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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.

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3.2

Berlin, September 26, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3.2, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 6.3 family, with many bug and regression fixes. LibreOffice 6.3.2 “fresh” is targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, who are suggested to update their current version.

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 6.3.2’s change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.3.2/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.3.2/RC2 (changed in RC2).

LibreOffice in business

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommend 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.

Also, support for migrations and trainings should be sourced from certified professionals who provide value-added services which extend the reach of the community to the corporate world and offer CIOs and IT managers a solution in line with proprietary offerings.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.3.2

LibreOffice 6.3.2 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements are specified on the download page. TDF builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are 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.

All versions of LibreOffice are built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Support LibreOffice

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.

TDF Annual Report 2018

The Annual Report of The Document Foundation for the year 2018 is now available in PDF format from TDF Nextcloud in two different versions: low resolution (6.4MB) and high resolution (53.2MB). The annual report is based on the German version presented to the authorities in April.

The 52 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 Albania, Brasil, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Nepal, Taiwan and Turkey. Stock photos are CC0 by Pixabay.

Marina Latini, Chairwoman of TDF Board of Directors, has written in the welcome address:

After eight full years, the challenge is to further grow the project, by leveraging the presence of active volunteers, enthusiastic supporters and happy users in many geographies. During the last couple of years, a growing number of events has been organized by native language communities around the world, with significant growth in Asia.

What we have achieved so far goes beyond the most optimistic forecasts of the project’s founders back in 2010, thanks to the commitment of the large group of people who manage the foundation and take care of related activities, and the volunteer contributions of organizations and individuals in every continent.
Of course, what we are now would not be possible without the generosity of thousand of donors and the valued members of the Advisory Board who support the growth of LibreOffice, the Document Liberation Project and the ecosystem around them.

Today, LibreOffice is the only suite for personal productivity with the ambition of providing desktop and cloud users with the same seamless experience, based on a solid set of features. Mobile apps are under development, to further extend the reach.

This Annual Report of The Document Foundation is a showcase of all community activities which support the growth of LibreOffice and the Document Liberation Project.

We are getting closer to our 10th anniversary. I look forward to another great year for our global community of friends, working united on the goal of creating the best free office software ever. Thank you very much to all of you who made this dream come true!

LibreOffice 6.2.6 is ready, all users should update for enhanced security

Berlin, August 14, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.2.6, the sixth minor release of the LibreOffice 6.2 family, targeted at users in production environments. All users of LibreOffice 6.1.x and LibreOffice 6.2.x versions should upgrade immediately for enhanced security, as the software includes both security fixes and some months of back-ported fixes.

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 6.2.6’s change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.2.6/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.2.6/RC2 (changed in RC2).

LibreOffice in business

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommend 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.

Also, support for migrations and trainings should be sourced from certified professionals who provide value-added services which extend the reach of the community to the corporate world and offer CIOs and IT managers a solution in line with proprietary offerings.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.2.6

LibreOffice 6.2.6 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 6.2.6 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

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