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Author: Italo Vignoli

LibreOffice has been awarded the Editor’s Pick badge by Software Informer

This is Software Informer’s editor rating.

Work with document files either imported from programs like MS Word, Excel and other office tools or created natively in formats like ODF or PDF compatible with modern and open standards. Editing, copying and incorporating data in databases is possible.

LibreOffice is an open-source free alternative to heavy commercial office suites like MS Office. While having generally the same functionality, LibreOffice is more open to modification and updates, making it a more attractive suite if you want a comfortable and adjustable tool for working with documentation.

LibreOffice consists of several tools capable of working with documents of any type, from standard Word files and Excel tables to presentations and Publisher files. There’s a word processing and desktop publishing tool called Writer; spreadsheet program Calc; tool for creating effective multimedia presentations called Impress; a sketching tool named Draw; database manager Base; formula editor Math; advanced chart and diagram creator Charts. Every tool has all the features of an advanced editor for the kind of files you could work with. The tools work stable and fast, they are easy to use even if you’re not an experienced user of office tools.

LibreOffice adds several unique features into its programming, such as the support for ODT documents and the ability to incorporate various plugins and extensions. You can always add new templates for various documents.

Open-source tools sometimes disappoint by being attempts to copy a licensed product. LibreOffice is different in that, it’s a genuinely good product itself.

PRELIMINARY results of the elections for the next Board of Directors at The Document Foundation

TDF Membership Committee announces the PRELIMINARY results of the elections for the next Board of Directors at The Document Foundation.

The number of TDF Members who voted is 120, from a total amount of 211 eligible voters. This means that 91 TDF Members did not vote. The Membership Committee would like to thanks all the voters, as the elections are the most significant time of the year for TDF Members, because they can decide about the project’s governance.

Based on the PRELIMINARY results, the following candidates are elected as members of TDF Board of Directors, in order of preference:

Full Members:

  1. Thorsten Behrens
  2. Paolo Vecchi
  3. Jan ‘Kendy’ Holešovský
  4. Emiliano Vavassori
  5. Caolán McNamara
  6. Cor Nouws
  7. László Németh

Deputies:

  1. Gábor Kelemen
  2. Ayhan Yalçınsoy
  3. Gabriel Masei

Results were calculated using the same tooling and rules of previous elections, based on the single transferable vote (STV) voting system and the Meek algorithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_single_transferable_votes). The software used is OpenSTV (https://github.com/Conservatory/openstv).

The Membership Committee agreed on the ranking of the first six candidates, but is still discussing about the last four candidates.

Unfortunately, given that there are 10 candidates and 10 seats, OpenSTV 1.7 does not provide more than one round to rank all candidates that have not reached the threshold, and considers all candidates as elected. For more details, see: https://elections.documentfoundation.org/results.php?election_id=14. The Membership Committee will investigate this further, and will update TDF Members and the general public as soon as possible.

Before the results can be considered as final, we have the challenge phase from Wednesday, December 15, to Monday, December 20, at midnight CET (UTC+1).

TDF Members are invited to check their votes as explained after the voting, by using the anonymous token received at that time (each voter has received a different token, and is the sole owner of that token). Election results to verify are available here: https://elections.documentfoundation.org/votes.php?election_id=14.

If you have any questions or if you think that there were irregularities during the vote, please get in touch with the Membership Committee AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, and in any case no later than Monday, December 20, at midnight CET (UTC+1), using the email address elections@documentfoundation.org.

For reference, details of the whole election process have been outlined in the first announcement: https://listarchives.tdf.io/i/tFJzSYUUGcSjf0c0NtNiEOou.

Open Letter to Members of EU Parliament

Today, the Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets (https://competitivedigitalmarkets.eu/), 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.

Open Letter 6 December

LibreOffice 7.2.4 Community and LibreOffice 7.1.8 Community available ahead of schedule to provide an important security fix

Berlin, December 6, 2021 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 7.2.4 Community and LibreOffice 7.1.8 Community to provide a key security fix. Releases are immediately available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/, and all LibreOffice users are recommended to update their installation. Both new version include the fixed NSS 3.73.0 cryptographic library, to solve CVE-2021-43527 (the nss secfix is the only change compared to the previous version).

LibreOffice 7.2.4 Community is also available for Apple Silicon from this link: https://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/7.2.4/mac/aarch64/.

LibreOffice Community is based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud.

LibreOffice individual users are assisted by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice Technology DevRoom Call for Papers

FOSDEM 2022 will be a virtual event, taking place online on Saturday, February 5, and Sunday, February 6. The LibreOffice DevRoom is scheduled for Sunday, February 6, from 9AM to 7PM (times to be confirmed). If we will get more interesting talk proposals than the maximum number we can fit in one day, we will have the opportunity to extend the DevRoom to Saturday, February 5, in the afternoon.

NEW RULES FOR 2022

  • The reference time will be Brussels local time (CET).
  • Talks will be pre-recorded in advance, and streamed during the event
  • Q/A session will be live
  • A facility will be provided for people watching to chat between themselves
  • A facility will be provided for people watching to submit questions

IMPORTANT DATES TO REMEMBER

  • December 26: Submission deadline
  • December 28: Announcement of selected talks
  • December 31: Publication of DevRoom final schedule
  • January 16: Availability of pre-recordings for review
  • January 23: Deadline for upload of presentations

CALL FOR PAPERS

We are inviting proposals for talks about LibreOffice Technology, including ODF standard document format, on topics such as code, localization, QA, UX, documentation, tools, extensions, migrations and general advocacy. Please keep in mind that product pitches are not allowed at FOSDEM.

The length of talks is limited to a maximum of 25 minutes, as we would like to have some minutes for questions after each presentation, and to fit as many presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be explicitly requested and justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you have requested.

IMPORTANT INFORMATIONS

  • Presentations have to be pre-recorded and tested for streaming before the event.
  • Once your talk is pre-recorded, and approved by a reviewer in term of quality for streaming, it will have to be uploaded by January 23, to be prepared and ready for broadcast (the deadline cannot be moved further).
  • During the stream of talks, speakers must be available online for the Q/A session.

TALK SUBMISSIONS

All talk submissions have to be made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM22.

While filing the proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), some information about yourself (name, bio and photo, but please do remember that your profile might be already stored in Pentabarf). To submit your talk, click on “Create Event” and select the “LibreOffice Technology” DevRoom as the “Track”. Otherwise, your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please get in touch with the DevRoom manager.

DEVROOM MANAGER

Italo Vignoli: italo@libreoffice.org

EU coalition urges EU to push back against gate keeping by Microsoft, files official complaint

Brussels, November 26 – A coalition of EU software and cloud businesses joined Nextcloud GmbH in respect of their formal complaint to the European Commission about Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior in respect of its OneDrive (cloud) offering. In a repeat from earlier monopolistic actions, Microsoft is bundling its OneDrive, Teams and other services with Windows and aggressively pushing consumers to sign up and hand over their data to Microsoft. This limits consumer choice and creates a barrier for other companies offering competing services.

Over the last few years have grown their market share to 66% of the EU market, while local providers lost out from 26 to 16%. By heavily favoring their own products and services (so-called “self-preferencing”) or outright blocking other vendors they leverage their position as gate keepers to extend their reach in more and more neighbouring markets and push users deeper into their ecosystems. Local, more specialised vendors are unable to compete “on the merits” as the key to success is not a good product but the ability to distort competition and block market access.

“This is quite similar to what Microsoft did when it killed competition in the browser market, stopping nearly all browser innovation for over a decade. Copy an innovators’ product, bundle it with your own dominant product and kill their business, then stop innovating. This kind of behavior is bad for the consumer, for the market and, of course, for local businesses in the EU. Together with the other members of the coalition, we are asking the antitrust authorities in Europe to enforce a level playing field, giving customers a free choice and to give competition a fair chance,” said Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud GmbH

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition exists precisely for the purpose of preventing this kind of abusive behavior and keeping the market competitive and fair for all players. Nextcloud GmbH has filed an official complaint with the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition about the abusive practices of Microsoft related to OneDrive. Nextcloud GmbH has also filed a request with the German anti-trust authorities (the “Bundeskartellamt”) for an investigation against Microsoft and is discussing a complaint in France with its coalition members.

Dozens of European SMEs organisations support these efforts to push back against Big Tech and create a level playing field, supporting innovation and local (European) businesses.

A full list of these companies as well as non-profits and industry consortia can be found on https://antitrust.nextcloud.com. On the same page, there is also a list of the media coverage.

About Nextcloud GmbH

Nextcloud Hub is the industry-leading, fully open-source, on-premises team productivity platform and Germany’s number one collaboration solution. It combines the easy user interface of consumer-grade cloud solutions with the security and compliance measures enterprises need. Nextcloud Hub brings together universal access to data through mobile, desktop and web interfaces with next-generation, on-premise secure communication and collaboration features like real-time document editing, chat and video calls, putting them under the direct control of IT and integrated with existing infrastructure. Nextcloud’s easy and quick deployment, open, modular architecture and emphasis on security and advanced federation capabilities enable modern enterprises to leverage their existing file storage assets within and across the borders of their organization. For more information, visit nextcloud.com or follow @Nextclouders on Twitter.

Press Releases

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Open Document Format

IMPORTANT ODF Template added to CRA Guidance feedback

Last week, the European Commission published the draft guidelines for the CRA and opened a comment session open to all…