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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.

LibreOffice 7.0.6 has been released

Berlin, May 13, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.0.6, the sixth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.0 family, is available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. All users are invited to update to this version.

End user support is provided by volunteers via email and online resources: 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.

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 other benefits, including SLAs (Service Level Agreements): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

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 7.1.3 Community available for download

Berlin, May 6, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.1.3 Community, the third 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 7.1.3 includes over 100 bug fixes, with 25% focused on Microsoft Office file compatibility (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).

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 7.1.3 Community

LibreOffice 7.1.3 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 7.0.5.

LibreOffice 7.1.3 change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.3/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.3/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 7.1.3 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

LibreOffice Conference 2021: Call for Papers is Open!

The Document Foundation invites all members and contributors to submit talks, lectures and workshops for this year’s LibreOffice Conference, which will take place online. The event is scheduled from September 23 to 25, Thursday to Saturday. 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.

Please send a short description/bio of yourself as well as your talk/workshop proposal to the program committee on the conference list: conference@libreoffice.org

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 send a separate email for each one.

Thanks a lot for your participation!

Dates for LibreOffice Virtual Conference

Our traditional LibreOffice Conference will be a fully virtual event for the second consecutive year, from September 23 (Thursday) to September 25 (Saturday), 2021. Unfortunately, the uncertainty still surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on travel, conference planning, logistics and possibility for attendees to come to the conference – coupled with the unpredictability of the current vaccination campaign – are reasons for shifting the event to online also in 2021.

We all know how important and rewarding is a face-to-face meeting for a large free open source community such as the LibreOffice one, spanning over all continents and representing well over 100 native language communities. For the second year in a row, we will be forced to attend the conference from our houses and offices around the world, trying to make the most out of a virtual event which will be extremely rich in term of contents but not as rich in term of physical interactions.

We will publish the Call for Papers by the end of April. In the meantime, if you have a suggestion for the organizers – something you think we can improve, or a topic that should be covered by the Call for Papers, or just an idea to make the virtual conference more engaging for the attendees – you can send an email to conference@global.libreoffice.org or a message to the Telegram group https://t.me/liboconvirtual.

Free software becomes a standard in Dortmund, Germany

LibreOffice is free and open source software, which means that it’s much more than zero-cost. Anyone can study how it works, modify it, and share those modifications with other users. (So the “free” is more about freedom than price.)

There are many other well-known free software projects, such as the GNU/Linux operating system, Firefox web browser, and Thunderbird email client. Free software helps companies, organisations and governments to reduce costs, improve reliability and free themselves from dependence on a single vendor.

Now, the Council of the German city of Dortmund has announced that it’s moving to free and open source software, where possible. Here’s a translation of the original German blog post:

Memorandum – Digitalisation 2020 to 2025

The Dortmund Council has declared digitalisation to be a political leadership task in its Memorandum 2020 to 2025. In the course of this, two central resolutions for free software were passed on February 11, 2021, for which the minutes were published on March 30:

  • “Use of open source software where possible.”
  • “Software developed by the administration or commissioned for development is made available to the general public.”

Open source wherever possible

With this resolution, city policy takes on the shaping of municipal digital sovereignty and digital participation. The resolution means a reversal of the burden of proof in favor of open source software – and at the expense of proprietary software. In the future, the administration will have to justify why open source software cannot be used for every proprietary software application. Based on the report of the Dortmund city administration on the investigation of the potentials of free software and open standards, open source software is understood in the sense of free software.

Public Money? Public Code!

So, the Council’s decision is in line with the concerns of the campaign Public Money, Public Code. What is financed with public money should be available to the general public for use. For software, this is achieved by means of a corresponding free license. With this resolution, local politicians ensure that the city of Dortmund not only draws from the free software community, but also contributes to it. In this way, inter-communal synergies can be achieved true to the motto develop together, use individually.

Support for open standards

Through the Digital Dortmund Charter 2018-2030, among other things, Open Standards were established as a requirement for further digitalisation.

Politically unanimous in favor of Free Software

The resolution for free software is supported by a broad political base. The motion was passed unanimously by the City Council of Dortmund. The digitalisation motion was jointly introduced by the following parliamentary groups: CDU, SPD, Die Grünen (Greens) and Die Linke (The Left).

Conclusion

The city of Dortmund has ushered in the political turning point and begun the exit from the proprietary era. Now it is important that the city finds the appropriate means to implement this process practically, by means of a proprietary exit strategy and to dissolve existing vendor lock-in. For Do-FOSS, the decision of the Memorandum 2020 to 2025 is the result of a functioning democratic local discourse. The practical management work for Free Software has the necessary political backing to succeed.

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