Today, the Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets (https://competitivedigitalmarkets.eu/), a group of more than 50 technology companies from 16 different European countries, sent an open letter to members of the European Parliament to raise awareness about interoperability and to impose stricter rules on big companies – the so-called ‘big tech’ companies – that act as gatekeepers and prevent transparency and openness in digital markets.
Open Letter 6 DecemberCategory: LibreOffice
LibreOffice 7.2.4 Community and LibreOffice 7.1.8 Community available ahead of schedule to provide an important security fix
Berlin, December 6, 2021 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 7.2.4 Community and LibreOffice 7.1.8 Community to provide a key security fix. Releases are immediately available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/, and all LibreOffice users are recommended to update their installation. Both new version include the fixed NSS 3.73.0 cryptographic library, to solve CVE-2021-43527 (the nss secfix is the only change compared to the previous version).
LibreOffice 7.2.4 Community is also available for Apple Silicon from this link: https://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/7.2.4/mac/aarch64/.
LibreOffice Community is based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud.
LibreOffice individual users are assisted by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.
Talk at SFCamp 2021: LibreOffice and the community behind it
At the recent online Software Freedom Camp, an event organised by Indian free software supporters, Mike Saunders from The Document Foundation gave a talk about the LibreOffice community. Learn about what we’re doing, where we’re going, and how you can get involved – click the image below to watch it!
LibreOffice Technology DevRoom Call for Papers
FOSDEM 2022 will be a virtual event, taking place online on Saturday, February 5, and Sunday, February 6. The LibreOffice DevRoom is scheduled for Sunday, February 6, from 9AM to 7PM (times to be confirmed). If we will get more interesting talk proposals than the maximum number we can fit in one day, we will have the opportunity to extend the DevRoom to Saturday, February 5, in the afternoon.
NEW RULES FOR 2022
- The reference time will be Brussels local time (CET).
- Talks will be pre-recorded in advance, and streamed during the event
- Q/A session will be live
- A facility will be provided for people watching to chat between themselves
- A facility will be provided for people watching to submit questions
IMPORTANT DATES TO REMEMBER
- December 26: Submission deadline
- December 28: Announcement of selected talks
- December 31: Publication of DevRoom final schedule
- January 16: Availability of pre-recordings for review
- January 23: Deadline for upload of presentations
CALL FOR PAPERS
We are inviting proposals for talks about LibreOffice Technology, including ODF standard document format, on topics such as code, localization, QA, UX, documentation, tools, extensions, migrations and general advocacy. Please keep in mind that product pitches are not allowed at FOSDEM.
The length of talks is limited to a maximum of 25 minutes, as we would like to have some minutes for questions after each presentation, and to fit as many presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be explicitly requested and justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you have requested.
IMPORTANT INFORMATIONS
- Presentations have to be pre-recorded and tested for streaming before the event.
- Once your talk is pre-recorded, and approved by a reviewer in term of quality for streaming, it will have to be uploaded by January 23, to be prepared and ready for broadcast (the deadline cannot be moved further).
- During the stream of talks, speakers must be available online for the Q/A session.
TALK SUBMISSIONS
All talk submissions have to be made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM22.
While filing the proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), some information about yourself (name, bio and photo, but please do remember that your profile might be already stored in Pentabarf). To submit your talk, click on “Create Event” and select the “LibreOffice Technology” DevRoom as the “Track”. Otherwise, your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all.
If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please get in touch with the DevRoom manager.
DEVROOM MANAGER
Italo Vignoli: italo@libreoffice.org
German coalition treaty endorses “Public Money, Public Code” principle
A quick news update from Germany: the upcoming coalition government endorses free and open source software. In the coalition agreement (German), there are some key sentences on this topic, for instance:
Development contracts will usually be commissioned as open source, and the corresponding software is generally made public.
Another section states:
In addition, we secure digital sovereignty, among other things through the right to interoperability and portability, as well as by relying on open standards, open source and European ecosystems, for example in 5G or AI.
We are encouraged to see FOSS being considered by the incoming government, along with other news such as the north-German state of Schleswig-Holstein switching to LibreOffice and free software.
EU coalition urges EU to push back against gate keeping by Microsoft, files official complaint
Brussels, November 26 – A coalition of EU software and cloud businesses joined Nextcloud GmbH in respect of their formal complaint to the European Commission about Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior in respect of its OneDrive (cloud) offering. In a repeat from earlier monopolistic actions, Microsoft is bundling its OneDrive, Teams and other services with Windows and aggressively pushing consumers to sign up and hand over their data to Microsoft. This limits consumer choice and creates a barrier for other companies offering competing services.
Over the last few years have grown their market share to 66% of the EU market, while local providers lost out from 26 to 16%. By heavily favoring their own products and services (so-called “self-preferencing”) or outright blocking other vendors they leverage their position as gate keepers to extend their reach in more and more neighbouring markets and push users deeper into their ecosystems. Local, more specialised vendors are unable to compete “on the merits” as the key to success is not a good product but the ability to distort competition and block market access.
“This is quite similar to what Microsoft did when it killed competition in the browser market, stopping nearly all browser innovation for over a decade. Copy an innovators’ product, bundle it with your own dominant product and kill their business, then stop innovating. This kind of behavior is bad for the consumer, for the market and, of course, for local businesses in the EU. Together with the other members of the coalition, we are asking the antitrust authorities in Europe to enforce a level playing field, giving customers a free choice and to give competition a fair chance,” said Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud GmbH
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition exists precisely for the purpose of preventing this kind of abusive behavior and keeping the market competitive and fair for all players. Nextcloud GmbH has filed an official complaint with the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition about the abusive practices of Microsoft related to OneDrive. Nextcloud GmbH has also filed a request with the German anti-trust authorities (the “Bundeskartellamt”) for an investigation against Microsoft and is discussing a complaint in France with its coalition members.
Dozens of European SMEs organisations support these efforts to push back against Big Tech and create a level playing field, supporting innovation and local (European) businesses.
A full list of these companies as well as non-profits and industry consortia can be found on https://antitrust.nextcloud.com. On the same page, there is also a list of the media coverage.
About Nextcloud GmbH
Nextcloud Hub is the industry-leading, fully open-source, on-premises team productivity platform and Germany’s number one collaboration solution. It combines the easy user interface of consumer-grade cloud solutions with the security and compliance measures enterprises need. Nextcloud Hub brings together universal access to data through mobile, desktop and web interfaces with next-generation, on-premise secure communication and collaboration features like real-time document editing, chat and video calls, putting them under the direct control of IT and integrated with existing infrastructure. Nextcloud’s easy and quick deployment, open, modular architecture and emphasis on security and advanced federation capabilities enable modern enterprises to leverage their existing file storage assets within and across the borders of their organization. For more information, visit nextcloud.com or follow @Nextclouders on Twitter.