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LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users

Thanks to the work of 300 contributors, the new LibreOffice comes with substantial improvements

The Internet, August 1, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.4.2, the third version of the 3.4 family, targeting both private individuals and enterprises. LibreOffice 3.4.2 fixes the majority of the most-important bugs identified by users in the previous version, and can be deployed for production needs by most enterprises.

The Document Foundation encourages large organizations deploying LibreOffice to do so in conjunction with a support partner, who can carefully assess specific requirements, help manage migration and provide bespoke fixes for identified issues. Purchasing LibreOffice support from a TDF partner also provides enterprises with an indirect means to contribute financially to the project, thereby funding its development, improving its stability, and accelerating its growth. Users should always refer to the release notes before deploying the new version.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 is the result of the combined activity of 300 contributors having made more than 23,000 commits, with the addition, deletion or modification of around five million lines of code. The developer community is well balanced between company-sponsored contributors and independent community volunteers: Oracle and SUSE have each provided around 25% of the commits, with a further 25% coming from community volunteers new to the project since our inception, and with a further 20% from RedHat. The remaining commits came from a combination of pre-TDF contributors, Canonical developers, and organizations like Bobiciel, CodeThink, Lanedo, SIL, and Tata Consultancy Services.


If we look at the same data for individual developers, the top 12 by number of commits since the inception of LibreOffice is composed of a mixture of corporate-sponsored contributors (from 4 companies: Canonical, Oracle, RedHat and SUSE) and a number of private individual contributors, indicating a balanced situation and a healthy community.

“TDF was born with the aim of evolving the OpenOffice.org code to develop a cleaner and leaner free office suite and, after ten months, we are right on track to achieve this objective,” says Bjoern Michaelsen, one of the four Canonical contributors, and a key member of the Engineering Steering Committee. “Of course, with such a large code renovation effort, we are aware of the short-term risk of reduced stability, but this is counterbalanced by the long-term improvement in features, speed and – again – stability.”

Other news is that the number of TDF official contributors and LibreOffice users is increasing. Youbing Jin, President of RedFlag2000 Software Company, says, “We are delighted to see that TDF is getting ever stronger, and we are proud to be part of it.”

The community around The Document Foundation and LibreOffice will gather in Paris for the first LibreOffice Conference, from October 13 to October 15, 2011 (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). The call for papers is open until August 8, while registration will close at the end of September.

Although TDF is happy that 3.4.2, deployed with support from a suitable partner, can be considered “enterprise-ready”, it is clearly only one more milestone on our march towards ever greater stability, with the 3.4.3 release to incorporate further stability improvements and security fixes by the end of August.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

A glimpse at our developer community

Since the start of The Document Foundation, we’ve been aiming for a healthy and vivid ecosystem, for involving many corporate contributors, as well as for strenghtening the volunteer developers. Looking at the current numbers, it becomes obvious that the developer community is indeed well balanced between company-sponsored contributors and independent community volunteers:

Employers with the most developers (total 300)

  • (Unknown): 205 (68.3%)
  • Oracle: 54 (18.0%)
  • SUSE: 20 (6.7%)
  • Known contributors: 9 (3.0%)
  • Canonical: 4 (1.3%)
  • Redhat: 2 (0.7%)
  • SIL: 2 (0.7%)
  • CodeThink: 1 (0.3%)
  • Bobiciel: 1 (0.3%)
  • Lanedo: 1 (0.3%)
  • Tata Consultancy Services: 1 (0.3%)
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge

Developer Interview: Tor Lillqvist

Programming is about people: so please ! tell us a bit about yourself:

Tor Lillqvist enjoying a beer

I am Tor Lillqvist. On LibreOffice IRC I am known as tml_ . I live in Helsinki, Finland, with my wife and our 10-year daughter. My son has already grown up and moved out. Some of my passions are trains (modern and recent electric and diesel technology, I am not that much into steam nostalgia), reading good books, listening to challenging and/or good music, the visual arts, architecture, and travels.

Most recently I have read “The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore” by Benjamin Hale, “Hitch-22” by Christopher Hitchens and “Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell. Among art museums that have impressed me are the Guggenheim Bilbao and ICA Boston. I love the music of for instance David Sylvian, Nico, Steve Reich, Sigur Rós, Erik Satie, rechenzentrum, Emilie Simon, Carnatic and Gamelan music.

What was your very first program ?

Some silly assignment at University, presumably. I had not used computers before University. Or actually, I did have a programmable TI calculator and did some programming on that in my teens.

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

Read, sleep, eat, etc.

When do you usually spend time on the project ?

What I do as my work, mostly normal working hours. Hacking for fun during evenings and weekends when I have the inspiration and nothing more important to do.

Which is your preferred text editor? And why?

XEmacs, because it is so intuitive. (That is a joke. No software is intuitive.) I have used various versions of Emacs for 30 years and don’t see any reason to change.

Did you work on Free Software projects before LibreOffice ?

Yes, and Open Source in general, before that term was invented even. I always seemed to work on “non-mainstream” platforms, like HP-UX when “everybody” else doing what became known as Open Source was using BSD or SunOS. As an example of early and obscure Open Source hacking I did I can mention porting TeX and Metafont to the HP1000 A-Series (a 16 bit minicomputer running an obscure not-at-all-Unixish OS,  ).

More recently, since the late 1990s until last year or so, I ported GTK+ to Windows, initially to get GIMP, and then took part in maintaining the port. At one point, in 2005, I even was paid to work on related stuff, in the effort to make Evolution run on Windows. Alas, in recent years I had less and less inspiration to hack on the GTK+ stack on Windows, and finally then this year I admitted/announced publicly that I was not really doing it any more. I hate saying this, but I guess I have kinda lost faith in quality cross-platform GUI toolkits. At least volunteer-maintained ones.

What Operating System do you use mainly ?

Windows Server 2008 R2 (server version of Windows 7) on my main desktop, and then Mac OS X, iOS and openSUSE.

What do you think was your most important contribution to LibreOffice so far ?

I can’t point to anything particular. Perhaps, from a future point of view, my spare time hacking on cross-compilation to iOS and Android.

How will that improve things for users ?

By hopefully making possible apps on those platforms that use LibreOffice code to for instance support rare old document formats not supported in other apps. (To end-users the freedom aspect of such an application presumably being FLOSS is of zero importance. Sorry.)

What is your vision for the future and/or what would you most like to see improved ?

I would love to see the codebase cleaned up even more. I would like us to have the courage to jettison from the main codebase unloved functionality that nobody seems to step up to maintain. (I am looking at you, Base.)

Anything else interesting you get up to when not hacking ?

I enjoying doing photography. But I don’t really do as much photography as I would like. I would love to have the inspiration and time to attempt making music (mainly odd beeps and noises, no doubt).

 Can you tell us a bit about your cross-compiling work, and why it is important ?

I don’t know if it is important. It is fun, that is why I do it.

I am working on making it possible to cross-compile LibreOffice (to various degrees) for iOS (from (Intel) MacOSX), Android (from Linux or MacOSX), Windows (from any Unix with a suitable cross-compiler tool-chain) and PowerPC MacOSX (from Intel MacOSX).

The basic cross-compilation changes in the LibreOffice configure and build machinery should be more or less done now. Very little actual new code (as needed to at least some degree for iOS and Android) has been written. No planning has been done regarding what this work really tries to achieve for the new platforms, etc…

For the new, mobile, touch-based platforms, iOS and Android, it might make most sense to use non-GUI LibreOffice code as a library, and write applications in a totally native way from scratch that then use the LibreOffice libraries.

But maybe just to get the interest up it would make sense to also have some early toy application on either platform that would use some amount of LibreOffice GUI code, thus needing a port of the GUI toolkit in LibreOffice.

For Windows, LibreOffice obviously already has code for full functionality on Windows. The task is just to make it build using a cross-compiling MinGW tool-chain instead of Microsoft’s tool-chain. That is not trivial.

The Intel to PowerPC MacOSX case should be the easiest.

Finally: Yes, I am aware of the potential license incompatibilty between the LGPL and DRM-enforcing distribution mechanisms like the iTunes App Store (and maybe the Android Market). But I find such discussion boring. And perhaps the Apache thing will affect this somehow. Anyway, I am doing this for the hacking pleasure.

What is your estimate of the proportion of bugs that are specific to Windows ?

Maybe ten percent?

What other question would you like to answer (with answer) ?

“Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

No.

Thanks a lot for your answers, and contribution !

What does it mean to be in the Board of Directors?

With the upcoming elections at the doorstep, many people ask themselves what it means to be in the Board of Directors, and whether they should run for a seat or not. Based on my experience with being in the board of the German association Freies Office Deutschland e.V., I would like to share some thoughts with you. The most important is that all future board members cooperate openly, transparently and effectively together, and that they have a common understanding of their duties, so they can drive the foundation and its projects into a bright future. While I do not have a hands-on experience in a “Stiftung” (foundation), I assume that many of the principles in associations are similar to those of a foundation.

First of all, being in the Board of Directors is not just a title you get awarded because your contributions have been extraordinary. Of course, people active and gaining merit are likely to be voted in the future board, but this honour also comes with a lot of new work. Being in the board does not mean that you can just continue your contributions, but you rather will get additional administrative work, that is not related to your current tasks at all. The Board of Directors is the body responsible for legally representing the foundation, so duties like tax declarations, correspondence with the governments, overseeing trademark, copyright, competition and cartel law and many other tasks are the daily business of board members. While many of those duties can be shared with external professionals, given the foundation is wealthy enough, it is still the board’s duty to oversee and coordinate them, which is a fair amount of work by itself.

In addition, for wilful intent or gross negligence, the Board of Directors can be held personally liable in civil and criminal law. We will have insurances in place that limits most of the risks effectively. However, inactivity or just lazyness may already be seen as gross negligence, and then the insurance will not kick in. By the way, this liability is no different to any other association, corporation or charity, so it is in no way special to German law.

One of my main concerns is the participation rate in discussions and phone conferences. Right now, with the steering committee not legally representing the legal entity, it might just be an annoyance. When later on, the Board of Directors has many administrative tasks and legal liabilities, it is absolutely crucial that all members regularly join the phone conferences and e-mail discussions. Of course, people are on vacation, get ill or are otherwise busy, but if we have ten future board members, I would feel uncomfortable if the average participation rate was below nine out of ten (for comparison, right now the average participation rate is only about five out of nine steering commitee members). Arrangements on when and how often conferences take place can be done, but the rationale behind this is that being in the board involves continuous, active participation. The same is true for reading e-mails: At least once every workday, board members should have a look into their mailbox to get aware of important notices, and a reaction time to important mails of no longer than one work day is highly advised. There are already court decisions where a slower reaction has been seen as gross negligence, with all attached liability risks.

Many people also asked whether a good knowledge of German is required to run for an official role. Although the legal correspondence with the authorities will be in German, this is not the major task of the Board of Directors, so not everyone in the board needs to speak German. The experience from the past months has shown that using English as language of correspondence works out very well, so the only thing I consider crucial is that all future board members are very fluent in written and spoken English. Like we do now, e-mails will be exchanged in English, and phone conferences will take place in English as well. As legal topics and administrative tasks will be part of these calls, a good understanding of English is indeed crucial, as misunderstandings can cause troubles.

For the probably most interesting question – how much time is required for fulfilling these duties – I really have no good answer, as it is hard to foresee. My gut feeling tells me that seat holders should be able to spend a few hours per week for their duties, next to the time they spend for their community engagement. The exact time will heavily depend on how the foundation develops, how many external professionals are involved, and how effectively the board will work together. Below a few hours per week, however, I doubt that this role can be fulfilled.

So, in a nutshell: Being in the Board of Directors means additional work, lots of administrative and legal tasks, and an active commitment to fulfill these, besides all other duties you have in the project. If all ten members of the future board have a common understanding of that, and are willing to dedicate their time and passion for the foundation – then they are the right ones to lead the foundation into the future.

After all, being in the Board of Directors is a very honourable and truly exciting duty, when you are prepared and willing to commit.

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