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Create a Template for LibreOffice, and get a free T-shirt

The Document Foundation launches a competition to increase the number of document templates bundled with the upcoming major release of Libreoffice, open to designers, artists, and creatively talented users.

Deadline for submission, to be included in LibreOffice 4.4, is January 4, 2015. Templates submitted after this deadline will be considered for later LibreOffice major and minor releases, like LibreOffice 4.5 or LibreOffice 4.4.1.

Templates will be selected by the members of the LibreOffice Design Team, and may be edited before the inclusion. Authors of the templates bundled with LibreOffice 4.4 will get a free T-shirt either at LibreOffice booth at FOSDEM on Saturday January 31, or Sunday February 1, 2015, or by post after FOSDEM, and will be credited with a mention on http://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/credits/. They will also have a chance to meet LibreOffice developers and the design team during and after the show.

To be considered for inclusion, templates must meet the following conditions:

  • They are an original work, and are not converted from existing templates.
  • They are licensed under Creative Commons CC0.
  • They are based only on fonts bundled with LibreOffice (Caladea, Carlito, DejaVu, Gentium, Liberation, Libertine G, Open Sans, PT Serif, Source Code, Source Sans).
  • They are based on LibreOffice styles, and not on direct element formatting. Styles must be created according to the expected use of the template.
  • They contain only a minimum of text (ideally, no text at all), as they will not be translated for LibreOffice 4.4. Because of that, language must be en_us.

To participate, either upload the template on TDF wiki or send it by email to templatecontest@libreoffice.org, and we will add it to the list. Templates will be collected here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboards/Templates_for_LibreOffice_4.4.

Please specify the category and/or the intended use of the template, and the license of the template. You can send any number of templates, provided that all of them meet the above conditions.

For more information about creating templates, please check here: https://help.libreoffice.org/Writer/Creating_a_Document_Template and
here: http://lodahl.blogspot.ae/2014/12/making-good-and-solid-templates.html.

As an example, categories of templates could be: books of various types, address/phone books, business cards, calendars, curriculum vitae/resumes, essays, expense reports, letters, lists, records and reports of various types, schedules, etc.

Be creative ! We look forward to bundle your template designs !

Get ready for LibreOffice 4.3 bug hunting session

The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the schedule of the first LibreOffice 4.3 bug hunting session, which will start with the availability of the first beta of the new major release in calendar week 21 (May 23 to May 25).

Participating will be easy. Details of the bug hunting session are on TDF wiki (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugHunting_Session_4.3.0), where there is also a growing list of LibreOffice 4.3 new features and improvements to check for bugs and regressions (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.3).

To participate, it will be necessary to have a PC with Windows, MacOS or Linux, and LibreOffice 4.3 Beta 1 (available at http://www.libreoffice.org/pre-releases), plus a lot of enthusiasm.

Filing bugs will be extremely easy, thanks to the help of experienced volunteers who will be around on the QA mailing list (libreoffice–qa@lists.freedesktop.org) and IRC channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/#libreoffice-qa).

A second LibreOffice 4.3 bug hunting session will be organized – with the same pattern – immediately after the release of LibreOffice 4.3 Release Candidate 1, in mid June.

LibreOffice happy to work with Coverity Scan results

Spending part of my time to LibreOffice QA, I look over the web page displaying all the commits for LibreOffice code (1) from time to time.
The last months, I saw an large amount of commits related to ‘Coverity’. I remembered that name from years back, in the old OpenOffice.org project.
To explain: Coverity is a project that runs all kind of automated code checks, discovering typical but often hidden programming errors. Memory leaks, but also errors that may cause little, not so often encountered errors for the users. The reports from Coverity are a valuable contribution to – among others – the LibreOffice development process.

The work on using the Coverity reports for LibreOffice is done by a variety of LibreOffice developers, some on the building and testing, others on the other work to fix the issues. In the first months many hundred improvements have been made, making LibreOffice more robust, better. There are still some few thousand issues left however 🙂 So pls get in contact if you like to help with these improvements.

Again it’s lovely to see that core and volunteer developers work together to get thousands of improvements in the LibreOffice code.
Of course in this special case it only can be done with to the work of the Coverity team, that helps open source projects to become more stable and improve quality. Thanks a lot for that!

Impress Remote for Android: video and how-to instructions

Impress Remote for Android is one of the coolest features introduced by LibreOffice 4.0. With version 4.0.1, it is compatible with every platform – Linux, MacOS and Windows – and works like a charm.

In order to install and operate the Impress Remote you must first download it from Google Play on your Android smartphone, and then follow a simple procedure, which is described in this wiki page and also in this video:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM5H4fUxq4M&w=640&h=360]

If you like the Impress Remote for Android, please remember that The Document Foundation is a not for profit entity which lives thanks to the work of many volunteers, but also thanks to donations, which support infrastructure, marketing and community development.

Waving TDF Long Tail

TDF Long Tail

In 2012, developers hacking LibreOffice code have been around 320, with a majority of volunteers and a minority of people paid by companies such as SUSE, RedHat and Canonical (plus a multitude of smaller organizations such as Lanedo, which is also a member of our Advisory Board and builds a significant part of its business by providing development related value added services on top of LibreOffice code).

The graphic visualization of the individual commits has the shape of a “long tail“. The pie is an explosion of the work done by the top 33 hackers with 100+ commits: 16 volunteers, and 17 paid developers (11 from SUSE, 5 from RedHat and one from Canonical). At TDF, we do not have “paid volunteers” because we love transparency and truth.

If you are not familiar with the importance of the “long tail”, especially for free software projects, you might get some interesting insights from the following TED speech, by Clay Shirky:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPQViNNOAkw?rel=0&w=640&h=480]

Clay Shirky has inspired the work of Chris Anderson on the long tail (article, book and blog) with his 2003 essay “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality“, which is a very interesting reading.

Searching for infrastructure sponsors

One of the most valueable assets of The Document Foundation, the charitable entity behind LibreOffice, clearly is its infrastructure. It provides the grounds where the community develops, markets, designs, improves and offers its free office suite for download.

That’s why it comes to no surprise that the infrastructure budget is one of the largest spendings. As of today, we spend about 700 € per month on infrastructure, which is more than 50% of our regular monthly operations budget – quite a lot for a foundation of our size.

The last months, the community has grown rapidly, and so we will also have an upward trend with regards to infrastructure, with costs growing more and more.

Therefore, we would like to take the opportunity to ask for infrastructure sponsors. Internet service providers, webhosters, universities and corporations can contribute to the success of LibreOffice. You can support the further development and growth of the community and the product, by sponsoring the use of dedicated machines for LibreOffice purposes.

Due to our setup, we specifically look for dedicated machines (“rented root servers”) that we can use. Virtual servers or shared webhosting unfortunately won’t fit.

As a rough estimation, here are some technical details on what would be desirable:

  • Quadcore CPU
  • 32 GB RAM, ideally with ECC
  • two hard disks with 1,5 TB/each for RAID1; smaller SSDs also welcome
  • one dedicated IPv4 address
  • one IPv6 subnet (/64 or larger)
  • automated reset service
  • remotely bootable rescue system
  • no extra fees for traffic (we approximately use between 2 and 5 TB on an average machine and month); forced traffic shaping after a certain threshold is fine
  • ideally, 1 Gbit/s bandwith instead of 100 Mbit/s

Support of any kind towards our infrastructure efforts is highly welcome, and we would like to thank everyone for their contributions!

If you would like to support our efforts, or have further questions, feel free to ask our infrastructure team at hostmaster@documentfoundation.org or ping Florian directly.

On behalf of the whole LibreOffice community and my infrastructure colleagues, thank you very much!

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