Spending part of my time to LibreOffice QA, I look over the web page displaying all the commits for LibreOffice code (1) from time to time.
The last months, I saw an large amount of commits related to ‘Coverity’. I remembered that name from years back, in the old OpenOffice.org project.
To explain: Coverity is a project that runs all kind of automated code checks, discovering typical but often hidden programming errors. Memory leaks, but also errors that may cause little, not so often encountered errors for the users. The reports from Coverity are a valuable contribution to – among others – the LibreOffice development process.
The work on using the Coverity reports for LibreOffice is done by a variety of LibreOffice developers, some on the building and testing, others on the other work to fix the issues. In the first months many hundred improvements have been made, making LibreOffice more robust, better. There are still some few thousand issues left however 🙂 So pls get in contact if you like to help with these improvements.
Again it’s lovely to see that core and volunteer developers work together to get thousands of improvements in the LibreOffice code.
Of course in this special case it only can be done with to the work of the Coverity team, that helps open source projects to become more stable and improve quality. Thanks a lot for that!
Berlin, April 11, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.6.6, for Windows, MacOS and Linux, targeted to enterprises and individual end users who prefer stability to more advanced features. This new release is suited to the increasing number of organizations migrating to LibreOffice, which is steadily growing worldwide.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation. There is a donation page – with many options including PayPal and credit cards – at http://donate.libreoffice.org, to support the growth of the project in areas such as infrastructure, marketing and development of native language communities.
Berlin, April 4, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.2, for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, the third release of the LibreOffice 4.0 family that fixes several small bugs and glitches.
This is another important milestone in the process of improving the quality and stability of the bleeding edge version of LibreOffice, and facilitating the migration process to free software. The Document Foundation has recently published a white paper to provide a reference roadmap for migrations to LibreOffice, which is available here: http://tinyurl.com/mwp-v1.
To foster the development of LibreOffice, The Document Foundation needs your support! There is a dedicated donation page at http://donate.libreoffice.org that lists various options to contribute to the budget of the charitable entity.
Berlin, March 27, 2013 – The Document Foundation releases a white paper to help organizations migrate to LibreOffice. Published on Document Freedom Day, the text explains how governments and enterprises can leverage Free Software to lower their IT expenditures and get rid of proprietary software lock-in.
The white paper can be accessed from here: LibreOffice Migration White Paper (of course, it is a Hybrid PDF document, which can be edited with LibreOffice).
According to the white paper, migrations to Free Software – and especially to LibreOffice – should follow a carefully crafted change management process, which needs to handle not only the technical aspects, which are actually the easiest ones to cope with, but also the barriers met when breaking long-term working habits.
LibreOffice liberates the users from proprietary document formats by adopting natively ODF (Open Document Format), which is the standard document format recognized by the largest number of organizations and supported by the largest number of desktop software (including Microsoft Office).
In addition, LibreOffice offers the largest set of import filters for proprietary document formats (including Microsoft Office, Publisher, Visio and Works, plus Corel Draw, Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPro, Quattro Pro and WordPerfect), and thus protects user investments in legacy applications, while providing a migration path to ODF.
Last but not least, LibreOffice templates are using only free fonts available on every OS which can be installed independently from any software package and thus foster interoperability between GNU/Linux, Mac OS and Windows users as documents maintain their original layout on every platform.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to maintain the infrastructure, and support events and marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at a global and local level.
Update: click here for the latest protocol documents
Impress Remote for Android now available on every platform
Berlin, March 6, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.1, for Windows, MacOS and Linux, the first release after the successful launch of LibreOffice 4.0 in early February, which has yielded rates of entirely new client IP addresses requesting updates each day over the 100,000 mark (they were just 25,000 one year ago).
LibreOffice Impress Remote is now available for all platforms – Linux, MacOS and Windows – from Google Play. How to instructions are available on the wiki.
The new release is a step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.0. For enterprise adoptions, though, The Document Foundation suggests the more solid and stable LibreOffice 3.6.5, backed by certified level 3 support engineers.
The Documentation team has also released the guide “Getting Started with LibreOffice 4.0”, which is available in PDF and ODF formats from the website and as a printed book from Lulu.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation – infrastructure, marketing, community development – with a donation. There is a donation page with many options including PayPal and credit cards.
LibreOffice 4.0.1 is available for immediate download from the website. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the extension repository.
The free office suite the community has been dreaming of for twelve years
Berlin, February 7, 2013 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0, the free office suite the community has been dreaming of since 2001. LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement, in September 2010: a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem.
LibreOffice 4.0: a community on fire
In less than 30 months, LibreOffice has grown dramatically to become the largest independent free software project focused on end user desktop productivity. TDF inclusive governance and the copyleft license have been instrumental in attracting more than 500 developers – three quarters of them being independent volunteers – capable of contributing over 50,000 commits.
The resulting code base is rather different from the original one, as several million lines of code have been added and removed, by adding new features, solving bugs and regressions, adopting state of the art C++ constructs, replacing tools, getting rid of deprecated methods and obsoleted libraries, and translating twenty five thousand lines of comments from German to English. All of this makes the code easier to understand and more rewarding to be involved with for the stream of new members of our community.
“LibreOffice 4.0 is a milestone in interoperability and an excellent foundation for our continued work to improve the User Interface,” explains Florian Effenberger, Chairman of the Board of Directors. “Our project is not only capable of attracting new developers on a regular basis, but it also creates a transparent platform for cooperation based on a strong Free Software ethos, where corporate sponsored and volunteer developers work to attain the same objective.”
Integration with several content and document management systems – including Alfresco, IBM FileNet P8, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, Nuxeo, OpenText, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Service and others – through the CMIS standard.
Better interoperability with DOCX and RTF documents, thanks to several new features and improvements like the possibility of importing ink annotations and attaching comments to text ranges.
Possibility to import Microsoft Publisher documents, and further improvement of Visio import filters with the addition of 2013 version (just announced).
Additional UI incremental improvements, including Unity integration and support of Firefox Themes (Personas) to give LibreOffice a personalized look.
Introduction of the widget layout technique for dialog windows, which makes it easier to translate, resize and hide UI elements, reduces code complexity, and lays a foundation for a much improved user interface.
Different header and footer on the first page of a Writer document, without the need of a separate page style.
Several performance improvements to Calc, plus new features such as export of charts as images (JPG and PNG) and new spreadsheet functions as defined in ODF OpenFormula.
First release of Impress Remote Control App for Android, supported only on some Linux distributions. (The second release, coming soon, will be supported on all platforms: Windows, MacOS X and all Linux distros and binaries.)
Significant performance improvements when loading and saving many types of documents, with particular improvements for large ODS and XLSX spreadsheets and RTF files.
Improved code contribution thanks to Gerrit: a web based code review system, facilitating the task for projects using Git version control system (although this is not specific of LibreOffice 4.0, it has entered the production stage just before the 4.0 branch).
Overall excellent backwards compatibility is retained for legacy extensions, but moving forward TDF is committed to a more pro-active approach to evolving the UNO APIs, with more functionality to be deprecated, and eventually dropped, in due time – according to the six month release cycle – throughout the LibreOffice 4.x release series.
During the last seven months, since the branch of LibreOffice 3.6 and during the entire development cycle of LibreOffice 4.0, developers have made over 10,000 commits. On average, one commit every 30 minutes, including weekends and the holiday season: a further testimonial of the incredible vitality of the project.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to grow the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.
