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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/.

LibreOffice Community announces broad program for its Berlin conference

Tracks on development, marketing, migration and community success
The Document Foundation to host official ODF Plugfest and ODF Plugtesting

The LibreOffice community today announces the program for its Berlin conference (October 17th to 19th). Taking place at the conference center of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi), and sponsored by leading players Canonical, Google and SerNet, it is not only the annual gathering of the worldwide community, but also meeting point for governmental and corporate adopters and innovators.

“With three tracks in parallel, plus the ODF Plugfest, including ODF Plugtesting, this years’ LibreOffice Conference is the major event for everyone interested in the development of free office suites and the OpenDocument ecosystem at large”, says Volker Merschmann, member of the program comittee.

Jacqueline Rahemipour, lead organizer from the host Freies Office Deutschland e.V., states: “Our program reflects the broad engagement and diversity of the community, and includes talks and workshops from various areas of the project. Interested users, developers, marketeers, as well as corporate and governmental adopters are invited to come to Berlin, to exchange ideas and jointly work on shaping the future of free office suites.”

Interested participants are required to register no later than October 8th at http://conference.libreoffice.org/registration

Following the project’s principles, the conference system has been implemented exclusively using free software. Board member Andreas Mantke has been developing an addon, based on Dexterity for the Plone CMS.

Meet the Membership Committee

The Members of The Document Foundation have just elected the new Membership Committee, with five members – Sophie Gautier, Fridrich Štrba, Eike Rathke, Cor Nouws and Jean Weber – and two deputies – Simon Phipps and Leif Lodahl.

I think that there are a couple of significant facts to underline here: the number of the original TDF founders is lower than the number of new TDF members (although several of them have been active in the project for a long time), and the number of independent members is higher than the number of people affiliated with companies sponsoring TDF.

I suppose that people are curious about the activity of these seven people, inside TDF and outside TDF.

I think that the best way to meet them is to link their web presence, as everyone has at least a blog. Of course, it will be soon possible to find them on the Membership Committee page on TDF website, and meet them at LibreOffice Conference in Berlin.

Sophie Gautier does not need any introduction: she is the history of the project, a TDF founder and a pillar of several projects: French localization, QA and certification. She has a website, a blog and a Google+ page.

Fridrich Štrba is a SUSE developer, with a passion for hacking filters (Visio and Corel Draw), who speaks a large number of languages including Italian. He has a website and a Google+ page.

Eike Rathke is a RedHat developer, and a longtime Calc hacker living in Hamburg where he has breathed the OOo code for the last twenty years. He has a website and a blog, while here you can learn about his erAck programmer name.

Cor Nouws is a TDF founder and a long time member of the project, active in several projects: Dutch localization, QA and certification. Together with Sophie, he brings a huge amount of wisdom and sense of community to TDF. He has a website and a blog.

Jean Weber is the leader of the documentation project, and the representative of the southern emisphere inside the Membership Committee (she lives in Australia). She has a blog and a Google+ page.

Simon Phipps is the President of the Open Source Initiative, and has been the engine behind Sun’s open source efferts for 10 years. He has a website and a Google+ page, and is featured on Wikipedia.

Leif Lodahl is a TDF founder, and has been instrumental in the first large migration to LibreOffice at Copenhagen Hospitals. He has a blog and a Google+ page.

Of course, the best way to meet the entire Membership Committee and discuss with them will be the LibreOffice Conference in Berlin.

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