LibreOffice Conference 2013 Call for Papers Announced

Berlin, July 5, 2013 – LibreOffice Conference will be held in Milan, Italy, on September 25-27, 2013, at the Department of Computer Science of Milan State University. The Document Foundation invites members and volunteers to submit proposals for papers. Whether you are a seasoned presenter, or have never stood up in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice we want to hear from you.

The Call for Paper page is available at the following address: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2013/en/call-for-papers.
Proposals should be filed by August 4, 2013, in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference program. Detailed instructions on how to file proposals are available at the following address (and should be followed carefully): http://conference.libreoffice.org/2012/archive/support-information.

The conference program will be based on the following tracks:
a) Open Document Format (ODF) Track
b) Interoperability
c) LibreOffice – Development and the future: Technology, API, Extensions
d) Community-Track: Localization, Documentation, etc.
e) Best Practice and Migration: Certification and Support
f) Migrating to LibreOffice in governments and enterprises
g) Building a successful business around LibreOffice

Presentations, case studies and technical talks will discuss a subject in depth, and will last either 45 or 30 minutes (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and will last 20 minutes (including Q&A). Workshops and panels will last longer (but they should not exceed 90 minutes), and will discuss a topic or an issue. Session will be streamed live and recorded for download.

The Document Foundation welcomes a new member of the Advisory Board: King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia

KACSTBerlin, June 25, 2013 – The Document Foundation announces that King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia is now an effective member of its Advisory Board. KACST sponsors the National Program for Free and Open Source Software Technologies (Motah: http://www.motah.org.sa/), which has been contributing to LibreOffice for almost one year, to enhance the Arabic language and the RTL (right-to-left) support, and to develop new features.

Motah LibreOffice Project (http://motah.org.sa/en/?q=node/94) is only one of the activities of Motah at KACST, where several software products are studied to explore the extent of Arabic support and their suitability for Arab users. LibreOffice was selected to be the first localization project because most Arab users need a full feature office suite.

liberoffice_image.png“Motah software engineers have been regularly contributing to LibreOffice since 2012, and are now one of the largest groups of full time developers hacking LibreOffice code, together with SUSE and Red Hat”, states Michael Meeks of SUSE, a Member of TDF Board of Directors. “Thanks to the injection of these new groups of hackers, during the last months we have been able to increase the number of contributors, which is now around 100 on a monthly basis and over 330 on a yearly basis”.

“It is fascinating to see The Document Foundation combining people from different cultures, languages and geographical locations around the development of LibreOffice, the best free office suite ever”, says Dr.Turki Alsaud, KACST VP for research institutes. “Having KACST inside TDF Advisory Board reflects our support to the development of LibreOffice, extending our reach from the improvement of the Arabic language version to the development of new features and the improvement of the user interface”.

With the addition of KACST, the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation has now ten members: FSF, Google, Intel, KACST, MIMO, Red Hat, SPI, Lanedo, Freies Office Deutschland e.V. and SUSE (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Advisory_Board).

About KACST

King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) is an independent scientific organization administratively reporting to the Prime Minister’s Office. KACST is both the Saudi Arabian national science agency and its national laboratories. The science agency function involves science and technology policy making, building national scientific database, funding of external research, and conducting applied scientific research in varius disciplines through its own research institutes and providing services such as the patent office, scientific information, and scientific consultations to public and private sector etc. KACST has currently over 2500 employees.

Media Contact KACST

Mohamed Alkanhal – Director of Computer Research Institute
Phone: + 966 11 4813765 – Email: cri@kacst.edu.sa (website: http://www.kacst.edu.sa)

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0.3

Berlin, May 9, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.3, for Windows, OS X and Linux, the third minor release of LibreOffice 4.0 family. OS X Intel packages are now signed by The Document Foundation, to pass OS X Gatekeeper security without user intervention.

In the meantime, another large migration to LibreOffice has been announced, as the government of Spain’s autonomous region of Extremadura has just begun the switch to free software of desktop PCs and expects the majority of its 40,000 PCs to be migrated by the end of 2013. Extremadura estimates that the move to open source – including LibreOffice – will help save 30 million Euro per year.

Community is growing too. After the success of the LibreOffice Impress Sprint in Germany, it is now the turn of the first LibreOffice Bay Area Meetup. It will take place on May 11, 2013 starting at 2pm in the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California. Bjoern Michaelsen will be there for some good Q&A, and most importantly for some hands-on work on how to get involved in the project, with Simon Phipps keynoting about “Foundations and Empires”.

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice are still growing at a steady pace: +13% year over year according to data parsed by Ohloh, with an average of over 100 active developers per month since February 2013. These figures tops the cumulative number of over 650 new developers attracted by the project since the announcement on September 28, 2010.

Developers are contributing not only to the code but also to the quality of the software, as in the case of Markus Mohrhard’s python script for LibreOffice that automatically imports some 24,500 documents and tests if the program crashes in the process (http://mmohrhard.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/automated-import-crash-testing-in-libreoffice/), or Florian Reisinger’s LibreOffice Server Install GUI which performs a parallel installation of LibreOffice without using the command line, for QA purposes (http://flosmind.wordpress.com/libreoffice-server-install-gui/).

LibreOffice 4.0.3 is another important step in the process of improving the quality and stability of the bleeding edge version of the suite, and facilitating migrations to free software by governments and enterprises.

The new release is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.3/RC1 (fixed in 4.0.3.1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.3/RC2 (fixed in 4.0.3.2), and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.3/RC3 (fixed in 4.0.3.3).

LibreOffice Bay Area Meetup on May, 11 2013

After the success of the LibreOffice Impress Sprint in Germany last month, we are very happy to announce the first LibreOffice Bay Area Meetup. It will take place on May 11, 2013 starting at 2pm in the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California. Simon Phipps and Bjoern Michaelsen will be there and have some hopefully interesting topics prepared:

  • “Foundations and Empires” (Simon)
  • “LibreOffice, the Document Foundation, the universe and all the rest” (Bjoern)

We will also have time for some good Q&A, and most importantly: some hands-on work on how to get involved in the project.

We are excited this was made possible in collaboration with the friendly local folks helping us out here (notably and among others: Mike Higashi, Geo Mealer and Alison Chaiken) and hope to meet and greet many of you there.

You are invited, please consider dropping us a note here!

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.6.6

Berlin, April 11, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.6.6, for Windows, MacOS and Linux, targeted to enterprises and individual end users who prefer stability to more advanced features. This new release is suited to the increasing number of organizations migrating to LibreOffice, which is steadily growing worldwide.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation. There is a donation page – with many options including PayPal and credit cards – at http://donate.libreoffice.org, to support the growth of the project in areas such as infrastructure, marketing and development of native language communities.

LibreOffice 3.6.6 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

The change log – with over 50 bugs solved – is available at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.6.6/RC1 (fixed in 3.6.6.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.6.6/RC2 (fixed in 3.6.6.2).

Impress Sprint Dresden Retrospective

The weekend before Easter, a number of hackers congregated in the beautiful city of Dresden, Germany for the first Impress Sprint. Hosted by Dresden Technical University’s Institute for Applied Photophysics, and run by TDF volunteers, the event was rooted in the desire to improve Impress for power users, and getting a number of those tiny, but annoying little paper cuts and needless extra hoops to jump through eliminated.

TDF Hackfests and Sprints are taking place all over the world, organised and run by local volunteers, are excellent opportunities to taste the spirit of the LibreOffice community, and get you bootstrapped in a weekend to fix your first bug or two. As such, we are firm believers in the help-to-help-yourself paradigm. And it is fun, too!

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The rather long list of tackled bugs is here – thanks to all participants for making this a success!

If you want to join us the next time, following are the upcoming opportunities: