Google Trends is a service which compares end user searches for specific terms, and as such is a useful marketing tool to get some insight on the awareness of LibreOffice in comparison with other applications. I have compared the five alternatives to the leading office suite during the last 12 months: LibreOffice is leading, followed – as expected – by OpenOffice and WPS Office. LibreOffice is also leading in term of geographical coverage.
The sun never sets on the LibreOffice community, as there are always active members in some countries. Unfortunately, only a minimal part of this global effort is reflected on this blog, which should feature all activities and achievements. In order to get to this objective, we warmly invite all native language communities around the world to send us a short synopsis and a couple of pictures – if available – every time they do something significant for LibreOffice: a talk at a conference, a booth at an exhibition, a meeting, a conference, a localization sprint, or any other event. The same for achievements such as LibreOffice adoptions by government bodies, central or local public administrations, or large enterprises. Just send an email to media@documentfoundation.org, and we will take care of writing the blog post (if necessary, we will translate the local language to English).
In 2017, The Document Foundation has announced the availability of a Dashboard, based on data gathered from several development-related repositories. It is a very useful resource for marketing, as it can be configured to provide either an overview of the project or several detailed charts which can be used to get a more precise picture of what has happened in term of commits, committers, organizations, and issues. The time span covered by the dashboard can be set by the user, from days to years.
The three histograms show trends related to commits, committers and organizations during the last 12 months (clicking on the thumbnails will open a large image, easier to read).
Commits and committers show a rather stable trend, which confirms the maturity of the project. The very few lows in commits are either seasonal or related to the LibreOffice Conference, when core developers are spending most of their time on knowledge sharing rather than on code hacking.
The organizations’ histogram adds the affiliation bit to commits. Collabora, Red Hat and independent volunteer developers (marked as “unknown” in the legend) are the three largest group of contributors, followed by CIB and SIL. Of course, we would like to see more contributions from developers paid by large organizations deploying LibreOffice for personal productivity.
The following four thumbnails show the dashboard home configured for the following time intervals: 2 years, 1 year, 6 months and 90 days. They provide some interesting insights.
Our global community of volunteers, represented by The Document Foundation and based on many independent native language projects, is one of the main strengths of LibreOffice. Starting from today, we launch a new weekly blog post – scheduled on Wednesday – focused on community activities: events, seminars, conferences, projects with schools and central or local government bodies, achievements, etcetera. We want to show the world how diverse and inclusive is our community, and at the same time we want our community members to be proud of being part of it.
One of the largest and strongest LibreOffice communities is based in Indonesia. From March 23 to March 25, 2018, they will organize their first LibreOffice Conference Indonesia in Surabaya: 3 days of meetings based on Workshops, Seminars, Discussions about The Document Foundation, and gathering of LibreOffice advocates and activists. The event is also intended to be a form of thanks to LibreOffice developers who have provided the outstanding free software solution.
LibreOffice Conference Indonesia will be hosted by the Politeknik Elektronika Negeri Surabaya. The event will start on March 23 with a workshop focused on testing LibreOffice builds and localizations, and will follow on March 24 with a full day of seminars on everything LibreOffice, from an introduction to LibreOffice 6.0 to success stories and technical talks. The last day, March 25, will be dedicated to the meeting of LibreOffice Indonesian community members. Call for Papers is already open, and will close on February 8, 2018.
Starting from today, we launch a weekly blog post focused on marketing topics. We will try to provide ammunition to community members advocating LibreOffice and the Open Document Format, and food for thought to people still trying to understand the viability of FOSS on the desktop.
Let’s start with some numbers about LibreOffice.
Although LibreOffice defect density score – according to Coverity Scan – has been around 0.00 per 1,000 lines of code for ages, we should never forget that it is the outstanding result of the commitment to quality of LibreOffice developers (and we should always mention it with pride when we present the software).
The bulk of the activity related to Coverity Scan weekly reports is under the responsibility of Red Hat developers, but we cannot forget that the result is related to the quality of the entire development process. Of course, LibreOffice – as any other software – is not immune from bugs and regressions, but improvements with every new version have been acknowledged by both enterprise and individual users.
Let’s have a look at development numbers provided by OpenHub. During the last 12 months (2017) there have been 15,389 commits by 244 contributors, and during the last 30 days (December 2017) there have been 1,334 commits by 88 contributors. The chart on the left shows that during the last three years the monthly number of contributors has been rather stable, with highs close to 100 and lows close to 75.
After Coverity Scan and OpenHub, which are independent sources, next week we will analyze an internal tool for the analysis of development-related information: TDF Dashboard.
A smiling Michael Meeks with a smiling LibreOffice icon. Happy 2018 !!!
