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!
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.
Today we’re talking to Nige Verity who’s helping out in the LibreOffice marketing community…
I’ve been working in IT since the mid 1980s, spread across the aerospace, defence, science and financial services sectors. In the beginning I was mostly coding and testing, but as time went by I found myself working on requirements, designing systems and documenting them as much as doing any actual coding.
I first learned to program using Fortran on a VAX computer running the VMS operating system. Since then I’ve used all sorts of hardware and programming languages, even including a brief spell updating an ancient legacy system written in Algol running on an Elliott computer of late 1960’s vintage, for which the program was loaded from paper tape. This was an experience that gave me enormous respect for the programmers of the past for whom that was hi-tech.
Having worked on some extremely complex systems over the years I have come to value simplicity. When I am developing software for my own use my tool of choice these days is Gambas – an amazing but surprisingly little-known IDE, best described as “Visual Basic for Linux”, only Gambas is far superior to VB and leaves Python for dead in terms of productivity and performance.
Away from IT I am a musician – playing flamenco and blues guitar, and also the piano. In parallel with IT I’ve worked on the fringes of the art world, helping to organise four large-scale public art shows in recent years.
Although originally from London, I am blessed to live in rural South Shropshire, surrounded by farmland and arguably the most beautiful scenery the UK has to offer.
I started using GNU/Linux after years of frustration with the limitations and failings of Windows. My first distro was Xubuntu 8.10 which came with OpenOffice.org as its office software package. Until then I’d never heard of it, but it didn’t take long to discover that it had all the functionality that I’d ever used in MS Office, and a lot more besides.
When LibreOffice was launched as a fork of OO.org I jumped ship to it and have never looked back. I never cease to be astonished at how powerful and stable it has become. In my ideal world I would see Base become much more closely aligned with MS Access, in the way that the other components are close analogs for their MS Office counterparts. At the moment, any organisation with a sizeable investment in the use of Access is really not likely to migrate to LibreOffice.
Compared with most contributors I am a total lightweight. While my initial inclination was to get involved with developing the software itself, I felt daunted by the likely learning curve, given the size of the codebase, so it would be a long time before I could become really useful. I decided I might be more effective in helping to spread the word about LibreOffice.
I got myself added to the marketing mailing list and this has proven to be a great way to get involved. You get an inside view of the project and initiatives to expand the userbase. Crucially you get the opportunity to comment on these marketing activities and contribute any ideas you may have.
Recently I have been distributing flyers promoting LO around secondary schools and colleges of Further Education in my area, along with the local university campus. My car has a LibreOffice banner displayed in the windscreen. Every email I send includes a promotion for LibreOffice in the signature section. These are minor activities in the scheme of things, but as I see it if every LO user successfully encourages just one other person to try it some of those new users will inevitably be decision makers, in a position to bring many others on board. “From little acorns….” and all that.
By putting myself forward as a LibreOffice point of contact I hope I will be able to help get some prospective new users “across the line”, by helping to resolve any questions or reservations which may be holding them back.
I feel the greatest challenge to the adoption of LibreOffice is simple resistance to change. In organisations where MS Office is already deeply entrenched, and possibly the only software many of their staff ever use at work, migrating from a tool they know very well to another which they may barely have heard of is a big ask. The bigger the organisation, the greater the task of migration is perceived to be. We have to persuade organisations that it is worth the effort.
A great opportunity where the UK is concerned is its highly dynamic business environment, which probably generates more startup companies than any other country in Europe. Some of these are highly professional, well-funded affairs but most involve only one or two people initially, seeking to create a business based on their skills and talents. With the bare minimum of funding and very little in their budget for software, this is where LibreOffice has great potential, if only ways can be found to reach people still in the planning stage of a new enterprise. This has the added advantage that if a startup includes LibreOffice in its workflows from day one, and that new business becomes a success, it is likely to stay with LO as it grows, thereby furthering its adoption.
In my experience of advocating the use of free software, people usually “get” the advantages of open source. They are not difficult to explain. The additional advantages of free software, however, are a much harder sell. If you are not involved in software development they really don’t seem that relevant. Does that really matter, though, as long as the applications people use are indeed free and open source? Does it really matter if the motivation for choosing that free software is the concept of free as in “gratuit” rather than free as in “libre”?
At the level of day-to-day users I don’t think it does all that much, as long as their managers understand that somebody somewhere has paid for their “cost free” software to be developed, in terms of man hours of effort and/or hard cash, and that this can only continue if sufficient numbers of users express their appreciation in financial or other practical ways.
Thanks a lot to Nige for his time and contributions! Everyone is welcome to join our marketing project, mailing list and Telegram group. Let us know your ideas – and we can provide you with materials, to help spread the word!
Want to organise a local (or online) LibreOffice event? Need some merchandise to boost your project or community? Then we can help you! The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice, is backed by contributions from ecosystem members and volunteers, as well as donations from end-users. This helps us to maintain TDF, but we can do a lot more too. And next year, we want to do a lot of projects again!
Each year, we set a budget that LibreOffice projects and communities can use for financial support. Some examples:
So if you have some ideas for a meetup, project or activity that could benefit from financial help, let us know! We can also assist you in other ways: our team members are there to help you, and enable you to do exciting and interesting things.
You don’t need to work out all the technical details right now – the main thing is that we have an overview. To help us with planning, we kindly ask you to send your ideas by the end of November, as we try to prepare the 2022 annual budget during December.
You can send your proposal (with estimated costs) to budgets@documentfoundation.org and we’ll take a look. Of course, can’t guarantee that everything will be approved, but we’d love to hear your ideas!
One week ago, we announced LibreOffice 7.2, our brand new major release. It’s packed with new features, and has many improvements to compatibility and performance too. So, what has happened in the week since then? Let’s check out some stats…
These are just stats for our official downloads page, of course – many Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.
The announcement Tweet was viewed almost 45,000 times, and had 418 likes and 187 retweets. We’re also on Mastodon, a FOSS-friendly federated microblogging service: our Mastodon toot had 48 likes and 45 shares. Meanwhile, the Facebook post reached 7,604 people, with 297 reactions and 32 shares.
Our LibreOffice 7.2 New Features video has been popular, with 57 comments and 522 likes. (We also uploaded the video to PeerTube, an open source, decentralized and federated video platform.)
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As always, we posted the announcement on the /r/linux subreddit, where it had 1077 upvotes and 161 comments. We also have our own dedicated /r/libreoffice subreddit – check it out!
A huge thanks to our worldwide community of volunteers, and certified developers, for all their work on this release!
Love LibreOffice too? Want to help us spread the word about it, and other free and open source software (FOSS) projects? Then we appreciate your help! Everyone can raise awareness about the importance of FOSS and open standards, like the OpenDocument Format, LibreOffice’s native format.
For instance, Jessé Moreira from the Brazilian Portuguese LibreOffice community has created a set of tutorial videos. Here’s what he has to say:
Hello! I am a high school math teacher. I love LibreOffice and make videos demonstrating educational software applications. I have a channel that talks about libreoffice in Portuguese on Odysee and YouTube.
I intend to continue promoting LibreOffice by recording videos and contributing to the incredible project. Greetings from Brazil!
Thanks, Jessé! We have more videos created by other community members too. Recently, we talked to Harald Berger from the German community about how he makes his tutorials. To anyone reading this who also wants to contribute videos in their language, drop us a line and let’s work together!
And one more thing: Jessé recently became a Member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. This means that he can help to steer the project and vote for the Board of Directors, amongst other things. All LibreOffice contributors are welcome to become Members and help us to keep doing awesome things:
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