LibreOffice is privileged to have been accepted as a Google Summer of Code 2011 organization. Don’t hesitate to spread the news and to contact us for more information to start on a project. All our project ideas with mentors are in the wiki and we are eager to encourage students to sign up for a summer of fun, working with our mentors to make LibreOffice even better.
The Document Foundation maintains its release schedule thanks to a growing and vibrant community of developers
The Internet, March 22, 2011 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.3.2, the second micro release of the free office suite for personal productivity, which further improves the stability of the software and sets the platform for the next release 3.4, due in mid May. The community of developers has been able to maintain the tight schedule thanks to the increase in the number of contributors, and to the fact that those that have started with easy hacks in September 2010 are now working at substantial features. In addition, they have almost completed the code cleaning process, getting rid of German comments and obsolete functionalities.
“I have started hacking LibreOffice code on September 28, 2010, just a few hours after the announcement of the project, and I found a very welcoming community, where senior developers went out of their way to help newbies like me to become productive. After a few hours I submitted a small patch removing 5 or 6 lines of dead code… enough to get my feet wet and learn the workflow”, says Norbert, a French developer living in the United States. “In a short time, I ended up removing the VOS library – deprecated for a decade – from LibreOffice, and finding and fixing various threading issues in the process”.
LibreOffice 3.3.2 is being released just one day after the closing of the first funding round launched by The Document Foundation to collect donations towards the 50,000 euro capital needed to establish a Stiftung in Germany. In five weeks, the community has donated twice as much, i.e. around 100,000 euro. All additional funds will be used for operating expenses such as infrastructure costs and registration of domain names and trademarks, as well as for community development expenses such as travel funding for TDF representatives speaking at conferences, booth fees for trade shows, and initial financing of merchandising items, DVDs and printed material.
Italo Vignoli, a founder and a steering committee member of The Document Foundation, will be keynoting at Flourish 2011 in Chicago on Sunday, April 3, at 10:30AM, about getting independent from OpenOffice and Oracle, starting The Document Foundation, raising the capital and the first community budget, organizing developers and other work, and outlining a roadmap for future releases and features.
The Document Foundation is at http://www.documentfoundation.org, while LibreOffice is at http://www.libreoffice.org. LibreOffice 3.3.2 is immediately available from the download page.
About The Document Foundation
The Document Foundation has the mission of facilitating the evolution of the LibreOffice Community into a new, open, independent, and meritocratic organization within the next few months. An independent foundation is a better reflection of the values of our contributors, users and supporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient and transparent community. TDF will protect past investments by building on the achievements of the first decade, will encourage wide participation within the community, and will co-ordinate activity across the community.
Media contacts for TDF
Florian Effenberger (Germany)
Mobile: +49 151 14424108 – E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org
Olivier Hallot (Brazil)
Mobile: +55 21 88228812 – E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org
Charles H. Schulz (France)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424 – E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org
Italo Vignoli (Italy)
Mobile: +39 348 5653829 – E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
By Vedran Miletić
LibreOffice 3.3 release party in Rijeka (Croatia)
Event was originally planned for January when we expected release of LibO 3.3. Since LibO was released on 25.1, we decided to postpone because of the last tests and then the final exams around that time. The next plan was to March (during February most students from other towns are home). On 14.3. we held LibreOffice 3.3 release party in Rijeka. University of Rijeka Department of Informatics provided us with the room. Irena Hartmann, first year student of informatics, decorated the room with green and white paper chains.
The event itself went great. We started with a lecture given by Domagoj Margan, second year student of informatics. The lecture was focused on the history of StarOffice->Sun StarOffice->OpenOffice.org->BrOffice.org->LibreOffice, LibreOffice in general and new features in 3.3, and a bit of the story about Oracle’s relationship with opensource community in general. There were approximately 30 people, mostly first and second year students of informatics. At the event we had drinks and cakes (in LibreOffice palette; we especially mention LibreOffice cake) and airplanes made of paper with the logo of LibO. People had a great time talking and having fun.
In the future, we hope that the release date of LibO 3.5 will be known in advance, so that we can prepare something like this a few days after the release of new version. We will probably extend it with some kind of workshop focused on features which might be of interest to users of Office tools and send invitations to all Rijeka companies that might be interested to come.
A lot of people have asked what’s going on with the Foundation, and where we stand exactly. After the successful launch of our fundraising challenge, that brought us the needed 50.000 € capital stock in just amazing eight days, it is clear that the future Foundation will be located within Germany. Still, the Foundation itself does not legally exist yet, and the German nonprofit association is acting as interim legal entity.
What are you doing at the moment? There are several steps involved before the Foundation will finally exist.
First, we are currently translating the community bylaws into a German version that we can hand over to the authorities. During this process, we found some minor issues that we resolved already. The process, however, is not simply about translating a legal document into another language, but it is also about adapting it to fit local law. We do not expect that there’s a need for many changes, but still, some minor edits might be necessary.
The second step then will be to send the changes back to our Steering Committee for final approval, which also involves translating the changes back to English. Given that we do not expect a large modification, this should be a rather straightforward process. However, we consider it important and crucial to review any necessary modification and discuss it with the community, as this will be the basis we will work on in the future, so it should be absolutely clear.
Once we have a final version of the Foundation’s statutes in English and German, that have been adapted to fit German law, we will then as third step evaluate the best German state to set up the Foundation in. Although the law is similar throughout Germany, Foundations have to be approved by the local governments, and the requirements to become approved varies from state to state and the type of Foundation planned. In addition, it is desirable to have someone living near the location where it will be established, to make logistics and communication with the governmental entities easier.
In a fourth step, we plan to discuss the statutes and the idea of our Foundation with all possible states we’ve come up in step three. Ideally, we then already can get the approval. If no state is ready to approve us yet, once again minor changes to the statutes might be necessary.
The fifth and last step will be the formal founding act, by which the Foundation will begin its existence as legal entity.
Aren’t there any votes? What about membership? Indeed, there will be votes. What happens in parallel to the legal paperwork is that we will be voting on a board of directors for the new Foundation, which then will later appoint also officers and other representatives, as set in our bylaws. For the board of directors, a formal vote by the community is important. They should be the ones voting on those who will represent them. In order for that to work, we have compiled a membership committee that soon will start its work. As soon as members have been identified and approved, we will prepare the vote for the future Foundation’s board.
Why does this take so long? Most tasks are done by pure volunteers, which of course limits the amount of time we have per day. In addition, to save money for lawyers and tax consultants, we try to prepare most of the paperwork oursevles. This saves paid time for external professionals, thus leaving us more money to focus on our mission and goals. In addition, setting up a Foundation is way more complicated than having an association, so things naturally take a bit longer.
Talking about money… your fundraising still runs? Didn’t you say you just need 50.000 €? Yes, definitely, any donation is highly welcome, and the challenge website is of course still online. As stated previously, the 50.000 € are required for the capital stock of the future Foundation, but it is money we cannot use for our daily work. Anything coming in on top of those 50.000 € will be directly used for budgets, like infrastructure, marketing, travels, trade show attendance, and of course for exciting new projects. We have compiled a list of questions and answers about the donations and budgets. So far, we already received 90.000 € in donations, giving us a budget of about 40.000 €, which is pretty amazing and exciting! Thank you very much to everyone who supports us!
Will you tell us how you will spend the money? We will pretty soon announce concrete examples and projects we like to fund, naming the exact amount of money needed, so donors know what they are donating for and what their money will do.
How can I donate? You can donate via bank transfer, via PayPal, and from now on also via Flattr. All details are compiled on our challenge website.
When will we see the Foundation, finally? This is probably one of the toughest question, as it depends on a variety of hard-to-predict parameters. My gut feeling tells me that sometime in the second quarter of 2011 will be possible, but do not pin me down on that.
The next marketing confcall will take place on Tuesday, March 29th, at 16:00 UTC (=18:00 German time). Remember that in some countries, daylight saving time will be in effect by that date! To determine your local date and time, see the converter in the Doodle poll at http://www.doodle.com/nn9gubpev28kzeus
Dial-in details will be provided in time. Please add your desired agenda items and topics you want to discuss about to http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/ConfCalls#Agenda
Looking forward to hearing you, and to be working with you on marketing LibreOffice and its community!
The Document Foundation is happy to announce the second release candidate of LibreOffice 3.3.2. The upcoming 3.3.2 is the next in a series of frequent bugfix releases on top of our LibreOffice 3.3 product. Please be aware that LibreOffice 3.3.2 RC2 is not yet ready for production use, you should continue to use LibreOffice 3.3.1 for that. The Release Candidate 2 is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X from our QA builds download page at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases/
For more details, refer to the original announcement.
