Category Archives: OOo Postings

Back from FOSDEM, time for links!

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It’s been two busy weeks for me: Releasing LibreOffice 3.3, working on several professional projects, attending FOSDEM, etc. In a word, I got swamped but I’m coming back. Below is a series of links for February:

  • LibreOffice 3.3.1 RC1 is released. You will mostly notice the new icons unless you are the part of the people who were affected by one of the several bugs that got fixed. The Document Foundation is going to come back on a more regular work on its community and project building. Now that the 3.3 release is gone we will have (supposedly) more time to work on the Foundation and further implement our policies, bylaws, etc. Stay tuned for announcements!
  • Louis Suarez-Potts, community manager of the OpenOffice.org project, employee of Sun Microsystems and Oracle, resigns from Oracle. The formal resignation from its position of community manager of the OpenOffice.org project is not known yet, but I am expecting news either of his resignation, or else of the election of a new community manager (Louis should run for these). If that’s not the case then two comments are to be made in the light of the situation inside the OpenOffice.org project: This project is now either deprived of any governance or structure whatsoever, and/or the community manager has no real standing as no charter, text, agreement, structure mandates its existence outside a detailed charter (which has by now probably exploded after the announcement of the Document Foundation). But enough with that for the moment: I have been working with Louis for 10 years and I sincerely wish him good luck for the future.
  • Talking about Free and Open Source projects, I couldn’t resist to submit LibreOffice to Simon Phipps’ benchmark. On a scale going from -10 to +10, Simon gave LibreOffice +5, which is quite good and this number might even go up if we can get one or two things done.
  • Nokia “partners” with Microsoft (some might say that Microsoft just acquired a mobile hardware division) and not many people seem to like it. I will spare you yet one more “Elop resigns from Microsoft, goes to Nokia, sells Nokia to Microsoft, connect the dots” lines that I dented and tweeted to ask two important questions:
      • If I understand the terms of the agreement correctly, Nokia would sell phones with the Microsoft operating system for mobile platforms and in return Nokia would have an “influence” on the development of Windows Mobile.  That’s the part I don’t really understand. Surely Nokia was struggling with a proper strategy for its smartphone operating system(s) but selling out to Microsoft appears as the worst solution possible, as it essentially turns Nokia into another OEM… for Windows Mobile. As for influencing the development of that operating system, perhaps the only words that come out of my mind is: “Open Source anyone?” … and that does not necessarily mean Android.
      • From a pure FOSS perspective, the partnership between Nokia and Microsoft jeopardizes the future and funding of Qt, the KDE project and to a lesser extent MeeGo. There is nothing we can really say, at this stage, except this: That this unfortunate story highlights again the peril of having one and only corporate sponsor behind a FOSS project. This is a weakness several of these projects have and I do hope the thinking around this will evolve.
  • FOSDEM: the FOSDEM was great, our booth was very popular as well as our conference room. It was great to feel this momentum around us. Let me thank all the volunteers who made that event possible and especially Cor, Thorsten, Christoph, Michael… and I’m sure I’m forgetting several others.
  • Last but not least, and for future reference: our page listing the press articles on LibreOffice is here. We will watch that one grow over the time with pride!

Yes We Can

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Yesterday the Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 3.3 . I guess you may already have seen the news if you read this blog. I wanted to express my joy and my pride of our community who made this release possible. Not only did we make our first release, but we also showed everyone we could improve the software in a significant way. This is just a beginning as you can imagine. In addition, we have now published our short term roadmap (stay tuned for our other releases of February, March and May) and announced our will to work along time-based releases.

All this would not have been impossible without the incredible community of LibreOffice and I would like to thank every contributor for such a great work. It is impressive to see both the spectacular growth of our project when healthy principles and fundamentals have been used since the beginning and the unavoidable, yet relative chaos and conflicts of a community in formation. In a sense it’s a bit like the beginning of an universe: it starts with a big bang. Only here, we are merging evolution with intelligent design.

I am also impressed by the international press coverage we’re getting. It takes about 24 hours to perceive the full span of the articles, and I don’t recall OpenOffice.org ever had a similar coverage, and the tweets with the hashtag #LibreOffice are flowing by the hundreds every hour now. So again, Iwould like to express my heartfelt congratulations to everyone who made this possible: you can be proud of you!

Starting 2011 : a progress report on LibreOffice

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Now that everyone is back from the Holiday Season the LibreOffice mailing lists and repositories are again bristling with activity. In fact we did progress in several ways and I would like to give a brief update on what we did and what we’re working on now.

  • The Document Foundation has joined the OpenDoc Society. The OpenDoc Society is an international community (based in the Netherlands) that promotes the use of open standards such as ODF and helps various initiatives related to open standards. I think it illustrates our unwaving commitment to ODF -despite what you might have read around the Internet these past weeks- and you should expect more news to come about our commitment to ODF in the coming months.
  • LibreOffice RC3 has been released; will we be releasing the final version soon? Suspense! In any case, give it a shot, and bring us your feedback!
  • By now you may have noticed that we do indeed have a new and beautiful website. I would like to thank everyone who worked hard on it. In fact since the Steering Committee of the Document Foundation wanted to improve the clarity and the organization of the work around the website it has decided to appoint a team of four persons who will effectively further the development of our website, each of these persons being responsible of one specific area: content, site design, user experience and site administration/infrastructure.
  • While we have a final draft of our Community Bylaws we hadn’t implemented them. Part of the reason was a lack of time, and part of the reason was that we felt that until we hadn’t properly incorporated our foundation we might have been led to amend them for legal reasons. Yet some people pointed out that we could at least start to implement them and progressively enact them as to enable a clear governance and leadership of the community. It’s a good point. So we started by appointing the first Membership Committee, while the Engineering Steering Committee will be formalized very soon.  The Membership Committee is in charge of managing our contributors, who in turn have the power to elect the Board of Directors, run as candidates for various roles, etc. It is in fact this process that defines the fabric of our community, and it’s therefore a crucial one, for almost everything else will depend on contributors running our project.
  • Much in the same way we were lacking a trademark policy. We were really missing one, with people coming to us asking for the permission to use our logos and names and also a few people misrepresenting themselves as LibreOffice or the Document Foundation. Here’s the stable draft; we’re waiting for legal reviews on it.
  • We also started to work on the incorporation of the Document Foundation. As we have chosen to incorporate an actual foundation in Germany, the process will take time, effort and money. We will keep you posted on this.
  • We will be present at several shows soon, throughout the world: the FOSDEM in Brussels and the SCALE in southern California: come and visit us!
  • Last but not least we just received the news that the former “OOoAuthors” team who was writing quite a lot of good user documentation for OpenOffice.org has changed its name to ODFAuthors, working now on manuals and documentation about LibreOffice as well. Congratulations folks, we look forward working with you !

The tragedy of Soapboxing

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Recently we had a bunch of quite furious people storming one of our lists at the Document Foundation. The issue at stake was that someone understood that LibreOffice was going to have OOXML filters. It sparkled quite some debate and I read so many inaccuracies, not say so much outright bullshit, that I was dismayed to see the rumor spreading across identi.ca and twitter. Check #OOXML if you want to read more. The problem comes from three causes I think: ignorance, the complexity of the matter, and for some people the urge to have a soapbox and to use it to the fullest: The fact remains that despite all the concerted efforts to censor the Internet by the French “Democratic and Transparent” Government and others, still no one knows you’re a dog on the Network these days. (Update: Pamela Jones of Groklaw is not targeted here and I would never call Groklaw a soapbox) But let me clarify what LibreOffice is doing, what it is not doing, what it is about, and what it is not about.

LibreOffice is not owned by Novell. LibreOffice is independent, is a project created by the Document Foundation that counts Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, Google, BrOffice and many other entities and people as its supporters. Yes, Novell, Debian, Red Hat engineers (and others) contribute to the code of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice, just like OpenOffice.org offers the ability to handle documents in the format of Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010. As we know, these are called OOXML but are different from the ISO standard (ISO 29500) known as OOXML. Microsoft is trying hard, as far as I know, to work out something that might be implemented by MS Office 2010 and is known as OOXML Transitional, which is the polite label to call a proprietary format that still comes with a lot of undocumented areas. OpenOffice.org has offered such a feature ever since 2008, not by reading whatever specification was sent to the ISO, but in analyzing the format used in the real world and called OOXML . (yes it’s confusing) If OOo had tried to implement OOXML by reading the standard it would have ended in a dead corner, because as we know, the OOXML ISO standard is broken, and the ISO itself with it.

LibreOffice is no different than that. But there is one addition compared to OpenOffice.org: where OpenOffice.org allowed the reading of MS Office 2007 and 2010 documents only, we allow their editing and saving under the same format. It does not imply any dramatic extension of features: the same capability is in OpenOffice.org, but it’s been intentionally crippled around 2007 or 2008 for obvious strategic reasons (OOXML hadn’t become a standard yet and MS Office 2007 new formats hadn’t been widely distributed). I would not be surprised if Oracle were to enable such a feature in the coming months.

The other factor was that people connected dots: Quite murky details about the Novell/Microsoft emerged recently thanks to Groklaw : and what was known by many of us, discussed on this blog for quite some time, became apparent to the eyes of everyone: Novell got paid by Microsoft to promote OOXML and to implement some compatibility layers with it inside Go-OO. So people connected the dots, and I would understand their concern, if it had been voiced in a more polite tone and in a less oracular and imperative tone. But it was a mixed bag of everything: “stop implementing OOXML now, you’re traitors and owned by Novell, and by the way you’re based on Go-OO”. Therefore I’d like to clarify certain things again:

  • LibreOffice is an independent project, not owned by Novell and not even based on Go-OO. But it’s based on OOo with some patched of Go-OO, and now more than ever before, it’s making its own choices.
  • LibreOffice strives to be an independent community, not an area for people who do not know how to contribute to Free and Open Source Software Communities, do not even want to learn but only want to stand on their soapbox and shout whatever they will please. Just take a look at the founders of the Document Foundation: there are Novell engineers. Some others work for Red Hat, some others come from Debian, some others are talented community individuals, and then there’s yours truly. Call it a worldwide conspiracy for Novell if you want, and sit on it. If there’s anything that should be clear, it’s that we are for ODF. We’ve joined the OpenDoc Society, and we will be joining the OASIS Consortium as soon as we can. Free Software, Open Standards, Community and Innovation, that’s what we strive for.
  • Of course, there will be the question that needs to be asked: Are we falling into Novell’s trap (or rather Microsoft’s trap) ? I think we aren’t and we won’t. Truth be told, the Document Foundation is not aware of any secret pact between Novell and Microsoft to stuff LibreOffice with OOXML and patents (were it only because 1) their cooperation is ending soon 2) MS was not in the know about LibreOffice until a long time, and Novell does not own anything in LibreOffice). But the more important -and perhaps some will find it naive- is that the Novell people we’re working with, among them Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens, Kendy (and all the others) have so far proven to be not just reliable and trustworthy, but also good and loyal fellows of ours. They’re not in this to serve Mr Ballmer and the dancing ponies of Redmond Club: they’re in this because just like me, just like all of us, the founders of the Document Foundation, we believe in Freedom, Free Software and Open Standards. And if it were of any reassurance to anyone: if one day we had the evidence of patches directly resulting from a secret agreement between Novell and Microsoft on LibreOffice, I trust the community would replace them as soon as possible.

Happy New Year everyone, and may the Force be with you!

How to move from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice: A message to localizers & International communities

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These past days I was contacted by several leads of native-language teams of OpenOffice.org who asked me this question: How can we start to work on the localization of LibreOffice?

The answer is very easy, but it might not be that easy for ever. Let me explain: Right now you can essentially use your  translation files from the  OpenOffice.org’s Pootle server to work on LibreOffice: we use Pootle too, and the software still does not have too much difference for localizers (It does though, please check out our localization mailing list). But let’s do like Lewis Carroll’s March Hare and “start at the beginning”:

The usual process on OpenOffice.org would start by posting a proposal on the native-language list or localization list, introducing yourself, your team and your language. There would usually be an automatic approval, and then you would have to create an username on the infamous Collabnet’s online infrastructure, provide that username, wait for (it used to be me or anyone with the title of Community Manager in charge) someone to file an issue in the internel issue tracker requesting the administrators (distinct from the community) to consider your application, upload your SSH2 keys (but beware, these are no simple SSH keys, never lose them!),  sign the Copyright Agreement with your blood, send it with some hair of yours, scan your fingerprint and fax the whole thing to an address in California that could very much be one of the possible entrances of the Area-51. Once you had done that, you needed to wait, usually for 4 weeks in order to have the right to wait some more. Then, the imprimatur from the powers that be usually were descending upon you and it was possible to start working on code, the website, etc.

The way we do this with LibreOffice is completely different. Just show up on the Localization mailing list, say hi, request a Pootle access, someone will answer to you usually in less than 36 hours and you’re set. No copyright agreement, no oath to be taken, no specific checking on your criminal antecedents. If you want to contribute, you can be all set in less than 2 hours.

Because of the history of LibreOffice and its relationship to the OpenOffice.org project, but even more so because the greatest majority of the worldwide communities of OpenOffice.org supported the Document Foundation from day one, we felt however that the existing native-language and localization teams had to be given the priority over potential newcomers. That’s indeed the case except if we know that an existing OpenOffice.org team has been orphaned or inactive for some time and that there’s really nobody showing up in either project. At this stage, and to my knowledge, almost everyone who now contributes localization work to LibreOffice used to be or is a localizer of OpenOffice.org . As usual there are exceptions. The trouble several teams had with LibreOffice for the first two months is that there was simply no localization tool or infrastructure available. Right now things are still moving, but we do use Pootle and you can contribute localization work to LibreOffice now. Understand, however, that there will be growing differences in our methods and our software; but the good thing is, that you can take part in the development of localization processes (and many other things) now, by discussing options and contributing patches, bugs, ideas, etc.

Last but not least I would like to thank all of the localization and native-language teams who have joined us since the beginning of the fantastic adventure of the Document Foundation. We are grateful for your support, and we look forward working with you for a very, very long time.

Happy New Year 2011!