Behind the scenes at TDF: Openness, transparency and projects

by Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of TDF Florian Effenberger With the second quarter being over, the longest day of the year having passed by, and summer vacation time coming up for many of us, it’s time to look back what happened at TDF the first six months of the year. With many projects, activities and developments going on, time has passed by once again at lightning speed, and I want to highlight a few of the things that happened, enabled by our invaluable volunteer contributions, our generous donors, and our wonderful and amazing community, end-users and adopters. In my capacity as Executive Director, I mostly shed a light on the administrative bits of the foundation running, and my staff colleagues will give an overview on their respective areas of working later on. One of the most noteworthy things for sure is the publication of our annual report, which for the first time since TDF’s existance has been published in English and in German at the same time, a model we want to follow also for the upcoming years. The English version has been polished up by a designer, and will also serve as printed brochure for upcoming events and meetings.

Behind the scenes at TDF: Executive Director

With the beginning of 2015, a new year packed with exciting projects and ideas around LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, we continue our behind-the-scenes series, to share achievements in 2014 with our community and our generous donours, to whom we’d like to express our sincerest gratitude and thanks for their incredible and wonderful support and their invaluable contributions! I’m Florian, and I live in the very southern part of Bavaria in Germany, 100 km southwest of Munich, near the border to Austria and Switzerland – a beautiful place to be. 😉 Today, I’d like to shed a light on my role as Executive Director, a fulltime position which I have held since last March. With TDF having grown over the past years in terms of contributions, projects, ideas, staff and donations, my role as Executive Director is, in a nutshell, to keep everything together and have “the show running”, working for the Board of Directors and with the Membership Committee, and all the other wonderful volunteers, contributors and staff members like Sophie, Italo, Christian, Robinson and Alex. Having worked intensively on the statutes and the initial setup of TDF, the first part of my role is taking care of many

Behind the scenes at TDF: L10N and NLP

Towards the end of the year, The Document Foundation would like to share achievements in 2014 with our community and our generous donours, to whom we’d like to express our sincerest gratitude and thanks for their incredible and wonderful support and their invaluable contributions! Sophie Gautier is in charge of our L10N and NLP projects at The Document Foundation, and gives you insight into this key part of our project: L10n – NLPs status quo I would like to give a brief overview of the many things that happened or are in the pipe either on the Localization project (L10n) or on the Native Language projects (NLPs). For the latter, it is not always easy to know what is going on locally, but we tend to get more and more feedback from these groups which is really great. So, on the Localization side, several new languages were added to Pootle these last months, more Indic languages, for example. Translating UI and Help is a very huge task, and when you think it is finished, there is still some work to do for the next version. For example, currently, the teams are in the starting blocks to translate the 4.4.x new

Meet the team at The Document Foundation

LibreOffice is made by hundreds of people around the world, working on code, documentation, QA, translations, marketing, infrastructure and much more. Coordinating the project’s activities is the team at The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. Let’s see what the team members do: 1. Christian Lohmaier, Release Engineer Christian’s typical tasks include taking care of the continuous integration system (both the automation server and the build machines), managing the LibreOffice release process, handling app store updates with all the paperwork that entails, managing the technical side of language translations not only for LibreOffice, but for any translatable system we have and making sure our integration with payment platforms works smoothly. He has also been involved in creating and maintaining websites and web services. Christian’s work is influencing the developer experience as well. In the past, LibreOffice’s Windows development setup was somewhat messy. After Christian introduced automation into the setup process with the help of WinGet scripts, there has been much less need for troubleshooting. 2. Dan Williams, Developer Dan was involved in the Mac port back in the 2000s when LibreOffice was still called OpenOffice.org. For some months now he has been working for TDF on user interface and macOS

ODF: An Analysis of the Adoption of the Open Document Format

Over the course of its 20-year history, the ODF standard has been adopted, or at least recommended, by numerous supranational bodies and several countries on almost every continent. However, this does not necessarily mean that the ODF standard is used in accordance with these decisions, which are often laws in their own right, as Microsoft’s substantial lobbying and misinformation campaigns aimed at protecting its revenue of around $25 billion generated by the proprietary OOXML format (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX) encourage the use of the latter. This is despite the fact that the disadvantages for national systems, communities of citizens and individuals are very easy to demonstrate: loss of control over content, interoperability problems and dependence on the commercial strategies of a single vendor. The information in this post is based on my research into sources relating to the adoption or recommendations for the use of ODF. I began compiling this collection of documents around 2010 and continue to update it annually. Over the last twelve months, I have also used artificial intelligence in my research, which has helped me find some articles. Unfortunately, formal adoption or recommendation of ODF does not guarantee its actual use in accordance with the law.

Insights from the Prague InstallFest 2025 Conference

Petr Valach from the Czech LibreOffice community tells us about feedback from the LibreOffice booth at this event… InstallFest is a well­‑established yet relatively small open­‑source conference held annually in the Czech Republic, traditionally at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering building at Karlovo námÄ›stí in Prague. Personally, I prefer these more intimate spaces over the larger venues like the Faculty of Information Technology, where the LinuxDays conference takes place. I highly appreciate the somewhat old­‑fashioned and historical atmosphere that fills every corner of the faculty building. It reminds me of English universities and other institutions like museums, where the ambiance of past eras is still preserved. Some may find it irritating, but to me, such a place has far more character than modern buildings devoid of history. Building E of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FEL), or perhaps the shared building of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering (FJFI) on Trojanova Street, which I used to visit as a student – and even more so the main building of FJFI on BÅ™ehová Street, or the joint workplace of FJFI and the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics (MFF) of Charles University on Karlova Street – all of these buildings