TDF Presentation Gallery

downloadWe have created a number of slide decks which can be re-used by community members as a basis for their presentations at events. For the time being, slide decks are based on the old 4:3 format, as this is still the most common, but in the future will also be available in the new 16:9 format. Needless to say, the file format is ODP, and fonts are those installed by LibreOffice.

Slide decks will be updated regularly, and the date will be featured on the wiki page (at the moment, the date is September 30, 2016 for all slide decks). If you plan to use a slide deck and you feel that some slides are outdated (or should be updated), please ask on LibreOffice marketing mailing list with the subject “Slide Decks” (marketing@global.libreoffice.org).

The gallery is available on TDF wiki at the following address: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Gallery_Presentations.

LibreOffice 5.2.2 available for download

birthday_banner_smallBerlin, September 29, 2016 – Just one day after the project 6th anniversary (https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/09/28/happy-6th-birthday-libreoffice/), The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the availability of LibreOffice 5.2.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family.

LibreOffice 5.2.2, targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users, provides a number of fixes over the major release announced in August. For all other users and enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still”, with the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

A summary of the most significant new features of the LibreOffice 5.2 family is available on the website: http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new-features/.

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.2/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.2.2/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.2.2 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at 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.

Happy 6th Birthday, LibreOffice

On September 28, 2010, LibreOffice was announced with the distribution of this press release:

OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation

The community of volunteers developing and promoting OpenOffice.org sets up an independent Foundation to drive the further growth of the project

The Internet, September 28, 2010 – The community of volunteers who develop and promote OpenOffice.org, the leading free office software, announce a major change in the project’s structure. After ten years’ successful growth with Sun Microsystems as founding and principal sponsor, the project launches an independent foundation called “The Document Foundation”, to fulfill the promise of independence written in the original charter.

The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals and organizations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite. It will generate increased competition and choice for the benefit of customers and drive innovation in the office suite market. From now on, the OpenOffice.org community will be known as “The Document Foundation”.

[snip]

The Document Foundation is the result of a collective effort by leading independent members of the former OpenOffice.org community, including several project leads and key members of the Community Council. It will be led initially by a Steering Committee of developers and national language project managers. The Foundation aims to lower the barrier of adoption for both users and developers, to make LibreOffice the most accessible office suite ever.

The Foundation will coordinate and oversee the development of LibreOffice, which is available in beta version at the placeholder site: http://www.libreoffice.org. Developers are invited to join the project and contribute to the code in the new friendly and open environment, to shape the future of office productivity suites alongside contributors who translate, test, document, support, and promote the software.

Speaking for the group of volunteers, Sophie Gautier – a veteran of the community and the former maintainer of the French speaking language project – has declared: “We believe that the Foundation is a key step for the evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the development of the code and the evolution of the project from the constraints represented by the commercial interests of a single company. Free software advocates around the world have the extraordinary opportunity of joining the group of founding members today, to write a completely new chapter in the history of FLOSS”.

This is a group picture – at LibreOffice Conference in Brno – of many of the people who made that announcement possible, in different capacities:
TDF founders in Brno
From left to right: Florian Effenberger, Tor Lillqvist, Andreas Mantke, Andras Timar, Caolan McNamara, Miklos Vajna, Olivier Hallot, Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens, David Tardon, Sophie Gautier, Jan “Kendy” Holesovsky and Italo Vignoli
This is a group picture of the people – mostly volunteers – who attended the LibreOffice Conference in Brno in September 2016, travelling from Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and South America. They are the ones who make LibreOffice and Document Liberation projects possible today.

brno29

What we have achieved in six years, and what you can expect in the foreseeable future

Six years have gone by, and it seems like only yesterday. The Document Foundation has a stable governance, a growing team taking care of daily tasks and a community spanning over six continents (although there might be LibreOffice users in Antartica).

membersmap

During this timeframe, the project has been able to attract new developers for 72 months in a row, quite an achievement for a source code which was said to be extremely difficult to contribute to (at least, when under the OpenOffice name). Last, but not least, LibreOffice has just won Infoworld’s Bossie (Best of Open Source) Awards for the sixth straight year in a row.

newdevelopers72months

bos16-libreoffice-100683495-orig

Starting from tomorrow, we will be focusing on the next major release – LibreOffice 5.3 – which will be launched at the end of January 2017, just before FOSDEM in Brussels. Stay tuned.

For people new to the project, this is a collection of the articles published on September 28, 2010, and still available on the net:

 

LibreOffice wins Bossie Awards 2016

bos16-libreoffice-100683495-origEvery year, InfoWorld editors and contributors pick the top open source software for data centers, clouds, developers, big data analysts, and IT pros. LibreOffice has been selected amongst InfoWorld’s top picks in open source business applications, collaboration, and middleware.

According to Doug Dineley, InfoWorld’s Executive Editor: “Open source software projects continue to fuel an amazing boom in enterprise technology development. If you want to know what our applications, data centers, and clouds will look like in the years to come, check out the winners of InfoWorld’s Best of Open Source Awards”.

Official Results of the 2016 Membership Committee Elections

noun_545315_ccThe board declares the following Members of The Document Foundation elected into the Membership Committee:

  • Katarína Behrens
  • Cor Nouws (tied for first with Katarína)
  • Gustavo Buzzatti Pacheco
  • Gabriele Ponzo
  • Miklos Vajna

The board declares the following Members of The Document Foundation elected as deputy members of the Membership Committee:

  • Stephan Bergmann
  • Klaus-Jürgen Weghorn
  • Charles-H. Schulz
  • Antonio Faccioli

Full detailed election materials are to be found at: https://elections.documentfoundation.org/2016-mc/, with the processed STV result here: https://elections.documentfoundation.org/results.php?election_id=8, and the list of all votes here: https://elections.documentfoundation.org/votes.php?election_id=8

The board wants to take the opportunity to thank all past and new members of the Membership Committee for their service to the community, and all candidates for running. Congratulations to the newly elected committee members and their deputies!

Prototypefund: an opportunity for German freelance developers

The Document Foundation is happy to share with the community the opportunity represented by Prototypefund (http://codefor.de/blog/prototype-fund), an excellent project for freelance developers based in Germany.

TDF Board of Directors encourages all hackers with the necessary credentials and interested in improving either LibreOffice or the Document Liberation Project to apply for the fund. Approved projects will be supported by the LibreOffice development community, which will provide the mentoring resources to achieve the objective.

This is a list of potential projects, which will be very helpful both for LibreOffice users and for the broad scope outlined by Prototypefund:

  1. Develop a LibreOffice Calc import filter from public administration sources, to allow citizen to process and analyze data themselves. Such an import filter would allow to easily create content for publication.
  2. Develop a digital tool based on LibreOffice, to create, share and use (open) data, for data visualization and storytelling, social engagement, transparency and citizen participation. An example project would be to create a filter that export diagrams in Calc to d3js for publication on the web.
  3. Develop an “open data browser” – most likely as an extension – capable of importing data made available at: https://offenedaten.de/dataset into LibreOffice Calc or Base.
  4. Allow LibreOffice to read/process and render basic geographic data from OSM using Calc or Draw.

These are just examples, which can be used to look at Prototypefund in a creative way, to write the project (according to the website, one page should be enough to apply).

The Document Foundation is happy to help the interested developers with their pitch related to the development of LibreOffice.