TDF in 2012: a summary

The cumulative number of new hackers attracted by the project since September 2010 (being LibreOffice a true free software project, there are many volunteers who come and go, and many with just one or two commits).

I have tried to summarize in a single text what we – members, developers, volunteers, native language communities, advocates and supporters – have achieved during 2012. Looking back, it has been amazing.

TDF has started 2012 with a hackers community of 379 individuals, mostly volunteers, which has continued to grow steadily – month after month – and has now reached the amazing figure of 567 developers (320 active during the last 12 months, which means that LibreOffice is the third largest open source desktop software project after Chrome and Firefox).

Monthly contributors during the last two years, with the global 12 month average shown by the green line on the upper right corner).

In early 2012, The Document Foundation – an truly community based independend organization – has been registered in Berlin, under the form of a German Stiftung (supervised by the German authorities). The oldest German Stiftung dates back to 1509, and over 250 of them have existed for over 500 years (so, stability is not an issue).

Once established, The Document Foundation has immediately attracted additional sponsors and supporters. Intel and Lanedo have joined the Advisory Board, while Project LiMux (City of Munich) and MIMO (the French Government organization responsible for the migration to FOSS) are actively supporting the project.

The long tail of LibreOffice development during 2012 (the 320 committers active between January 2012 and December 2012), with a pie explosion of the top 33 hackers with over 100 commits.

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice role inside the free software ecosystem have been recognized by the French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in a formal letter to the members of the French government.

In 2012, The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 3.4.5, LibreOffice 3.5, LibreOffice 3.5.1, LibreOffice 3.4.6, LibreOffice 3.5.2, LibreOffice 3.5.3, LibreOffice 3.5.4, LibreOffice 3.5.5, LibreOffice 3.6, LibreOffice 3.5.6, LibreOffice 3.6.1, LibreOffice 3.6.2, LibreOffice 3.5.7 and LibreOffice 3.6.3. LibreOffice 3.4 has been awarded Linux Questions Office Suite of the Year 2011.

Linux Questions has awarded LibreOffice the title of Office Suite of the Year 2011.

In addition, the hackers community has started working on LibreOffice 4.0, which is already at Beta 2 and will be announced in February 2013. LibreOffice 4.0 will be a milestone release, and the first of a new generation of free office suites.

In order to further improve the quality of LibreOffice 3.5, 3.6 and 4, the QA community has organized several bug hunting sessions during 2012 and a full bug hunting marathon in December 2012 (with almost 500 bugs chased during a full week of tests).

LibreOffice community has met at FOSDEM in Brussels, at LinuxTag in Berlin, at LibreOffice Conference in Berlin, and in Hamburg and Munich for TDF Hackfests. In addition, local hackfests have been organized in the Netherlands and Brazil, and LibreOffice volunteers have attended several local events around the world.

Linux Journal has awarded LibreOffice the title of Best office Suite 2012.

In February 2012, TDF has launched LibreOffice Ask page, and the Windows version of LibreOffice has been made available for downloads from the Intel AppUp Center targeted to mobile PC and UltraBook owners.

In September 2012, TDF has joined the OASIS Consortium (Organisation for the Advancement of Standards in Information Society (OASIS). At the end of the same month, the new Membership Committee has been elected by TDF members: five members – Sophie Gautier, Fridrich Štrba (Chairman), Eike Rathke, Cor Nouws and Jean Weber – and two deputies – Simon Phipps and Leif Lodahl.

LibreOffice has been awarded the title of Free Office Suite of the Year 2011 by LinuxQuestions, and Best Office Suite 2012 by Linux Journal (in both cases, getting over 70% of the votes). In Brazil, LibreOffice has received the “Technology For Citizens Award” from Guarulhos City.

LibreOffice downloads from unique IPs during 2012. Scale on the left shows daily downloads, scale on the right shows cumulative downloads in 2012.

During 2012, many private and public organization have announced the migration of their desktop office suite to LibreOffice: several French ministries (500,000 desktops), city of Munich in Germany (15,000 desktops), the Capital Region of Denmark, Vieira do Minho in Portugal, Limerick in Ireland, Grygov in the Czech Republic, Las Palmas in Spain, the City of Largo in Florida, the municipality of Pilea-Hortiatis in Greece, Regione Umbria, Provincia di Milano and Provincia di Bolzano in Italy, and the Public Library System of Chicago.

This growth is reflected in the downloads of the Windows and MacOS X versions during 2012. The number of unique IPs who have downloaded LibreOffice has grown from just over 200,000 per week in January to well over 600,000 in December, for a total of 15 million unique IPs in 2012. Linux users, with very few exceptions, do not download LibreOffice as they can get the software from the repository of their distribution of choice.

The Document Foundation has also announced the Certification Program for LibreOffice, and the first group of certified developers. In 2013, the program will be extended to professionals active in migrations and trainings, and later to L1 and L2 support.

Florian Effenberger

The last, and in my opinion the best news of 2012, waits TDF under the Xmas tree: in fact, just a few days before Xmas TDF has hired the first employee, to manage the infrastructure and take care of administrative tasks (which, thanks to the extremely fast growth of the project, are now a full time task): Florian Effenberger, who is already popular inside the project for his volunteer work.

The Board of Directors – with the obvious exception of Florian – has unanimously chosen him for infrastructure and administrative tasks, as he is already familiar with both, being the architect behind the entire infrastructure and the person who has been talking with the authorities during the process of putting in place The Document Foundation.

Florian Effenberger has been active inside the OOo project from 2004 to 2010, as infrastructure and then marketing lead, and has been a founder of TDF. During all these years he has put an incredible amount of hours – of his personal time – behind free software, OOo and LibreOffice.

From now on, Florian will devote his working hours to TDF, and will add the usual amount of volunteer hours for his BoD duties (which must be volunteer based, according to our statutes).

Florian Effenberger is going to be a tremendous asset for TDF, because he knows perfectly our ecosystem, he is a true free software advocate, and he is knowledgeable not only on administration and infrastructure but also on marketing.

Looking at 2013 and beyond, The Document Foundation is ready to face every challenge, and win over the competition not only by providing a better product but also by creating a different and better ecosystem for free office suites.

So far, TDF has been an exciting journey, and I am sure that what has happened is just the first chapter of a long and successful history.

LibreOffice Munich Hack-fest

The intense pace of development work on LibreOffice as we approach our 4.0 release has rather delayed an update on our recent extremely successful LibreOffice hack-fest. To give an idea of the work going on, instead of the around 1500 commits per month we normally get, we had nearly a month’s worth of commits in the last two weeks before our feature freeze, with lots of bug fixing ever since; things have been busy.

Some portion of this work was done by the more than thirty LibreOffice developers that arrived to augment the existing Munich Limux developers – who kindly hosted us. Munich is a forward looking enterprise who have deployed Linux to their fifteen-thousand users, and have committed to moving to LibreOffice.  First of all – many thanks to our friendly hosts who provided a great venue, helped feed us, so we could continue coding late into the night, and tidied up the detritus afterwards: your contribution is greatly appreciated.

It was also nice to meet a number of the Debian guys – who had a separate room for a parallel bug squashing party some of whom took an interest in and did a little LibreOffice work too. We had over thirty participants for LibreOffice alone, with other new people we’d never met before showing up and getting involved over the weekend which was particularly encouraging.

So what did we get done ?

as always with LibreOffice there were a lot of scattered improvements; you can read the full list in the wiki, but here are some highlights:

• Miklos with Michael Stahl obsoleted a great chunk of horrible RTF filter, improved performance and should significantly improve our copy/paste behavior on windows from MS Office.
• Robert, David, Bjoern and Norbert(remotely) helped get a staging / gerrit test site up and running to help upgrade and manage our gerrit instance (which makes contributing patches very easy)
• Kendy made the UI for the drop-down style selector very much more attractive with live previews
• Rob Snelders and Christine Koppelt made some great strides improving the (pretty) Bug Submission Assistant that Loic originally created to give bugzilla an end-user usable bug filing front-end.
• Michael Meeks worked on getting to the bottom of an intermittent Java / LibreOffice crasher causing the critical Wolmux e-government plugin problems. Thanks to Andrew Haley of RedHat for fixing the underlying problem (in Java naturally).
• Lionel and David made improvements to ‘Base’ and helped debug longer term issues
• Thorsten worked on polishing the Android remote-control for Impress
• Markus made conditional formatting even more beautiful and stable in Calc
• Peter Baumgarten produced a beautiful playterm session (with video thanks to Cloph) to help people build LibhreOffice as well as some German comment translations.
• Christina Roßmanith worked on  improvements for SVG import
• Markus Maier translated some German code comments, and helped migrate dialogs to the new UI layout.
• Italo Vignoli – inspired us with various kinds of wonderful Italian food.
• and more (that was not easy to enumerate).

It was excellent to see so many friendly faces, introduce new people to the team, get people more familiar with the code, meet old friends and be encouraged about the great progress we’re making. Getting everyone to stand in one place, at the same time proved rather problematic, however here is a picture of a subset of twenty-plus happy LibreOffice contributors, and some Debian-ites:

Finally, none of this can happen without people helping to host and fund the work.  Many thanks to those who provided financial and logistical support to the enterprise – as well as our many individual donors who help support The Document Foundation’s ability to get developers together to improve their productivity.

The Limux Project: hosting and co-organising, thanks to Jan-Marek Glogowski

Thorsten Heintke – an individual donation for travel bursaries

Credativ GmbH for food and beverages

DBI Klarl & Schuler GmbH for the saturday pizza

LibreOffice Conference 2013 Proposals

Following our public call for locations, The Document Foundation has received the following two proposals for hosting the LibreOffice Conference 2013, in alphabetical order:

• Milan, Italy
  Read the original proposal in PDF format here.
• Montreal, Canada
  Read the original proposal in PDF format here.

The Document Foundation would like to thank all proponents for their support, which is truly appreciated! Soon, we will start a public vote to determine the location of the 2013 Conference. In the meantime, we invite the community to discuss with the proponents on our discuss mailing list any questions they have.

Thanks again, and looking forward to seeing you in 2013!

The LibreOffice community organises a 6 day Test Marathon to help preparing the new 4.0 version of LibreOffice

Berlin, December 7 2012, The Document Foundation announces the LibreOffice 4.0 Test Marathon. During 6 days, from December 14 to 19, users and supporters around the world will be testing the first beta of the upcoming LibreOffice 4.0.

The final version of LibreOffice 4.0 will be released in February 2013. By organising this big Test Marathon early, the developers will be able to fix many bugs before the release candidates and the final version are made available.

The LibreOffice community has organised various bug hunt sessions before, with many people joining, bugs found and tests done. This has contributed considerably to the overall quality of the product.
Also participants were enthusiastic. Thanks to helping in the QA work, they learned a lot about powerful functions of LibreOffice and tricks how to use the office suite.

Participating is easy and fun. Since the event is lasting a week, everyone may choose the moments that suit them best.

Details are available on the wiki of The Document Foundation

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Test_Marathon_LibreOffice_4.0.

There’s also an overview of LibreOffice 4.0 new and improved features http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0.

All participants need is a PC with Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, and a LibreOffice 4.0 test version (which will be available from http://www.libreoffice.org/pre-releases a few days before the Test Marathon), plus a lot of enthusiasm.

Filing bugs will be extremely easy, thanks to the help of experienced people who will be around those days to help users and supporters with tips, on the QA mailing list (libreoffice-qa@freedesktop.org) and on the IRC channel (irc://chat.freenode.net/libreoffice-qa).

The LibreOffice community organises a 6 day Test Marathon to help preparing the new 4.0 version of LibreOffice

Berlin, December 7 2012, The Document Foundation announces the LibreOffice 4.0 Test Marathon. During 6 days, from December 14 to 19, users and supporters around the world will be testing the first beta of the upcoming LibreOffice 4.0.

The final version of LibreOffice 4.0 will be released in February 2013. By organising this big Test Marathon early, the developers will be able to fix many bugs before the release candidates and the final version are made available.

The LibreOffice community has organised various bug hunt sessions before, with many people joining, bugs found and tests done. This has contributed considerably to the overall quality of the product.
Also participants were enthusiastic. Thanks to helping in the QA work, they learned a lot about powerful functions of LibreOffice and tricks how to use the office suite.

Participating is easy and fun. Since the event is lasting a week, everyone may choose the moments that suit them best.

Details are available on the wiki of The Document Foundation

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Test_Marathon_LibreOffice_4.0.

There’s also an overview of LibreOffice 4.0 new and improved features http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0.

All participants need is a PC with Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, and a LibreOffice 4.0 test version (which will be available from http://www.libreoffice.org/pre-releases a few days before the Test Marathon), plus a lot of enthusiasm.

Filing bugs will be extremely easy, thanks to the help of experienced people who will be around those days to help users and supporters with tips, on the QA mailing list (libreoffice-qa@freedesktop.org) and on the IRC channel (irc://chat.freenode.net/libreoffice-qa).

The LibreOffice community organises a 6 day Test Marathon to help preparing the new 4.0 version of LibreOffice

Berlin, December 7 2012, The Document Foundation announces the LibreOffice 4.0 Test Marathon. During 6 days, from December 14 to 19, users and supporters around the world will be testing the first beta of the upcoming LibreOffice 4.0.

The final version of LibreOffice 4.0 will be released in February 2013. By organising this big Test Marathon early, the developers will be able to fix many bugs before the release candidates and the final version are made available.

The LibreOffice community has organised various bug hunt sessions before, with many people joining, bugs found and tests done. This has contributed considerably to the overall quality of the product.
Also participants were enthusiastic. Thanks to helping in the QA work, they learned a lot about powerful functions of LibreOffice and tricks how to use the office suite.

Participating is easy and fun. Since the event is lasting a week, everyone may choose the moments that suit them best.

Details are available on the wiki of The Document Foundation

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Test_Marathon_LibreOffice_4.0.

There’s also an overview of LibreOffice 4.0 new and improved features http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0.

All participants need is a PC with Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, and a LibreOffice 4.0 test version (which will be available from http://www.libreoffice.org/pre-releases a few days before the Test Marathon), plus a lot of enthusiasm.

Filing bugs will be extremely easy, thanks to the help of experienced people who will be around those days to help users and supporters with tips, on the QA mailing list (libreoffice-qa@freedesktop.org) and on the IRC channel (irc://chat.freenode.net/libreoffice-qa).