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Author: Italo Vignoli

LibreOffice 6.2.8 is available, the last release of the 6.2 family

Berlin, October 17, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.2.8, the last minor release of the LibreOffice 6.2 family. All users of LibreOffice 6.2.x versions should update immediately for enhanced security, and be prepared to upgrade to LibreOffice 6.3.4 as soon as it becomes available in December.

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommends sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and bug fixes, and other benefits. Also, the work done by ecosystem partners flows back into the LibreOffice project, benefiting everyone.

LibreOffice’s individual users are helped 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. While TDF can not provide commercial level support, there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos on the website and the wiki. Your donations help us make these available.

LibreOffice 6.2.8’s change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.2.8/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.2.8/RC2 (changed in RC2).

Availability of LibreOffice 6.2.8

LibreOffice 6.2.8 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.9. Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are also available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server-based platform, and should be installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice 6.2.8 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

FOSDEM 2020: Open Document Editors DevRoom Call for Papers

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each year in Brussels (Belgium) at the ULB Campus Solbosch. In 2020, it will be held on Saturday, February 1, and Sunday, February 2.

The Open Document Editors (OFE) DevRoom is scheduled for Saturday, February 1, from 10:30AM to 7PM. Physical room has not yet been assigned by FOSDEM. The shared devroom gives all project in this area a chance to present ODF related developments and innovations.

We are now inviting proposals for talks about Open Document Editors or the ODF document format, on topics such as code, extensions, localization, QA, UX, tools and adoption related cases. This is a unique opportunity to show new ideas and developments to a wide technical audience.

Length of talks should be limited to a maximum of 20 minutes, as we would like to have 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 request.

All submissions have to be made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM20.
While filing your proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), some information about yourself (name, bio and photo).

To submit your talk, click on “Create Event”, then make sure to select the “Open Document Editors” 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 contact ode-devroom-manager@fosdem.org.

The deadline is Saturday, November 30, 2019. Accepted speakers will be notified by Sunday, December 8th, 2019. The DevRoom schedule will be published by Tuesday, December 12, 2019.

Recording permission

The talks in the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too.
In the “Submission notes” field, please indicate that you agree that your presentation will be licensed under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 or CC-BY-4.0 license and that you agree to have your presentation recorded. For example: “If my speech is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to license all recordings, slides, and other associated materials under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License. Sincerely, Name”.

October 12: International Day Against DRM 2019

Digital Restrictions Management is the practice of imposing technological restrictions that control what users can do with digital media. When a program is designed to prevent you from copying or sharing a song, reading an ebook on another device, or playing a single-player game without an Internet connection, you are being restricted by DRM. In other words, DRM creates a damaged good; it prevents you from doing what would be possible without it. This concentrates control over production and distribution of media, giving DRM peddlers the power to carry out massive digital book burnings and conduct large scale surveillance over people’s media viewing habits.

If we want to avoid a future in which our devices serve as an apparatus to monitor and control our interaction with digital media, we must fight to retain control of our media and software.

Defective by Design is a broad-based anti-DRM campaign that is targeting Big Media, unhelpful manufacturers and DRM distributors. The campaign aims to make all manufacturers wary about bringing their DRM-enabled products to market. DRM products have features built-in that restrict what jobs they can do. These products have been intentionally crippled from the users’ perspective, and are therefore “defective by design”. This campaign will identify these “defective” products, and target them for elimination.

LibreOffice 10/20 Logo Community Contest

The year 2020 will be the 20th anniversary of the free office suite (OpenOffice.org was announced on July 19, 2000) and the 10th anniversary of LibreOffice (announced on September 28, 2010). We have the opportunity to celebrate both during the year, to reaffirm the fact that LibreOffice today is the leading free office suite available in the market.

For the anniversary project, we need a specific logo which celebrates the 10/20 anniversary without making a difference between the two dates, as the concept is that LibreOffice was born 20 years ago as OpenOffice.org, and evolved into LibreOffice 10 years ago.

The 10/20 logo should be easy to associate to the current LibreOffice logo (with tagline), and follow TDF design and style guides (Corporate Image) published on the wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/Branding.

The 10/20 logo will be used for presentations, event signage, swag and gadgets (like stickers). It should be easy to recognize and read at small sizes.

The 10/20 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 squared or nearly squared format, plus other formats as appropriate.

One 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.

Authors must declare in writing that they are the sole owners 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 be rejected. Also, the 10/20 logo must be global and as such any reference to a regional styling approach (such as Anime or Manga) will also be rejected.

Logo proposals must be sent to: italo@libreoffice.org by November 30, 2019, at 11:59PM UTC. TDF will select the best proposal, which will be announced on December 16, 2019.

The author of the winning proposal will be announced at FOSDEM 2020, where the 10/20 logo will be displayed for the first time during a global FOSS event.

Interview with Ilmari Lauhakangas, Development Marketing

Ilmari Lauhakangas, based in Helsinki (Finland), is in charge of Development Marketing.

We have asked him a few questions, about his relationship with free software and his role in the community.

How did you become involved with free software and LibreOffice? Are you contributing to other FOSS projects?

I did localisation for FOSS projects in the early 2010s. Around 2012, I started contributing more to Retroshare, a secure communication platform, doing recruiting, translation coordination and web design.

In 2014 I began doing quality assurance for LibreOffice. People like Yousuf Philips, Joel Madero and Robinson Tryon were instrumental in making me understand the relevance of QA work. The attitude towards recruiting more contributors was spontaneous and immediate in the QA team.

I have focused on LibreOffice for the past few years.

You have been involved in the LibreOffice project for quite a long time, in QA and other areas. Can you summarize your activities?

I have: 1. somehow touched over twelve thousand reports in TDF Bugzilla, 2. improved and written technical documentation in TDF wiki, 3. improved help content, 4. done development for the web help, 5. edited content for the main website, 6. piloted the use of the translate extension for TDF wiki and guided people in its use, 7. helped new contributors get started in development, QA, documentation, design and infra, 8. recruited contributors through various channels such as VolunteerMatch.

You have explored several tools to attract new contributors. What do you think we should do as a project to keep the high level of contributions necessary for a large FOSS project such as LibreOffice?

We should make sure our technical documentation is high quality. When developers run into good documentation, they are very happy.

We should invest in improving the user experience of our web-based tools.

You are responsible for Development Marketing since September 1. How can you describe your responsibilities? Who should get in touch with you?

Basically everyone who wants to improve LibreOffice should get in touch. If you have no idea of how you could even be useful, I will help you find out, because everyone can be a part of the community and contribute! I hope to encourage strong cross-team collaboration. I want people to be credited for their work. I want us to have a safe and supporting environment for everyone to challenge themselves, try new things and learn new skills.

Technology focused high schools and universities, what should we do to grow the interest and the willingness to contribute among students?

This is more of a political question. If money and resources are lacking in education, teachers will not have time to offer structured introductions to free software projects. Likewise, if higher education is not free, students will have to work alongside their studies and will not have the energy contribute to FOSS.

On our part, we need to provide students with software they can rely on. In Finland, thirty thousand students in advanced secondary education use LibreOffice every year. If they find the software enjoyable, surely they are more inclined to contribute.

Happy 9th Anniversary, LibreOffice

Happy 9th Anniversary to LibreOffice, to the community of volunteer contributors  – represented by The Document Foundation – and to every person who made the dream possible with a donation or a simple download. If you have developed, patched, localized, tested, triaged, documented, communicated, promoted, explained, supported, certified, trained or migrated either the software or the organizations deploying it or the people using it, you should celebrate. Together, we have been able to transform a dream into a reality.

Thanks to Geralt for the image, released with a Pixabay License.

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