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Two ODF Toolkit releases in a row!

ODF is the Open Document Format, the native format used by LibreOffice (and supported by many other apps too). Then there’s the ODF Toolkit, a set of Java modules that allow programmatic creation, scanning and manipulation of ODF files. Svante Schubert writes with some updates:

We are happy to announce that there have been recently two ODF Toolkit releases in a row. These were our first releases at The Document Foundation (TDF), after the migration of the project to TDF in 2019:

  • With the 0.9.0 release, we have our last JDK 8 release (due to a switch of the Java Doc Taglet API we are using). After this release, we dropped the so-called “Simple API” (which was once forked from our ODFDOM doc Java Package by IBM, but not merged back, leaving lots of duplicated code that was unable to embrace our new change API). And the XSLT Runner Ant plugin will be removed in a future release, as we are no longer using Ant but Maven (to avoid maintenance of untested functionality).
  • With the 0.10.0 release, we support the next JDK 11 LTS version and our new change API that was implemented by myself for Open-XChange’s web office OX Documents – thanks to them, especially Malte Timmermann and Rafael Laguna for keeping the Apache License 2. Unfortunately, OX forked before I started there and it took me several months – and some sponsorship from a PrototypeFund project – to merge manually every file and enable all tests again (which some OX colleagues had disabled as they took too long…). (Please check out the PrototypeFund: Any German taxpayer may apply with an open-source project/idea!).

I would like to thank also all those numerous folks assisting us to make this work – especially recently in pushing this forward!

Especially, I would like to congratulate Michael Stahl for officially becoming the co-maintainer of this project. Michael has been my long term colleague (from StarOffice Hamburg times) and helps me constantly drop procrastination and/or fix issues I am no longer capable to realize as I looked too long at them. In addition, Michael and I also serve as editors of the OASIS ODF TC. There at the ODF TC, we envision having a faster turn-around of ODF spec deliveries and making their information set more readable for downstream software as we are. Thanks to allotropia software GmbH, Michael’s employer, for providing him with the time for working on these tasks!

So what’s next? Obviously, it’s more than time to release an ODF Toolkit 1.0.0.

Personally, I would like to get the code generation right, but keep as much compatibility to prior releases as possible. Michael and my aim is to work from the end of January on this release (any helping hand is most welcome) 😊

There is also ODF 1.3, to be embraced by a release in the near future.

In February, I will likely have an online talk at FOSDEM, at the LibreOffice dev room about our project and what I intend to do next year.

In a nutshell, I was able to receive some NGI Search funding for this project to enable search in ODF documents.

Aside from the obvious search API – focusing on one higher-level based on user semantic and likely having also one lower-level based on XML, I would like to refactor my “spaghetti feature code” in the SAX parser that made the implementation of the changes hard to maintain. Sorry for that, not my first and likely not my last mistake – but I am learning! 🙂

We’re going to work out a more elaborate picture for the FOSDEM presentation.

Until then, have fun with the ODF Toolkit!

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Open Letter to Members of EU Parliament

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 December
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Free software becomes a standard in Dortmund, Germany

LibreOffice is free and open source software, which means that it’s much more than zero-cost. Anyone can study how it works, modify it, and share those modifications with other users. (So the “free” is more about freedom than price.)

There are many other well-known free software projects, such as the GNU/Linux operating system, Firefox web browser, and Thunderbird email client. Free software helps companies, organisations and governments to reduce costs, improve reliability and free themselves from dependence on a single vendor.

Now, the Council of the German city of Dortmund has announced that it’s moving to free and open source software, where possible. Here’s a translation of the original German blog post:

Memorandum – Digitalisation 2020 to 2025

The Dortmund Council has declared digitalisation to be a political leadership task in its Memorandum 2020 to 2025. In the course of this, two central resolutions for free software were passed on February 11, 2021, for which the minutes were published on March 30:

  • “Use of open source software where possible.”
  • “Software developed by the administration or commissioned for development is made available to the general public.”

Open source wherever possible

With this resolution, city policy takes on the shaping of municipal digital sovereignty and digital participation. The resolution means a reversal of the burden of proof in favor of open source software – and at the expense of proprietary software. In the future, the administration will have to justify why open source software cannot be used for every proprietary software application. Based on the report of the Dortmund city administration on the investigation of the potentials of free software and open standards, open source software is understood in the sense of free software.

Public Money? Public Code!

So, the Council’s decision is in line with the concerns of the campaign Public Money, Public Code. What is financed with public money should be available to the general public for use. For software, this is achieved by means of a corresponding free license. With this resolution, local politicians ensure that the city of Dortmund not only draws from the free software community, but also contributes to it. In this way, inter-communal synergies can be achieved true to the motto develop together, use individually.

Support for open standards

Through the Digital Dortmund Charter 2018-2030, among other things, Open Standards were established as a requirement for further digitalisation.

Politically unanimous in favor of Free Software

The resolution for free software is supported by a broad political base. The motion was passed unanimously by the City Council of Dortmund. The digitalisation motion was jointly introduced by the following parliamentary groups: CDU, SPD, Die Grünen (Greens) and Die Linke (The Left).

Conclusion

The city of Dortmund has ushered in the political turning point and begun the exit from the proprietary era. Now it is important that the city finds the appropriate means to implement this process practically, by means of a proprietary exit strategy and to dissolve existing vendor lock-in. For Do-FOSS, the decision of the Memorandum 2020 to 2025 is the result of a functioning democratic local discourse. The practical management work for Free Software has the necessary political backing to succeed.

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Google Seasons of Doc 2020: Extensive Calc Functions Description is there.

The Calc Guide for LibreOffice release 6.2 contained a lengthy appendix (70 pages) devoted to the 500+ functions available in Calc, providing a shallow list of the functions and their arguments. During the update of the document for release 6.4 in 2019, the Documentation Team agreed that it would be better to move this list to an online service, and as part of this move, to enhance the function descriptions by adding more examples, use cases and collateral information on standards, compatibility and more.

That situation provided an opportunity for us to create a documentation project to submit to Google Season of Documents 2020 (https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs), an initiative by Google to create, enhance and extend the documentation of open source projects worldwide such as LibreOffice.

The Document Foundation applied to the program on behalf of the LibreOffice Community and submitted several ideas for documentation, which included the Extensive Calc Functions Wiki pages. The Foundation received several applications, containing important information including the technical writer’s resumés, proposals for project schedule and suggested deliverables. After a careful evaluation by the project mentors, the Foundation retained the application of Ronnie Gandhi (@Krezhairo) a computer science undergraduate student enrolled at IIT Roorkee, India.

The project was targeted for three months work and ended in early December 2020. Steve Fanning, who had already worked as coordinator of the Calc Guide, served as mentor with Olivier Hallot as second mentor. Ilmari Lauhakangas and Olivier managed the administrative aspects of the project on behalf of The Document Foundation.

Monitoring the project was an important part of the task. There was frequent correspondence on the Documentation Team’s mailing list to discuss the detailed technical aspects of the work. In addition, Ronnie, Steve and Olivier met online once each week for follow-up discussions and resolution of any issues. To maximize the benefit of the opportunity provided by Google, it was decided to improve the wiki page contents with

  • Statements describing each function’s compliance with the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.2 specification
  • Extra use cases and examples
  • Illustrations when applicable
  • External references for further reading
  • Identification of equivalent functions in other spreadsheet software

A useful side-effect of the project was the identification of several potential areas of improvement for Calc’s help files and the exposure of a software issue in two rarely used functions! In addition, Ronnie was able to present his work at the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference in October 2020 and hopefully gained some insights into the role of a Technical Writer.

We are grateful for the work that Ronnie was able to carry out during this task. As all documentation related to software development, the Extensive Calc Functions Wiki is open for further improvements. If you would be interested in helping, please get it touch through the Documentation Team’s mailing list.

Access the Extensive Calc Functions Description in the Document Foundation wiki at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Calc_Functions.

Happy documenting!

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What to do with a document “created by a newer version of OpenOffice”

Are you using Apache OpenOffice? Have you recently tried to open a .odt, .ods or .odp file and received this error message? “This document was created by a newer version of OpenOffice. It may contain features not supported by your current version.”

In this case, the document probably wasn’t created in OpenOffice, but in LibreOffice, a successor project. LibreOffice 7.0 introduced support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3, which includes many new features and benefits.

LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice share the same roots, and while Apache OpenOffice’s last major release (4.1) was back in 2014, LibreOffice has since been developed much further with extra features and updates.

LibreOffice is still free and open source software, of course, so to get the most out of newer documents, download LibreOffice and give it a try!

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Linux and LibreOffice Migration at Eyüpsultan Municipality in Turkey

Many companies, non-profits, schools and other organisations around the world have switched to LibreOffice to avoid vendor lock-in and get back full control over their data. The Eyüpsultan Municipality reported from their migration to Linux and LibreOffice in recent years, which started in 2015:

This was a big decision, and it wasn’t made lightly. Open source technologies provide an important opportunity for our country to have an independent and secure information infrastructure. There are uncertainties about future terms and costs of using licensed software that connects users to a particular brand ecosystem. The more connected to these technologies we are, the harder it is to switch to alternative products. The commercial nature of key companies, to say nothing of pricing and licensing policies, poses significant risks.

As Eyüpsultan Municipality, we aimed to reduce service costs as well as external technology dependencies by using open source software, including the Pardus GNU/Linux operating system. Pardus was developed by the Turkish government as a desktop Linux distribution focused on graphical users in office settings. We wanted a solution that gave us an independent developer and increased sustainability, flexibility, and fiscal savings. In this respect, we consider our migration project to be a social responsibility. We are trying to create awareness of this goal by pioneering the use of Pardus in public institutions throughout Turkey.

Initial steps

The migration team knew from the start that it would be a major undertaking. They made sure to communicate with all workers in the municipality about their plans, and began by running training sessions with LibreOffice in the first phase. Then:

After the trainings, administrators installed the open source LibreOffice software to replace the licensed Microsoft Office software on all client computers. This decision to train users before installing the software minimized the problems they experienced when migrating from familiar software (including the operating system).

We didn’t stop there, though. We let people settle in with LibreOffice for a year, and in 2016, we repeated the training on Linux and LibreOffice. Once users passed an exam at the end of the training, we installed Linux on their computers. We provided re-education to those who didn’t pass the exam and then installed Linux upon success. So, the migration of the operating system began!

Even after the training, the migration team didn’t stop communicating with users – they checked in regularly to see what the workers were struggling with, and helped to fix them. In all, the team regards regular training as the most most significant reason for its success.

Introducing open source to your organisation

So, what else did they learn, and what would they say to other organisations or companies considering LibreOffice, Linux and other free and open source software?

Open source software has many advantages, including flexibility, high performance, major savings on licensing fees, independence from any particular company, and compliance with open standards. The benefits of open source software are recognized all over the world, especially in the European Union member countries, and similar action plans and studies are being used all over for transitioning to open source software.

Take what lessons you can from our experience, which is ongoing. Introduce open source as a viable option for your workplace. Take on the responsibility of delivering education on the knowledge required to use open source solutions. With open source, you never know what will become possible.

Thanks to the migration team for their report! Note that The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, offers a comprehensive certification program for migration professionals. Also see the Migration Protocol which provides more information on migrations to LibreOffice.

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