Category: Community

On September 28th, 2010, The Document Foundation was announced. The last six months, it feels, have just passed within a short glimpse of time. Not only did we release three LibreOffice versions within three months, have created the LibreOffice-Box DVD image, and brought LibreOffice Portable on its way. We also have announced the LibreOffice Conference for October 2011 and have taken part in lots of events worldwide, with FOSDEM and CeBIT being the most prominent ones.

People follow us at Twitter, Identi.ca, XING, LinkedIn and a Facebook group and fan page, they discuss on our mailing lists with more than 6.000 subscriptions, collaborate in our wiki, get insight on our daily work in our blog, and post and blog themselves. From the very first day, openness, transparency and meritocracy have been shaping the framework we want to work in. Our discussions and decisions take place on a public mailing list, and regularly, we hold phone conferences for the Steering Committee and for the marketing teams, where everyone is invited to join. Our ideas and visions have made their way into our Next Decade Manifesto.

We have joined the Open Invention Network as well as the OpenDoc Society, and just last week have become an SPI-associated project, and we see a wide range of support from all over the world. Not only do Novell and Red Hat support our efforts with developers, but just recently, Canonical, creators of Ubuntu, joined as well. All major Linux distributions deliver LibreOffice with their operating systems, and more follow every day.

One of the most stunning contributions, that still leaves us speechless, is the support that we receive from the community. When we asked for 50,000 € capital stock for a German-based foundation, the community showed their support, appreciation and their power, and not only donated it in just eight days, but up to now has supported us with close to 100,000 €! Another one is that driven by our open, vendor neutral approach, combined with our easy hacks, we have included code contributions from over 150 entirely new developers to the project, alongside localisations from over 50 localizers. The community has developed itself better than we could ever dream of, and first meetings like the project’s weekend or the QA meeting of the Germanophone group are already being organized.

What we have seen now is just the beginning of something very big. The Document Foundation has a vision, and the creation of the foundation in Germany is about to happen soon. LibreOffice has been downloaded over 350,000 times within the first week, and we just counted more than 1,3 million downloads just from our download system — not counting packages directly delivered by Linux distributors, other download sites or DVDs included in magazines and newspapers — supported by 65 mirrors from all over the world, and millions already use and contribute to it worldwide. With our participation in the Google Summer of Code, we will engage more students and young developers to be part of our community. Our improved release schedule will ensure that new features and improvements will make their way to end-users soon, and for testers, we even provide daily builds.

We are so excited by what has been achieved over the last six months, and we are immensely grateful to all those who have supported the project in whatever ways they can. It is an honour to be working with you, to be part of one united community! The future as we are shaping it has just begun, and it will be bright and excellent.

We’re proud to announce, that from now on, LibreOffice is also an SPI-associated project. This also helps users from the US to donate via credit card and local bank accounts (don’t forget to mention “LibreOffice” when donating).

By Vedran Miletić

LibreOffice 3.3 release party in Rijeka (Croatia)

Event was originally planned for January when we expected release of LibO 3.3. Since LibO was released on 25.1, we decided to postpone because of the last tests and then the final exams around that time. The next plan was to March (during February most students from other towns are home). On 14.3. we held LibreOffice 3.3 release party in Rijeka. University of Rijeka Department of Informatics provided us with the room. Irena Hartmann, first year student of informatics, decorated the room with green and white paper chains.

The event itself went great. We started with a lecture given by Domagoj Margan, second year student of informatics. The lecture was focused on the history of StarOffice->Sun StarOffice->OpenOffice.org->BrOffice.org->LibreOffice, LibreOffice in general and new features in 3.3, and a bit of the story about Oracle’s relationship with opensource community in general. There were approximately 30 people, mostly first and second year students of informatics. At the event we had drinks and cakes (in LibreOffice palette; we especially mention LibreOffice cake) and airplanes made of paper with the logo of LibO. People had a great time talking and having fun.

In the future, we hope that the release date of LibO 3.5 will be known in advance, so that we can prepare something like this a few days after the release of new version. We will probably extend it with some kind of workshop focused on features which might be of interest to users of Office tools and send invitations to all Rijeka companies that might be interested to come.

The next marketing confcall will take place on Tuesday, March 29th, at 16:00 UTC (=18:00 German time). Remember that in some countries, daylight saving time will be in effect by that date! To determine your local date and time, see the converter in the Doodle poll at http://www.doodle.com/nn9gubpev28kzeus

Dial-in details will be provided in time. Please add your desired agenda items and topics you want to discuss about to http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/ConfCalls#Agenda

Looking forward to hearing you, and to be working with you on marketing LibreOffice and its community!

For quite a while, I have been asked about the number of subscriptions in our mailing lists. I’ve now spent some time in the night and hacked a little bash script, to compile recent numbers, and will regularly post these to our moderators mailing list. Today’s statistics, for example, are available in this posting.

For the future, I plan to enhance the script to show some more statistics, like the number of total postings, the number different countries, the number of moderators, and some graphical representation of the data. Stay tuned!

The Document Foundation welcomes the contribution of Canonical‘s development team to LibreOffice. In particular it is great to welcome Bjoern Michaelsen’s recent addition to the full time team on the project from Canonical. Bjoern brings deep expertise on the LibreOffice core, and has spearheaded many improvements in his previous role at Oracle, we are excited to see his positive impact on LibreOffice, as well as in the Debian and Ubuntu versions of the future. It is also wonderful to see Canonical’s fixes for ARM based platforms, and the results of their investment via CodeThink in Unity Integration. It’s great to have you guys on board.