The time has come when The Document Foundation will elect a new Board of Directors. As you might already know, there are many good candidates. And since I clearly think I am the best of them, I am writing this to ask you to vote for me. Some of you might know me a bit already, but it is never bad to present myself.

My name is Fridrich Štrba, national of Switzerland and Slovakia, happily married with Susan since more then 12 years and father of 3 wonderful children: Patrick (9), Miriam (6) and Nathanael (3).

My story with LibreOffice started around 2004, with its predecessor, OpenOffice.org. I was just trying to contribute to libwpd which is the horse-power of our WordPerfect import and the OpenOffice.org integration was an interesting thing to contribute to. And since then, my love story with our project went through different stages, but we are still together and sometimes even happy.

I have been mentoring Google Summer of Code students since 2006 and recently I was co-responsible for several import filters for reverse-engineered formats (i.e. Visio, CorelDraw, MS Publisher). I can frankly say that my development and marketing work around the filters are a huge part of the reason why LibreOffice is called the "Swiss army knife of file-formats". We managed quite recently to bootstrap a vibrant community of filter-writers and the the amount of supported file-formats will only grow.

Between 2007 and 2013, I was highly blessed to be working on LO as my day-job, employed by Novell, then SUSE. Since September 2013, I am again a volunteer as many of you. This new-acquired independence is an advantage. I have no monetary interests of any kind in LibreOffice and, if elected, I will take decisions only and only considering the good of the project as such.

The advantage of my election would be that I am part of various native language communities. I speak several languages and can understand the aspirations of the corresponding communities. Besides that, I was part of the Membership Committee from 2010 and the last year, I was its Chairman. In this quality, I was able to push forward my vision of diverse and open and inclusive community that goes beyond personal sympathies or aversions. And this is the vision I desire to pursue if you give me your trust.

And since it is written "You don't have because you don't ask", with this message I ask you to cast your vote for me.

Around last weekend we had the LibreOffice 4.2.0 BugHunt Session. During three days volunteers – either known or new – added some extra steps to test the Beta version of the next LibreOffice. Compared with the weeks before, around three times more bugs were filed against that version (46/15). Overall around 25% more bugs were filed (107/80).
Experienced QA volunteers worked hard to triage as many bugs as possible, but I would not be surprised if still some need to be checked, clarified...
Also on the MozTrap tool people have been doing tests. This environment is especially easy for newcomers that want to do some good for their favourite office-suite ;) I'm told that there will be new test series for the release candidate 1 (in one, two weeks). So stay tuned there!
And last but not least: it was again really encouraging to see that several of the reported bugs have been repaired within hours or a day or so.
Thanks to the developers, thanks to all testers and other users!

• Up early, music practises variously. Mail chew, sync. with Tor & Kendy. Mail chew, partner calls, Lydia over in the evening.
• Pleased to see Linux Voice reach it's funding target with two weeks to go; you can still get your subscription ahead of time now.

• Up early, NCC, helped in the Creche, home for lunch with Phil - good to catch up with him. David & Allison over for tea - lovely to meet and get to know Allison a little better. Quartet practise. Put everyone to bed.

A few days ago I entered a conversation (in French) on the LibreOffice mailing lists that was highlighting the misunderstanding that some people were caught into about how the project is running and how Free and Open Source Software works. There was nothing new in this conversation, so to speak. Free and Open Source Software, at least its inner workings, remains a set of elusive concepts for many people,  even for actual contributors. As I was getting frustrated over some parts of the discussion, it dawned on me that Free Software was an interesting depiction of the views and ideas rooted at the core of the Libertarian movement in North America. While we owe Microsoft the rare “priviledge” for the label of “communists”, it turns out that studying Free Software through the prism of libertarian ideas may prove an effective way to gain a proper understanding of the matter.

Let’s see how we could do this. I’ve based the reference to libertarian concepts on the Wikipedia article, and will therefore refer mostly to “US libertarianism as it stands today”. However, this post is not at all meant as a reflection on my own political opinions.

• Individual Liberty : this is an easy one. Free Software’s four freedoms are implied by it as well as they imply individual liberty. On a deeper level, the right to fork software, and the basic right, often overlooked or buried under several other distinctions, to write and develop software are expressions of individual liberty.
• Political Freedom: essentially an extension of the first right described above, the notion that we cannot prohibit anyone to use Free Software regardless of its purpose would match political freedom in the software world.
• Voluntary Association: the fundamental right to open a project online, open your source code repository and your development to anybody else. Or not to do it as Free Software does not mandate the development of software by community but focuses solely on the freedoms brought by the code.

Next would come more controversial concepts that are hallmarks of the modern day US Libertarianism:

• Small government: we don’t like structure and Free and Open Source Project. We want freedom, no bureaucracy, and the more bureaucratic a Free Software project becomes, the less contributions it gets. Also, we love contributors, but politicians tend to have an importance brought down to almost nothing.
• Stop the Welfare Queen: that is actually a very important point. True Free and Open Source Software projects are meritocracies. They are no democracies, or they’re only limited democracies in that only an identified set of people (recognized contributors most of the time) can elect their representatives or the formal leadership of the project. A meritocracy is a system of governance where the people who decide are the people who do and who work on the project. The only thing we give away for free and for ever is the code, the software itself. As such the software is sometimes labeled as the Digital Commons, which does not really belong to libertarian views.
• Individual initiative: besides meritocracy, we could maybe even call Free and Open Source projects “Do-ocracies”. It’s not enough to be meritocratic as the entire base of reasoning relies on the individual initiative. You could be meritoratic in the essence, but still steers dozens of people to go this way or that way, and then distinguish the ones who accomplished the most. That is however not usually the case for Free and Open Source projects that appeal to different kinds of contributors by highlighting opportunities for contributions that may be as diverse as possible (although it usuall depends on the project: a C compiler project may not need a host of marketing and UX experts).

Where this comparison stops being relevant is in two important points, one of them I’ve written about above. Digital Commons introduce the notion of Commons that is usually not part of the traditional libertarian corpus of ideas, although it’s not entirely  sure Commons would be a concept antagonistic to Libertarianism. Commons -and their digital version- coin the idea that we all share a common resource. For the physical world, it means everyone manages specific resources in common: food, water, wood, ore, books. One may need as much as a government branch for this, or as little as a rural community. Digital Commons are pretty much everything we produce online, from code (in its binary and source forms) to artwork, documentation, etc. And these are considered commodities that cannot be privatised or segregated from the common lot except under very, very specific circumstances and conditions.

The second point where Libertarianism may be at odds with Free and Open Source Software projects is the natural tendency of these projects to instigate voluntary sharing and collaboration. Libertarianism does not stand against these, but it usually does not pitch these notions as hallmarks of the values it advocates. Of course, one could point out that as much as there are libertarians on the right, so are there on the left, and that would be where these notions would then create a rift or at least an ideological divide.

While Libertarianism may not reflect my political views, I believe it provides an interesting prism to better understand how Free and Open Source Software projects work, and I hope I’ve been successful in exposing the libertarian ideas as well as the concepts of Free and Open Source Software.

Cheers!

Dear TDF members,

It is nearly time to vote for the next Board of Directors! During the past weeks, members have been nominated or nominated themselves, willing to serve at the Board of our Foundation. People working on all aspects of LibreOffice and in all parts of the community. So now the important task for all of us: voting. The details of this election process have been outlined in the first announcement: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/msg03358.html

IMPORTANT: The election credentials and voting instructions for voting in The Document Foundation Board elections 2013 were just sent to all eligible voters.

The voting period starts 2013-12-10, 00:00 CET/UTC+1 and ends 2013-12-17, 24:00 CET/UTC+1. The statements of the candidates as well as links to the full nomination e-mails can be found at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/2013-board/candidates.html

The detailed rules are available at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/2013-board/rules.html

The Document Foundation uses a modern preference voting system that requires you to vote by selecting as many of the candidates as you would like to see elected, sorted in your order of preference. After you have voted, you will receive an anonymous token that can be used at the end of the elections to verify your vote was counted.

If you are a member – see the page at http://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/members/ – and you have not received your credentials:

1. Please verify you are actually a member of The Document Foundation. Only members are eligible to vote.
2. Please check your spam folder. In the past, a few voters discovered their voting credentials were erroneously tagged as spam by their provider.
3. Please check all your e-mail accounts.

If you are certain you are eligible to vote, and have not received your credentials despite the above steps, please contact the Membership Committee in private at elections@documentfoundation.org for instructions on how to proceed.

IMPORTANT: Please check NOW if you have received your token, so any possible problem can be resolved in time.

If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to ask the Membership Committee in private at elections@documentfoundation.org

Happy voting!

Cor Nouws
– The Document Foundation – Chairman Membership Committee

• Up lateish, J. and H. out on a Santa Marathon in Kings Lynn for charity. E. not feeling well; breakfasted E. played games with babes, chewed some mail quickly. Set too helping M. and N. make some orange soup or other, ate it for lunch.
• Read LOTR to M. slugged variously, J. home, tea, watched The Two Towers part 1 (parentally censored edition) with H.N.M. Tried to locate a ThinkPad with AMD and not NVidea graphics that would be a good LibreOffice build machine: roll on Kaveri; bed.

• Up early; off with J. into Cambridge, showed her the Collabora office, plugged away at mail quickly, in-person interview with Scott, Kendy & Rob's kind assistance. Training in the afternoon. Back early for the All Saints School Christmas Fair; fun. Put babes to bed.

• Mail chew, partner call, build testing; churned through the more tedious mailing. Lunch, ESC call. Setup an interview for tomorrow; poked at bugs.

Berlin, December 5, 2013 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.2 International Bug Hunting Session, which will start on December 6th and will end on December 8th. During the three days, volunteers from all over the world will test the beta of LibreOffice 4.2 to find bugs and regressions.

LibreOffice 4.2 will be released at the end of January 2014, with a large number of new features (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.2) and loads of fixed bugs. The community is working to make this major release the finest in the history of the free office suite.

In order to join the bug hunting session, volunteers should download LibreOffice 4.2 Beta 2, available from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases/.

Mentors will be available at least from 08:00 UTC to 22:00 UTC, and will be reachable through IRC (irc://chat.freenode.net/libreoffice-qa) and the QA mailing list.

Other information on LibreOffice 4.2 International Bug Hunting Session are available at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/BugHunting_Session_4.2.0.

José Guilherme Vanz and Marcos Souza, LibreOffice development in Brazil

Our first contact with the LibreOffice was in FISL 2012 (International Forum of Free Software, held in Porto Alegre, Brazil). Since then, we got quickly involved with the LibreOffice development community. Now we attend events in Brazil advocating to people about the better office suite ever done!

Months ago, after some time contributing to the project and participating in LibreOffice community, we, José Guilherme Vanz and Marcos Paulo de Souza were invited to participate in the Freiburg LibreOffice Hackfest. We were very happy and very excited! This invitation showed us that we were recognized for our humble work in the project and because this is a unique opportunity to work with people that we just know by mailing or IRC chats. So, we started the preparations of travel, such as paperwork, funds and a negotiation with our employers.

We arrived in Germany thinking about how to learn more about LibreOffice code base, and learn some tips and tricks to code while contributing with the project. The guys at the hackfest work full time in the project, so we were very excited to improve our skills, including stuffs about how to make a nice hackfest and try setup one in Brazil!

Our journey in Germany began in the beautiful city of Munich, where we stayed for two days. We met Christian Lohmaier, the current release engineer of LibreOffice project. He and Florian Effenberger were patient and generous to show Munich to us and all nice places of this nice city! Thanks a lot guys!

Then we went to Freiburg, where the Hackfest was to start. The event took three days. We had the opportunity to meet some of the most famous mega developers! It was a very nice experience to link faces and names to IRC nicks, and of course, to question the “pythons” of the project in real time! Surely, we learned a lot in these 3 days!

Marcos did some work in LibreOffice Math. The first was about including tooltips in the new Elements Dock. To solve this bug, we basically need to create some strings with the descriptions of each element in the Elements Dock. These strings are stored inside “.src” files. These files are “compiled” and used by translators to translate each string to a specific language used in the user interface of LibreOffice. This fix was not difficult, just painful!

The second bug that Marcos worked was about to implement a scrollbar in the Elements Dock. We did not finish this fix because he had some doubts and some points that need some other fixes. Still in the event, we talked with some others hackers about other issues.

I was focused trying to execute a static checker to detect some error prone code and fix them.

After three days of hackfest, we started the “Hamburg Home Hacking Marathon”! We stayed four days in Hamburg, coding in the house of LibreOffice enginners! Again, we had the pleasure to work with Eike Ratke, Michael Stahl, Stephan Bergmann and Bjoern Michaelsen. All of them willing to help us teaching about the code base and showing some tips.

Using our precious time with them, Marcos worked in the issue 60698 (https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60698). This bug is about unify some shared libraries that are built by few files. Doing this we get a smaller library because these libraries are compiled and built just once, and by this we avoid the dispersion of shared libraries. Working in this bug, Marcos unified all shared libraries of IO module.

Marcos tried yet to solve a bug in Calc, with the help of Eike as mentor. This bug was about ODS files using link to another sheets. By changing the referenced files, Calc was not allowed to update the data inside the file that was referencing. But, this bug was not so easy, and the problem was bigger than we thought. So we couldn’t solve this bug in that time, and Eike removed the bug from the easy hacks.

And I was still working in static checker. I started to look to a bug of Math, about the user interface. After some work, I fixed that bug!

In the third day, we went back to Stephan’s place, trying to solve bugs and learn more! This day Bjoern went to Stephan’s house too, totaling six guys programming in the same table! In this day Marcos worked in a bug(https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=63020) indicated by Bjoern. That bug was related to removing a class from LibreOffice. With Stephan’s help, Marcos could remove that class and use a better approach in the code.

And in the last day, we went again to Eike’s home, where we enjoyed to last moments with the great developers of LibreOffice! We talked a little about their work and how they work daily.

For sure, these days were very fruitful, and we learned a lot of things that we’ll use in the future.

We came back to Brazil and we want to say a big THANK YOU for all of you guys! To the  Brazilian community, that welcomed us and keeps helping us. To The Document Foundation, who gave us this opportunity. To all developers that are helping us since we started in the project, specially YOU we met this wonderful German journey, and all people involved directly or indirectly in this amazing project!

Opening LibreOffice’s source code for the first time, the amount of code that a new developer has to sift through can be intimidating and off-putting. So, here are some useful locations within the LibreOffice source directory structure that should help…

Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small,
Can we ever get away from the sprawl?

Sprawl II — Arcade Fire

So these days, most people prefer to use an IDE to navigate their source code. This has often been greeted with some defensive elitism of the “real programmers” kind since the early days of the open sourcing of StarOffice. One does not simply load a code base the size of LibreOffice in your wimpy IDE: while it is possible somehow in the end, its a lot more trouble than its worth to manually set up e.g. all the include path manually to get the fancy stuff like autocompletion. Add to that, that e.g. UNO headers are generated during the build and header were at distributed over multiple IDE unfriendly locations, with many headers even available as copies from multiple locations, before we fixed that.

All these things are fixed now. And while LibreOffice still is a huge beast with our new build system we can get a holistic view of what needs to get build where, how and when. This makes it easy, almost trivial to generate an IDE project file from the build system. And to prove this point, I did just that for the kdevelop IDE. This isnt limited in principle to this one IDE — in fact the kdevelop specific part of this is some 150 lines of Python. So no matter what IDE you use: Eclipse, Netbeans, Anjuta, Visual Studio, Code::Blocks or XCode — you should be able to adapt this. In fact, while writing this, I find there is already work going on for XCode. Feel invited to join the party and make LibreOffice trivially buildable in your favourite IDE!

So as announced to the developer list, this allows you to make navigating, editing, building, testing and running LibreOffice much easier, giving you features like:

• autocompletion
• building a module from the IDE
• building all of LibreOffice from the IDE
• nondebug and debug build configs for the above
• starting LibreOffice from the IDE
• running unitchecks, slowchecks and subsequentchecks from the IDE

Dont believe it? Here is a video featuring a stuttering german guy (me) on the audio track showing this:

<iframe class="youtube-player" frameborder="0" height="322" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/-5hVXeHNt2M?version=3&amp;rel=1&amp;fs=1&amp;showsearch=0&amp;showinfo=1&amp;iv_load_policy=1&amp;hd=1&amp;wmode=transparent" type="text/html" width="519"></iframe>

If you want to show this around on social media, there is also a shorter version featuring the essentials (make sure to link to the HD versions).

A closing note: A long time, common IDEs embrace and extended into the buildsystems so once you used an IDE, you could only use this one IDE and no other. In retrospect, this is obviously doing it wrong. With the current approach, we can make LibreOffice easily buildable in any IDE on any platform. A very important fact for a product available on so many platforms.

addendum: As Karl Fogel wrote “LibreOffice is now ridiculously easy to build.“ before we even had this, it just shows that one can always do better.

p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; line-height: 120%; }a:link { } LibreOffice is using a XML based document format so of cause there is a built in XML parser. But until now it has been quite cumbersome to deal with XML in macros. You need to manually traverse through the entire XML structure like this example (thanks to Andrew Pitonyak): Function CreateDocumentHandler()

Lulu.com, where the printed copies of the LibreOffice user guides are published and sold, is having a sale: 30% off until midnight on Thursday, December 5, US east coast time. The discount code is: LULUVIP6131 Direct link to LibreOffice books: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/opendocument Note: the 30% off discount coupon is applied to the prices shown as already […]

Browsers and email clients typically offer a mode in which automatic access to remote content (like loading a linked graphic) is blocked. This helps improve both privacy (so the other end cannot track you opened a document that contains a well-crafted link) and security (when there are exploitable bugs in rendering certain graphics formats, say). And the demand to offer such a “stealth mode” for LibreOffice, too, naturally arises from that.
Upcoming LibreOffice 4.2 will start to offer this feature in stealth mode, so to say. The Options dialog’s “Security – Options…” page contains a new “Block any links from documents not among the trusted locations” check box, using the list of trusted locations managed on the “Security – Macro Security… – Trusted Sources” page. When enabled, a matching document’s references to any external entities are not resolved. This includes resources like linked graphics, movies, and sounds, references to external settings like color and gradient tables, and ODF’s “auto-reload” feature.

But in its current form this is more of a proof-of-concept than a fully fleshed-out feature (and hence comes in stealth mode for now):

• Managing the mode is awkward. You likely want to select this more interactively on a case-by-case basis (probably in addition to a more static setting of which locations to always/never put under this treatment).
• An unresolved link cannot easily be resolved manually afterwards. For example, an unloaded graphic is represented as an unclickable hyperlink, and there is no way to explicitly load it later.
• All of a document’s external references are treated the same. It does not make a difference whether they come from the same origin as the document itself or reference the default color table, for example.
• While the implementation tries to be thorough, it might not yet have identified all places in the code where access to external resources needs to be blocked.

So consider this a starting point from wich a truly useful feature will emerge over time. And feel free to try it out and give feedback, of course.

The Documentation Team has published the LibreOffice 4.1 Calc Guide.

Free PDFs of individual chapters and the full book can be downloaded from The Document Foundation’s wiki.

Printed copies can be purchased here. (Published by Friends of OpenDocument Inc.)

This completes a full set of books for LibreOffice 4.0 – 4.1.
See this page or the LibreOffice wiki for a list of books with links to ODT, PDF, and printed copies.

The Documentation Team has published the LibreOffice 4.1 Calc Guide. Free PDFs of individual chapters and the full book can be downloaded from The Document Foundation’s wiki. Printed copies can be purchased here. (Published by Friends of OpenDocument Inc.) This completes a full set of books for LibreOffice 4.0 – 4.1. See this page or […]

He asked me if I’d seen a road with so much dust and sand.
And I said, “Listen, I’ve travelled every road in this here land!”
I’ve been everywhere, man.
I’ve been everywhere, man.

I’ve been Everywhere, Johnny Cash

So about a month ago I travelled in one week from Hamburg via Zürich and San Francisco to Oakland and then via San Francisco, Munich and Basel to Freiburg to attend the LibreOffice Hackfest Freiburg 2013 and back to Hamburg. The Freiburg Hackfest is the third and last Hackevent we had in Germany this year (after the Impress Sprint in Dresden and the Hackfest in Hamburg) nicely accompanying the international events like the LibreOffice conference in Milan and our usual presence at FOSDEM.

I have to admit that I arrived at this event with some travel fatigue and some upcoming Ubuflu, so I was not too productive myself, but its good to see fixes like for example in the kde integration (Jan-Marek), in Calc (Eilidh), for enabling bitcoin donations (Florian), to mail merge (again Jan-Marek), to Math (Marcos), for the build system (Michael and David) happening (or at least be prepared at the event). A big “Thank You” to all the angels of the Chaos Computer Club Freiburg that organized the event — when I learned that I would need to travel to the US right before this, I had some doubts if it would result in “remote-organization-troubles” given this was a first time in Freiburg. This was completely unfounded, the support of our hosts was amazing and they seemed to have made a deal with Eris to take revenge for the original snub somewhere else on this weekend.

So, given that I did not do much coding (just some preparation for the KDevelop integration for LibreOffice, more on that later), what can I offer you? Catcontent was not available (no cats at this Hackfest), so I give you the second best thing: the deputy chairman of the board of the Document Foundation patrolling the premises on a skateboard:

So, whats next? FOSDEM! We will of course be there again, and back-to-back with the event we will have a user experience Hackfest in Bruessels. So come and join us:

The LibreOffice templates site experienced very high spam bombing during the last weeks. We got about 100 to 200 new tickets via the account request form that were mostly spam or for not intended use. Thus I decided to research for a better protection of the form against robots. I got some hints from the Plone community and decided to go with an add-on named collective.z3cform.norobots and a hidden field that should not be filled (robots tend to fill that field and will be recognized by that and will never open a new ticket).

The new add-on that I use to protect the form adds a field with free configurable questions to the form. There are currently some questions with answers available but there is always space for some new for a human easy to answer questions. If you want to propose a new question-answer-pair please contact me at maand<at>gmx<dot>de.

The new form is currently implemented for the LibreOffice templates site and will be added to the LibreOffice extensions site the next days, as soon as I get some spare time to write the source code.

Open document editors are coming again to FOSDEM with a shared
devroom which gives every project in this area a chance to present
ODF related developments and innovations. The devroom is organized
by Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

We invite submission of talks for the Open Document Editors devroom,
to be held on Saturday, February 1st, from 10AM to 6PM.

Length of talks should be limited to 20 minutes, as we would like to
have questions after each presentation, and to fit as many
presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be
explicitly requested and justified.

Technical talks (code, extensions, localization, QA, tools and
significant adoption related cases) about open document editors or
the ODF format are welcome.

Submissions must be done using the Pentabarf system:
https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM14 .

While filing your proposal, please add a few lines about yourself
(although your profile might already be stored at Pentabarf) and
specify what product or topic (Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice, both,
other editor, ODF in general…) your talk is about.

The deadline is Sunday, December 22, 2013. Accepted speakers
will be notified by January 5, 2014.

You can send any questions to the devroom mailing list:
office-devroom@lists.fosdem.org

The Documentation Team has published the LibreOffice 4.1 Draw Guide.

Free PDFs of individual chapters and the full book can be downloaded from The Document Foundation’s wiki.

Printed copies can be purchased here. (Published by Friends of OpenDocument Inc.)

The Documentation Team has published the LibreOffice 4.1 Draw Guide. Free PDFs of individual chapters and the full book can be downloaded from The Document Foundation’s wiki. Printed copies can be purchased here. (Published by Friends of OpenDocument Inc.)

As many who follow the LibreOffice mailing lists know, soon we will have the elections for the Bord of Directors again. Without doubt, there will be a lot of good candidates and the choice will be difficult. Different competencies, personalities, sensibilities. As many parameters as there could ever be. Nonetheless, there is one parameter that was eliminated from before the first election: the corporate pressure.

From the very beginning of The Document Foundation, the Steering Committee and the initial Membership Committee knew that while corporations can contribute a lot to open source, they can also in some moments try to use the community bodies for their own interest. That is the reason that all elected bodies of The Document Foundation have the 30 per cent rule, where no more then 30 per cent of any body can have the same affiliation. In the same spirit, the election system was designed the way that it is technically impossible for anybody to know how a given member voted. From the experience with the "old good times" of OpenOffice.org, it was obvious that corporate influence can do a lot of harm and skew the elections in a considerable way. And even if the rule of 30 per cent is in place, it might be hard for a election officer or for a MC member to stand strong before a corporate pressure. And this was the reason why we chose a design that makes it impossible even for the election officer to know whom you voted for. This information is known only to you.

Last week I was speaking at the SFSCon 2013 in Bolzano-Bozen in South Tyrol, Italy. This event was a great moment as it connects both the local players of Free and Open Source Software and the boader FOSS scene, while the relative seclusion of the Tyrolean mountains and – we should not forget this- the formidable hospitality of our guests-  the TIS park and the South Tyrol Province.

This year we had  a workshop dedicated to LibreOffice migrations inside the public sector and I spoke about what was going on in France. I was however reminded of a very important notion during my various conversations with the audience. Free Software licences pass on several rights to the users. But these rights or freedoms, while essential, do not mandate how a Free Software project community should work. If anything, that would be quite out of topic and perhaps going against the very spirit of Software Freedom. Among these freedoms, two are implied that are of particular importance but often overlooked in regard of Free Software development projects: the right to fork and the right -as a user- to leave the software or the vendor/supplier who is providing you support and services on the FOSS stack in question.

The right to fork is a well known, yet sometimes not so well accepted right. It is however one of the most fundamental freedom, as it is the freedom to exert its very own liberty with respect to the code: leaving, and starting anew. The right to leave or to avoid vendor capture seems less controversial but I’d be tempted to say that it is perhaps a not so well protected freedom. Many suppliers will leave grey areas just aside FOSS stacks where they can “capture” the customer, but then there are others who don’t.

What happens, however, when organizations such as public sector entities decide to join a project and not rely entirely or exclusively on suppliers to support their migration and use of a specific Free Software might end up being quite different. Joining a Free Software community means investing resources (and by resources I mean anything from developers to money) and through this becoming a contributor to the project. Becoming a contributor does not change the freedoms that have been passed on to you through the software licence. It  means however that you become a stakeholder of the project. Pieter Hintjens uses the nice term “remix” to express anything you can do with code that is licensed under a Free Software license.

As a stakeholder you are not only free to remix -anybody could do this- you’re also taking a “stake” in the project, and your stake is only as real as the influence you may exert on the project as a contributor. Because  of this, true FOSS communities, communities whose independence is real, work because of the existence of multiple stakeholders. They belong to no one in particular, but the project itself, belongs to everyone.

The next question of course would be to ask what are the projects that I believe have no real stakeholders besides the major player contributing in them . For instance, are “benevolent dictators” or a Linux distribution such as the Fedora project communities that are only bound to one player and therefore let no stakeholders in, thus failing to achieve a real, functional community? Of course they aren’t. Stakeholders can be measured in terms of governance, but it’s how the contributions of other parties are integrated that ultimately becomes the final criteria. At the end of the day, it’s what you do in a community that matters, not how many fans you’ve made.

For Rapicorn i need a simple and nicely readable way to special case code on various strings, which isn’t a problem in most scripting languages but is not provided by C/C++. Switching on strings turns out to be a widely investigated topic: SOS (agay), TheScript, JavaBug (CNFW), CodeGuru, CLC-FAQ and google has lots more. Now [...]

Last week i got a bug report where activating “Help/Quick Start”, “Help/FAQ” and any other web browser related menu item in Beast would do nothing. That of course completely defeats the purpose of writing help documents and offering help via the menu. Luckily, we were able to get browser launching debugging print outs in that [...]

Majorly improved the speed of rectangle shading in Rapicorn, here’s a quick-and-dirty random number generator which is still good enough for dithering: inline uint32 quick_rand32 (void) { static uint32 accu = 2147483563; accu = 1664525 * accu + 1013904223; return accu; }   This has been the major speed-up-knob, other aspects were as confusing as [...]

We decided a longer time ago that we shut down self registration because we got so many unused accounts on the extensions- and templates-site. We had to delete the empty accounts by hand.

We changed over to a request form on both sites where contributors could ask for an account. This prevent us from the former situation, because the requests were forwarded to our ticket system and could be handled manually by copy and paste to create a new account.

There were not only requests from real contributors but also some requests from spammer. This situation changed since the last weekend. First we got about 30 new tickets per day into our queue, but today we got more than 210 tickets per day. Thus if you asking me what I’m doing for The Document Foundation and LibreOffice during the evening you may even get an idea.

Sadly it’s currently not developing a new templates site or other useful tasks.

WOW, Absolutly looking forward to it!!!!!

Tagged: LibreOffice, LibreOffice 4.2, software, technology, UI

Long time not see, dear friends. But that does not mean that there is nothing to speak about. So, hence a new blog post for those that were wondering what was happenning in the reverse-straight engineering partnership.

After the moments in August and September, where I transitioned from working on LibreOffice to working on SuSE Linux Enterprise and after some breathing pause to give to the Cesar (or also known as family) what is belonging to Cesar, the activity on LibreOffice related stuff restarted in October. Just this time, during nights, weekends and other free time.

Sample Keynote presentation in LibreOffice 4.2

It is with a huge pleasure that I realized that we start to have a vibrant developer community around the libwpd/libwpg family, as well as around Valek&aposs reverse-engineering framework. SUSE Hackweek 10 helped me to produce an initial importer for Freehand file-format. Close to that, David Tardon of RedHat fame added a library to parse Keynote files and a library to convert different e-book file-formats. Laurent Alonso works like a bee on importing Microsoft Works spreadsheets (*.wks). Many exciting things in the pipeline, as you can see.

Wireframe of shapes from a sample Freehand drawing in LibreOffice 4.2

With the extension to presentations and spreadsheets, we decided that the time has come to simply break the super-stable libwpd/libwpg API and profit to make it even more future-proof and in the same token solve some of the API issues that were preventing us from importing correctly several features; most notable of which the Visio connectors.

librevenge

We decided to diminish drastically dupplication of code and we extracted from libwpd, libwpg and from libetonyek the API classes along with the used types. We created a new library, librevenge where we also added as sub-libraries the (structured) stream implementations that used to be in libwpd-stream, as well as several classes that the libraries used to copy and paste between them. The structured stream implementations support now both OLE2 and Zip containers and the relevant libraries assume this. That means that we will have to eventually extend the WPXSvStream implementation in LibreOffice&aposs "writerperfect" module to cater for Zip too.

A new sub-library, librevenge-generators has the simple implementations of the interface classes that we use to convert documents into html, text, or that we use to see the raw API calls for the purpose of regression testing. The exception is the RVNGSVGDrawingGenerator class. In the current stable branches, all of the libraries that convert graphics file-formats contain an SVG generator and they rely on its presence in several cases for things like fills with vector graphics. This class is thus not part of the librevenge-generators library, but of the base librevenge, which is a hard dependency of all of the converter libraries.

RVNGPropertyList

The base type for passing information using the API callbacks is RVNGPropertyList, which was born from libwpd&aposs WPXPropertyList. We modified the design of this class the way that each atrribute can have as a value either a simple property or an array of RVNGPropertyList element. This allows us to do more or less all that JSON is able to do. The API classes are even more flexible and future-proof, since extending the information passed in the different callbacks will not modify function signatures.

Quality improvement

Although the relevant libraries were quite extensively regression-tested in the past, the new librevenge extends the coverage of unit tests. We hope that this helps us to keep under control the basic functionalities without having to use the heavy regression tests on each commit.

Other effort is to avoid to copy in the API calls huge data structures. This effort will result in some performance improvements especially if a document contains a lot of shapes that are filled by different bitmap fills.

When will it be ready?

When it is ready! But seriously, we are trying to take our time and get the APIs right. Like this we intend to prevent gratuitous breakages of binary compatibility in the future. So, it will not be in LibreOffice 4.2 for sure.

If this is interesting for you, please drop by at #libreoffice-dev channel at irc.freenode.net in order to meet us. We cannot promise you that you will become rich, but we can guarantee you fame and eternal gratitude

The LibreOffice team attended the Open Rhein Ruhr in Oberhausen last weekend (9./10. Nov.). We, Jacqueline Rahemipour, Ellen and Walter Pape and myself, had a booth there with interesting discussions about the office suite and it’s features. We could answer some user questions and explain to them the rich amount of filters for the work with different file formats. Some visitors only showed up at the booth to thank us and the LibreOffice project for the work we have done and are doing.
In addition to running the booth I gave two presentations (in German) about ‘Office suite also for business use – LibreOffice‘ and about ‘The Document Foundation – The open, free and meritokratic future of free Software Development’. Both gave another opportunity to discuss with visitors of the Open Rhein Ruhr the current status of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation and what they expect in the future.

Converting LibreOffice dialogs to .ui format, 500 conversions milestone

We’ve now reached 500 dialogs and tabpages converted from LibreOffice’s classic fixed widget size and position .src format to the GtkBuilder .ui format.

Using the guesstimate tool ./bin/count-todo-dialogs the current status is:

500 .ui files currently exist
There are 213 unconverted dialogs
There are 127 unconverted tabpages
An estimated additional 340 .ui are required

Digging down a little there is just 1 tabpage + 2 dialogs in draw/impress (sd) and 6 tabpages + 8 dialogs in writer remaining to convert from the old format. The remainder are in calc or in the various shared modules.

The How to conversion guide is still relevant, and help is always appreciated.

Take the corner, going to crash
Headlights, head on, headlines
Another junkie lives too fast
Yeah, lives way too fast, fast, fast, woh

– Fuel, Reload, Metallica

So, LibreOffice 4.2.0 alpha1 has been tagged upstream a week ago. It is an alpha release, essentially only a tagged snapshot of the LibreOffice master branch and as such might eat your kitten and kill unsuspecting relatives. On the other hand, if you absolutely are of the type that Metallica roars about in the above quote and therefore you are running the development release of Ubuntu (trusty tahr, which will become Ubuntu 14.04 LTS), you can add the LibreOffice prereleases PPA and try it out and report bugs. Of course, you should not use this in a production environment of any kind!

Im happy to see that this build available again a week earlier than last year, as early testing allows more bugs to be triaged and fixed in time. The more important difference though is that last year, the alpha version was build on the stable and released version of Ubuntu, while this year the version is already build against the early and moving development version of Ubuntu.

Happy testing!

Reblogged from the Lanedo GmbH blog: During recent weeks, I’ve started to create a new tool “Tobin” to generate website statistics for a number of sites I’m administrating or helping with. I’ve used programs like Webalizer, Visitors, Google Analytics and others for a long time, but there’re some correlations and relationships hidden in web server [...]

During recent weeks, I’ve started to create a new tool “Tobin” to generate website statistics for a number of sites I’m administrating or helping with. I’ve used programs like Webalizer, Visitors, Google Analytics and others for a long time, but…

The new cppunit release which is just a minor update brings mainly support for 64bit Windows builds and fixed some packaging bugs related to the Visual Studio project files. For Linux/Unix users the only change is that we report dlopen errors now correctly thanks to a LibreOffice patch.

Please report bugs and feature requests to the freedesktop bugzilla or the developer mailing list. More information including the MD5 hash can be found on the project page.

A few weeks ago we started to have a quite interesting discussion on the LibreOffice project’s marketing mailing list on how to engage users in our community. Readers of Moved by Freedom – Powered by Standards may remember that during the LibreOffice Conference of 2012 in Berlin, the marketing strategy had already defined that the mission of marketing for the LibreOffice project was not to market a product but rather to grow the size of the community of contributors, improve the communications and raise the brand awareness of LibreOffice. This strategy was clearly reaffirmed during our second marketing workshop in Milano in September 2013. 

Thus, a few weeks ago, a serious discussion started that resulted in the creation of an online survey specifically targeted at end users, and by end users, mostly people who do not contribute or are not involved in the LibreOffice project. The survey was a success in terms of respondents: close to 600 people took the time to answer and I’d like to thank all of them for their time. Full results can be downloaded on the LibreOffice wiki but I’ve mirrored them here. We spread the word on the users mailing lists, forums (all of them multi-lingual) and social networks.  What do our users tell us?

Users want to join LibreOffice

While this is not an absolute majority, many users think they could find the time to contribute to the LibreOffice project. Is it surprising? Yes and no. In a sense you would expect a majority of users to use LibreOffice the same way they could use any other productivity suite and in this particular case, it’s free so maybe they wouldn’t care. Wrong! While some users either claim they don’t have the time or that they donated money outright (roughly 26% combined), a larger number actually points out they don’t know how to do that or they were not even aware they could contribute to the project (around 33% total) The rest of them either claim it’s too difficult, or that they’re already contributing (my hunch is that these respondents are already on the project’s mailing list, but it’s open to debate). I’d like to focus on the users who tell us they are interested in contributing to LibreOffice, because that’s the purpose of the survey and that their proportion – a third of the respondents- is actually important.

Users are confused about how to contribute

Here comes the other results of the survey. Whether clearly stated (in the fourth question, which was not a mandatory  one) or implied in the question 2, users tend to be confused about what to do and how to contribute. It seems our website – and ourselves, the people- aren’t good or clear as to what can be done for the LibreOffice project. I hear someone in the back saying that our Easy Hacks have been a tremendous success. They have. Except they were meant for developers, and developers know how to find an exhaustive list that’s reasonably well documented on a wiki. Users do not seem to find the right information as to what tasks need them or what they could be doing in general. Drawing on the questions 2 and 4, but as well as the susequent questions and answers, there are several levels, so to speak, in this confusion:

• the website is not clear on what can be done
• the website is not clear on the tools available (one has to understand that as to the availability of QA tools I think)
• there is no team or process that can enroll them or make them feel part of the project

Quality Assurance and Documentation are difficult to reach

The question 7 let respondents fill in whatever they thought is hard to find on the website. My initial analysis (feedback welcome!) is that all in all, people seem to be looking for help and when they are looking to contribute, they are looking to run tests on LibreOffice and they can’t find enough information about these two areas. In a nutshell, they are screaming for documentation (and my guess is that given the survey was made available in several languages, this remark applies in full to specific native-language projects) and quality assurance. I’m not done parsing through all the answers (at least those that make sense). People looking for documentation and people looking for quality assurance are two different issues. But they both point to a lack of clarity of the website.

Users are not developers but they sure can contribute

Question 7 and 10 provide more granular  data on how users think could help. Question 8 is about the time respondents think they could give to the project on a weekly basis. The answers to these three questions combined give a very clear and coherent picture on what kind of contribution users could provide: users support, involvement in local activities and quality assurance. These three activities are possible without requiring too much time on a weekly basis  and do not require strong technical knowledge. Perhaps more surprisingly, creative tasks such as designing templates or artwork does not seem a popular option. A distant, but nonetheless relatively interesting option seems to be writing or translating documentation.

Users want to give back, wherever they come from

I’d like to mention two questions that may not seem to be of immediate use nor revealing a particular truth. Questions 9 and 11 highlight the underlying reason -as much as it can be highlighted in such a survey- people would like to contribute  to the project: they use the product, and based on the question 1, many of them do since the beginning or at least since 2 years, and they would like to give back. That’s a good reason, and probably the kind of reason that prompts someone to want to improve the quality of the product. While there’s no geographical breakdown of this question, we at least have an idea of the geographical location of the respondents. A majority comes from Europe (the survey was translated in Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish). Despite not being available in the related languages, respondents from Poland, Denmark and Czech Republic were many. Outside of Europe, people from all the Americas were very represented. In South America, Chile and Argentina, alongside Brazil need to be mentioned for having a sizeable number of respondents. Just as encouraging -perhaps even more so, knowing the small size of the LibreOffice community in the U.S., we had quite a large number of respondents from various states of the Union. This  may offer a precious insight as to how we could grow the community in this geography.

Closing yet temporary remarks

While the data must be parsed and analyzed in more detail the two main points that really matter to me at  least are that we have an untapped source of contributors who only wish to help, and that they could help if only we could provide them with the right information online.  The website redesign project that I’m happy to drive certainly could not have arrived at a better moment.