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The philosophy behind ODF: openness, freedom and control

Meet the LibreOffice community at FOSDEM 2026!

State of the Project – Calendar Year 2025

Version 1 of TDF Community Bylaws

Why open standards are extremely beneficial to end users

LibreOffice Podcast, Episode #6 – Language support

March 8, Women’s Day

march8March 8 is the International Women’s Day. The theme for 2016 is “Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality”.

march8dayThe Document Foundation has 210 members, but only 20 are women: Belinda Dibra (Albania), Christina Roßmanith (Germany), Eliane Domingos de Sousa (Brasil), Ellen Pape (Germany), Gülşah Köse (Turkey), Irmhild Rogalla (Germany), Jacqueline Rahemipour (Germany), Jean Hollis Weber (Australia), Katarina Behrens (Czech Republic, living in Germany), Linda Martinez (Venezuela), Marina Latini (Italy), Pallavi Jadhav (India), Priyanka Gaikwad (India), Rajashri Bhat Udhoji (India), Regina Henschel (Germany), Sigrid Carrera (Germany), Sonia Montegiove (Italy), Sophie Gautier (France), Surbhi Tongia (India) and Vinaya Mandke (India).

Marina Latini has recently been elected to the Board of Directors, and is the current ChairWoman of the Board of Directors.

Women active in the LibreOffice and Document Liberation communities are definitely more than 20. They should apply for membership, not only to be recognized for their contributions, but also to elect and be elected to the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee.

They can find the application form on the website: http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/members/application/.

LibreOffice @ Didacta

didacta01LibreOffice has been exhibiting at Didacta, a large event focused on the education – schools and universities – environment, from February 16 to February 20, 2016, in Koeln (Germany). Booth was attended by Ellen and Walter Pape, and Thomas Krumbein during the week, plus Andreas Mantke on Saturday. Volunteers have answered individual questions (often about compatibility between MS Office and LibreOffice) and have, when it came up, mentioned Libre Logo, Dmaths and the export as a Hybrid PDF.

LibreOffice was generally very well received, and volunteers were often addressed as “Nice that you exist”. The number of LibreOffice installations in education and in the private sector seems to have increased substantially in the last two years (at least, compared to Didacta 2014 in Stuttgart). Relevant people talked, for example, of a 30% increase in schools in NRW (North Rhine-Westphalia ).

In a tour around the fair one could see the wide range of educational materials about MS Office, quite often in combination with hardware. All (electronic) whiteboards are equipped with MS Windows and MS Office. For almost every profession there are countless textbooks / brochures in combination with Word, Excel and PowerPoint (for example, “Office Organization with Word 2013”). We still need to do a huge effort to raise the awareness and grow the market share of LibreOffice in the educational market.

Didacta 2016 Report in German, Spanish and French (ODT)

200,000 thanks

noun_23937We’ve received 200,000 donations in 1030 days, from May 1st 2013 to February 24th 2016, with an average of 194 donations per day. The best day was February 11th 2016 – the day after we announced LibreOffice 5.1 – with 474 donations. Together with volunteers who are contributing their time, and Advisory Board members who are investing in The Document Foundation, individual donors are making the dream of an independent self-sustaining free software-oriented foundation – capable of pushing the best free office suite to the next level of awesomeness – into a solid, enduring reality.

Back in 2010, when the independent foundation was announced, one of the most frequent objections was based on the assumption that a large free software project cannot exist without a single large corporate sponsor. After five and a half years, the dream has come true and has a bright future. Thanks to donations, we have been able to fund a large number of projects, from hackfests for developers to LibreOffice booths at exhibitions, along with native language community events, a stronger independent infrastructure, and so on. In addition, our staff is growing, taking care of background activities, and making things happen.

More importantly, we have been able to demonstrate that a large free software project does not need a single large corporate sponsor to thrive, but can rely on a diverse ecosystem based on companies and volunteers, and supported by individual donors. Companies come and go, while volunteers – and hopefully donors – stay, and possibly grow. So far, they have had the unique power of making a ten year-long dream come true, and become history. With a simple donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org, they can keep the history alive, forever.

200,000 thanks, again.

LibreOffice 5.1 Videos: Analytics

For LibreOffice 5.1 we created a playlist of short videos highlighting some of the new features in action. At the time of writing, these videos have been viewed over 50,000 times in total. Here’s the breakdown:

  • Calc: 15,346
  • Impress: 12,275
  • Writer: 25,229

Let’s take the Writer video and look at some of the viewer analytics data behind it. Interestingly, Spain currently provides the most viewers – whereas for the Calc and Impress videos, the USA is in first place. This chart shows the breakdown of the top 10 countries where the Writer video is popular:
(more…)

The new Board of Directors of The Document Foundation

TDF_Logo_WikiBerlin, February 19, 2016 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the new Board of Directors, in charge from February 18, 2016, to February 17, 2018. Elected as directors are, in order of votes: Marina Latini (Studio Storti), Michael Meeks (Collabora), Thorsten Behrens (CIB), Jan Holesovsky (Collabora), Osvaldo Gervasi (independent), Simon Phipps (independent) and Eike Rathke (Red Hat). Elected as deputies are, in order of votes: Norbert Thiebaud (independent), Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical) and Andreas Mantke (independent).

The board has elected Marina Latini as Chairwoman and Michael Meeks as Deputy Chairman. “The new board of directors provides at the same time the continuity with the past, and the new energies to push forward the project. After four years, The Document Foundation is globally recognized as one of the most successful free software projects. I look forward to the next two years, as we will have the challenge of growing our community to improve the awareness of LibreOffice and open document standards in every geography”, comments TDF Chairwoman Marina Latini.

membermapAs of January 1st, 2016, The Document Foundation has more than 200 members – representing 50 different countries or native language communities, from the five inhabited continents (a map is attached) – and thousands of volunteers worldwide. For additional information, please visit: http://www.documentfoundation.org.

Marketing Project: New Marketing Assistant

I’d like to introduce myself as the new Marketing Assistant at The Document Foundation. My name is Mike Saunders, and some LibreOffice followers may have already seen the 5.1 New Feature videos that I made for Calc, Impress and Writer. Others may have come across my work in Linux Voice magazine in the last two years, and other computing publications such as Linux Format before that. (I’ve also written a book about Linux.)

I’ve been using, developing, writing about and advocating open source and Free Software since 1998, when I took the plunge with Red Hat Linux 5.1 from a magazine coverdisc. Around the same time, I discovered StarOffice, the commercial office suite which, of course, eventually became OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice. I’ve seen the Free Software community grow from a grassroots movement to a major force in the computing world, and along with writing about and promoting FOSS, I’ve tried to give a little bit back with my own Free Software project: MikeOS.

So I’m really excited to be joining The Document Foundation – helping to promote and spread awareness about LibreOffice. Not only is LibreOffice a hugely versatile and useful piece of software, it represents much more: the growing importance of open standards and document formats. It’s clear that companies, communities and local governments are starting to recognise that fully open formats are the future, so it’s great to see adoption of LibreOffice all around the world.

I’ll be working on a part-time basis, helping The Document Foundation with various tasks and projects. We’re going to be at CeBIT in mid-March, we’re working on our Annual Report for 2015, and we have many ideas for presentations, events and social media promotions in the pipeline.

So far I’ve met lots of great people involved in LibreOffice and TDF, and no doubt I’ll be meeting many more – either in person at events, or collaborating on the wiki and mailing lists – over the coming 12 months. I look forward to working with you!

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 philosophy behind ODF: openness, freedom and control

File formats are not usually the subject of philosophical debate because most users just want to open, save and share…