Thursday, 28th September 2017 will be a special day – not only is it the seventh birthday of The Document Foundation, but we will also be running an “Ask me (us) Anything” session on Reddit – specifically, the /r/linux subreddit.
Team and board members from The Document Foundation will be on hand to answer questions and point people in the right directions. The AmA will run from 12:00 UTC, and we’ll be around for several hours to answer questions. (And indeed we’ll check the post the following day for any extra questions).
We look forward to taking part and talking to everyone!
Yesterday, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced that the opportunity to apply for LibreOffice certification for migrations and training is now available to FSF Associate Members. In 2015, TDF began offering LibreOffice certification to certify “individuals actively promoting LibreOffice deployments, thanks to their competence in specific areas” including development and L3 support, migrations to LibreOffice, and LibreOffice training. In 2017, TDF Certification Committee decided to open the certification process to members of other FLOSS projects, starting from those sitting in TDF Advisory Board.
People certified in LibreOffice migrations and training are able to help companies and government offices make the switch away from proprietary office suites, and that raises the value of a deep understanding of LibreOffice. Italo Vignoli, Chair of the LibreOffice Certification Committee, said: “By extending LibreOffice certification to FSF members, we are widening the reach of our program to foster migrations to LibreOffice. In several geographies, the availability of certified professionals has triggered a number of large deployments in public administrations and enterprises.”
LibreOffice’s native file format is the fully standardised OpenDocument Format. This is ideal for long-term storage of data, but many of us have to work with other file formats as well, including those generated by proprietary software. The Document Liberation Project (DLP) develops libraries to help us access these files, and there have been various updates in the last two weeks, so let’s see what’s new:
libfreehand 0.1.2 – This is a library for importing Aldus/Macromedia/Adobe FreeHand documents. In this release, the library can import more elements, such as text on paths, text effects, stroke patterns, arrows and paragraph attributes.
libzmf 0.0.2 and libcdr 0.1.4 – libzmf is a library for importing Zoner drawing and bitmap files, currently supporting Callisto/Draw 4-5 and Bitmap, while libcdr is a library that parses the file format of CorelDRAW documents of all versions. Both have been made more secure thanks to OSS-Fuzz, which we talked about recently, and there have been build fixes as well.
libwpg 0.3.2 and libwpd 0.10.2 – The former is for importing WordPerfect Graphics images, and has performance improvements when reading image data from WPG2 files, while the latter has had build system improvements and also fixes from the aforementioned OSS-Fuzz.
These improvements will be included in future major releases of LibreOffice, and indeed other open source programs that use Document Liberation Project libraries.
Meanwhile, DLP developer Laurent Alonso sent us this great before-and-after picture, showing recent improvements to the import of Lotus 123 spreadsheets. At the top you can see a Lotus 123 file (that contains lots of formatting) being displayed in LibreOffice 5.3 – but the formatting is missing. Thanks to improvements in DLP libraries, though, LibreOffice 5.4 can read and display the spreadsheet much more accurately, as you can see underneath (click for bigger):
The DLP community appreciates all contributions, and even if you’re not a coder, there are many ways to help – such as documenting file formats, or preparing sample documents. To learn more about DLP, check out our short video:
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Thanks to donations to The Document Foundation, along with valued contributions from our community, we maintain a small team working on various aspects of LibreOffice including documentation, user interface design, quality assurance, release engineering and marketing. Together with Italo Vignoli, I help with the latter, and today I’ll summarise some of the achievements so far in 2017.
Videos
The year started off with preparations for LibreOffice 5.3, a major release that arrived on February 1st. We’ve found that videos are a great way to demonstrate new features to end users – and news websites often embed them as well. So I created a series of New Features videos for LibreOffice 5.3 covering the suite as a whole, along with Writer, Calc and Impress. So far they’ve had over 150,000 views in total:
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I also coordinated script translations from our diligent localisation community, so that the videos had subtitles in 17 different languages. Thanks to everyone who helped!
Around the same time, FOSDEM took place in Brussels, and I used the opportunity to record video interviews with various people involved in The Document Foundation. If you want to learn more about how TDF works, and what you can do to help the project, check out this playlist:
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In May, we had another Month of LibreOffice, celebrating contributions from right across the project. But this time we awarded printed stickers to everyone who took part:
Over 300 contributors won stickers, and we gathered together some photos showing them in action on laptops, PCs, and even a bike!
Regarding events, I attended the MuvGoc ’17 BarCamp in Munich together with Thorsten Behrens. We discussed removing barriers in the digital world, and the relationship between open data and open source. See here for the write-up.
From 23 – 25 of June, I helped to organise a German LibreOffice community meeting in Berlin. We talked about various topics, including ways to bring in new contributors and link different parts of the project and community together – see here for the details (German version).
Website, blog and infrastructure
The LibreOffice download page was due for a facelift, so I worked with Christian Lohmaier (Cloph) on a new design: this makes the download button more prominent, provides better and clearer information, and is generally more pleasant to look at. Similarly, we worked on a restructured donate page, making it significantly simpler and more user-friendly than the previous version.
Meanwhile, I created a new Frequently Asked Questions page on the site, to handle some of the queries TDF receives every day. Community members can point users to these answers where necessary, and discuss them further on Ask LibreOffice.
Various LibreOffice-related events around the globe have taken place since the start of the year, and I collected information about them and wrote a short report. In addition, I summarised various updates from the Document Liberation Project.
If you haven’t seen TDF’s 2016 Annual Report yet, check out out – the TDF team worked together to write it and translate it into German.
Infrastructure-wise, Guilhem Moulin and I set up a new Nextcloud instance for community members to host and share data. We also moved the events calendar to Nextcloud as well.
LibreOffice timeline and LibreOffice 5.4
LibreOffice has a rich history behind it, starting with StarOffice in the 1990s and being open sourced as OpenOffice.org in 2000. To showcase many of the important steps along the way, we worked on a LibreOffice timeline on the website. Along with new versions of the suite, you can see news of major LibreOffice migrations and events that took place.
In August, TDF welcomed a new Development Mentor, Teodor Mircea Ionita (aka Shinnok). I worked with him to examine the state of our build system documentation, to see how we can make it friendlier for new developers – here’s my report.
Finally, for LibreOffice 5.4 I created another New Features video – and again, our localisation communities did a great job providing subtitle translations:
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So that’s the progress so far this year – but there’s more to come, with the LibreOffice Conference in October, another Month of LibreOffice in November, and preparations for LibreOffice 6.0 – which is due to be released early next year!
LibreOffice’s development community has been growing steadily for seven years, thanks to the great enthusiasm demonstrated by several core members. They have mentored an entirely new generation of LibreOffice developers, also thanks to Hackfests and other face-to-face meeting opportunities such as FOSDEM and the LibreOffice Conference.
After seven years is now the right time to start thinking about the new generation of Hackfests. For several reasons, their number has decreased over the last couple of years, and they have never really gone beyond European borders (even with core developers flying over the Atlantic to attract potential new developers).
Bjoern Michaelsen will be hosting a conference call to discuss HackFests “The New Generation” on Sunday, September 17, at 4:30PM CEST (Berlin time, or UTC +2). Everyone interested is warmly invited to participate, especially from LibreOffice native language communities around the world.
If you cannot connect, make your voice heard by sending a couple of ideas by email to the Projects mailing list: projects@global.libreoffice.org.
31 organisations ask to improve public procurement of software
Digital services offered and used by public administrations are the critical infrastructure of 21st-century democratic nations. To establish trustworthy systems, government agencies must ensure they have full control over systems at the core of our digital infrastructure. This is rarely the case today due to restrictive software licences.
Today, 31 organisations are publishing an open letter in which they call for lawmakers to advance legislation requiring publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. The initial signatories include CCC, EDRi, Free Software Foundation Europe, KDE, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, openSUSE, Open Source Business Alliance, Open Source Initiative, The Document Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, as well as several others; they ask individuals and other organisation to sign the open letter. The open letter will be sent to candidates for the German Parliament election and, during the coming months, until the 2019 EU parliament elections, to other representatives of the EU and EU member states.
“Because the source code of proprietary software is often a business secret, it radically increases the difficulty of discovering both accidental and intentional security flaws in critical software. Reverse engineering proprietary software to improve or strengthen it is an absolute necessity in today’s environment, but this basic technical requirement is unlawful in many circumstances and jurisdictions. With critical infrastructure such as hospitals, automobile factories, and freight shippers having all been brought offline this year due to flaws concealed within proprietary software, unauditable code is a liability that states can no longer subsidize with special legal privileges without incurring a cost denominated in lives.
Right now, the blueprints for much of our most critical public infrastructure are simply unavailable to the public. By aligning public funding with a Free Software requirement — “Free” referring to public code availability, not cost — we can find and fix flaws before they are used to turn the lights out in the next hospital.” says Edward Snowden, President of the Freedom of the Press Foundation about the “Public Money Public Code” campaign launch.
Public institutions spend millions of euros each year on the development of new software tailored to their needs. The procurement choices of the public sector play a significant role in determining which companies are allowed to compete and what software is supported with tax payers’ money. Public administrations on all levels frequently have problems sharing code with each other, even if they funded its complete development. Furthermore, without the option for independent third parties to run audits or other security checks on the code, sensible citizen data is at risk.
“We need software that fosters the sharing of good ideas and solutions. Only like this will we be able to improve digital services for people all over Europe. We need software that guarantees freedom of choice, access, and competition. We need software that helps public administrations regain full control of their critical digital infrastructure, allowing them to become and remain independent from a handful of companies,” says Matthias Kirschner, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe.
That is why the signatories call on representatives all around Europe to modernise their digital infrastructure to allow other public administrations, companies, or individuals to freely use, study, share and improve applications developed with public money. Thereby providing safeguards for the public administration against being locked in to services from specific companies that use restrictive licences to hinder competition, and ensuring that the source code is accessible so that back doors and security holes can be fixed without depending on only one service provider.
“Public bodies are financed through taxes. They should spend funds responsibly and in the most efficient way possible. If it is public money, it should be public code as well!”, says Kirschner.
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