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 2017, it will be held on Saturday, February 4, and Sunday, February 5.
As usual, the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be jointly organized by Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, on Saturday, February 4, in room 4.401 in Building K (from 10:30AM to 6:30PM). The shared devroom gives every 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 30 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.
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, but please do remember that your profile might be already stored at Pentabarf).
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 Monday, December 5th, 2016. Accepted speakers will be notified by Sunday, December 11th, 2016. The DevRoom schedule will be published on the same day.
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”.
Berlin, November 3, 2016 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the availability of LibreOffice 5.2.3 “fresh”, the thirdminor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family, representing the bleeding edge in term of features and as such targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users.
For all other users and especially for enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.1.6 “still”, with the backingof professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).
With the availability of the LibreOffice 5.3 Alpha, the project has entered the road to LibreOffice 5.3, which will be announced at the end of January 2017. The next step in the process will be the release of LibreOffice 5.3 Beta around the end of November, and the announcement of the user interface concept.
Users can start learning about the new exciting features on LibreOffice 5.3 Release Notes page (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.3). The page will be updated for the next month, when the feature set will be frozen for the final quality assurance activity and the preparation of launch materials.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donationat http://donate.libreoffice.org.
Several companies sitting in TDF Advisory Board (http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) are providing either value added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and trainings, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.
A short interview to introduce Guilhem Moulin, the team member in charge of the development and the maintenance of The Document Foundation (TDF) infrastructure since October.
Q1. You have just started to take care of TDF infrastructure. Why did you apply for the role?
I finished my studies last spring and wanted to take a few months off to travel a bit and try to tie some loose ends on the many side projects I started earlier and never had time to finish. In particular, with the Debian 9 freeze approaching, I wanted to do some triaging on the BTS to help uploading some new upstream releases to the next Debian Stable. All in all, I was not really in a hurry to start with a new day job.
Of course, although I live rather cheaply, I had limited savings and I knew at some point I would have to find a job to pay the bills. I was looking for that day with apprehension, because I didn’t want to take a usual “9 to 5” job in an office, and was also afraid to have to make compromises and use proprietary software or closed formats to comply to an employer’s internal policy.
Although I never was a member, I knew TDF as a major actor of the Free Software ecosystem and as a strong supporter of open formats. So when one of my friends tipped me about the opening at TDF, I jumped on my keyboard to prepare an application. The mere fact of managing the infrastructure of one of the most popular Free Software projects out there was a unique enough opportunity to combine the practical and the enjoyable without renouncing my convictions. Furthermore, working from home with flexible working hours was particularly appealing to me.
Q2. Can you provide a short personal background, including both your education and work experiences?
I’ve been at school until very recently, actually I grew up in France and moved to Gothenburg (Sweden) in 2010 for my doctoral studies. I have graduated earlier this year with a PhD in theoretical Computer Science from Chalmers University of Technology [0].
In parallel to my studies, I did some volunteering work for various organizations. In particular, I’ve been a volunteer system administrator at Fripost [1], a Sweden-based association (ideell
förening) providing an email infrastructure for its members.
Q3. Which is your perception of the project, as seen from outside and then as a team member (even for a short time)?
As a mere user, I was aware that LibreOffice was one of the biggest Free Software project out there, and although I wasn’t familiar with TDF internals, I was very pleased it was managed by a non-profit organization.
My first contact with the community was in Brno earlier this year (at the LibreOffice Conference), and I was impressed by its cohesion. I also immediately felt very welcome! Moreover, I’m used to go to conferences where the audience is a lot less diverse, and I was pleased to see a better gender / ethnic / background balance at LibreOCon. Even if I know there is still a long, long way to go…
As a very fresh team member, I’m still trying to get up to speed on the infrastructure. But I’d say staff & team members reflect the atmosphere of the general community and so far have been very helpful and very welcoming.
Q4. Which are the objectives of your role within TDF, in the short and long term?
Aside from regular internal infrastructure maintenance, which is probably irrelevant for most members and contributors, my short term goal is to implement Single Sign On (starting with the most popular services, namely Gerrit, the wiki, and Bugzilla) so people don’t have to remember one set of credentials per service. I’m also eager to try out Jabber/XMPP [2] as a modern (and free!) alternative to our weekly phone calls.
A long term goal would be to lower the threshold to get oneself accustomed to the infrastructure. Getting fresh blood in the infra team is crucial for sustainability, especially in a non-profit where most of the contributors are volunteers.
Q5. How would you describe yourself?
I guess I’m an idealist, and rather binary: I’m absolutely passionate about the things I care about — and find it really hard to make compromises about these (so I guess it’s good I ended up in infra and not in marketing :-D) — and I tend to neglect the rest. As such, I live a relatively simple life and value principles over comfort or convenience.
Q6. Are you contributing to other open source projects? If yes, which is your role, and which are your expectations?
I’ve been a Debian GNU/Linux [3] user for over a decade, but only became a maintainer around 2 years ago, after a couple of months contributing to various packages. Debian is aiming at being the “the universal operating system”, and of course I expect its releases to become better and better.
Beside package maintenance and some minor contributions to my packages’ upstream I enjoy email-related protocols, and one of my long-term project is to write an email client to replace the venerable mutt [4] I’ve been using for around 10 years.
I also feel close to the GnuPG [5] and Tor [6] communities, although for the latter, I mostly contribute by only running relays these days.
Q7. Last, but not least, which is your personal hardware/software configuration? Do you have any preferred tool?
I still use the old Thinkpad X60s I bought second hand in 2010 (although I believe I changed every single part by now: screen, motherboard, case,…) the BIOS of which I replaced by a free one (libreboot [7]). By today’s standard a Core™2 Duo isn’t that fast anymore, but it doesn’t bother me much as I tend to use my laptop merely as a terminal: for builds or heavy computation I remotely access a workstation. I also recently bought an USB armory from Inverse Path [8] which I would like to use as an air gap for my GnuPG secret keyring.
Of course, I run Debian GNU/Linux [3] on all my machines (sid on my laptop & workstations, and the latest stable on servers) I don’t use a desktop environment like GNOME or KDE, but a minimalist tiling window manager (dwm [9]) instead. My editor of choice is Vim, and the current email client is mutt [4]. For web browsing I pretty much exclusively use the Tor Browser. In fact, I’d say Tor is my favorite tool.
With the availability of the LibreOffice 5.3 Alpha, we have entered the road to LibreOffice 5.3, the next significant major release of the best free office suite ever developed. The software is in the early stage of the final development cycle, and as such should be installed only by expert community members skilled in quality assurance tasks, or involved in launch activities. Although in Alpha stage, LibreOffice 5.3 has an outstanding Coverity Scan score, as confirmed on October 20, with 0.01 defects per 1,000 lines of code (the image on the left is a screenshot of the Coverity Scan dashboard). LibreOffice 5.3 will be officially announced at the end of January 2017.
The next step in the process will be the release of LibreOffice 5.3 Beta around the end of November. At that time, we will announce our user interface concept, based on the joint efforts of development, design and marketing teams.
In the meantime, users can start learning about the new exciting features on LibreOffice 5.3 Release Notes page (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.3). The page will be regularly updated for the next month, when the feature set will be frozen for the final quality assurance activity and the preparation of launch materials.
Berlin, October 27, 2016 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.1.6, the sixth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family launched in January 2016, targeted at individual users and enterprise deployments. Users of previous LibreOffice releases should start planning the update to the new version.
For enterprise deployments, The Document Foundation suggests the backing of professional support by certified developers, migrators and trainers (the full list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.
Several companies sitting on TDF Advisory Board (http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) are providing either value added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and trainings, based on best practices detailed by The Document Foundation.
Following the success of the LibreOffice Conference Telegram channel, we have asked our community – through an informal poll on the Telegram channel itself – if they wanted to keep the channel alive and change the name to LibreOffice Community. The feedback has been overwhelming, as 21 out of the 22 answers have been positive.
We have therefore changed the name of the Telegram channel to LibreOffice Community, and made the channel public to allow everyone to subscribe. The link is the following: https://telegram.me/libreoffice. To widen the reach, the channel is bridged to the #libreoffice-telegram IRC channel on Freenode. Please be aware that the objective of this channel is to share information and experiences amongst community members, and not to support end users.
End user support, as well as other strategic activities for the project, will continue to be managed through the current channels. For end user support, the different options available are listed here: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/.
In addition to the discussion channel, we have also opened a Telegram broadcast channel, which will be used to increase the reach of our announcements: https://telegram.me/tdforg. This channel will be used to broadcast announcements, and therefore will have a very low traffic.
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 2017, it will be held on Saturday, February 4, and Sunday, February 5.
