Fundraising, December 4

Consider a donation to LibreOffice to help the project produce even more gadgets for volunteer contributors, free software advocates and proud users, to raise the awareness of LibreOffice and Open Document Format (ODF)

#IDAD, International Day Against DRM

Today we are celebrating 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, such as backing up copies of CDs or DVDs, lending materials out through a library, accessing works in the public domain, or using copyrighted materials for research and education under the fair use doctrine.

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.

DRM can be associated to document lock in by means of pseudo-standards. They are both hidden to users and reduce their freedom as they make sharing contents – even when fully legitimate – completely or partially impossible.

The Document Foundation 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.

TDF Annual Report 2017

The Annual Report of The Document Foundation for the year 2017 is now available in PDF format from TDF Nextcloud in two different versions: low resolution (7.4MB) and high resolution (31.5MB). The annual report is based on the German version presented to the authorities in April.

The 48 page document has been entirely created with free open source software: written contents have obviously been developed with LibreOffice Writer (desktop) and collaboratively modified with LibreOffice Writer (online), charts have been created with LibreOffice Calc and prepared for publishing with LibreOffice Draw, drawings and tables have been developed or modified (from legacy PDF originals) with LibreOffice Draw, images have been prepared for publishing with GIMP, and the layout has been created with Scribus based on the existing templates.

Pictures have been kindly provided by members of the LibreOffice community from Albania, Brasil, Germany, Italy, Japan, Taiwan and Turkey.

TDF Annual Report will soon be available on Lulu for print-on-demand. In addition, some printed copies will be available at LibreOffice Conference in Tirana.