Starting from July, the TDF team has increased by one unit with the arrival of Teodor Mircea Ionita, aka Shinnok, in the role of Development Mentor. Teodor has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Iasi in Romania, his native country and city, where he is still living. We asked Teodor a couple of questions in order to introduce him to the LibreOffice community. How would you describe yourself? I’m a passionate open source advocate and developer, Unix head and occasionally sysadmin. I’m also deeply interested and involved in systems, network and information security as an independent security researcher and aficionado. On a personal note, I like to travel a lot, enjoy swimming and sun bathing, exchanging good reads and good movies (who doesn’t like them?), as well as interacting with peeps of various trades and life experiences and learning from real people, instead of avatars. Can you outline your work experience? My experience in the field spans across 10 years, casting a wide range of interest in programming and scripting languages, operating systems, network and web technologies, with a rather strong focus on systems, network and application development on Unix flavours and cross-platform technologies. I’ve been venturing
The Document Foundation (TDF) thrives thanks to our strong, vivid and worldwide community of end-users, contributors and enterprises, supporting our efforts with contributions of time and money. Thanks to these donations, we are able to work together on the idea of the best independent free office suite. So thank you very much, thanks to everyone – together you have made our dream of a strong and independent foundation come true! Using these donations, TDF can: maintain and improve its infrastructure; pay a team to take care of daily activities and several strategic tasks; manage a budget for the community and marketing based activities; and tender specific tasks. Management of donations is not always as smooth as we would like, for a number of different issues which we will try to explain in this document. Cost of donations Unfortunately, donations do not come for free, as we have to rely on third parties such as credit card processors and PayPal, which take a small percentage from every amount for their services. We are also charged for currency conversion, if the donation is not in Euros. In general, donations lower than the minimum suggested amount of 5 Euro are more expensive to
Berlin, May 23, 2017 – For the last five months, The Document Foundation has made use of OSS-Fuzz, Google’s effort to make open source software more secure and stable, to further improve the quality and reliability of LibreOffice’s source code. Developers have used the continuous and automated fuzzing process, which often catches issues just hours after they appear in the upstream code repository, to solve bugs – and potential security issues – before the next binary release. LibreOffice is the first free office suite in the marketplace to leverage Google’s OSS-Fuzz. The service, which is associated with other source code scanning tools such as Coverity, has been integrated into LibreOffice’s security processes – under Red Hat’s leadership – to significantly improve the quality of the source code. According to Coverity Scan’s last report, LibreOffice has an industry leading defect density of 0.01 per 1,000 lines of code (based on 6,357,292 lines of code analyzed on May 15, 2017). “We have been using OSS-Fuzz, like we use Coverity, to catch bugs – some of which may turn into security issues – before the release. So far, we have been able to solve all of the 33 bugs identified by OSS-Fuzz well
LibreOffice is free software. This means that it’s totally free of charge to download and use – a benefit that many people appreciate. But free software is about much more than just saving money; it’s about having freedom to control our own computers and devices. Free software is incredibly important for digital freedoms, security, privacy and civil rights. All together, free software is a movement. So what defines free software, compared to proprietary software? The Free Software Foundation outlines four key freedoms that we should have as users of the software. Here’s a summary: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose The freedom to study how the program works, and change its source code The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your friends and colleagues The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others, so that they can benefit Fundamental to this is the license under which the software is made available. LibreOffice is released under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0, a free and open source license that lets everyone share the program – and gives everyone the right to study how it works and modify it. You can get
Information on the ODF standard and how to move your organization to ODF-compliant document solutions The document has been forked in a textual format (Pandoc’s Markdown) by Paolo Dongilli, to keep track of versions and changes, correct typos, add new content and easily fork it for localization purposes. It is available on GitHub: https://github.com/paolodongilli/ODF-Guidance. This guidance gives general information on the standard, as well as more detailed information for chief technology officers and government procurement officers. Table of Contents: Introduction to Open Document Format (ODF) Procure ODF solutions Base ODF solutions on user needs Validators and compliance testing Platforms and devices Accessibility Privacy and security Avoid macros in documents Integrate ODF with enterprise tools Extensions, plugins and custom solutions Collaborate on documents Change tracking in ODF Embed fonts in ODF documents Corporate styles and templates ODF spreadsheets and formulas Support and training Overview of productivity software Costs and benefits of ODF
The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks a Infrastructure and System Administrator to start work as soon as possible. The role is scheduled for 40 hours a week. The work time is flexible and work happens from the applicant’s home office, which can be located anywhere in the world. Our infrastructure is based on 4 large hypervisors with about 50 virtual machines running on them. In addition there are several bare-metal machines, additional backup servers, externally hosted virtual machines and services, split across three data centers and connected via dynamic routing. Key technology used is Debian 8, some legacy Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 machines eventually to be migrated SaltStack for deployment KVM as virtualization technology GlusterFS for distributed storage Icinga-based TKmon for monitoring MikroTik routers and switches IPMI-based Supermicro and ASUS bare metal hardware documentation in RST text files Git repositories Sphinx as documentation generator Tools we make use of Nginx and Apache Postfix, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, amavisd, ClamAV Gitlab and Gitlab CI MirrorBrain PostgreSQL and MySQL Gerrit, Bugzilla, Jenkins AskBot, ownCloud, MediaWiki, Etherpad, Piwik Silverstripe, WordPress Plone Redmine gitolite Kibana-based statistics dashboard Pootle, MozTrap rsnapshot, BackupPC OpenVPN LDAP Graylog Asterisk/Freeswitch WebDAV
