Record number of new contributors + 10 Google Summer of Code projects Berlin, May 2, 2012 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.5.3, the fourth version of the 3.5 family. LibreOffice 3.5.3 provides additional stability to corporate and individual users of the best free office suite ever. “In April 2012, 34 new developers contributed code to The Document Foundation, the largest number since January 2011 [Source: http://www.ohloh.net]. Eight of them have already committed more than once, thanks to the help of an extremely welcoming community, where old developers spend a portion of their time mentoring new ones to bring them up to speed,” comments Norbert Thiebaud, a volunteer developer active since September 28, 2010. “In less than two years, we have been able to build an authentically diverse community, where full time and volunteer developers coexist and help each other, as it should happen in every free software project.” Ten of the new developers are Google Summer of Code 2012 students, who will work at developing the following features: Calc performance improvements; Lightproof improvements; collaborative spreadsheet editing using Telepathy; a Microsoft Publisher import filter; a signed PDF export; a smartphone remote control; a new UI for picking templates; a Java
We are grateful to our next interviewee whom has contributed a lot to cleaning up the code-base, improving the efficiency of icon theming, and getting stuck into making LibreOffice something more beautiful. Anyhow without further fuss: Programming is about people: so please ! tell us a bit about yourself: I’m Joseph Powers, JoeP on IRC, based on the American West Coast in Las Vegas, in my very early fourties, married to a wonderful woman: Abelita – a beautiful Philipina lady. I spent around four years in the US army working on computer repair, and now I work in the Entertainment industry, and live in Vegas – sadly not in the old Irish Powers’ family pile. What was your very first program ? I started program in high school on the Apple IIe. I’m a little bit of a math geek so most of my early programs where related to graphing math equations. I quickly moved on from BASIC and when into Pascal when my parents purchased an PC-XT for me. What do you do when you’re not hacking on LibreOffice ? Currently I’m employed by a Hotel/Casino group out of Las Vegas, Nevada. At work I mostly customize and maintain
