Statement about Richard M. Stallman and the Free Software Foundation

Dear LibreOffice Community, Dear FOSS Community,

All of us at The Document Foundation are following the discussion in the global free software community about Richard M. Stallman’s return to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors. We do share your concerns, and we do take this situation very seriously.

Our worldwide community is strongly committed to have a safe, welcoming, harmonious and inclusive environment, based on dignity and support. We absolutely do not tolerate harassment of any kind. Working together in trust requires mutual respect and understanding. These standards are also part of our guiding statutes that we expect all our community members and affiliates to follow.

We have therefore reached out to the FSF’s representative in our advisory board, asking for details and for a statement which confirms their commitment to our core values. We are all perfectly aware of the consequences also for our project, given that the FSF is a member of our advisory board.

We clearly expect a strong evidence that the FSF found a proper solution to the severe impact their actions have had on the global free software community. We will suspend FSF‘s membership in our advisory board and cease any other activity with this organization and their representatives, until the situation is healed.

Thanks for your support.

Lothar Becker (TDF Board)
Thorsten Behrens (TDF Board)
Daniel Armando Rodriguez (TDF Board)
Cor Nouws (TDF Board)
Emiliano Vavassori (TDF Board)
Franklin Weng (TDF Board)
Paolo Vecchi (TDF Board Deputy)

Marina Latini (TDF Membership Committee)
Gustavo Buzzatti Pacheco (TDF Membership Committee)
Ahmad Haris (TDF Membership Committee)
Gabriele Ponzo (TDF Membership Committee)
Jona Azizaj (TDF Membership Committee Deputy)
Shinji Enoki (TDF Membership Committee Deputy)
Dennis Roczek (TDF Membership Committee Deputy)

Florian Effenberger (TDF Team)
Xisco Fauli (TDF Team)
Sophie Gautier (TDF Team)
Olivier Hallot (TDF Team)
Christian Lohmaier (TDF Team)
Guilhem Moulin (TDF Team)
Italo Vignoli (TDF Team)

LibreOffice in the Google Summer of Code 2021

New features in LibreOffice are made by volunteers, certified developers, and – during the summer – participants in the Google Summer of Code programme. This is focused on introducing students to open source software development, and last year LibreOffice received a bunch of new features thanks to the work of several students.

Well, we’re happy to announce that LibreOffice is part of this year’s Summer of Code (GSoC). If you’re a student, want to improve your programming skills and receive a financial stipend to implement new features in LibreOffice, take a look. Get in contact with us, show us that you’ve learnt the basics by working on an Easy Hack, and then propose your project(s). We look forward to meeting you!

Click here to get started

And to learn more about GSoC, check out this interview with Gautam Prajapati, who was part of the programme a few years ago:

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LibreOffice 7.0.5 has been released

Berlin, March 12, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.0.5, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.0 family, is available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. All users are invited to update to this version, as this is now the suggested version for all users.

End user support is provided by volunteers via email and online resources: 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.

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommends sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners, to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other benefits, including SLAs (Service Level Agreements): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

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.

New Generation: Flyer for schools and universities

In late January, we announced LibreOffice New Generation, which focuses on bringing younger contributors into our projects and communities. We’ve had many discussions in our Telegram group since then, and today we’re announcing our first finished project: a LibreOffice flyer for schools and universities:

The goal of this flyer is to not only make students aware of LibreOffice, but also encourage them to get involved and help to improve it. Joining a free and open source software project is a great way to build up skills and gain experience, for potential future career options.

Thanks to Fabio Pesari, Timothy Brennan Jr. and Maharaj for their help and suggestions!

So what’s next?

We’ve put the flyer source file on our wiki (in ODG format, for opening in LibreOffice Draw – font used is Vegur), so translations in more languages would be great! If you make a translation, please email it to us and we’ll add it to the wiki. Here are the translations we have so far:

And then: let’s get the flyers out there! We’ll print copies of these flyers, so if you want to distribute them in your school or university, send us an email and we’ll talk further.

Onwards and upwards!

This is just the first project in New Generation – and we have many more ideas…

  • Create certificate for skills: creating presentations, spreadsheets, illustrations
  • Provide materials for local training in schools, universities etc.
  • Set up a contest (eg Python macro programming) with rewards
  • Set up a survey for students and teachers to spread around on campus
  • Use Open Badges to reward contributors and confirm their work

But we need your help to make them a reality! Join our Telegram group and let’s do awesome things together 😊

International Women’s Day – March 8, 2021

#ChooseToChallenge  #IWD2021

A challenged world is an alert world. Individually, we’re all responsible for our own thoughts and actions – all day, every day.

We can all choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality. We can all choose to seek out and celebrate women’s achievements. Collectively, we can all help create an inclusive world.

From challenge comes change, so let’s all choose to challenge.

LibreOffice 7.1.1 Community available for download

Berlin, March 4, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.1.1 Community, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 7.1 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice 7.1.1 includes over 90 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are 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.

Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud. They may have a different name, according to each company brand strategy, but they share the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.

Most significant new features of LibreOffice 7.1

LibreOffice 7.1 family adds several interoperability improvements with DOCX/XLSX/PPTX files: improvements to Writer tables (better import/export and management of table functions, and better support for change tracking in floating tables); a better management of cached field results in Writer; support of spacing below the header’s last paragraph in DOC/DOCX files; and additional SmartArt improvements when importing PPTX files.

GENERAL: (1) new dialog to select the User Interface flavor, aiming to pick the right UI based on each user’s own preferences at first start; and (2) print Preview is now updated asynchronously, to not block UI when adjusting settings in Print Dialog.

WRITER: (1) new Style Inspector to display the attributes of Paragraph and Character Styles, and user formatted text; and (2) significant speed improvement of find/replace operations.

CALC: significant speed improvement of Autofilter and find/replace operations.

IMPRESS & DRAW: (1) possibility to change animations for several objects at once in Impress; (2) addition of “Pause/Resume” and “Exit”buttons to Presenter’s Screen; (3) addition of realistic soft blurred shadows to objects; and (4) addition of new physics based animation capabilities.

LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options – represents the ideal solution for users that want to regain or keep control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Migrations to LibreOffice

The Document Foundation has developed a Migration Protocol to support enterprises moving from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, which is based on the deployment of a LTS version from the LibreOffice Enterprise family, plus migration consultancy and training sourced from certified professionals who offer CIOs and IT managers value-added solutions in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.1.1 Community

LibreOffice 7.1.1 Community represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites. For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation provides LibreOffice 7.0.4.

LibreOffice 7.1.1 change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.1/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.1/RC2 (changed in RC2).

LibreOffice Technology based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while for App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/

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 are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

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.

LibreOffice 7.1 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.