Community Member Monday: Sam Tuke

Over the last few years we’ve posted many LibreOffice contributor interviews on this blog. Today, we catch up with Sam Tuke who is a member of the marketing community and helps out with QA too… Where do you live, and are you active on IRC/social media? I live in Berlin, Germany. Originally I’m from Suffolk, England. I like Twitter and Mastodon for community news. For my business, which makes Free Software newsletter app phpList, I use Facebook and Telegram too. In which areas of the LibreOffice project are you active? The marketing team, and filing occasional bugs. How did you get involved with LibreOffice? While in high school I started a small business building computers for local people. They needed an office suite to come with their new PCs, and OpenOffice.org was the perfect fit. I’ve been a user and advocate ever since, following my friends to LibreOffice when it was established. Later on I became a full time Free Software developer, and after that a campaigner. From 2014 I worked on marketing LibreOffice-related products at Collabora. It was an exiting time and I had the opportunity to announce LibreOffice for Android and LibreOffice Online. What was your initial experience

LibreOffice monthly recap: July 2018

There’s a lot going on in the LibreOffice community, in the lead up to LibreOffice 6.1, in development, documentation, design, QA, translations and much more. Here’s a summary of news and updates in July… Preparations for LibreOffice 6.1 continued, with the final Bug Hunting Session on July 6. Users around the world helped to test new features and report bugs so that they can be fixed before the final release – thanks to everyone who took part! The Taiwanese LibreOffice community created an awesome promotional video for LibreOffice Viewer. Check it out below – and download the app from the Play Store or F-Droid. If you have some Android coding experience, build the latest version and help us to improve it! Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Another Bug Hunting Session took place in July, this time with the Turkish LibreOffice community. 15 people were present, and tested the software for three hours. See the full report here. TDF

LibreOffice @ 17th Linux-Infotag in Augsburg, Germany

LibreOffice is the default office suite in almost every desktop Linux distribution, and the Linux community has done a lot to help support, develop and promote LibreOffice over the years. So we like to meet up with Linux users and free software enthusiasts face-to-face – and on April 21 we were at the 17. Augsburger Linux-Infotag in southern Germany. This yearly event has been running since 2001, and is described as being “one of the oldest and biggest Linux-related events in the area”, with around 350 visitors. Christian Lohmeier and Mike Saunders from the LibreOffice community set up a booth which had a screen showing a video of LibreOffice 6.0, along with stickers and (most importantly) flyers encouraging people to get involved with the project: Virtually every Linux user has heard of LibreOffice, so we didn’t have to explain what the software does. But we talked about what the community is doing, some things we’re working on, and how people can help. One especially hot topic was LibreOffice Online – so we demonstrated the latest version, showing its collaborative editing features. Many other Linux and free software-related communities were present, and there were talks on security, programming, networks and containers

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.0.2

Berlin, March 1st, 2018 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 6.0.2, the second minor release of the recently announced LibreOffice 6 family in just over a month, with around 50 bug and regression fixes. All LibreOffice users are invited to update either to LibreOffice 6.0.2 or to LibreOffice 5.4.5 to solve potential security-related issues. TDF suggests to conservative users and enterprises to deploy LibreOffice with the backing of certified developers, migrators and trainers (an updated list is available at: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/). This is extremely important for the growth of the LibreOffice ecosystem. Technical details about LibreOffice 6.0.2 bug and regression fixes are available in the change log: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.0.2/RC1 (fixed in RC1). Download LibreOffice LibreOffice 6.0.2 is immediately available for download at the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/. LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/. Donations help TDF to maintain its infrastructure, share knowledge, and fund the activities of local communities, such as the event in Surabaya, Indonesia, on March 23/25 (http://libreoffice.id) or the hackfest in Hamburg, Germany, on April 6/8 (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest/Hamburg2018). Several companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) provide either value-added LTS versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations

Sunday Marketing #5

On Friday, we have announced LibreOffice 5.4.5 and LibreOffice 6.0.1. In both cases, it has been an earlier than scheduled – and expected – release, to solve a couple of issues which were considered significant enough to change the usually predictable release schedule. The first issue was related to security, and we decided to release a patched version to reduce the risk for LibreOffice users (details are available on dedicated channels). The second issue was related to the increase of crashes on Windows of the just announced LibreOffice 6.0. The chart on the left shows the increase of crashes after January 31 announcement and the subsequent decrease after February 9 announcement (right-clicking on the image will allow opening the original image, which is easier to read). It is important to underline the fact that the chart is generated by our test system, which is stressing the software, and does not reflect the actual number of crashes experienced by end users. On the other hand, we received several reports of unexpected crashes, which confirmed data provided by the test system. Although both issues were reported while a large number of developers and other community members were in Brussels for FOSDEM and

Update about Marketing Activities in 2nd Half of 2017

LibreOffice has turned seven on September 28, 2017. When we launched our first press release on September 28, 2010, our entire mailing list was quite small: 200 recipients gathered from different sources with journalists and media contacts from all over the world. During these seven years, my main task has been media relations. One of the most important objectives has been the improvement of the mailing lists, both in terms of quantity and quality. Today, after seven years, the size of the database has changed dramatically, as we have almost 19,000 email address in our mailing lists, which are targeted based on country, platform (desktop, iOS, Android, mobile, cloud) and focus (security and reviews). In 2017, we have started to target industry analysts, but this list is far from being complete. Based on geography, we have 6 global lists (journalists, analysts, teams), 70 lists for Europe, 30 lists for the Americas, 5 lists for Pacific, 21 lists for Africa, 18 lists for Asia Middle East, 17 lists for Asia, and 24 lists for Asia Far East. In addition, around 5,000 records are updated and 2,500 are added each year. Lists are global by country, plus each country – when possible