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The Document Foundation announces a Certification Program

The Document Foundation announces a Certification Program
to foster the provision of professional services around LibreOffice

Berlin, May 7, 2012 – The Document Foundation announces the Certification Program, to foster the provision of professional services around LibreOffice and help the growth of the ecosystem of the world’s best free office suite. The program is outlined on the following page: http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification.

“The Certification Program will recognize the competence of individuals capable of developing and supporting LibreOffice, provide integration services around the suite, offer training and maintenance, and migrating enterprises deployments from proprietary to free software”, comments Italo Vignoli, Member of the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation. “TDF Certification is an opportunity for sponsors, TDF members and third parties, to build a business around LibreOffice, to help companies of any kind and size to get the most out of the best free office suite ever”.

The Certification Program will be overseen by the Board of Directors, through a Certification Committee coordinated by Italo Vignoli and composed by 10 people: Olivier Hallot and Charles Schulz for the Board of Directors; Sophie Gautier and Cor Nouws for the Membership Committee; Stephan Bergmann, Jan Holesovsky, Tim Janik and Björn Michaelsen for the developer’s community; Lothar Becker and Jacqueline Rahemipour for third parties.

The first certified developers and third parties will be announced in May during LinuxTag (Berlin, May 23-26), when the Certification Committee will meet for the first time. After the meeting, TDF will announce the roadmap for certification, including pre-requisites for third parties not involved in the project, and the first dates for trainings and exams.

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.5.3

Record number of new contributors + 10 Google Summer of Code projects

Berlin, May 2, 2012 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.5.3, the fourth version of the 3.5 family. LibreOffice 3.5.3 provides additional stability to corporate and individual users of the best free office suite ever.

“In April 2012, 34 new developers contributed code to The Document Foundation, the largest number since January 2011 [Source: http://www.ohloh.net]. Eight of them have already committed more than once, thanks to the help of an extremely welcoming community, where old developers spend a portion of their time mentoring new ones to bring them up to speed,” comments Norbert Thiebaud, a volunteer developer active since September 28, 2010. “In less than two years, we have been able to build an authentically diverse community, where full time and volunteer developers coexist and help each other, as it should happen in every free software project.”

Ten of the new developers are Google Summer of Code 2012 students, who will work at developing the following features:

  • Calc performance improvements;
  • Lightproof improvements;
  • collaborative spreadsheet editing using Telepathy;
  • a Microsoft Publisher import filter;
  • a signed PDF export;
  • a smartphone remote control;
  • a new UI for picking templates;
  • a Java based GUI for an Android viewer;
  • an improved Impress SVG export filter;
  • tooling for more and better tests.

LibreOffice 3.5.3 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

Change logs are available at http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.3/RC1 and http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.5.3/RC2.

LibreOffice Hackfest Munich 2012

Good news, everyone!

The LiMux office of the city of Munich invited us for a second LibreOffice Hackfest in Bavaria’s capital this autumn. To determine the best weekend, please cast your vote in our poll at

http://www.doodle.com/sz6eehwtn57f765a

The final date will be announced as soon as we know the time of the LibreOffice Conference in Berlin, to avoid collisions.

Note that the Hackfest runs from Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime, but we have only listed the respective Saturdays.

Happy hacking! 😉

Thank you for your support!

Dear supporters and friends of The Document Foundation,

on behalf of the worldwide LibreOffice community, and on behalf of the donor Freies Office Deutschland e.V., we would like to express our sincerest thanks to all of you for your kind and generous support in setting up the legal entity.

On February 17th, The Document Foundation has been incorporated as a German Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts, located in Berlin, and in the meantime, the transfer of all assets has been nearly finished. In other words: The long-awaited foundation is finally in existence and fully operating.

For us, it is still unbelievable how strong the worldwide support is, how many people support the idea of an independent foundation, and how many contributed by either getting engaged in the project, or by donating to fund our operations.

Following our open and transparent approach, we have made public our budget, and will constantly update it, so you see what your donations are being used for.

Our sincere thanks also go out to the members of our advisory board, who provide us not only with guidance, but also with financial support.

Although many of us are volunteers, working pro bono in their spare time, running such an entity needs funds. Travel support, participation in events, providing infrastructure, and many other areas need to be covered. Without all your support, The Document Foundation would not be what it is today.

Your contribution made a real difference and enabled us to create a strong community-driven, meritocratic, vendor-neutral foundation for the best free office suite. We could not have done it without you.

Thank you very much for your support of The Document Foundation!

The Board of Directors

Budget draft

Following our rules of openness and transparency, The Document Foundation has published an early draft of its budget, and a short update to the numbers afterwards. In the future, we will continue to publish even more details about donations and their specific use, so donors have a full overview on how their contributions are spent.

Thank you very much for your continued and ongoing support!

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