFlag2000 Software Company, says, “We are delighted to see that TDF is getting ever stronger, and we are proud to be part of it.”

The community around The Document Foundation and LibreOffice will gather in Paris for the first LibreOffice Conference, from October 13 to October 15, 2011 (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). The call for papers is open until August 8, while registration will close at the end of September.

Although TDF is happy that 3.4.2, deployed with support from a suitable partner, can be considered “enterprise-ready”, it is clearly only one more milestone on our march towards ever greater stability, with the 3.4.3 release to incorporate further stability improvements and security fixes by the end of August.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

Developer Interview: Tor Lillqvist

2011-07-21

Programming is about people: so please ! tell us a bit about yourself:

I am Tor Lillqvist. On LibreOffice IRC I am known as tml_ . I live in Helsinki, Finland, with my wife and our 10-year daughter. My son has already grown up and moved out. Some of my passions are trains (modern and recent electric and diesel technology, I am not that much into steam nostalgia), reading good books, listening to challenging and/or good music, the visual arts, architecture, and travels.

Most recently I have read “The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore” by Benjamin Hale, “Hitch-22” by Christopher Hitchens and “Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell. Among art museums that have impressed me are the Guggenheim Bilbao and ICA Boston. I love the music of for instance David Sylvian, Nico, Steve Reich, Sigur Rós, Erik Satie, rechenzentrum, Emilie Simon, Carnatic and Gamelan music.

What was your very first program ?

Some silly assignment at University, presumably. I had not used computers before University. Or actually, I did have a programmable TI calculator and did some programming on that in my teens.

What do you do when you’re not hacking on LibreOffice ?

Read, sleep, eat, etc.

When do you usually spend time on the project ?

What I do as my work, mostly normal working hours. Hacking for fun during evenings and weekends when I have the inspiration and nothing more important to do.

Which is your preferred text editor? And why?

XEmacs, because it is so intuitive. (That is a joke. No software is intuitive.) I have used various versions of Emacs for 30 years and don’t see any reason to change.

Did you work on Free Software projects before LibreOffice ?

Yes, and Open Source in general, before that term was invented even. I always seemed to work on “non-mainstream” platforms, like HP-UX when “everybody” else doing what became known as Open Source was using BSD or SunOS. As an example of early and obscure Open Source hacking I did I can mention porting TeX and Metafont to the HP1000 A-Series (a 16 bit minicomputer running an obscure not-at-all-Unixish OS, ).

More recently, since the late 1990s until last year or so, I ported GTK+ to Windows, initially to get GIMP, and then took part in maintaining the port. At one point, in 2005, I even was paid to work on related stuff, in the effort to make Evolution run on Windows. Alas, in recent years I had less and less inspiration to hack on the GTK+ stack on Windows, and finally then this year I admitted/announced publicly that I was not really doing it any more. I hate saying this, but I guess I have kinda lost faith in quality cross-platform GUI toolkits. At least volunteer-maintained ones.

What Operating System do you use mainly ?

Windows Server 2008 R2 (server version of Windows 7) on my main desktop, and then Mac OS X, iOS and openSUSE.

What do you think was your most important contribution to LibreOffice so far ?

I can’t point to anything particular. Perhaps, from a future point of view, my spare time hacking on cross-compilation to iOS and Android.

How will that improve things for users ?

By hopefully making possible apps on those platforms that use LibreOffice code to for instance support rare old document formats not supported in other apps. (To end-users the freedom aspect of such an application presumably being FLOSS is of zero importance. Sorry.)

What is your vision for the future and/or what would you most like to see improved ?

I would love to see the codebase cleaned up even more. I would like us to have the courage to jettison from the main codebase unloved functionality that nobody seems to step up to maintain. (I am looking at you, Base.)

Anything else interesting you get up to when not hacking ?

I enjoying doing photography. But I don’t really do as much photography as I would like. I would love to have the inspiration and time to attempt making music (mainly odd beeps and noises, no doubt).

Can you tell us a bit about your cross-compiling work, and why it is important ?

I don’t know if it is important. It is fun, that is why I do it.

I am working on making it possible to cross-compile LibreOffice (to various degrees) for iOS (from (Intel) MacOSX), Android (from Linux or MacOSX), Windows (from any Unix with a suitable cross-compiler tool-chain) and PowerPC MacOSX (from Intel MacOSX).

The basic cross-compilation changes in the LibreOffice configure and build machinery should be more or less done now. Very little actual new code (as needed to at least some degree for iOS and Android) has been written. No planning has been done regarding what this work really tries to achieve for the new platforms, etc…

For the new, mobile, touch-based platforms, iOS and Android, it might make most sense to use non-GUI LibreOffice code as a library, and write applications in a totally native way from scratch that then use the LibreOffice libraries.

But maybe just to get the interest up it would make sense to also have some early toy application on either platform that would use some amount of LibreOffice GUI code, thus needing a port of the GUI toolkit in LibreOffice.

For Windows, LibreOffice obviously already has code for full functionality on Windows. The task is just to make it build using a cross-compiling MinGW tool-chain instead of Microsoft’s tool-chain. That is not trivial.

The Intel to PowerPC MacOSX case should be the easiest.

Finally: Yes, I am aware of the potential license incompatibilty between the LGPL and DRM-enforcing distribution mechanisms like the iTunes App Store (and maybe the Android Market). But I find such discussion boring. And perhaps the Apache thing will affect this somehow. Anyway, I am doing this for the hacking pleasure.

What is your estimate of the proportion of bugs that are specific to Windows ?

Maybe ten percent?

What other question would you like to answer (with answer) ?

“Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

No.

Thanks a lot for your answers, and contribution !

Author: Italo Vignoli

The Document Foundation celebrates its first anniversary

LibreOffice Conference Program

InfoWorld awards Best of Open Source to LibreOffice

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.3

LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users

Developer Interview: Tor Lillqvist

Press Releases

LibreOffice 26.2 is here: a faster, more polished office suite that you control

Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.4

Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.3

Open Document Format

Why OOXML is not a standard format for office documents

The philosophy behind ODF: openness, freedom and control

Why open standards are extremely beneficial to end users