OfficeBuzz

Last Friday (December 17th) I was invited for a podcast done by the "IT-Bende" ('Bende' can be translated as 'gang' but also as 'a mess', as in a badly cleaned house.) This ITBende is a group of IT-professionals, that discusses the latest news/developments each week. Latest news ... so that must be LibreOffice. Of course the talk was about the start of LibreOffice coming from OpenOffice.org. It was fun to notice the visions, that spoke from the questions that the people had. One bit out-dated idea, IMO, was the call to finally include an e-mail client in LibreOffice. More of these days, were the questions about Google Docs and working via the web. One long standing issue is about the conflict between a simple user interface and the vast amount of available functions. Maybe it is time after all, to offer 'skins' to serve the various audiences? The Podcast can be listened via http://www.itbende.nl/blog/2010/12/itbende-podcast-nr-81-libreoffice/ ...

The Dutch Linux User-group (NLLGG) invited me to their meeting on December 11 to give a presentation about LibreOffice. Of course I was glad to accept the invitation, and held my talk with the bit provoking title: "LibreOffice, the successor of OpenOffice.org ??" Some 30 people joined and I explained them about the start of LibreOffice , what we are working on and what is the goal: an open community, where contributing is fun and attractive. And of course creating an excellent piece of open source software. The audience was enthusiastic about the developments. Which is not surprising, speaking to people that are catched by the idea of open source. Most of them could well understand why the group of volunteers from OpenOffice.org, that started with LibreOffice, wanted to work freer and easier, and do not want to be dependent on the one big sponsor, nowadays Oracle. During the preparations of the presentation I was digging through nearly all that had happened in the past mon...

Have been busy days last years. Yeah, running a business and working in open source.. However more and more interesting stuff happening, so decided to dig up my blog for a new start ... Keep on watching this!