The Document Foundation announces the first group of LibreOffice Certified Developers

Berlin & Barcelona, November 7, 2012 – The Document Foundation announces the first group of LibreOffice Certified Developers, who are recognized for their ability to hack LibreOffice code to develop new features or provide L3 support to enterprise users. They are: Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical), Caolan McNamara (RedHat), Cedric Bosdonnat (SUSE), Christian Lohmaier (Volunteer), David Tardon (RedHat), Eike Rathke (RedHat), Eilidh McAdam (Lanedo), Fridrich Strba (SUSE), Jan Holesovsky (SUSE), Kohei Yoshida (SUSE), Lionel Elie Mamane (Volunteer), Lubos Lunak (SUSE), Markus Mohrhard (Volunteer), Michael Meeks (SUSE), Michael Stahl (RedHat), Petr Mladek (SUSE), Rene Engelhard (Volunteer), Stephan Bergmann (RedHat), Thorsten Behrens (SUSE), Timár András (SUSE) and Tor Lillqvist (SUSE).

Certification is a key milestone for building LibreOffice ecosystem, and increase the number of organizations capable of adding value around the best free office suite ever (and, hopefully, help to spread the adoption over proprietary and open source office suites). LibreOffice Certified Developers have been peer reviewed by the Engineering Steering Committee, which has appointed Bjoern Michaelsen, Jan Holesovsky and Stephan Bergmann to manage the certification process for developers.

Certified developers extend the reach of the community to the corporate world, and offer CIOs and IT managers a professional recognition in line with corporate requests for added value development and support services. TDF will soon extend certification to Migration Professionals and Training Professionals, starting from early 2013.

The LibreOffice Certification Program is outlined on the project website at the following address: http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/. There is also a specific mailing list – certification@global.libreoffice.org – dedicated to the certification project, which is reaching all the members of the Certification Committee. Requests for information and applications should be addressed to this mailing list.

FOSDEM 2013 Call 4 Papers

FOSDEM 2013, Brussels, February 2/3, 2013

FOSDEM has been the first public appearance of The Document Foundation, after the release of LibreOffice 3.3 at the end of January 2011. The conference has been instrumental, so far, for the extraordinary growth of LibreOffice hackers community. FOSDEM 2013 should escalate what we have been able to achieve in 2011 and 2012!

FOSDEM 2013 will be your next chance ever for a talk about LibreOffice at the largest European gathering of free software developers and advocates.

Do you want to share your experience in starting to hack the code, or tell about the tweaks in your build environment, or talk about the code changes you have done or those that you have been preparing, or share some insight on your QA work? Or maybe what you plan for translation or infrastructure?

Please submit your speech proposal on this page, by adding the information on a copy of the table. We really like you to share in the way that fits you best, be it 5, 15 or up to 30 minutes.

We might have to choose between the various proposals, as time is limited. So please give a clear description of your talk, including goals and target audience.

The deadline is December 23, 2012. This will allow the DevRoom managers to spend most of their holiday time by putting together the schedule, which will be published in early January 2013 in order to allow early booking of flights and accommodations.

FOSDEM is a free conference to attend, and we will try to seek sponsorship. But funding is limited, so please only request it if you cannot attend otherwise, and we will try to do our best to support you.

LibreOffice DevRoom

Come and hear about the growth and success of LibreOffice and how you can get involved in this exciting project at the cutting edge of Free Software. Hear from many of the core developers, work out how best to get your most annoying problems fixed, and find how best to get plugged into the team. Co-ordinate with your co-developers, get caught up with the latest developments all over the project, meet friends you’ve hacked with on-line, all this and more. If you’re just a user and want to go deeper, to help improve things we’ll have something for you too.

When and where?

On Sunday, February 3rd, 2013, from 09:00 onwards. We have to leave the room by 17:30 at the latest.

More Info

Wiki Page: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/Events/Fosdem2013

Email for Questions: info@documentfoundation.org

Discussions with developers and code hackers take place on libreoffice@lists.freedesktop.org

Discussions with marketers for the organization of the DevRoom take place on marketing@global.libreoffice.org

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.6.3

Berlin, November 1, 2012 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.6.3, for Windows, MacOS and Linux. This new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability for any kind of deployment, on personal desktops or inside organizations and companies of any size.

LibreOffice has quickly become the de facto standard for migrations to free office suites, thanks to the growing feature set and the improved interoperability with proprietary software. Instrumental for the overall progress is the growing developer base, which has just reached the number of 550 since the launch of the project, making LibreOffice one of the fastest growing free software projects of the decade.

After the City of Munich and the French Government, which are migrating from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice, it is now the turn of several provinces in Italy, including the largest one in term of inhabitants. In addition, there are many private companies switching to LO, like the largest furniture manufacturer and retailer in Romania, with 1,000 Windows and GNU/Linux desktops.

LibreOffice hackers community will gather in Munich for the second LiMux HackFest (http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest/Munich2012) between November 23 and 25. As usual, there will be code, but also beer and pasta, in the true spirit of a free software project.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support the efforts the development and the advocacy efforts of The Document Foundation with a donation – with many options, including PayPal and credit cards – at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

LibreOffice 3.6.3 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

Change logs are available at http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-6-3-release-3.6.3.1.log (fixed in 3.6.3.1) and http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-6-3-release-3.6.3.2.log (fixed in 3.6.3.2).

Searching for infrastructure sponsors

One of the most valueable assets of The Document Foundation, the charitable entity behind LibreOffice, clearly is its infrastructure. It provides the grounds where the community develops, markets, designs, improves and offers its free office suite for download.

That’s why it comes to no surprise that the infrastructure budget is one of the largest spendings. As of today, we spend about 700 € per month on infrastructure, which is more than 50% of our regular monthly operations budget – quite a lot for a foundation of our size.

The last months, the community has grown rapidly, and so we will also have an upward trend with regards to infrastructure, with costs growing more and more.

Therefore, we would like to take the opportunity to ask for infrastructure sponsors. Internet service providers, webhosters, universities and corporations can contribute to the success of LibreOffice. You can support the further development and growth of the community and the product, by sponsoring the use of dedicated machines for LibreOffice purposes.

Due to our setup, we specifically look for dedicated machines (“rented root servers”) that we can use. Virtual servers or shared webhosting unfortunately won’t fit.

As a rough estimation, here are some technical details on what would be desirable:

  • Quadcore CPU
  • 32 GB RAM, ideally with ECC
  • two hard disks with 1,5 TB/each for RAID1; smaller SSDs also welcome
  • one dedicated IPv4 address
  • one IPv6 subnet (/64 or larger)
  • automated reset service
  • remotely bootable rescue system
  • no extra fees for traffic (we approximately use between 2 and 5 TB on an average machine and month); forced traffic shaping after a certain threshold is fine
  • ideally, 1 Gbit/s bandwith instead of 100 Mbit/s

Support of any kind towards our infrastructure efforts is highly welcome, and we would like to thank everyone for their contributions!

If you would like to support our efforts, or have further questions, feel free to ask our infrastructure team at hostmaster@documentfoundation.org or ping Florian directly.

On behalf of the whole LibreOffice community and my infrastructure colleagues, thank you very much!

Send us your LibOCon pictures!

We would like to publish a collection of images from the LibreOffice Conference 2012. Lots of people at the venue made photos, and we invite you to share them with us. 🙂

You can upload them at

http://conference.libreoffice.org/upload

Here’s how to do that:

  1. Please ZIP them,
  2. put a file with your name
  3. as well as the image license into the archive.

Our preferred license is Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/). We cannot publish pictures without a license statement and author’s name in the archive.

Looking forward to getting lots of pictures!