Moved by Freedom - Powered by Standards » community

Seasonal Greetings

Charles — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 17:06:35 +0000

It is this time of the year again; so… Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, Merry Winter Solstice celebrations wherever you are, and a happy healthy new (calendar) year 2012. It’s going to be quite a year on many fronts, but I think we’ll get out of this one stronger, and we’ll probably have real fun too. Thank you, dear readers, for following my blog regularly despite me not being so good at publishing regular posts.

Picture by Eliane Domingos of the Document Foundation

If you wish to read our official wishes, we have t hem here, and they come from all of us. My thanks go to everyone who is making the LibreOffice project possible and what it is today. We have grown quite a lot in 15 months, probably more than we would have thought. 2012 is going to be the opportunity for the Document Foundation to solidify its successes and turn them into a powerful entity and structure. It will also be the year where several strategic project, such as LibreOffice OnLine, will see their development hopefully take off. Adoption-wise things are already well on their way. Deployments are ongoing on a worldwide basis, large and small, and what we need at this stage is to push our brand name in a more consistent way. It will also be the year where our friends at the Apache Foundation release their first Apache OpenOffice; what will be interesting will be not their first release(s) but the one that will see most of the Lotus stack be injected into it. This will actually be a good opportunity to clearly differentiate Apache OpenOffice, and that in turns will improve the Apache OpenOffice project’s health and its relation with the outside world (LibreOffice being one example).

But 2012 will be the year where you will be able to experiment the benefits of the LibreOffice development’s effort as we will bring the 3.5 and the 3.6 lines to life. I think it will illustrate that a community-based development model does effectively work and brings real and regular improvements and changes to an aging codebase.

On a more personal note, 2012 will be an important year: I’m getting married in June (expect full delays in blog posting) and this is something I was not expecting even a few years ago. But there are a few people in this world (in this case, only one) who can change everything for the best, and for this I’m truly blessed and very, very happy.

Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to my family and my friends at the Document Foundation and at Ars Aperta for making all this a reality. You truly rock. What else is there to wish? Health, happiness, and love.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year 2012.

On Citrus UI, and a zest of realism

Charles — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 17:28:15 +0000

A few days ago I was surprised to learn that LibreOffice was to get a brand new interface called Citrus. The series of mock-ups called Citrus are not a surprise, they are the result of the enthusiastic work of Mirek M. with the feedback of our Design team. However, the fact that a OMGUbuntu could write an article claiming that Citrus was going to become LibreOffice’s user interface got me thinking.

LibreOffice has an aging interface. It’s not just that it has many defaults, because, as much of the software packed with features tends to have this problem; it’s that LibreOffice looks a bit like it’s living in 2003. That reason alone is enough to want to change the whole UI. However the LibreOffice codebase is, despite constant clean-ups somewhat too complex to have its UI change overnight. Therefore we will be able to do so in an incremental fashion. What is needed is specifications developers can work with that target one specific user interface feature. With that, developers are able to “swallow” the specification and possibly implement it in a specific time frame. Will Citrus be the next LibreOffice UI? I don’t know. But if the design team is good at writing specifications (something some of its active members are in the process of learning) we might get to something that will have much in common with Citrus. The fineprint on this, however is that we need motivated volunteers able to work on UI improvements in an effective fashion, and developers’ resource to implement them. If you are interested and would like to help, please join!

Occupy France! #occupyFR

Charles — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:22:56 +0000

We are the 99%

Charles — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 17:45:58 +0000

The financial crisis people started to notice around 2008 is not just financial. It goes deeper than what we usually want to admit. It is about a fundamental shift in our civilization’s balance of power, our survival plans, our values and our way of life. I regret to say that anything like 9/11 pales in comparison of what we have been experiencing since 3 years or so. Just like the metaphor used by Geog Zoche in his excellent book “the clash of currencies”, we tend to think the initial shock is pretty much all what has made the crisis while we are witnessing the long agony and fall of the twin towers of our civilization and our economy. Let’s leave the not so interesting gesticulations that took place this past week in Brussels and the Chinese buyout of Europe (never forget, the European Commission has always acted has the de facto Chinese Chamber of Commerce) aside and fast forward on the Occupy Wall Street Movement that has spread thoughout the US and originated in a distributed fashion from the Middle East and Europe. This movement is the symptom of something powerful, of the need for profound and radical change. It is also the place to mix several ideas, concepts, technologies and models that liberate people. I recently read articles on whether this movement was open source or not (and the articles tended to agree with the “open source nature” of the movement), but even more interestingly such movements do claim and advocate Open Source models and approach for many, even non software related matters.

Fast forward to the LibreOffice Conference in Paris. On the evening of the 14th we thought we would set up some beer and music party in a hacklab and we contacted the LOOP in Paris. While they had to migrate from one location to another we ended up in an alternative cultural space shared by hackers but also completely different people as well. What was really interesting to watch was the general blending of these populations. In the end, it should remind us that even the coming of the Document Foundation was and is at the same time the answer to the decay of a free software project struggling under the iron fist of an irresponsible and greedy corporation (Oracle) and the perfect example of a community deciding what’s good for itself, having reached a point where “enough is enough”.

The LibreOffice Project is thus more than a free software project developing an office suite. It has started a bit before the events in Tunisia, but roughly at the same time the Iranian revolts were taking place (and they’re still going on by the way). It is about freedom and the individual power to refuse the will and the agenda of a large corporation. It is about realizing that something had been failing in our community and that it was time to fix it.

The Document Foundation was started because of that; and just like the people on the streets of the world, it was prepared somewhat in a stealth mode at first, otherwise it would have failed. Now things have become quite different, and we just celebrated our first year as a project and as a free community where everyone can fit in and contribute meaningfully to the greater good. The numbers speak for themselves, and the OpenOffice.org community has chosen to go for LibreOffice, not just as a product but as model, as a set of values and as a refusal to compromise one’s freedom to corporate agendas. Our manifesto highlights the goals and the values of the LibreOffice community and why the Document Foundation has been created and set up.

Yet we are not one fork among others. We are the next chapter of the next decade. We are LibreOffice, we are the Document Foundation. We are the people of OpenOffice.org . We are no puppets and no useful idiots. We bow to no one. We are here to fulfill the destiny of this great project: to create instruments of freedom and tools for knowledge. We are “OOO”, we “Occupy OpenOffice” we stand for freedom, community, excellence and collaboration.

We are the 99%. Expect us.

October wrap-up

Charles — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 14:15:36 +0000

This was quite a busy month. I was happy and exhausted by the LibreOffice Conference which went despite my immediate perception quite well. When you’re part of the organizers you tend to see all the small and not so small things that go wrong, and regardless of what the other participants notice or experience, you end up feeling that it’s just not as good as the others see it. Be it as it may, I would like to thank all the participants to the first LibreOffice Conference. It’s been very moving and heartwarming to see all of you, after a year of adventure and perils we have gone through. I would also like to thank all the organizers of the LibreOffice Conference, the community volunteers of France who made it possible, Sophie, Marie-Jo, Christophe, Jean-Baptiste, our hosts, La Cantine and the IRILL, and our sponsors. Among them, a special mention should be made to the Paris Region (Région Île de France) with whom we announced several exciting news. It’s all in the press now but I think that these announcements highlight how far we have come in one year. More importantly, it also shows how a Free Software community can work as it should, that is, with diverse contributors and a variety of stakeholders in a sustainable fashion. Of course, all this is far from being built and all the dots are not being connected. This year will therefore be exciting as we will continue to build and grow our community further.

I would like to come back shortly on two of the announcements we made, regarding the porting of the LibreOffice platform (not the interface) to iOS and Android, as well as LibreOffice OnLine. While these two projects are at various stages of completion and have different requirements they help to show not just the vitality of our community, they also shed some light on how we manage to embrace a bazaar-like approach to development and think about what I call our “development ecology” (which some could really translate into development strategy, but I think it’s more subtler than that). What you see through our online office suite project and platform porting announcements is that we are taking some great care in doing something paradoxal with respect to our stated intent to change the codebase as much as possible: we keep our codebase intact. Note that we do change, upgrade, clear and trim the codebase, but we do adopt a singular codebase approach where the code used in LibreOffice OnLine, and the underlying code on iOS and Android will essentially be the same than the one inside the LibreOffice Desktop suite. In other words, we do not release a product here and something completely different there, even if in the future, a specific work on the interface for tablets will have to be made (we won’t use the existing interface on these as it would not make sense).

This “universal” approach makes sense not just for “market growth” and adoption, it has two benefits. The first one is to pool the resources as much as we can, because maintaining millions of lines of code here while maintaining a million of new and different lines of code there would not require around 3 hundred developers; it would actually require 3 thousands of them. We thus keep the codebase as a coherent whole (hence Rob Weir’s confusion answered by something like “just pull the git”) while we will enjoy in the future the second benefit of being able to make changes (and even important ones) in one codebase, thus replicating the changes for the online version at the same time as they will be made available in the desktop or the tablet version.

Exciting times are ahead. Stay tuned!

Happy Birthday LibreOffice!

Charles — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:52:36 +0000

It’s been one year, and I still can’t believe time has gone so fast. I would like to thank everybody who has been making the LibreOffice Project what it is today, and what it will become in the years to come. To the first founders and to the newcomers these days, to the former OpenOffice.org community and to the LibreOffice community; to the users who put their confidence in us; to our families, friends and colleagues who supported us: thank you for a wonderful year on your side. We are now one year old and we owe it to you. If anything’s been proven in these incredible 365 days, it’s that community works. I’m not referring to community “management”, I’m talking about people standing up for what they believe is the right thing to do, and getting it done. It’s about software freedom and perhaps about freedom in general too. It’s about realizing that no one will step up and set you free if not yourself. One of the greatest Americans of all times, Benjamin Franklin, used to say that freedom is not something that’s given to you, it is something you take. The LibreOffice Project is fundamentally about that and not about anyone’s corporate roadmap.

It’s been a great year. It’s been a tough year. I learned a lot. I grew quieter. I tried to become more humble. I didn’t lose weight. I got engaged to the Love of my life. I helped pushing something nobody usually gets excited about: an office suite. But folks, beyond the code, beyond a community, beyond ourselves, we did more than an office suite.

We changed the world.

Short update on the LibreOffice Conference in Paris

Charles — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 08:28:51 +0000

I thought it would be useful to update everyone on the Paris LibreOffice Conference, as we received several inquiries especially from speakers of the conference. We have ended the selection process of the conference proposals and are right now dispatching each of the selected papers to a fixed room, day and time and have sent the confirmation or rejection email(s) to everyone of the submitter (if you have submitted a proposal and are reading this and you haven’t received anything do contact me).

Thanks to a great team work and a small contest we now have a very nice conference template that you may download here that will be used by the conference speakers as their presentation template during the event. The next big step is to publish the detailed schedule of the conference. Right now all you may see is an outdated and rather imprecise looking schedule. This will change in the coming days.

The conference will take place in two locations. One is called La Cantine and is a famous meeting place for hackers and researchers communities in France. The place itself is located in one of these nineteenth century “passages couverts” of the french capital that were built from early napoleonic times till the middle of the century. Do not expect something monumental, neither outside in the Passage or inside La Cantine. The whole point of the place is to meet and collaborate, and that’s why such a location matters. La Cantine is located very much in the centre of Paris, behind the old stock exchange and two metro stations away from the Opera Garnier. The other location is the IRILL an acronym standing for International Research Institute for Free Software. This place is located near the Place d’Italie in the southeastern quadrant of the city. This is part of a much larger university in Paris, and the building is shared with a large post office (you might have the feeling you’re entering a post office the first time you’re getting there).The inside has a modern design and will sport two large conference rooms with all the equipment (even streaming video) that you come to expect. One of the two rooms is on the top floor of the building and has a roof garden accessible from the room itself. The other one has sofas for informal meetings in a corner with espresso machine not far away.

But the conference won’t be “only” about conference and talks. We have several events for the evenings and nights. On the 12th at 6 pm there will be the cocktail party by Cap Digital and on the 13th a rather big event at the Paris Region headquarters where pretty much everyone from the IT community in Paris is invited and is simply called the LibreOffice Party at la Region. This is not just an opportunity to drink and eat “for free”, it’s an opportunity to learn about quite a few announcements we’ve been keeping under wraps. We hope to see all of you (and more!) there. The evening parties don’t stop there: there will be the Friday Night’s special by AF83 with beer and music.

Stay tuned and don’t forget to register if that’s not already done. See you soon in Paris!

A Word of Thanks

Charles — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:13:52 +0000

Yesterday Michael Brauer posted on the OASIS ODF TC mailing list his farewell post. Michael, like a very large number of the other employees of the “Oracle’s Hamburg Business Unit”, if not all of them, will be let go by the end of the month. If you wonder what the “Oracle’s Hamburg Business Unit” is, it’s the people who have been developing a large part of what was OpenOffice.org and before that, StarOffice. I remember the company when it was a privately owned entity called StarDivision. I have contributed and interacted with these people for over 10 years. I guess I will see some of them working for different employers; sometimes as competitors, sometimes as partners. But we will see us again one day or another, and I look forward that day. I have made a few friends there; these are bright people, and they have played an instrumental in the expansion of Free and Open Source Software, and dare I remind it? ODF and Open Standards as well. I sincerely wish them the best for the future, whatever road they choose to take. This “business unit” has been known under many names during all these years, and I understand very well that the present days must be sad and sorrowful days.

I would like to tell the “Hamburg team” as we often used to call them that they should have no regrets whatsoever. Perhaps my words will surprise some, after all, I didn’t leave the OpenOffice.org project under Hamburg’s cheers. It does not matter in the grand scheme of things; what I’m doing for the Document Foundation is what matters now and the shutdown of the operations at Hamburg shows once again that the people behind the Document Foundation were right from the start: Oracle’s stewardship of the OpenOffice.org project would neither be sustainable nor workable. I, for one, wish that in an ideal world, most of the Hamburg team would have transitioned over to the LibreOffice project. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, but life is made so that things are never really perfect. StarDvision team, you gave birth to many good things, your work now lives in several software, most important of all them, in LibreOffice and the Document Foundation; Apache Openoffice.org/Symphony carries your name, and will use a great deal of your code as well. Even more importantly, the Hamburg team, through the OpenOffice.org project, has also attracted and helped many people from all walks of life who over the years have worked together and grown as a team. That is the case for me, and it’s the case for many other people. You have brought us so much, and I would like to express my sincere gratitude for all what you’ve done. You have started something incredibly important; your work will not have been made in vain, and it will continue to bear fruit for a long time.

Take care!

PPAs and LibreOffice

Charles — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 12:39:47 +0000

Waow, two posts in two days. I have to calm down. Anyway, I wanted to answer publicly to a question that has been asked on our mailing lists, on IRC, through private mails, and I’m sure it will be asked by the press at some point. I’m not an Ubuntu user, I’m an Archer. But my fiancée and my father use Ubuntu on a daily basis, and I also took the time to fetch some information about LibreOffice PPAs. What seems to be the problem? As you are aware, we have just released LibreOffice 3.4.1 and our scheduled, fixed release time does not always coincide with Ubuntu (or any other distribution) release. Therefore people -but it seems mostly Ubuntu users- ask for PPAs of LibreOffice, in other words, packages that are ready to install on their system with the most recent stable version of LibreOffice.

First I would like to thank everyone for their interest in LibreOffice! Second, I think it’s very important to understand that there’s a difference between PPAs and the default version shipped by Ubuntu. Just like any other distribution, Ubuntu releases a full GNU/Linux system that comes with a set of fully defined and qualified packages. Unless Ubuntu chooses to upgrade these packages themselves, they won’t move or change until the next version of the distribution is released. PPAs are a community based and convenient way to use more up-to-date version of software packages, but do not expect the same quality or to have a fault-proof software running; it’s an upgrade for the users who wish to enjoy their system with more spice and not run a stable and fixed system with little or no change from the original release.

In the case of LibreOffice, it is very important to realize that THE DOCUMENT FOUNDATION DOES NOT RELEASE ITS OWN PPAs. Please don’t ask us to release a PPA. Inside the LibreOffice, each GNU/Linux distribution is responsible for its own packaging. We do however release .debs and .rpms but these are our very own. The packages you will find in many distributions tend to be optimized or repackaged by the distribution developers themselves. So if you look at Launchpad, you will see that the LibreOffice PPAs are there and are mostly done by the official Canonical LibreOffice team. They’re members of the Document Foundation themselves, but do not expect the Document Foundation to release PPAs, as it is this team’s sole choice (mostly based on their own remaining available time, I would imagine).

If you really want to help, I would suggest you join the Ubuntu team, or start packaging your own PPA. And you will always have the possibility to install the .debs by yourself by downloading them directly on the LibreOffice website. Also please check our general release plan for an overview of our general release timing in 2011 and 2012.

Ready for Paris? See you there in October!

Charles — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 15:20:55 +0000

It seems I’m continuing my pattern of posting less here, which I find to be a disappointing yet apparently an unescapable trend. If you haven’t seen my “dents” and “tweets” on the side of this page, feel free to follow me on identi.ca (charlesschulz) and on Twitter (ch_s). Note that I’m much more often on identi.ca than on Twitter. Today, I would like to send everyone reading this blog a very special invitation. The first LibreOffice Conference will take place in Paris, from the 12th to the 15th of October. These will be great days to meet face to face and to exchange though conferences and informal, quick talks about several topics related to LibreOffice development, distribution and design. Also, and this is important: our call for papers is open but it will close by the end of July, so feel free to submit your proposal now. I would like to unveil somewhat what we have in store for this event.

We will have 5 tracks : development, community, marketing; aside these, there will b two special tracks: one dubbed “technical bird of feather sessions” which is a “non-track” allowing anyone with a concrete issue or proposal to discuss it in front of the audience for 10 minutes (with five added minutes for questions) . You don’t need to submit everything for this one, but you’ll have to write your name on the spot and being queued for your talk. The second special track will be an ODF Master Class. It will gather both technical and policy-oriented talks and discussions about ODF in one big room. We will look for quality over quantity, but above all, we’re going to make this a fun, friendly and productive conference.

On the social and networking side, I can’t disclose too much what will happen; there will be parties, there will be cocktails, there will be announcements… We also hope you will enjoy the locations of the conference. As many of us come from the OpenOffice.org project we all have memories of large conference centers with an historical background. This year we decided to change things a little bit. Paris has enough monuments for everyone to enjoy; but we wanted to “blend” our community with other projects and communities. That’s why we’ll have conferences in a wonderful places called La Cantine, a famous location for digital innovators and hackers, renowned for its BarCamps and its ability to gather many different kinds of people and entities to work towards one goal. We will also have conference at the IRILL (International Free Software Research Institute), an university building entirely dedicated to Free Software. Among other things, I hear you will be able to interact with several key Debian leaders and enjoy the design of this renovated building (with wireless connectivity).

Stay tuned for more information as we will be updating our Conference pages constantly. In any case, see you in Paris in October!