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Author: Italo Vignoli

Hossein Nourikhah joins the TDF team as Developer Community Architect

Next week, Hossein Nourikhah will join the team at The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice, as Developer Community Architect. Hossein is a developer, university lecturer and FOSS advocate. He writes programs, teaches programming to students, and is an advocate for the use of free software applications, because they have a huge positive impact on the quality of our life by providing the essential freedoms that we all deserve.

Hossein has a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering (Software) from Isfahan University of Technology, and a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Information Technology from Amirkabir University of Technology, also called the Tehran Polytechnic. Since 2016 he has been an instructor at the Amirkabir University of Technology, teaching various courses including C/C++ programming, operating systems, software design, and many others.

Hossein started programming in BASIC and Pascal when he was 12, and after two and a half decades he is still involved in programming for fun and profit. He has worked with several programming languages, including C/C++, Java, Pascal, PHP and many more.

Industry experience

In addition to the university activities, including teaching and research, Hossein has several years of experience in the industry, working at various software/hardware companies as a C/C++/Java programmer – and lately as a software team manager and lead developer.

Hossein’s work experience ranges from web development with PHP to industrial application development with C++/Qt. He considers Qt a great platform for C++ software development, and he likes it very much as a clean and lovely tool.

Hossein has worked with many programmers as mentor, helping them to improve and reach their potential in software development by better understanding programming languages, libraries and tools. He feels great when he can empower other people, also because this helps him to expand his knowledge and understand things much better than before.

As Developer Community Architect, Hossein will be responsible for attracting new contributors to the LibreOffice project by identifying and onboarding new potential developers, building relationships between them and the community, and introducing them to TDF’s communication channels – where they will meet fellow co-hackers. He will encourage everyone’s contribution, and show community members ways to grow by bringing the more skilled contributors in contact with existing experts in the various fields for even deeper learning.

We’re happy to have him on board, and look forward to working with him!

100 Paper Cuts as a new student mentoring activity

Just before the pandemic, the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation approved a budget to launch an educational program targeted to universities, where students at selected tech schools would receive an economic incentive to promote LibreOffice amongst their peers, with the objective of increasing the number of young contributors both in source code development and in other areas. Unfortunately, the pandemics has forced all universities to stop all collateral activities, and this has resulted in the program being frozen for over one year.

Although the situation is not yet back to normal, we have the opportunity to mentor a student in Turkey. Muhammet Kara, a member of the MC and a Collabora full time developer, will mentor Ahmet Hakan Çelik, an undergraduate computer science student at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, who will be working on 100 Paper Cuts – a list of bugs and enhancement requests relating to LibreOffice’s user experience – during June and July, trying to solve as many issues as he can. The target is to collect 10 points.

This is a first step in the direction set before the pandemic. We are planning to make similar announcements soon.

After the summer, if the academic activities will be back to normal – although the recover will be slow, and will have to cope with entirely new regulations – The Document Foundation will be able to get back in touch with the universities to start the planned Ambassador Program.

LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community available for download

Berlin, June 10, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.1 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice 7.1.4 includes around 80 bug fixes, with 20% focused on Microsoft Office file compatibility (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX, and legacy DOCs).

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are 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.

Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud. They may have a different name, according to each company brand, but they share the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.

Migrations to LibreOffice

The Document Foundation has developed a Migration Protocol to support enterprises moving from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, which is based on the deployment of a LTS version from the LibreOffice Enterprise family, plus migration consultancy and training sourced from certified professionals who offer CIOs and IT managers value-added solutions in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community

LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites. For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation provides LibreOffice 7.0.6.

LibreOffice 7.1.4 change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.4/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.4/RC2 (changed in RC2).

LibreOffice Technology based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while for App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/.

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 are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

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 7.1.4 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

REMINDER LibreOffice Conference Call for Papers

LibreOffice Conference Call for Papers is open until June 30, 2021. Thanks to the efforts of TDF infra team led by Guilhem Moulin, you can now submit your proposal using TDF brand new event management platform at https://events.documentfoundation.org/libocon2021/cfp. We know that you were all eager to use that platform for your proposals, and now you don’t have any excuse for a further delay of your submission!

LibreOffice Conference 2021 will take place online from September 23 to 25, Thursday to Saturday. The Document Foundation invites all members and contributors to submit talks, lectures and workshops. Whether you are a seasoned presenter or have never spoken in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice, ODF, the Document Liberation Project or the ODF Toolkit, we want to hear from you!

Proposals should be filed by June 30, 2021, in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference program.

The conference program will be based on the following tracks:

  • a) Development, APIs, Extensions, Future Technology
  • b) Quality Assurance
  • c) Localization, Documentation and Native Language Projects
  • d) Appealing Libreoffice: Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility
  • e) Open Document Format, Document Liberation and Interoperability
  • f) Advocating, Promoting, Marketing LibreOffice
  • g) Diversity and Inclusion, New Generation Project for Students’ Inclusion

Presentations, case studies and technical talks will discuss a subject in depth and will last 30 minutes (including Q&A), while Workshops will last 90 minutes (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and will last 5 minutes (including Q&A). Sessions will be streamed live and recorded for download.

If you do not agree to provide the data for the talk under the “Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License”, please explicitly state your terms. In order to make your presentation available on TDF YouTube and PeerTube channels, please do not submit talks containing copyrighted material (music, pictures, etc.).

If you want to give multiple talks, please submit a separate proposal for each one, using the submission form at the following address (is always the same): https://events.documentfoundation.org/libocon2021/cfp.

Thanks a lot for your participation!

Contest for LibreOffice Ecosystem and LibreOffice Technology logo

The Strategic Marketing Plan discussed in 2020 has introduced a couple of concepts – LibreOffice Ecosystem and LibreOffice Technology – which will be the cornerstone of LibreOffice marketing activities for the foreseeable future, and will be deployed on web properties, marketing materials, documents, presentations and merchandise for events. Now, we need high-impact visuals to stress the importance of these concepts for LibreOffice.

Based on the success of the community contest for the 2020 Anniversary Logo, which has provided a consistent visual image for presentations at virtual events in 2020 (and will be used in 2021 as well), The Document Foundation is challenging community members with the task of developing two different logos:

(1) LibreOffice Ecosystem logo, to underline the unique characteristics of the LibreOffice project: global reach, continuous research for improvement and high quality, inclusiveness, loyalty to copyleft licenses, smooth combination of paid and volunteer contributors, and eventually lots of fun especially at events. The LibreOffice Sustainability slide deck provides an extensive description of the concept: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/4qLzRad8wNd8pFk.

(2) LibreOffice Technology logo, to underline the uniqueness of the LibreOffice platform, which provides a single common engine for all platforms, from desktop to mobile to cloud, and therefore a more consistent way of handling files both in ODF and OOXML document formats, which improves interoperability. The LibreOffice Technology slide deck provides an extensive description of the concept: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/Xw4A7mY6W6yJTqo.

LibreOffice Ecosystem logo is the most important one, so community members should focus their best energies on it. LibreOffice Technology logo would be nice to have, but not as important as the Ecosystem one, as this will be a logo that all community members should use.

As a reference, TDF design and style guides (Corporate Image) are published on the wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/Branding.

Both logos will be used for presentations, event signage, merchandise and gadgets (like stickers). They should be easy to recognize and read even at small sizes.

Both logos logo must be developed with free and open source software, and released in vector-based (SVG) as well as bitmap-based (PNG, JPG) formats. The logo must be available in a square or nearly square version, plus other formats as appropriate. An example of a possible implementation should also be provided with the proposal.

Intellectual property must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), while a copyright transfer to TDF is not required. The authors must declare in writing that they are the sole owner of all rights related to the artwork they have developed.

It should be clear that this is not a request for a mascot, and any kind of proposal which could be interpreted as a mascot will not be considered. Also, the logo must have a global reach, and as such any reference to a regional styling approach will not be considered.

Logo proposals must be sent to: italo@libreoffice.org by Augus 31, 2021, at 11:59PM UTC. TDF Team will select the winning proposals, which will be announced – and used – during the LibreOffice Virtual Conference, from September 23 to September 25, 2021.

We look forward to meeting the authors of the winning proposals at FOSDEM 2022 in Brussels or at the LibreOffice Conference 2022 (location still to be decided), to celebrate their work.

TDF Annual Report 2020

The Annual Report of The Document Foundation for the year 2020 is now available in PDF format from TDF Nextcloud in three different versions: low resolution (4.7MB), medium resolution (18MB) and high resolution (24.7MB). The annual report is based on the German version presented to the authorities in April.

The 54 page document has been entirely created with free open source software: written contents have obviously been developed with LibreOffice Writer (desktop) and collaboratively modified with LibreOffice Writer (online), charts have been created with LibreOffice Calc and prepared for publishing with LibreOffice Draw, drawings and tables have been developed or modified (from legacy PDF originals) with LibreOffice Draw, images have been prepared for publishing with GIMP, and the layout has been created with Scribus based on the existing templates.

All pictures are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License, courtesy of TDF Members from all over the world. Stock photos are CC0 by Pixabay.

Lothar Becker, Chairman of TDF Board of Directors, has written in the welcome address:

You will learn that our jubilee year was one of the most successful in our history. With all activities that took place, despite the situation that we could rarely meet in-person, it is really really incredible how the local communities and all supra-national activities carried on. And furthermore we grew in every aspect: our community base has more contributors than ever, and we had an impressive number of releases of LibreOffice, with a lot of code contributions – especially for the new major release of LibreOffice 7.0. And last but not least, the financial report of the foundation shows a year better than ever.

Certainly, we also had some shortfalls last year, starting with the lack of personal meetings and the consequences in the relationships between members – but also with changes and moves in the community and its ecosystem within. And let’s not forget the members of the community who suffered from bad health because of the pandemic situation. But overall, we could feel lucky and proud coming out of this year strengthened as described in this annual report. For all shortfalls, we are working hard in all TDF bodies (the Board, the old and new Membership Committee, the Advisory Board, the team led by Florian Effenberger), with the whole membership as well as national and international parts of the community.

So for all these activities, code and non-code contributions, personal engagements and donations we truly say a big THANK YOU, thank all of you for being with TDF in such a special year for every one of us.

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