Recent Posts

LibreOffice project and community recap: December 2025

The importance of ODF during the festive season

LibreOffice Viewer now available on Meta Quest VR headsets

The Role of ODF in the Era of Digital Identity and Authentication

Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.4

Czech translation of LibreOffice Draw Guide 25.8

KDE e.V. joins advisory board of The Document Foundation

ev_largeBerlin, June 16, 2016 – The Document Foundation announces that KDE e.V. is joining the organization’s Advisory Board, and at the same time The Document Foundation joins KDE’s group of advising community partners as an affiliate.

KDE is creating Free Software since 1996 and shares a lot of values around Free Software and open document formats with The Document Foundation, and brings the experience of running a Free Software organization for almost two decades to their advisory board.

Both organizations are working in the OASIS technical committee for the OpenDocument format, and also collaborate on common aspects of development of office software, such as usability and visual design. The affiliation of KDE and The Document Foundation at an organizational level will help to move forward with the shared goal of giving end users control of their computing needs through Free Software.

“The KDE project is one of the essential pieces of the FLOSS desktop initiative, and we are most happy to liaise with them now also on an organizational level. Beyond the shared goal of liberating people’s software experience, there is also lots of synergies to explore in areas ranging from document filter technologies to volunteer-driven governance,” says Thorsten Behrens, member of the board at The Document Foundation.

Lydia Pintscher, President of KDE e.V., says: “KDE has been one of the first Free Software non-profit organizations incorporated according to German law. We are happy to share some of the things we learnt over the many years we are running KDE now. Free software and open formats are two of the cornerstones which unite us with many other organizations, such as The Document Foundation, working on establishing freedom for users of digital devices everywhere. In order to achieve our vision of a world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy, we need strong partnerships with like-minded organizations like The Document Foundation.”

About KDE e.V.

KDE e.V. is a registered non-profit organization that represents the KDE Community: an international technology team dedicated to creating a free and user-friendly computing experience, offering an advanced graphical desktop, a variety of applications for communication, work, education and entertainment, and a platform to easily build new applications upon. More information about KDE and KDE e.V. can be found at www.kde.org.

LibreOffice developer interview: Muhammet Kara

Every new LibreOffice release is built on the work of developers around the world, who collaborate to add new features and fix bugs. But who are these developers? How did they get involved in LibreOffice, what is their vision for the future of the software, and how do they enjoy their free time?

We asked some contributors these questions, and will be posting their answers here on the blog in the coming weeks. Let’s start with Muhammet Kara…

Where are you based, and do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just code in your spare time?

I live in Ankara, Turkey. I am still a student, studying computer engineering, and I also work for TUBITAK-ULAKBIM in their Pardus Linux Group. They endorse the usage of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) nationwide. They also encourage me to work on LibreOffice when I am not given other tasks. I am glad I am able to contribute to such a great project as LibreOffice in the workplace. I also code in my spare time.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

I have been using and advocating OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice for years, but my involvement as a code contributor started with encouragement of Abdullah Erol, manager of the Pardus Linux Project.

What areas of the code do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

I don’t have a particular preference, and I work on various areas usually related to C++ and the user interface. After gaining some more experience, first I would like to spend some time on Base because I felt like it needs some love. I am also interested in getting involved with writing tests because they guard us against the introduction of new bugs and reintroduction of old ones. But there is no reason not to work on Calc or Writer 🙂

What is your vision for the future, and what would you most like to see improved in LibreOffice?

A well-known and widely-used LibreOffice suite worldwide, and particularly in Turkey. I think integration of LibreOffice with the cloud is also crucial for the future.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

I like going to the movies, reading books, mountain driving, and localizing free software. Nowadays I am trying to get GNOME 3.22 development branch’s Turkish translation to 100% completion. Wish me luck with that 🙂

Thanks Muhammet! And to any other interested developers reading this: join our community and help to make LibreOffice even better.

Coming up: the next LibreOffice Bug Hunting Session

A new release of LibreOffice is coming up – so help to make it the best version ever! LibreOffice 5.2 is due to be released at the start of August, and developers are busy working on new features and updates. With so many changes in the next version, we’d really appreciate your help finding bugs so that we can squash them!

To this end we’ll be holding a Bug Hunting Session on Friday 24 June, from 07:00 to 20:00 UTC. Anyone can take part at any time – it’s simple and fun! All you have to do is download the latest development release, try out the new features, and report bugs on our IRC chat channel. Even if you can only spare half an hour of your time, it’s a great help to make LibreOffice better than ever before – and you can show off a badge like the one above!

So mark the date in your calendar: Friday 24 June. We’ll post more details on this blog soon, so stay tuned…

Tender for a Infrastructure and System Administrator (#201606-01)

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks a

Infrastructure and System Administrator

to start work as soon as possible. The role is scheduled for 40 hours a week. The work time is flexible and work happens from the applicant’s home office, which can be located anywhere in the world.

Our infrastructure is based on 4 large hypervisors with about 50 virtual machines running on them. In addition there are several bare-metal machines, additional backup servers, externally hosted virtual machines and services, split across three data centers and connected via dynamic routing.

Key technology used is

  • Debian 8, some legacy Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 machines eventually to be migrated
  • SaltStack for deployment
  • KVM as virtualization technology
  • GlusterFS for distributed storage
  • Icinga-based TKmon for monitoring
  • MikroTik routers and switches
  • IPMI-based Supermicro and ASUS bare metal hardware
  • documentation in RST text files
  • Git repositories
  • Sphinx as documentation generator

Tools we make use of

  • Nginx and Apache
  • Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, amavisd, ClamAV
  • Gitlab and Gitlab CI
  • MirrorBrain
  • PostgreSQL and MySQL
  • Gerrit, Bugzilla, Jenkins
  • AskBot, ownCloud, MediaWiki, Etherpad, Piwik
  • Silverstripe, WordPress
  • Plone
  • Redmine
  • gitolite
  • Kibana-based statistics dashboard
  • Pootle, MozTrap
  • rsnapshot, BackupPC
  • OpenVPN
  • LDAP
  • Graylog
  • Asterisk/Freeswitch
  • WebDAV
  • etc.

Skills we seek for

  • experience in administrating and maintaining a 24/7 production system
  • fluent in English
  • a good and pro-active communicator
  • documentation skills
  • mentoring skills to onboard new volunteers
  • sensible towards data privacy-related topics
  • ability to act quickly on critical security updates
  • expertise with DNS, SSL certificates and domain registration
  • development skills for developing our self-written tools is a plus

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including curriculum vitae, your financial expectations, and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than July 15, 2016, midnight UTC. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

If you haven’t received feedback by August 15, 2016 your application could not be considered.

Month of LibreOffice, May 2016: The results!

So we’ve come to the end of the Month of LibreOffice, our campaign to credit the awesome work of contributors across the globe. And it has been a great month: we’ve seen updates and improvements across all areas of the software, from code and translations through to documentation and bug reports. So without further ado, let’s see the numbers…

Number of badges awarded: 341 – click here to see if you got one!

If you got a badge, click one of the share links to tell the world about it – or use the link to the small image to save a version for your blog or website. Thanks very much for taking part, and we look forward to your LibreOffice contributions in the future!

Here’s a chart showing how many badges were awarded as May progressed. There was a big jump at the start as lots of new names were added, but growth was steady and we could constantly see new names appearing as people made contributions to LibreOffice. This chart shows the total amount of badges awarded at the end of each day in the month:

Meanwhile, we also created a page where community members could award Barnstars to each other. These are icons to say thanks for doing a specific job, with bronze for smaller tasks, silver for bigger ones, and gold for making major improvements:

Number of Barnstars awarded: 22 – click to see if you got one!

So what’s next? Every month in the LibreOffice is full of activity, but we have some major events coming up such as the release of LibreOffice 5.2 in August and our conference in September. We plan to do another Month of LibreOffice later in the year – if you have any ideas or want to help out, join our marketing team!

Behind the scenes at TDF: NLP/L10n

_SDS5526In the first quarter of 2016 a lot of work has been carried out by the community. On the events side, FOSDEM gathered several LibreOffice members together, and a face-to-face meeting with the Pootle team took place to discuss further fixes and enhancements needed by our localization team. In the meantime, the board has approved the budget to implement those features and work is being carried out.

The German community went to the DIDACTA trade fair (and wrote a nice report in several languages) and also attended the full week at CeBIT.

Guess what? Our Japanese team organized 14 events since the beginning of the year – kudos to them for their energy, enthusiasm and dedication! The Indian team also organized four LibreOffice meetups since January where localisation (l10n) for Garhwali and Angika began during one of them. One of the meetups was a hackathon dedicated to l10n QA. Don’t hesitate to subscribe to the LibreIndia Facebook page, as each event is announced and reported there.

And there is much more to report on what’s happening this quarter, like the hackfests in Ankara (Turkey) and the LibreOffice summit in the city of Las Palmas (Spain). I’m so happy to see the local communities invested in so many LibreOffice events.

Do not forget to check regularly the LibreOffice conference site; the local Czech team is working hard already to prepare everything, and a lot of information will be added to the site in the coming days. There is also the call for papers – submit your idea before July 15th!

On the l10n activities, LibreOffice 5.1 brought a bunch of modifications and several new strings to translate. But there will be more for the next release, 5.2, where a lot of help articles have been added or updated. A new project has been added to Pootle: now there is also the LibreOffice Online project, the newborn baby who has few new strings of its own.

Press Releases

Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.4

Berlin, 18 December 2025 – LibreOffice 25.8.4, the fourth minor update to the free office suite developed by volunteers for…

Open Document Format

The importance of ODF during the festive season

To be honest, I didn't think I would publish my usual post about ODF over the festive period, as most…