Check out our regular summary of events and updates in the last month! The next LibreOffice Conference will take place in September, in Almeria, southern Spain. Join us there and meet developers, supporters, and other fans of LibreOffice and free software! You can also give a talk or presentation – we put the call for papers online at the start of the month. Meanwhile, The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, has a job offer: we’re looking for an Administrative Assistant. If you speak German and English, check out the details – but make sure to submit your application before April 5th! As part of our regular “Community Member Monday” series, we talked to Dieudonne Dukuzumuremy and Tomas Kapiye about their involvement in the LibreOffice project and community. Both have spent time in Japan, and have helped with bug triaging and localisation. During the month, there were two updates for LibreOffice: we released LibreOffice 6.2.1, the first minor release of the 6.2 family. It included over 150 bug fixes, thanks to the work of our developer community and ecosystem of certified developers. Later in the month, LibreOffice 6.2.2 was released as well. In March we also organised two C++
Berlin, March 15, 2019 – MITRE announced that The Document Foundation, the home of LibreOffice, has been approved as CVE Numbering Authority (CNA). The Document Foundation is at the center of one of the largest free open source software ecosystems, where enterprise sponsored developers and contributors work side by side with volunteers coming from every continent. The nomination is the result of significant investments in security provided by the LibreOffice Red Hat team under Caolán McNamara leadership. What is CVE? Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is a reference list of public cybersecurity vulnerabilities, with entries that describe those vulnerabilities and provide references for them. These references are often used as the vulnerability names, especially in security updates. To date, LibreOffice has a track record of rapid response to all reported threats. What is a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA)? A CNA is an organization that can assign and announce CVE entries within a particular scope. Some CNAs are organizations providing CVEs for their products such as The Document Foundation. How will The Document Foundation assign CVEs? The Document Foundation Security Team provides a forum for all of the vendors and individuals who contribute to LibreOffice development to co-ordinate the work of
LibreOffice 6.1.5 also released, for enterprise class deployments and mainstream users looking for robust productivity Berlin, February 7, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.2 with NotebookBar, a significant major release of the free office suite which features a radical new approach to the user interface – based on the MUFFIN concept [1] – and provides user experience options capable of satisfying all users’ preferences, while leveraging all screen sizes in the best way. The NotebookBar is available in Tabbed, Grouped and Contextual flavors, each one with a different approach to the menu layout, and complements the traditional Toolbars and Sidebar. The Tabbed variant aims to provide a familiar interface for users coming from proprietary office suites and is supposed to be used primarily without the sidebar, while the Grouped one allows to access “first-level” functions with one click and “second-level” functions with a maximum of two clicks. The design community has also made substantial changes and improvements to icon themes, in particular Elementary and Karasa Jaga. LibreOffice 6.2 new and improved features: The help system offers faster filtering of index keywords, highlighting search terms as they are typed and displaying results based on the selected module. Context menus
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
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 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
