Category: Community

Tell us what you’re doing in the LibreOffice project, and other free and open source (FOSS) projects!

I’m a member of the Brazilian documentation team, officially since 2017. I spent most of that time working on translation and localisation, but lately I’ve been working more on web design, like the Bookshelf project and the online help update. I’d also worked on translation and localisation in other projects before, like the XOOPS CMS and the Fedora project, where I started as an ambassador back in 2008.

What are your professional activities and how do they relate to FOSS?

I’m a federal public servant in Brazil, and I’ve taken part in some initiatives to use free software in government, but I don’t make decisions at that level, so there’s little I can do to push the adoption of free software where I work. My personal use and choice of tools leans toward free software whenever there’s a choice, but there aren’t many choices.

What have you contributed recently in the LibreOffice project?

The online help update has been getting some attention, and I’ve been able to contribute to modernising it and using standards that are more accessible and responsive, along with a more modern look that has more appeal. We have a weekly meeting in the Brazilian community where we keep up with the team’s efforts, propose new ideas, and adopt workflows that help the project.

What is contributing like (what bits are easy or hard, with the tools and processes in the project)?

One thing that took me a while was getting past the initial barrier to contributing bug reports or submitting code via Git — every organisation has its own way of doing things, and some have more hurdles than others. Once you get past that initial barrier, things get a lot easier.

How do you interact with other members of the LibreOffice community (especially the Brazilian one)?

Our weekly meeting helps a lot with that — we talk regularly, and that goes a long way toward solving problems and bringing members closer together. We’ve had some in-person meetings at events like the conference held in Brasília in 2022 and some hackathons, and we plan to have more of these gatherings, which tend to be quite productive and enjoyable too.

What is your impression of LibreOffice as a product? Do you see it used in Brazil, in areas of the public and private sectors?

Personally, I’ve been using the suite since it was called StarOffice, when it was pretty much the only really useful office suite for Linux at the turn of the millennium. Then came OpenOffice, which in Brazil ended up being named BrOffice, and finally LibreOffice.

My honest opinion is that it’s the most complete office suite available on the market, and I’m glad it’s an open source tool, which is my preference for any software. These days I use office suites a lot less because of the tasks I usually do on the computer — it’s rarely necessary — but I still keep up-to-date, even through translating the help, which shows new features in LibreOffice to anyone who pays attention.

Join the LibreOffice community here!

Tell us a bit about yourself!

My name is Rohan. I am currently in Berlin, Germany, and my background is in mechanical engineering and I have a master’s degree in sustainable mobility and robotics. I recently worked on my master’s thesis, where I used LibreOffice closely on macOS. That experience actually played a big role in bringing me closer to the project.

Outside of my academic and technical work, I am interested in open source software, mobility, robotics, and learning how large software projects are built and maintained. Contributing to LibreOffice has been a very new and rewarding experience for me, because I did not come from a traditional software engineering background.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

At the moment, I am exploring macOS-related development work, especially around OfficeBean and native window handling. One of the issues I have been looking into is adding macOS support for OfficeBean, which involves understanding how Java AWT, native macOS views, and LibreOffice’s VCL layer interact.

So far, my merged contributions have mostly been in the LibreOffice core repository, around C++ cleanup, refactoring, and modernisation. These include:

• tdf#168771 basctl: Convert traditional enums to enum class
• tdf#43157 canvas & chart2: Replace OSL_ASSERT with SAL_WARN_IF
• tdf#143148: Replace include guards with #pragma once

Some of my other patches have not been merged, but they still helped me learn a lot about the codebase, Gerrit, code review, and how to communicate with reviewers.

I also contributed to the developer documentation by adding macOS-related LCOV information to the Development/LCOV wiki page. I wanted to document what I learned so that other macOS contributors could have a clearer path when using coverage tools.

Why did you choose to become a TDF member?

I chose to become a TDF member because LibreOffice has personally helped me a lot, especially during my master’s thesis. While using it closely, I noticed bugs and small rough edges, and that made me curious about how such issues are reported and fixed.

After attending the LibreOffice Conference in Budapest, I became much more interested in the community behind the project. I saw how welcoming and serious the community is about open standards, user freedom, and long-term software sustainability.

For me, becoming a TDF member is a way to give back to a project that supported my own academic work. It is also a way to stay connected with the community and keep learning from people who have much more experience in open-source development.

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need?

In the future, I would like to continue improving my understanding of LibreOffice’s core codebase, especially in areas related to C++, macOS, VCL, and developer tooling. I am still learning, so I want to take on tasks step by step and contribute in a way that is useful and maintainable.

I think LibreOffice really benefits from better onboarding paths for new contributors, especially people who are not coming from a pure computer science background. The codebase is large and can feel intimidating at first, so documentation, mentoring, and small well-described tasks are very important.

LibreOffice also needs continued attention on platform-specific issues, including macOS, because many users depend on it every day across different environments. Even small improvements can make a big difference for users.

For me, contributing to LibreOffice has been both a technical learning journey and a way to give back. I really appreciate the patience and support of the community, because it has helped me ask better questions, understand code review better, and gradually become more confident as a contributor.

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m Aleksi, and I live in Oulu, northern Finland. I graduated this spring with a bachelor’s degree in business information technology, and before that I did a vocational degree in software development. Work-wise, my background is in software engineering: I worked on a secure Android smartphone, mostly fixing operating system bugs.

Outside of that, I’m into retro computing: old machines, old phones, and the software that ran on them. There is a lot to learn from software written back when it could only be shipped on physical media. Every time I sit down with a piece of old software, I notice a detail I want to try building myself: an interesting design decision that makes the UI stand out, or a feature that makes me wonder how on earth it was done.

I also like to hang out at my local hacklab and volunteer at gaming festivals. And of course, I like to work on LibreOffice too. What makes LibreOffice interesting to me is that its codebase has a long history. Reading the code and going through the commits allows me to look back in time and see how the software has evolved over the years.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

I’m currently working on smaller code fixes. I pick up bugs from Bugzilla, try to reproduce them, and ultimately submit a patch that fixes the issue. In a codebase the size of LibreOffice one can’t just aimlessly duct tape a solution and hope it works. One has to understand the root cause to be able to look in the right place and understand the effect that the change has on the bigger picture.

Coming from a background of debugging Android, I quite enjoy that part of the work. Also, everyone in the community is genuinely great to work with. Code reviews in particular taught me a lot, when a more experienced developer pointed out something that I’d never have spotted myself.

Why did you choose to become a member of The Document Foundation?

Becoming a member felt like a way of saying that I’m in this for the long term rather than just passing through. Before I started contributing, I was a bit scared of putting code out under my own name. I felt like my code wouldn’t be good enough, and that I could only contribute to open source after decades of development experience.

Boy, was I wrong. Going through the issues thoroughly (the community likes to leave hints in Bugzilla comments), understanding the problem, and submitting the best patch I could manage turned out to be enough. Having a mentor and the community’s support on IRC, where I could ask questions whenever I needed to, helped a lot too.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

I’m planning to move from smaller fixes towards more interesting bugs (our Bugzilla doesn’t contain any hard issues, only interesting ones). I’m also looking forward to working with other teams. I’ve been interested in quality assurance and documentation lately, so picking up small tasks in those areas to build up knowledge for larger work sounds like fun to me.

What does LibreOffice really need?

This is a tough question. At least in Finland, LibreOffice needs to be offered as a real option in schools. That also means we need more people who know it well enough to teach it.

On a lighter note, we recently watched the Excel World Championships at the hacklab. I’m not sure it’s what LibreOffice actually needs, but it would be great to see people who are seriously proficient with Calc solving problems and competing. In its simplest form, it could be a community competition to see who solves the most brain teasers.