I was about to write about the main topic of this post, namely FOSDEM 2016 when we learned of the death of someone who was a really nice and gentle human being, John McCreesh. For those who may not know John, it’s important to say that while he was not …
This week Collabora has shown an early testing version of the cloud version of LibreOffice integrated with an Owncloud instance. To me and others, this marks a significant milestone in the story of LibreOffice and the Document Foundation. I’m aware that the code is not stabilized and there’s much work …
Free Software has been growing pretty much everywhere around the world, and so much so that we now face challenges nobody would have thought possible even ten years ago. One of these unexpected issues is the need for proper legal structures. Traditionally, only a handful of entities used to exist. …
One of the core topics of this blog -at least one of the main reasons it came to existence- was open standards: their benefits, their advantages, and their value as a fundamental component for digital innovation and ultimately software freedom. This is still the case of course, but today I …
Short announcement: I’ll be speaking at the Open Source Summit in Paris on the 18th of November: the panel discussion will be about community and contributors’ engagement (the panel is dubbed “from the individual to the collective and the collective to the individual…”). You will find more information here and …
I have been meaning to write this post since this Summer, and since we will have a session at the Paris Open Source Summit in November about this topic, I thought now is the right time to discuss it here. There is a mystery of sorts about the reasons people have …
There are only very few software packages that can claim to be as feature-packed as LibreOffice. The thing is, sometimes it is even possible to forget about everything you can do with it. I’m not necessarily talking about the avalanche of features and improvements you can see listed on our …
I tend to write a lot about how Free and Open Source Software projects rely on a community of contributors to grow and expand, and how projects without a healthy community tend to face problems and in some cases disappear. Today, I would like to discuss a sad reality of …
I have been recently reminded that while it may be hard enough to discuss the role and importance of communities for Free and Open Source Software, it is equally important to understand the complexities and the challenges that a Free and Open Source Software foundation has to meet. It may …