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The Document Foundation announces the first group of LibreOffice Certified Developers

Berlin & Barcelona, November 7, 2012 – The Document Foundation announces the first group of LibreOffice Certified Developers, who are recognized for their ability to hack LibreOffice code to develop new features or provide L3 support to enterprise users. They are: Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical), Caolan McNamara (RedHat), Cedric Bosdonnat (SUSE), Christian Lohmaier (Volunteer), David Tardon (RedHat), Eike Rathke (RedHat), Eilidh McAdam (Lanedo), Fridrich Strba (SUSE), Jan Holesovsky (SUSE), Kohei Yoshida (SUSE), Lionel Elie Mamane (Volunteer), Lubos Lunak (SUSE), Markus Mohrhard (Volunteer), Michael Meeks (SUSE), Michael Stahl (RedHat), Petr Mladek (SUSE), Rene Engelhard (Volunteer), Stephan Bergmann (RedHat), Thorsten Behrens (SUSE), Timár András (SUSE) and Tor Lillqvist (SUSE).

Certification is a key milestone for building LibreOffice ecosystem, and increase the number of organizations capable of adding value around the best free office suite ever (and, hopefully, help to spread the adoption over proprietary and open source office suites). LibreOffice Certified Developers have been peer reviewed by the Engineering Steering Committee, which has appointed Bjoern Michaelsen, Jan Holesovsky and Stephan Bergmann to manage the certification process for developers.

Certified developers extend the reach of the community to the corporate world, and offer CIOs and IT managers a professional recognition in line with corporate requests for added value development and support services. TDF will soon extend certification to Migration Professionals and Training Professionals, starting from early 2013.

The LibreOffice Certification Program is outlined on the project website at the following address: http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/. There is also a specific mailing list – certification@global.libreoffice.org – dedicated to the certification project, which is reaching all the members of the Certification Committee. Requests for information and applications should be addressed to this mailing list.

FOSDEM 2013 Call 4 Papers

FOSDEM 2013, Brussels, February 2/3, 2013

FOSDEM has been the first public appearance of The Document Foundation, after the release of LibreOffice 3.3 at the end of January 2011. The conference has been instrumental, so far, for the extraordinary growth of LibreOffice hackers community. FOSDEM 2013 should escalate what we have been able to achieve in 2011 and 2012!

FOSDEM 2013 will be your next chance ever for a talk about LibreOffice at the largest European gathering of free software developers and advocates.

Do you want to share your experience in starting to hack the code, or tell about the tweaks in your build environment, or talk about the code changes you have done or those that you have been preparing, or share some insight on your QA work? Or maybe what you plan for translation or infrastructure?

Please submit your speech proposal on this page, by adding the information on a copy of the table. We really like you to share in the way that fits you best, be it 5, 15 or up to 30 minutes.

We might have to choose between the various proposals, as time is limited. So please give a clear description of your talk, including goals and target audience.

The deadline is December 23, 2012. This will allow the DevRoom managers to spend most of their holiday time by putting together the schedule, which will be published in early January 2013 in order to allow early booking of flights and accommodations.

FOSDEM is a free conference to attend, and we will try to seek sponsorship. But funding is limited, so please only request it if you cannot attend otherwise, and we will try to do our best to support you.

LibreOffice DevRoom

Come and hear about the growth and success of LibreOffice and how you can get involved in this exciting project at the cutting edge of Free Software. Hear from many of the core developers, work out how best to get your most annoying problems fixed, and find how best to get plugged into the team. Co-ordinate with your co-developers, get caught up with the latest developments all over the project, meet friends you’ve hacked with on-line, all this and more. If you’re just a user and want to go deeper, to help improve things we’ll have something for you too.

When and where?

On Sunday, February 3rd, 2013, from 09:00 onwards. We have to leave the room by 17:30 at the latest.

More Info

Wiki Page: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/Events/Fosdem2013

Email for Questions: info@documentfoundation.org

Discussions with developers and code hackers take place on libreoffice@lists.freedesktop.org

Discussions with marketers for the organization of the DevRoom take place on marketing@global.libreoffice.org

Searching for infrastructure sponsors

One of the most valueable assets of The Document Foundation, the charitable entity behind LibreOffice, clearly is its infrastructure. It provides the grounds where the community develops, markets, designs, improves and offers its free office suite for download.

That’s why it comes to no surprise that the infrastructure budget is one of the largest spendings. As of today, we spend about 700 € per month on infrastructure, which is more than 50% of our regular monthly operations budget – quite a lot for a foundation of our size.

The last months, the community has grown rapidly, and so we will also have an upward trend with regards to infrastructure, with costs growing more and more.

Therefore, we would like to take the opportunity to ask for infrastructure sponsors. Internet service providers, webhosters, universities and corporations can contribute to the success of LibreOffice. You can support the further development and growth of the community and the product, by sponsoring the use of dedicated machines for LibreOffice purposes.

Due to our setup, we specifically look for dedicated machines (“rented root servers”) that we can use. Virtual servers or shared webhosting unfortunately won’t fit.

As a rough estimation, here are some technical details on what would be desirable:

  • Quadcore CPU
  • 32 GB RAM, ideally with ECC
  • two hard disks with 1,5 TB/each for RAID1; smaller SSDs also welcome
  • one dedicated IPv4 address
  • one IPv6 subnet (/64 or larger)
  • automated reset service
  • remotely bootable rescue system
  • no extra fees for traffic (we approximately use between 2 and 5 TB on an average machine and month); forced traffic shaping after a certain threshold is fine
  • ideally, 1 Gbit/s bandwith instead of 100 Mbit/s

Support of any kind towards our infrastructure efforts is highly welcome, and we would like to thank everyone for their contributions!

If you would like to support our efforts, or have further questions, feel free to ask our infrastructure team at hostmaster@documentfoundation.org or ping Florian directly.

On behalf of the whole LibreOffice community and my infrastructure colleagues, thank you very much!

LibreOffice Community invites to Munich Hackfest

City of Munich LiMux project hosts Hackfest late November
Fostering the developer community of the free office suite

The LibreOffice Community today announces the next Hackfest, taking place in Munich, Germany from November 23rd to 25th. With developers of the leading free office suite working on improving the code, the Hackfest promises to be a major event for everyone interested in developing free software.

“With LibreOffice being a virtual project with hackers engaging from around the globe over the Internet, meeting everyone face-to-face at the Hackfest is a highlight of the year. Working on the code, meeting friends and colleagues, having a fantastic time together, plus getting in touch with other free software projects – it’s going to be a very fun and productive weekend!”, says Eilidh McAdam, one of the active LibreOffice developers, who joined the community in 2011.

The Document Foundation recently has announced the 500th code contributor, with volunteers and corporate sponsored developers being well balanced. The Hackfest is open for everyone, from interested newbies to experienced developers. Participation is free of charge, couchsurfing can be organized.

The community would like to thank the city of Munich for their invitation, and for hosting the Hackfest!

All details are available at http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest/Munich2012. The organizers ask for registration, to help planning.

The Document Foundation, the charitable entity behind LibreOffice, also started a fundraising campaign to define their budget for the next year. You can support us by donating at http://donate.libreoffice.org

The Document Foundation celebrates its second anniversary and starts fundraising campaign to reach the next stage

Fourth quarter’s donors define the communities budget for the next year

Berlin, September 28, 2012 – The Document Foundation celebrates its second anniversary since the announcement of the project on September 28, 2010. During the last 12 months, the foundation was legally established in Berlin, the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee were elected by TDF members, where membership is based on meritocracy and not on invitation, Intel became a supporter, and LibreOffice 3.5 and 3.6 families were announced. In addition, TDF has shown the prototypes of a cloud and a tablet version of LibreOffice, which will be available sometime in late 2013 or early 2014.

On October 1st, The Document Foundation will start a fundraising campaign with the objective of supporting the next wave of the growth. “So far, volunteers have provided most of the work necessary to sustain the project, but after two years it is is mandatory to start thinking really big”, says Italo Vignoli, the dean of the Board of Directors. “We had a dream, and now that thousands around the world made that dream come true we want to get to the major league of software development and advocacy. By donating during the fourth quarter of 2012, donors will define the budget we have available for 2013”.

Community members have set up a dedicated donation page – with several options including PayPal and credit cards – at http://donate.libreoffice.org, to support the fundraising campaign. The page will be updated on the fly, to show current achievements, and concrete goals achieved with the donations.

“In just 24 months, we have achieved what many people thought was impossible when the project was launched”, says Thorsten Behrens, SUSE developer, Deputy Chairman of the Board. “We have managed to aggregate a large number of people around the idea that an independent foundation was the only reasonable choice to provide a sustainable future to the legacy OOo code. According to Ohloh, in just two years we managed to become the third largest free software project focused on the development of a desktop application with 325 active committers over the last 12 months, after Firefox and Chrome”.

LibreOffice is the result of the combined activity of 540 contributors – including former OpenOffice.org developers – having made more than 40,000 commits. The program is faster and more reliable, and has a richer feature set than predecessors and competitors thanks to a growing hacker community where more experienced developers are mentoring newbies in order to bring them up to speed. Today, the group is well balanced between people looking after infrastructure, new features and patches.

Downloads since January 25, 2011, the date of the first stable release, have just exceeded 18 million, and amount to over 20 million when you add external sites offering the same package. In addition, millions of users install LibreOffice from CDs burned from the ISO images available online or bundled with magazines in many geographies. Around 90% of installations are on Windows, with another 10% on MacOS.

Linux users, in contrast, get LibreOffice from their distribution repository. Based on IDC reckonings for new or updated Linux installations in 2012, TDF estimates a subtotal of 30 million Linux users, as LibreOffice is the office suite of choice for all Linux distributions.

The community around TDF will gather in Berlin from October 16 to October 19, 2012, for the second LibreOffice Conference (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). Interested people need to register at http://conference.libreoffice.org/registration/ by October 8th.

LibreOffice can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org/.

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