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Annual Report 2018: The Document Foundation

Every year, The Document Foundation produces an Annual Report, detailing its activities in the projects and community. We’ll be posting parts of it here on the blog, while we prepare a final printed version…

Election of TDF Chairperson and Deputy

In February, the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation – during its first meeting of the new term – confirmed Marina Latini in the role of Chairwoman, and appointed Björn Michaelsen to the role of Deputy Chairman.

Marina said: “Our project is growing fast with contributors from several countries, and we need to focus much more on lowering the barriers to being a really welcoming community. I would like our community to become as inclusive as possible, and never leave out those who, just in appearance, look different to us. Openness is a state of mind.”

Björn, who had previously served as a Deputy on the Board, added: “I am encouraged to see strong contributors to the project as new candidates in this election, and hope to share the duty of serving with them, together providing a strong and reasonable voice of independent and unaffiliated input in the Board. Ultimately, I hope after this one last term I can confidently leave TDF’s Board with many new diverse and independent voices in all parts of the project and foundation, and retire back to spending my contributions more on – for instance – the source code again.”

New Advisory Board member

In May, TDF announced that BPM-Conseil, a company focused on open source business intelligence and based in Lyon (France), had joined the project’s Advisory Board. BPM-Conseil will develop the integration of LibreOffice with its business intelligence solutions Aklabox and Vanilla, and also create business intelligence-related extensions for LibreOffice.

BPM-Conseil is focused both on development of open source business intelligence solutions and on the related consultancy and integration activities. The company has a large roster of clients in France, such as the Ministries of Environment, Energy and Sea, Lyon Metropole, Nimes Metropole and City, La Rochelle Agglomeration, Haute and Basse Normandie, the Aveyron Department, and the University of Corsica.

Tenders

In 2017, TDF launched four tenders aimed at sharing knowledge about improving LibreOffice in several strategic areas, where the tasks are beyond the capabilities of independent volunteer developers. In 2018, companies selected to implement two of the tenders reported back on their work.

Firstly, Collabora was selected for the tender “improve image handling in LibreOffice (#201705-01)”. A new image life-cycle was developed, with simpler memory management for handling images and new swapping strategy. The results were incorporated into the LibreOffice 6.1 release – and a more detailed technical description of the work is on the blog, in order to share knowledge and experience from this project with the developer community and the general public.

The second tender, “implement HSQLDB binary format import in LibreOffice (#201705-03)”, was also assigned to Collabora and implemented by Tamás Bunth. He developed a mechanism to import database files with high fidelity from the HSQLDB binary file format, used by many existing ODB files, by reading the Java serialization code, and writing a filter to import all data into LibreOffice Base. The objective was to remove the legacy Java/HSQLDB database and to simplify the move to Firebird. More details are provided here.

Highlights of activities

Throughout the year, TDF supported initiatives and campaigns from other organisations that promote free and open source software. For instance, in February, we joined “I love Free Software Day”, a campaign by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). As they explain: “We should remember the power of a simple ‘thank you’ to motivate Free Software contributors in their important work for society. And the 14th of February is the ideal day to do that.”
March 27 was “Document Freedom Day 2018”, a campaign about open standards and document formats, aimed at non-technical people. The goal is to make regular users more aware of interoperability issues, and the importance of storing documents (and indeed any kind of data) in open and standardised formats. This helps users to avoid vendor lock-in, giving them more freedom to use the software they want – and this is also important for governments, companies and organisations.

In September, we joined the “International Day against DRM”. DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is a set of access control technologies for restricting the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works, by controlling the use, modification, and distribution of copyrighted works. Instead of educating users, companies prefer to restrict them from exercising their legal rights under the copyright law.

DRM is an epidemic spreading across the web, infiltrating homes, classrooms, workplaces, and just about everywhere else users can go. Tools, technologies, books, games, movies, and music are coming to us locked down with DRM, whether they are streaming or claim to be locally hosted. TDF supports the International Day Against DRM as part of its daily fight to make content sharing available to all individuals, and to educate them to adopt open standards to foster innovation.

Document Liberation Project

TDF also hosts and supports the Document Liberation Project (DLP), a sister project of LibreOffice, which fosters the development of software libraries that can import and export data in many different file formats. DLP libraries are used by many free and open source software projects, such as Inkscape, Scribus and LibreOffice, and help users to get control of their data – especially from old and proprietary file formats. In 2018, new libraries were added to the DLP project and the community produced videos encouraging people to contribute. Learn more about DLP in this quick video:

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Sophie Gautier talks about the project

You are one of the people who have been around from the beginning of The Document Foundation, and one of the oldest members of the community (including the years of OpenOffice.Org). How were you involved in the project?

I was using StarOffice 5.2 and was contributing support on the French speaking users list. When Sun Microsystems was about to open source the code and create the OpenOffice.org project, they invited me to join and support the community. From there, I’ve been involved in various tasks like localization, quality assurance or documentation.

We are getting close to the 10th anniversary of the LibreOffice project, and the 20th anniversary of the FLOSS office suite. Which are the milestones of this long history?

I may not remember all of them, but I guess the creation of the Native Language projects with the French speaking one as a Proof of Concept in 2001. Then the many community supported projects such as marketing, documentation, etc.

And then of course, the birth of the LibreOffice project. Since then I’ve the impression that each year is a milestone 😉

There have been so many exciting things to do in each corner of the project. The community is pushing a lot of good ideas and energy. Considering the work done on QA, UX/Design and marketing for the product or the community, the new help system and the size of our infra, we have achieved more than we could even imagine ten years ago!

You have been involved in the localization of the software since the very first version, and now you are coordinating the activity of native language projects. Can you talk about the localization activity?

Localization is a complicated task, and sometime tedious. LibreOffice is a big software with thousands of different strings. Localization happens at the end of the software making process, so the workload depends on development, UX/Design and marketing projects.

Recently, there have been changes on the strings format for almost the entire interface of each module, on the help system and more and more marketing activities. Each localization member should be very proud of his/her work.

We want to cover more languages because localization is a way to preserve those languages, preserve the local culture and give all users the opportunity to express themselves in their own language. This is where my activities lie: understand the needs of localizers, voice their concerns, update the workflow and try to make them happy to translate the different projects.

You have been a member of the team for almost six years, with a number of different responsibilities. From your point of view, how well did the project during this time?

Happy to say: fairly well 🙂 The task was not easy but I believe we are doing right. Some people would like to see more things happening, or the project going faster or further. But we are a diverse community with different cultures, different business or occupations and different time zones!

We need to keep people together on the same path, to preserve the soul of the project. It’s not easy to keep an eye on the horizon on a daily basis, but our directors are doing that since the beginning and they are doing it very well if you look at the foundation’s results.

I can see my colleagues of the team working hard on each critical part of the production process, and at the same time taking care of the community, trying to answer end user questions and help independently from what they have on the table. I’m proud and very happy to be part of this team, and happy to see how mature the foundation has became. Every day I’m learning something new, either from them or from the community. I’m thankful for that 🙂

With the growth of the project and the community, you are now moving to the position of Foundation Coordinator. Can you describe this role?

I’m taking care of several foundation activities, like helping to organize LibOCon and Advisory Board meetings, and handling several administrative tasks. I’m also directly involved in L10n/NL, marketing and certification projects.

I follow what is happening in other parts of the project, and try to bring my help and my knowledge where needed. For example, when the work began on the UX, I helped the team with my knowledge of the product and its philosophy.

The change will happen mainly in the administrative parts, where an assistant will be hired by the foundation. That should leave me more time to push some projects we want to put in place, like the travel support program, Open Badges, moving to another translation tool, etc.

Looking at the next decade, which are the top challenges for LibreOffice?

One of the most important challenges for open source projects is to make the community of volunteers and ecosystem participants thrive. Our developers are securing this by constantly enhancing tools and processes, but at the same time users and contributors are evolving, and we need to reinvent ourselves almost every day. This also means to re-evaluate processes and tools, looking at them in perspective.

Last, but not least, the product has to further evolve according to changes in the market, and we have to invest to make the online version more popular amongst users and increase the number of adoptions and contributions to the project.

OASIS announces the ODF Advocacy Open Project

The ODF Advocacy Open Project we have pre-announced at FOSDEM is now a reality. Yesterday, OASIS has released the following press release, which is just the first step of a new sustained activity focused on supporting the adoption of ODF – the only true standard document format available on the market – by governments, public administrations and enterprises worldwide, to increase interoperability (and thus knowledge sharing), reduce hidden costs associated to document management, and get rid of vendor lock-in.

OASIS Introduces Open Projects Program to Bridge Open Source and Standards Development

AirBus, CIB, Fujitsu, IBM, Red Hat, Siemens, Software AG, The Document Foundation, and others sponsor Open Projects

Boston, May 8, 2019 – OASIS, a global nonprofit consortium, today announced the launch of 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.

The lines between open source and open standards have been blurring for some time, and communities in both arenas have been calling for more flexibility and options for collaboration. Open Projects is a new approach that addresses the need for change in everything from handling IP to governance and decision-making, from funding to establishing trust and assuring quality.

“With Open Projects, we’re building a movement to transform the open source and standards world,” said Gershon Janssen, Chairman, OASIS Board of Directors. “We want to dissolve the barriers that separate communities. We want to empower groups with more control and streamlined governance. We want to support projects by giving them all the process they need–and not a bit more–so they can accomplish great things fast.”

Open Projects builds on the OASIS experience and reputation for producing quality work that’s been trusted and supported by governments and industries worldwide for more than 25 years.

“For many, open source has become a means of establishing de facto software standards. However, de facto standards are not recognized by many governments and institutions,” said Chris Ferris, IBM Fellow and CTO Open Tech for IBM. “OASIS Open Projects provides an important new opportunity to leverage the rapid innovation of open source in the process of developing open standards. The potential to achieve ISO, IEC, or ITU standards approval is a huge value for many important open source initiatives.” Ferris, who also holds a leadership position on the Hyperledger Fabric project, played an instrumental role in defining the OASIS Open Projects program and now serves on its Advisory Council.

The Open Projects program is being advanced by some of the most accomplished, regarded minds in open source today.

As part of the program announcement, OASIS is launching the first two Open Projects – Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) and OpenDocument Format (ODF) Advocacy.

The OSLC Open Project advances a suite of standard REST APIs to connect data and achieve the digital thread across domains, applications, and organizations. It is sponsored by AirBus, Austrian Institute of Technology, Bank of America, Boeing, Dassault, Fujitsu, IBM, Koneksys, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Red Hat, Siemens, Software AG, and Tasktop.

“OSLC helps create standard REST APIs that solve industry integration challenges,” said Andrew Berezovskyi of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. “Open Projects enables the OSLC community to produce deliverables that meet requirements from various stakeholders without being hindered by the weight of foundation bureaucracy or the baggage that comes with financial, legal, technical, and marketing administration.”

The ODF Advocacy Open Project promotes the world’s leading document standard. After being approved as an OASIS Standard, ODF was recognized by ISO/IEC and endorsed by governments around the world as a way to ensure permanent access to data and eliminate the risk of vendor lock-in. The ODF Advocacy Open Project is sponsored by CIB and The Document Foundation.

“ODF guarantees perennial access to data that can be transferred in a transparent way between different apps, computers and operating systems, getting rid of hidden interoperability costs, vendor lock-in issues and license fees,” said Italo Vignoli, Co-Founder, The Document Foundation.

Additional Open Projects for blockchain and other areas will be announced in the coming months. Further details about OASIS Open Projects are available here or email info@oasis-open-projects.org.

MITRE names The Document Foundation as a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA)

Berlin, March 15, 2019 – MITRE announced that The Document Foundation, the home of LibreOffice, has been approved as CVE Numbering Authority (CNA). The Document Foundation is at the center of one of the largest free open source software ecosystems, where enterprise sponsored developers and contributors work side by side with volunteers coming from every continent. The nomination is the result of significant investments in security provided by the LibreOffice Red Hat team under Caolán McNamara leadership.

What is CVE?

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is a reference list of public cybersecurity vulnerabilities, with entries that describe those vulnerabilities and provide references for them. These references are often used as the vulnerability names, especially in security updates. To date, LibreOffice has a track record of rapid response to all reported threats.

What is a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA)?

A CNA is an organization that can assign and announce CVE entries within a particular scope. Some CNAs are organizations providing CVEs for their products such as The Document Foundation.

How will The Document Foundation assign CVEs?

The Document Foundation Security Team provides a forum for all of the vendors and individuals who contribute to LibreOffice development to co-ordinate the work of protecting our users from threats related to the application.

As a CNA, The Document Foundation Security Team now has the ability to assign CVE IDs to vulnerabilities affecting our products, the ability to control the disclosure of vulnerability information without pre-publishing, and notification of vulnerabilities in our products by researchers who request a CVE ID from us.

Join our team! Job Search for a Development Mentor (#201902-01)

Note that we’re at FOSDEM (building K, level 1, group A) on February 2 and 3, so you can talk to us in person there!

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks an individual – or individuals part (or full) time – to be

a Development Mentor

to start work as soon as possible. The role requires the following:

  • Self-starting, remote working experience
  • Experience contributing to FLOSS communities
  • Excellent communication skills, with enthusiasm for mentoring
  • Coding experience (LibreOffice coding preferred)
  • Willingness to travel to Hackfests & conferences in Europe and globally

The role involves working from home at your location for at least 10 hours per week, up to full-time and includes among other items:

Supporting existing mentors in the LibreOffice community including:

  • Building relationships between existing mentors and new contributors
  • Identifying and on-boarding new contributors
  • Affirming and encouraging their contribution
  • Building initial relationships with them
  • Encouraging them to join IRC to meet the teams
  • Introducing them to domain experts for deeper learning
  • Helping to educate new contributors by
  • Positively reviewing their code contributions
  • Introducing them to our tooling and culture
  • Attracting new contributors by promoting the project
  • Interaction with UX volunteers

Previous experience with such tasks is highly welcome, so is using free software. Speaking and writing English reasonably well is a mandatory requirement.

The work time during the day is flexible, apart from some fixed times when availability is required (e.g. during meetings, which usually take place at 14:00 or 15:00 UTC once per week).

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including curriculum vitae, your financial expectations, and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than March 29, 2019. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

If you haven’t received feedback by April 29, 2019, your application could not be considered.

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