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Thank you for your support!

Dear supporters and friends of The Document Foundation,

on behalf of the worldwide LibreOffice community, and on behalf of the donor Freies Office Deutschland e.V., we would like to express our sincerest thanks to all of you for your kind and generous support in setting up the legal entity.

On February 17th, The Document Foundation has been incorporated as a German Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts, located in Berlin, and in the meantime, the transfer of all assets has been nearly finished. In other words: The long-awaited foundation is finally in existence and fully operating.

For us, it is still unbelievable how strong the worldwide support is, how many people support the idea of an independent foundation, and how many contributed by either getting engaged in the project, or by donating to fund our operations.

Following our open and transparent approach, we have made public our budget, and will constantly update it, so you see what your donations are being used for.

Our sincere thanks also go out to the members of our advisory board, who provide us not only with guidance, but also with financial support.

Although many of us are volunteers, working pro bono in their spare time, running such an entity needs funds. Travel support, participation in events, providing infrastructure, and many other areas need to be covered. Without all your support, The Document Foundation would not be what it is today.

Your contribution made a real difference and enabled us to create a strong community-driven, meritocratic, vendor-neutral foundation for the best free office suite. We could not have done it without you.

Thank you very much for your support of The Document Foundation!

The Board of Directors

LibreOffice @ Google Summer of Code

So, it is here again! The wonderful time of spring. Projects that were lucky enough to be selected by Google look for talented students. And students that care enough about open source try to find a matching project. LibreOffice was selected as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code again this year. And today, it is the first day when students can submit their applications. We would like you to convince you that LibreOffice is indeed the best choice for you if you are a student looking to impact the open source scene in a permanent way.

LibreOffice empowers you!

LibreOffice is a project of many volunteers and paid developers. Whether you are employee of one of the many companies that contribute to LibreOffice, or volunteer representing yourself only, you are handled in the same way and only your capacities dictate what you can and cannot do. It is not unusual to find a volunteer contributor being part of decisions about technical directions of the project.

The code you will produce during the summer will be going directly to the LibreOffice git repository. We always do our best in order to see student’s work integrated in the next big release.

Participation in Google Summer of Code with LibreOffice is good for your career!

Some of you might remember that last year we had several extremely successful Google Summer of Code projects. Two of our successful students are currently employed working on free and opensource software as a direct consequence of their participation in the program. Eilidh McAdam implemented a Visio import filter that is one of the flagship features of LibreOffice 3.5. Eilidh has been employed by Lanedo before she even was able to complete her PhD degree. Miklos Vajna worked in 2010 on RTF export filter and in 2011 on RTF import. As soon as he finished his studies, he was hired by SUSE to work on LibreOffice.

This is not always the case of course, but they were neither the first nor last to find paid opportunities in the project.

Wide choice of projects and mentors

Our GSoC Ideas wiki page is containing more then 40 different proposals in each and every corner of LibreOffice code-base. From import filter for Microsoft Publisher file-format to support of sqlite in LibreOffice Base, from hacking on collaborative feature to performance improvements in Calc, everybody can find the shoe for her feet.

LibreOffice project is full of dedicated mentors that know how to work with people that don’t share with them the room next door or even the same timezone. The community is friendly and welcoming.

How to apply

Convinced? We hope so. So, here is how to proceed.

  • Present yourself. Since we don’t know you we want to know some bits like your name, education, email, nickname on the LibreOffice IRC channel.
  • Prove that you want to get involved into LibreOffice. In order to check this we require students to complete one of the Easy programming tasks on the Easy_Hacks page (or part of one if that EasyHack is a selection of separate tasks), though the dead-line for this isn’t hard but needs to be somewhere before the end of the selection process. This means that each student who wants to have chances to be picked for a LibreOffice project will need to build the whole application, fix a bug and submit the patch to the development mailing list. See the Development page for more infos on this.
  • Explain what you want to achieve. Provide detailed informations on the project you want to work on and the use cases. The better you described it the better it is for us. It is best to base your project on one of our Ideas that come complete with friendly mentors to help you.
  • How do you plan to achieve it?Provide us the following:
    • An estimated schedule for the summer (including any potential conflicts you could have like courses, exams…)
    • Technical details on how you want to implement it. The more sensible details you provide the easier it will be for us to check that you understood the problem and difficulty.
  • Why should we choose you? Give us all the reasons for choosing you. Any past open source hacking is interesting us as well as your hacking and socializing skills.

LibreOffice community is looking forward to an enjoyable and productive summer with you.

Get ready for the Document Freedom Day 2012!

In two weeks from now we will be celebrating the Document Freedom Day. All over the world, thousands of people will be organizing events, meetings to raise awareness around open standards for digital documents. The Document Foundation encourages everyone to join the activities planned for this day and even to propose new ones.

 The Document Foundation is an enthusiastic supporter of the Document Freedom Day. We welcome this event each year as a great opportunity to expand the reach of an essential conversation : Open Standards and free digital documents for all.

 By removing the technical and legal barriers on document formats and standards, we enable true and effective interoperability while allowing hundreds of millions of people to create, think, and share content. We encourage everyone to join the existing initiatives that day and to get involved: Everyone can do this even with just a keyboard.

LibreOffice auf der Cebit 2012

Die Document Foundation (Stiftung) wird auf der Cebit 2012 auf dem Stand des Vereins
“Freies Office Deutschland e.V.” (Halle 2, Stand D 64/2) vertreten sein. Besucher
können dort  sowohl Fragen rund um die gerade in Berlin gegründete Stiftung mit
Mitgliedern des Vorstandes besprechen wie auch  sich zu der Office-Suite LibreOffice
informieren, deren Entwicklung von der Stiftung maßgeblich organisiert und gefördert wird.

Neben Präsentationen zu LibreOffice und Spezialthemen rund um die Office-Suite am
Messestand werden Mitglieder des (erweiterten) Vorstandes der Stiftung drei Vorträge
im Forum Open Source (Halle 2, Stand E 56) und im Vortragsbereich der Firma Univention
(Halle 2, Stand D48 ) halten. So wird am Donnerstag 8.3.2012 um 13.45 Uhr Florian
Effenberger, Mitglied im Vorstand der Stiftung, im Forum Open
Source unter dem Titel “Die Document Foundation – 18 Monate danach” den Weg bis zur
Genehmigung der Stiftung in Berlin aufzeigen. Dem folgt am Freitag 9.3.2012 um
14.00Uhr im Vortragsbereich von Univention eine Präsentation von Andreas Mantke
(Deputy of the Board at The Document Foundation) zu LibreOffice 3.5 und den darin
enthaltenen Neuerungen. Am Samstag referiert er im Forum Open Source ab 11.30 Uhr zum
Thema “LibreOffice – Die professionelle freie Community Office-Suite” und wird dabei
neben der Community auch das Programm und seine Entwicklung ansprechen.

Das Projekt LibreOffice und The Document Foundation freut sich, Sie auf der Cebit in
Halle 2, Stand D 64/2 begrüßen zu können und mit Ihnen interessante und spannende
Gespräche zu führen.

FOSDEM dev-room slides …

This FOSDEM we had a popular LibreOffice Dev-Room, with many interesting talks focused on a technical audience. Starting from Italo’s overview of where we’re at as of now, and moving into how to how to write filters, the code structure of our major components, how to get involved with easy hacks, and more.

If you missed some of that, the slides are now available (where there were slides) in our wiki, please do check them out.

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