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Five years of LibreOffice

LibreOffice, the historyLibreOffice was launched as a fork of OpenOffice.org on September 28, 2010, by a tiny group of people representing the community in their capacity of community project leaders. At the time it was a brave – although necessary – decision, because it was rather clear to everyone that OpenOffice.org was not going to survive for a long time under Oracle stewardship.

In fact, the group of 16 founders launched an independent free software project under the stewardship of The Document Foundation, to fulfil the promise made by Sun ten years before – at the time of the first announcement of OpenOffice.org – of an independent free software foundation capable of pushing forward the free office suite to the next level.

After five years, LibreOffice is acknowledged in the marketplace as the sole Microsoft Office contender, based on a sheer feature by feature comparison, and on the number of successful migrations. Migrating to LibreOffice has never been easier, thanks to the Migration Protocol drafted by the most experienced people at The Document Foundation, which outlines the best practices adopted by several large projects worldwide.

A success confirmed by the Future of Open Source Survey 2015, which has put LibreOffice amongst the seven most valuable open source projects, based on the answers provided by over 1,300 professionals worldwide.

It has been an amazing journey. In five years, LibreOffice developers have not missed a single time based release, with major announcements in late January and late July, and minor announcements on a monthly basis. Thanks to this sustained pace, LibreOffice has reached a richness of features and a level of interoperability which are second to none.

LibreOffice 5.0, launched in early August, has been the most successful major release ever, triggering an unprecedented 8,000 donations in 30 days. Of course, the success has been reflected in the number of adoptions, which has soared. The icing on the cake has been the announcement of the Italian Defence Organization, which will be migrating some 150,000 PCs to LibreOffice starting from October 2015.

To celebrate our 5th anniversary, we have put together a book based on the blog post of the people who have made the history, which is available in a mini (700 pages) and a maxi (1,300 pages) version. Enjoy.

LibreOffice 5.0.2 announced at LibreOffice Conference

Map of Conference Attendees Countries
Conference Attendees Map

Berlin/Aarhus, September 23, 2015 – The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 5.0.2 during the opening session of the LibreOffice Conference, to underline the importance of the event for the community. LibreOffice Conference has opened today, and will be closing on Friday, September 25.

LibreOffice 5.0.2 is the second minor release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family, with a large number of fixes over the first minor release announced in August. So far, the LibreOffice 5.0 family is the most popular LibreOffice ever, based on feedback from the marketplace.

LibreOffice 5.02 will offer OpenGL rendering by default on Windows for the first time, for those with the very latest windows drivers. The functionality is easy to disable in case of issues by accessing Tools > Options.

LibreOffice 5.0.2 is targeted to technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. For more conservative users, and for enterprise deployments, TDF suggests the “still” version: LibreOffice 4.4.5. For enterprise deployments, The Document Foundation recommends the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/).

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.0.2/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.0.2/RC2 (fixed in RC2).

Follow the LibreOffice Conference

Regular updates about the LibreOffice Conference 2015 will be published on the @libocon Twitter account and on the blogs of several participants. The conference website is at the following address: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/.

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.0.2 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. They can also buy LibreOffice merchandise from the brand new project shop: http://documentfoundation.spreadshirt.net/.

LibreOffice merchandising is available from Spreadshirt.Net

The Document Foundation has opened a store for LibreOffice merchandising at Spreadshirt.Net.

LibreOffice Merchandising Shop

We have a few items at the moment, mostly mugs and t-shirts, but we are open to suggestions and new designs. If you want to contribute, or if you already have a design to suggest, send an email to italo@documentfoundation.org.

The shop is managed by Spreadshirt, which is also responsible for the production of the items, the collection of the payment and the delivery of the items. The Document Foundation will get a small percentage of each item cost, to support the project.

The geography of LibreOffice

The LibreOffice community has a wide geographical reach, which is shown on this map, where all countries where there is at least a TDF Member are shown in green.

membersmap

 

The LibreOffice community will gather in Aarhus for the LibreOffice Conference, where most of the countries will be represented. In addition, there will be volunteers from other countries, according to this map, where all countries where there is at least a conference participant are shown in green.

 

conferencemap

Behind the scenes at TDF: L10N and NLP in the first half of 2015

_SDS5526Now that the summer vacation time is over for many of us, it’s time to have a look at what has been happening behind the scenes with our fantastic native-language community. And indeed – it’s a lot of exciting things!

Now that TDF has launched the Android Viewer and even if the application itself is not yet available other than in en_US language, we could at least give its description in several languages. We offer the download description in about 16 languages. If yours is not there, just join us on the localization list and we will help you to achieve it.

This is THE big news of this second quarter: Pootle has been moved two versions further and after a testing period, the server went live and we are now using this version to translate 5.0 strings. Imagine a big big database which needs several days to be saved and pushed, then a first migration to the intermediate version, then to the 2.7 which is the actual version we are using. Dwayne and his team have done a tremendous work during this migration, fixing bugs almost as soon as they were reported.

We have also changed our workflow while preparing 5.0.0 release.  The teams are now translating on master which allows more small steps in translation work instead of working on a large bunch of changes. Some new teams have joined the group and I would like to underline the work done by Giovanni to get the Guarani version done for 5.0. It was a challenge and he won it! We even have an emoji language in our translated versions, have you tried it already?

With the launch of the 5.0 version, several press releases have been translated and sent to the local press. Thanks to all who participated to this effort, that has allowed a very good coverage of the news in numerous countries.

At the same time, we also have made the annual report available in English and thus available for translation. This year, it was first written in English and then translated to German to be available for the German authorities. If it has not been translated in your language, you’ll find it here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/File:TDF2014AnnualReport.pdf. It’s a very nice document, which explains the many facets of our project.

We are preparing the LibreOffice conference in Aarhus (Denmark) in September, and we are very pleased to see that the Native Language and Localization teams will be well represented this year, with a full workshop and several talks. If you can’t attend, there will be an IRC channel available where we will report and discuss. Don’t hesitate to check the conference site, as even if you don’t attend, there will be several news here: http://conference.libreoffice.org.

The program of the LibreOffice Conference 2015 is online

03g_schmidt hammer lassen architects-smallThe program of the LibreOffice Conference 2015 has been published on the conference website at the address: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/the-program/. There is a separate page for each day of the event, including the community day (which is happening, as usual, the day before the conference).

Tuesday, September 22: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/the-program/sept-22th-community-day/.

Wednesday, September 23 (opening sessions + tracks): http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/the-program/sept-23th-wednesday/.

Thursday, September 24 (tracks): http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/the-program/sept-24th-thursday/.

Friday, September 25 (tracks + closing session): http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/the-program/sept-25th-friday/.

On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings there will be events involving all participants: dinners in local restaurants, plus a party and a hacknight at the Aarhus University. Check the program and register for the events (registration is mandatory, to help organizers with numbers) on this  page: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/events/.

 

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