Our membership committee has just published an updated list of Document Foundation members.
Category: Community
Statement about Oracle’s move to donate OpenOffice.org assets to the Apache Foundation
The Internet, June 1st, 2011 – The Document Foundation constitutes a global team of hundreds of developers working together to improve the LibreOffice product for the benefit of all users. We are governed by an open, and meritocratic community headed by a diverse interim Steering Committee, and a vendor neutral Engineering Steering Committee overseeing development.
Today we welcome Oracle’s donation of code that has previously been proprietary to the Apache Software Foundation, it is great to see key user features released in a form that can be included into LibreOffice.
The Document Foundation would welcome the reuniting of the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects into a single community of equals in the wake of the departure of Oracle. The step Oracle has taken today was no doubt taken in good faith, but does not appear to directly achieve this goal. The Apache community, which we respect enormously, has very different expectations and norms – licensing, membership and more – to the existing OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects. We regret the missed opportunity but are committed to working with all active community members to devise the best possible future for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org.
On the bright side, one benefit of this arrangement is the potential for future-proof licensing. The Apache License is compatible with both the LGPLv3+ and MPL licenses, allowing TDF future flexibility to move the entire codebase, to MPLv2 or future LGPL license versions. The Document Foundation believes that commercially-friendly, copy-left licensing provides the best path to constructive participation in, and growth of the project.
Thus, the event is neutral for The Document Foundation, which – as always – remains open to every company, individual or foundation that wishes to participate in co-development. There has never been a better time to get involved and advance the state of the art in free software office suites.
TDF is therefore willing to start talking with Apache Software Foundation, following the email from ASF President Jim Jagielski, who is anticipating frequent contacts between the Apache Software Foundation and The Document Foundation over the next few months. We all want to offer corporate and individual users worldwide the best free office suite for enterprise and personal productivity.
Finally, TDF continue executing on our time-based release plan for LibreOffice 3.4.0, due out this week, while continuing work on our bug fix release train, with 3.4.1 due in a months time, as well as ongoing feature development for our 3.5 release.
About The Document Foundation
The Document Foundation has the mission of facilitating the evolution of the OOo Community into an open, meritocratic and democratic organization. An independent Foundation is a better reflection of the values of our contributors, users and supporters, and will enable a more inclusive, effective, efficient and transparent community. TDF will protect past investments by building on the achievements of the first decade, will encourage wide participation within the community, and will co-ordinate activity across the community.
Media Contacts for TDF
Florian Effenberger (Germany)
Mobile: +49 151 14424108 – E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org
Olivier Hallot (Brazil)
Mobile: +55 21 88228812 – E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org
Charles H. Schulz (France)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424 – E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org
Italo Vignoli (Italy)
Mobile: +39 348 5653829 – E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
GreekLUG supports TDF and LibreOffice
The “Association of Greek Users& Friends of FLOSS” (GreekLUG) is a Greek NGO actively promoting and providing support both to Free Software and to Open Standards.
We are delighted to express our full support to The Document Foundation and to the development of LibreOffice, a project that perfectly embodies all the principles of the Free Software Community.
It delivers a great Office suite, genuinely vendor-independent and relying with selfconfidence on the collaborative effort of all human resources in the Community. We feel it represents the best possible guarantee of long-term success of the project.
As we share the same principles, our Association strongly applauds this move.
We are, therefore, very happy to declare our commitment to use, help to spread and support LibreOffice. We are looking forward to cooperating and helping out in all possible ways.
On behalf of GreekLUG’s Directors Board,
Constantine Mousafiris, Special Registrar
Lanedo supports LibreOffice
In our recent announcement of the Engineering Steering Committee, we wrote that Michael Natterer from Lanedo is having a seat in this body, contributing further to the development of LibreOffice. Here’s their statement of support: “Lanedo is proud to support LibreOffice, and participate in development and inside the Engineering Steering Committee (ESC)” said Martyn Russell, Managing Director, “our contribution underlines the quality and effectiveness of our software development and support services around LibreOffice.”
Developer Interview : Rob Snelders
LibreOffice can only exist because people are working on it: so please, tell us a bit about yourself.
I am Rob Snelders, a 28 years old Dutch guy. I am a programmer at a manufacturer of household equipment. I have studied Computer Sience at the Fontys University in Eindhoven.
In what other software projects have you been involved ?
I am also involved in T-Dose (www.t-dose.org), Ubuntu-NL.
What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice ?
(more…)
LibreOffice Hackfest in Munich
Together with their Linux migration team (LiMux), we’re planning a LibreOffice Hackfest in the City of Munich, Germany. To determine the best date for it, let us know all your possible dates! Like last time, the Hackfest is open for newbies as well as for routined hackers. More details will follow soon, but first, we need the date. So, let’s vote!
The poll is at http://doodle.com/i7pw9wubvdhdyzm4
NOTE: The Hackfest will run from Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime. For the ease of voting, we have just mentioned the respective Saturday.