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Board statement on the LibreOffice 7.0 RC “Personal Edition” label

Dear LibreOffice Community, supporters and friends,

Thanks to the hard work put in by many individual and ecosystem contributors, working together as a team in different fields, such as development, QA, design, marketing, localisation, release engineering, infrastructure, just to mention some, in a few weeks’ time we will be welcoming our LibreOffice 7.0 milestone.

At the same time, we are discussing our vision for the next five years, with a starting point being marketing and branding. See our marketing and board-discuss mailing lists.

Due to draft and development work in the area of branding and product naming, some speculation, in particular related to the “Personal Edition” tag shown in a LibreOffice 7.0 RC (Release Candidate), has started on several communication channels. So let us, as The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors, please provide further clarifications:

 1. None of the changes being evaluated will affect the license, the availability, the permitted uses and/or the functionality. LibreOffice will always be free software and nothing is changing for end users, developers and Community members.

 2. Due to the short time frame we are working with, the tagline appeared on the RC and we apologise if this caused some of you to think we unilaterally implemented the change. Rest assured that the consultation with the Community is still ongoing.

 3. This “Personal Edition” tag line is part of a wider 5 year marketing plan that we are preparing, and it has the purpose of differentiating the current, free and community-supported LibreOffice from a LibreOffice Enterprise set of products and services provided by the members of our ecosystem. The marketing plan is still under development and discussion so we are eager to receive and evaluate your feedback!

 4. Any feedback (in an appropriate way) to our marketing plan is welcome. There are several ways to send feedback to the Board of Directors: the most preferred way is to subscribe to the “board-discuss” mailing lists (e-mail here to subscribe), in which many of the discussions will take place in public and be archived. Besides the mailing list, we have a regular time slot (around 10-15 minutes maximum) in our Board meeting public section, for which we welcome all the community members to join and raise their questions. The Board meetings are held every two weeks and are announced in a timely fashion on the board-discuss mailing list.

 5. We are strongly opposed to any form of harassment, on any medium. Feedback itself is not an harassment, but personal attacks are. Please stay focused on the objective and be polite in your conversations!

 6. The team of editors for the marketing plan is weighting all the input, as it is important to get the feedback to define a clear strategy supported by the entire Community. We encourage everybody to support the Board, the marketing team and the Community working out the details; certainly we don’t want to make any decisions that is backed only by a small minority.

 7. This is a complex decision involving many overlapping concerns. We encourage people to read the detailed background slide-deck that Italo has produced, so that they can contribute to the current state of the discussion.

Apologies again if misunderstandings arose! We would very much appreciate your feedback and support!

Best Regards,

From all of The Document Foundation Board members

Annual Report 2019: LibreOffice Conference

(Note: this is a section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2019, which will be published in full in the coming weeks.)

The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. Every year, it takes place in a different country and is supported by members of the LibreOffice commercial ecosystem.

In 2019, the conference was organized in Almeria by the Spanish community, and took place from Tuesday, September 10 to Friday, September 13. Most of the conference took place in the Universidad de Almeria, next to the sea, but some social events and meetups were held in the city itself.

Over 100 people from across the globe attended the conference; for several people, it was their first LibreOffice Conference and therefore the first time they could meet other community members in-person.

On Tuesday, before the main conference presentations got underway, there was a community meeting. Various members of the LibreOffice community joined for informal talks about marketing and localisation of the software, and what we can do to bring more people into the project.

Conference Tracks

Wednesday kicked off with the opening session: a welcome and introduction from the university’s staff; the “state of the project” (summarising the last 12 months of activity in LibreOffice); quick introductions to the TDF team, Board of Directors and Membership Committee; and messages from the sponsors.

During the conference, there were over 70 talks, workshops and feedback sessions on all manner of topics. Some talks focused on technical aspects, such as continuous integration, build systems and debugging, while others were geared towards the community and other non-technical matters – for instance, getting new contributors, how the Membership Committee works, and reports from events in Asia.

In addition, community members and developers gave talks about LibreOffice Online, the PDF export feature, SmartArt editing in Impress, reproducible builds, and a neural machine translation plugin for the suite. Videos of most of the presentations – and a quick summary of the whole conference – are available on TDF’s YouTube channel as a playlist:

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Additional Events

Outside of the conference tracks, various social events and meetups took place over the four days. On Tuesday evening we had a welcome party outside the accommodation, with drinks and light snacks. A beach dinner party was held on Wednesday, with more great local food to try, while a hackfest took place on Thursday, giving developers the opportunity to work shoulder-to-shoulder and discuss ideas in person.

On Friday, the conference organisers took us on a visit to the Alcazaba – the city’s castle – parts of which date back around 1,000 years. We had an entertaining guided tour with excellent views over the city as the sun set. Once the tour had finished, many people headed back into the city to sample tapas. Finally, on Saturday there was another guided tour, this time through the city’s historical downtown area.

So much of this was made possible thanks to your generous donations. If you find LibreOffice useful, support us with a donation so that we can continue to build our community, share knowledge, and improve LibreOffice for everyone!

Annual Report 2019: The Document Foundation’s activities

(Note: this is a section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2019, which will be published in full in the coming weeks.)

2019 was a busy year for The Document Foundation, with elections for the Chairperson and Deputy, new staff members, and other activities.

Election of new TDF Board of Directors

The Board of Directors (or “BoD”) is the Foundation’s Board of Directors, the main administration of the Foundation’s projects and teams. Directors are directly elected by Community Members. The Board of Directors consists of seven (7) members and two (2) deputies. The Board of Directors may launch any other teams or committees ad hoc if necessary. In December, an election was held for a new Board.

Gabriele Ponzo, Chairman of TDF’s Membership Committee, announced the results:

The vote preliminary results were in conflict with § 8 IV of our statutes, as three candidates – Michael Meeks, Cor Nouws and Jan Holešovský – have the same affiliation. The elected candidates and the membership committee discussed the options to resolve the conflict and Jan Holešovský decided to not accept the role. The Membership Committee would like to thank Kendy for his support in this and especially for his longtime work in the board!

Elected as member of the Board of Directors, in this order, were: Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens, Franklin Weng, Daniel Armando Rodriguez, Cor Nouws, Lothar Becker and Emiliano Vavassori. Elected as deputies of the Board of Directors were: Nicolas Christener and Paolo Vecchi.

Advisory Board members and meetings

The Document Foundation relies on its Advisory Board Members in order to receive advice and support. The Advisory Board’s primary function is to represent The Document Foundation’s supporters and to provide the Board of Directors with advice, guidance and proposals. Members are the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), Software in the Public Interest (SPI), UK Government Digital Services (joined in 2019), City of Munich (Landeshaupstadt München), BPM-Conseil, Kopano b.v., GNOME, Google, Adfinis SyGroup (joined in 2019), RPA RusBITech, KDE e.V., the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Collabora, CIB Software and Red Hat.

Throughout the year, TDF had regular calls with representatives of the Advisory Board. Staff and Board members at TDF provided updates on the foundation, software and community, and described plans for the future. Advisory Board members were invited to provide valuable feedback on TDF’s activities, and various ideas and proposals were discussed. TDF would like to express its thanks to all Advisory Board members for their help.

New staff members

In 2019, two new staff members joined The Document Foundation’s team. Ilmari Lauhakangas (aka “buovjaga”) was well known in the community for his work in Bugzilla, and joined TDF as a Development Mentor. He described his work and plans in an interview here on the blog.

In addition, Stefan Ficht joined as an Administrative Assistant, helping Florian Effenberger (Executive Director) and the rest of the team with various tasks.

Highlights of activities

Throughout the year, TDF supported various campaigns and events, via this blog and our social media channels. For instance, on February 14 we joined the Free Software Foundation Europe’s campaign “I love Free Software”. This is “the perfect opportunity to say thank you to the contributors of the various Free Software we love: developers, translators, designers, testers, or documentation writers, of huge software projects – or smaller ones.”

Similarly, we backed International Women’s Day on March 8, raising awareness against bias. Free Software projects tend to be heavily male-dominated, but our community is trying to be more open and inclusive.

In May, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) announced “Open Projects”, the first-of-its-kind program that creates a more transparent and collaborative future for open source and standards development. Open Projects gives communities the power to develop what they choose–APIs, code, specifications, reference implementations, guidelines– in one place, under open source licenses, with a path to recognition in global policy and procurement. TDF supports this effort, along with OpenDocument Format (ODF) Advocacy.
October 12 was the International Day Against DRM – Digital “Rights” Management, but many argue it should be called Digital Restrictions Management.

DRM is the practice of imposing technological restrictions that control what users can do with digital media. When a program is designed to prevent you from copying or sharing a song, reading an ebook on another device, or playing a single-player game without an Internet connection, you are being restricted by DRM. In other words, DRM creates a damaged good; it prevents you from doing what would be possible without it. If we want to avoid a future in which our devices serve as an apparatus to monitor and control our interaction with digital media, we must fight to retain control of our media and software. The Document Foundation supports “Defective by Design”, a broad-based anti-DRM campaign that targets Big Media, unhelpful manufacturers and DRM distributors.

So much of this was made possible thanks to your generous donations. If you find LibreOffice useful, support us with a donation so that we can continue to build our community, share knowledge, and improve LibreOffice for everyone!

Annual Report 2019: LibreOffice in 2019

(Note: this is a section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2019, which will be published in full in the coming weeks.)

In 2019, LibreOffice celebrated its ninth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well.

Throughout the year, several Bug Hunting Sessions were held in preparation for the new major releases. These typically took place on a single day between set times, so that experienced developers and QA engineers could help new volunteers to file and triage bugs via the IRC channels and mailing lists. The Bug Hunting Sessions for LibreOffice 6.3 were held on May 9 and July 8 – while those for LibreOffice 6.4 took place on October 15 and December 18.

LibreOffice 6.2

On February 7, LibreOffice 6.2 was officially released after six months of development. It was the first version to showcase the new (but optional) NotebookBar user interface as a non-experimental feature, making it available for all users. The NotebookBar is available in Tabbed, Grouped and Contextual flavors, each one with a different approach to the menu layout, and complements the traditional Toolbars and Sidebar. The Tabbed variant aims to provide a familiar interface for users coming from proprietary office suites and is supposed to be used primarily without the sidebar, while the Grouped one allows to access “first-level” functions with one click and “second-level” functions with a maximum of two clicks.

LibreOffice 6.2 also included tidied-up context menus, performance improvements for change tracking, multivariate regression analysis in Calc, and many extra features in LibreOffice Online. A video was produced to explain and demonstrate many of the new features in LibreOffice 6.2. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release. Here it is:

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LibreOffice 6.3

Later in the year, on August 8, LibreOffice 6.3 was made available. Writer and Calc performance was improved by an order of magnitude based on documents provided by end users: text files with different bookmarks, tables and embedded fonts, large ODS/XLSX spreadsheets, and Calc files with VLOOKUP load and render more quickly. Saving Calc spreadsheets as XLS files was also made faster.

Meanwhile, the Tabbed Compact version of the NotebookBar user interface, introduced in LibreOffice 6.2, was made available for Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw. It leaves more space for user documents, spreadsheets and presentations on laptops with wide screens. In addition, the new Contextual Single UI was ready for Writer and Draw.

Export as PDF was improved with the support for the standard PDF/A-2 document format, which is required by several organizations for long term file storage. In addition, the design of editable PDF forms was simplified with the addition of the Form menu to Writer.

Finally, a redaction feature was added to remove or hide sensitive information such as personal data before exporting or sharing the file, to help companies or organisations to comply with regulations. As with the previous release, a video was created to demonstrate the new features:

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This was all possible thanks to help from hundreds of people around the world. Donate to The Document Foundation to support our community, or jump in and give us a hand!

TDF new Board of Directors

TDF Board of Directors (old and new), Membership Committee and Team members in Brussels, just before FOSDEM 2020 (Marina Latini and Sophie Gautier arrived after the meeting, while Osvaldo Gervasi did not attend FOSDEM, so they are all missing from the picture)

The new Board of Directors of The Document Foundation has just started the two year term on February 18, 2020. Members are: Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens, Franklin Weng, Daniel Rodriguez, Cor Nouws, Lothar Becker and Emiliano Vavassori. Deputies are: Nicolas Christener and Paolo Vecchi.

Five people have been elected for the first time to the Board of Directors: Daniel Armando Rodriguez from Posadas in Argentina; Lothar Becker from Karlsruhe in Germany; Emiliano Vavassori from Bergamo in Italy; Nicholas Christener from Bern in Switzerland; and Paolo Vecchi from Luxembourg (in Luxembourg).

During the first meeting of the Board of Directors, the nine members have elected Lothar Becker as Chairman and Franklin Weng as Deputy Chairman. In the meantime, also the responsibilities and areas of oversight have been discussed and decided.

At the same time, six people – who have served as board members and deputies during the previous term(s) – have left the board, but will continue their activity as TDF Members: Marina Latini, Chairwoman; Björn Michaelsen, Deputy Chairman; Eike Rathke, Member; and Jan Holešovský, Simon Phipps and Osvaldo Gervasi, Deputies.

Each one of these six people was responsible for several BoD activities:

  • Marina Latini: QA, Documentation, and Certification (and other business development activities) after four years of service (BoD);
  • Björn Michaelsen: Releases (including schedules), Events, and Affiliations after eight years of service (BoD);
  • Eike Rathke: Development, and Contracts/Legal (hiring, taxes, compliance, GDPR, trademarks and brands) after eight years of service (BoD/MC);
  • Jan Holešovský: Infrastructure, and Documentation after six years of service (BoD/MC);
  • Simon Phipps: License, Affiliations, and Contracts/Legal (hiring, taxes, compliance, GDPR, trademarks and brands) after six years of service (BoD/MC);
  • Osvaldo Gervasi: Documentation, and Native Language Projects (localization, marketing, non-English QA activities, etc) after four years of service (BoD).

Being a Board member means donating each year several weeks of activity to TDF – for full day face-to-face meetings (twice a year, at FOSDEM in Brussels and LibOCon), and for bi-weekly calls (which usually last a couple of hours) – to manage the foundation and administer the budget, mostly based on donations.

We are deeply grateful to all of these for their dedication, contribution to decision making and for all of their volunteer time spent in BoD duties, as well as for their ongoing contribution to the project.

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