Status quo on the Foundation, October 2011
30 de Outubro de 2011, 0:00 - sem comentários aindaIt has been a while since I have blogged about the Foundation status, but the Steering Committee have been very active on this topic in the meantime. Now that we are handing over to the new Board of Directors, it is good to document where we have reached.
First, we are delighted that the elections of the first BoD are now official. As promised, the Steering Committee has ceased its existence, and the TDF members voted on the new BoD in an open, transparent and meritocratic way. Gratifyingly, the Members have elected the core of the former Steering Committee onto the Board and I’m thus able to use “we” interchangeably in this report! The next election to take place will be the one of the Membership Committee, so expect an official announcement on that soon.
On to the status of incorporation. As previously planned, we approached three German federal states, and got very valuable feedback from them. One of our three candidates showed very strong support and is most likely to be the final location for The Document Foundation. We don’t want to pre-empt any result and therefore will not communicate the state’s name in public, but the secret will hopefully be revealed very soon.
We have included many improvements into the legally binding statutes, based on extensive input from many sources. We are right now in the process of translating the German legalese into English, so our new Board of Directors can make a final review. Based on the Board’s decision, we will hand over the documents to the authorities and hope for a positive reply. As soon as we receive that, the legal setup of the Foundation will be started and we will finally be incorporated.
We’d like to take the chance to respond to some questions on the process of legally establishing our entity. It has indeed taken much longer than we had initially expected, and we have to admit that our estimation on the necessary timeframe was wrong. However, the whole lengthy process has been educational and has led to a much more considered outcome. Together with the community, we have worked extensively on bylaws we wanted to have reflected in the legal entity of the Foundation.
In contrast to the the former model of having a single corporate sponsor – and different to what many other legal vehicles could provide – the Foundation we are creating guarantees endurance, safety and stability for the whole community, both for end-users and for private as well as corporate contributors. It also gives the community very strong rights. While previously – legally speaking – any community rules were arbitrary, the rights given to community members in this new model are not only binding, but legally enforceable by every single member.
Again: The rights we promised will be legally binding and enforceable by our members. There are not many – if any at all – communities giving such strong rights to their members. Creating such an intentionally durable and strong structure from the beginning is uncommon and we found that this has been something innovative and new for our advisors as well as the authorities, which has led to the slow progress we’ve encountered.
We invested lots of time to express fundamental and legally binding rights for our community and that task has admittedly proved enormous. But the time invested so far is justified by the goals we wanted to achieve from day one – an open, transparent and meritocratic organization, independent from any corporate sponsor and designed specifically for the purposes of The Document Foundation rather than borrowed from elsewhere. We are sure spending this time has been very much worth it.
Document Foundation Board 2011: Final Results
29 de Outubro de 2011, 0:00 - sem comentários aindaSimon Phipps posted this today to the announcement mailing list:
“Having received no objections to the preliminary election results I posted on October 20th within the period described in the election rules, it is now my pleasure to declare the results of the 2011 Board elections for The Document Foundation.
I declare the following Members of The Document Foundation duly elected as Board Members:
- Thorsten Behrens
- Florian Effenberger
- Olivier Hallot
- Michael Meeks
- Caolán McNamara
- Charles-H Schulz
- Italo Vignoli
I declare the following Members of The Document Foundation duly elected as Deputies:
- Jesús Corrius
- Andreas Mantke
- Bjoern Michaelsen
Full election materials can be found at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/2011/
Thanks for the opportunity to contribute to The Document Foundation in this way, and congratulations to the Board members on their election.”
LibreOffice Extensions and Templates Repository is online
28 de Outubro de 2011, 0:00 - sem comentários aindaAre you looking for ways to enhance your free office suite? Do you need some nice templates? The Document Foundation is proud to announce that today, the LibreOffice Extensions and Templates repository has been put online at
http://extensions.libreoffice.org
and
http://templates.libreoffice.org
This new website is one of the many community efforts at the LibreOffice project. Led by Andreas Mantke, a team of international community volunteers has worked hard during the past weeks to make this new repository possible, to the benefit of millions of LibreOffice and free office users worldwide.
We welcome everyone to try out the growing number of available extensions, and we invite developers to upload their own templates and plugins, to make them available to users worldwide.
Itaipu desenvolverá LibreOffice
25 de Outubro de 2011, 0:00 - sem comentários ainda
Document Foundation Board 2011: Preliminary Results
20 de Outubro de 2011, 0:00 - sem comentários aindaThe election results have been processed using OpenSTV by multiple members of the Membership Committee, and I am now confident that we have a result ready for review pending confirmation next week. Full election materials can be found at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/2011/
PRELIMINARY RESULTS
Candidates are sorted here in their order of overall preference after all preferences have been considered according to the Meek STV with Droop-Dynamic-Fractional threshold method. The first seven preferences will be elected as Board members after confirmation; the remaining three will be elected as Deputies.
Board Members:
- Florian Effenberger
- Thorsten Behrens
- Michael Meeks
- Caolán McNamara
- Italo Vignoli
- Olivier Hallot
- Charles-H Schulz
DEPUTIES:
- Bjoern Michaelsen
- Andreas Mantke
- Jesús Corrius
CONFIRMATION PERIOD:
The detailed results of running OpenSTV can be found at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/results.php?election_id=1 and a list of all votes cast can be found at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/votes.php?election_id=1
You can run the calculation yourself using OpenSTV from http://www.openstv.org/; the machine-readable votes are at https://elections.documentfoundation.org/blt.php?election_id=1 and the preference ordering is achieved by sorting according to keep factor in the final round of calculation.
Any eligible voter may challenge the preliminary results by e-mailing elections@documentfoundation.org prior to 2011-10-26 at 23:59 UTC with a detailed explanation of their challenge. The decision of the Membership Committee as to any challenge shall be final. Once any challenges have been resolved, the Membership Committee shall announce the final results.
LibreOffice Conference Announcements
14 de Outubro de 2011, 0:00 - sem comentários aindaDuring the LibreOffice Conference, The Document Foundation has announced:
* LibreOffice Online Prototype: you can watch a demo video at the following address:
http://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2011-10-10-lool-demo.webm. LibreOffice Online is based on GTK+ framework and HTML5′s canvas, and has been developed by SUSE’s Michael Meeks, built on GTK+ broadway from RedHat’s Alex Laarson.
* LibreOffice port project to Android and iOS, based on the voluntary work of Tor Lillqvist, a SUSE finnish developer know for having ported GIMP to Windows. The LibreOffice Android and iOS port has the objective of bringing the office suite to iPads and Android tablets, and eventually smaller devices. The user interface work has yet to start in earnest but the bulk of the code is compiling.
Please note that these are not products available to end users, but advanced development projects which will become products sometimes in late 2012 or early 2013.
* 500.000 desktops, mostly Windows, at several French Government entities switching from OpenOffice to LibreOffice (this increases the Windows installed base of LibreOffice by 5% in a single move)
* 800.000 USB keys with LibreOffice and other free software distributed to students of the Paris Region (Île-de-France)
* Region Île-de-France becoming a member of TDF Advisory Board
Conference ad-hoc information
9 de Outubro de 2011, 0:00 - sem comentários aindaTo all participants of the LibreOffice Conference:
Updates, important announcements and changes in the schedule of the LibreOffice Conference will be announced via Identi.ca and Twitter. Simply follow @docufoundation or open one of these URLs in your browser:
While we try to also feed the blog, the mailing lists and other social networks with updates, the above channels are to be considered official and will be updated in time.
Looking forward to meeting you in Paris!
The Document Foundation publishes details of LibreOffice 3.4.3 security fixes
5 de Outubro de 2011, 0:00 - sem comentários aindaThe Internet, October 4, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) publishes some details of the security fixes included with the recently released LibreOffice 3.4.3, and included in the older 3.3.4 version. Following industry best practice, details of security fixes are withheld until users have been given time to migrate to the new version.
RedHat security researcher Huzaifa Sidhpurwala identified a memory corruption vulnerability in the code responsible for loading Microsoft Word documents in LibreOffice. This flaw could have been used for nefarious purposes, such as installing viruses, through a specially-crafted file. The corresponding vulnerability description is CVE-2011-2713,”Out-of-bounds property read in binary .doc filter”.
LibreOffice 3.4.3 also includes various improvements to the loading of Windows Metafile (.wmf) and Windows Enhanced Metafile (.emf) image formats that were found through fuzz testing.
LibreOffice developers have developed some additional security patches and fixes. These are part of a general set of development improvements which are reflected in the overall quality and stability of the software. Most LibreOffice 3.4.3 security fixes have been developed by Caolan McNamara of RedHat and Marc-André Laverdière of Tata Consultancy Services.
“Working on fuzzing LibreOffice import filters has been a great experience, and I am glad I could contribute in securing the computing experience of millions of users,” said Marc-André Laverdière, Scientist, TCS Innovation Labs, Tata Consultancy Services, Ltd. “Working in cooperation with the TDF development team, we have found and fixed serious security and crasher bugs.”
All users are recommended to upgrade to LibreOffice 3.4.3 as soon as possible, in order to benefit from the improved security of the office suite. LibreOffice 3.4.3 can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org.
ODF 1.2 has been approved as an OASIS standard
1 de Outubro de 2011, 0:00 - 5 comentáriosODF 1.2, the document format adopted by LibreOffice, has been approved as an OASIS standard. Although we are still waiting the formal OASIS announcement, there have been a dry email by Chet Ensign and a more enthusiastic post by Rob Weir who provide several details about the story. Amongst the TC members who have contributed during the process, Rob lists two TDF founders – Thorsten Behrens and Charles Schulz – and an extremely active and well known LibreOffice core developer: Kohei Yoshida.
Standard document formats are key for liberating the user from the lock in of proprietary formats. ODF has been developed by OASIS based on OOo document format, and is now supported by most personal productivity software and many other computer programs. TDF is committed to supporting ODF and contribute to its development. ODF will be one of four main topics at the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in Paris.
