OfficeBuzz

Honestly a day one should not miss: * hacking LibreOffice code together * working with others on documentation * looking at the new features ... An interesting, open day for users and other active members in the OpenOffice.org/ LibreOffice community. More details at the wiki of the Dutch language group in the TDF.

Today, April 15, Oracle announced that they will follow a different route with OpenOffice.org. Oracle no longer looks at it as a commercial product, but will hand it all over to a community, a foundation or something like that. An organisation where all parties feel comfortable. This news can be read from this article , where Chief Architect Edward Screven is cited. On The Register I read an analysis , that was advised to me by 'an anonymus source' as 'interesting'. So where will Oracle find a place for OpenOffice.org? Since September 28 2010 there is The Document Foundation, where a large part of the former OpenOffice.org community joined to continue working on the product in a free project, in an independent organisation. Oracle did not want to join by then - therefore now The Document Foundation releases the program LibreOffice, and not OpenOffice.org... Then today Oracles remarkable change in course. This is a big step forward in the direction that I expressed as a ...

Last weeks Thursday, March 24, five Dutch LibreOffice hackers met for a special event: we were invited at the yearly congress of the NoiV – a Dutch governmental institute for the adoption of open standards and open source. We were there to show how developing open source works. All five of us have widely varying experience and skills. Speaking for myself, I am not really the most experienced C++ developer, far from that, but still could do useful work during the event and helping understanding features etc. Even more: our different backgrounds definitely helped us, to have a very interesting and useful day. Not only did we some good work on some interesting and useful code: we also learned a lot of each others skills, of the work itself, and as bonus were able to explain other people at the congress the suite and our work. So first some pictures: (see pictures one and two from Paul Ridderhof on flickr). Pieces of code we worked on and had a look at were - toggle function for Notes i...

One of the features why LibreOffice en OpenOffice.org excel is the native use of the open, ISO-certified ODF file format. ODF is evolved from the first complex XML fike format designed for office-documents, back in 2000 by the at that time very new OpenOffice.org project. One of the features of an xml based file is that the content can be read and edited as flat text. Not rather convenient for daily use; however very powerful for automated tasks and small extra tricks. I want to share an example of the last possibility here. Basic is, that everything that you can set in a document for formatting, content end so forth, can be found in standardised xml documents. Therefore sometimes new features in your favourite ODF supporting suite, can only be implemented as a standard, once the ODF file format is extended for that use. A recent example: coloured tabs in Calc. The other way round is possible too: there can be a feature supported by the file format, that you do not (yet) find in the us...

While the train drives me to Arnhem, let me write a little report from FOSDEM 2011. Short version: it was a really good weekend :-) Bit longer: as usual the booth at this great European free and open source software event, is an extreme mixture of meeting new people, discussing the work and product, enjoying the opportunity to better learn people from the community. You may notice that I do not mention the chance for gathering knowledge and improving technical skills, by visiting presentations and workshops. Well, that obviously was hardly relevant for me, since I was at the booth the most of the time. Another special thing in this weekend was meeting some friends from OpenOffice.org that were at the same place ;-) For LibreOffice we had a nice booth in the main building of the event, where we could sell shirts and hand over stickers. Both developers and people working on less technical stuff, talked all Saturday with so many people, explaining more about the history of The Document Fo...

Recently I visited a business relation, Hans de Vries from the Securityacademy , whom I helped last year with a nice basic script to correct bullets in Impress. Of course we discussed LibreOffice. Hans is expert on security and safety for many years now. But long before he worked in the university area, and from that time he remembered discussions with enthusiastic unix and open source developers, who didn't have much appetite to join OpenOffice.org. They didn't like to share copyrights for code-contributions with Sun, as was asked. Personally, I do not weight that issue so heavy (but frankly, I am not a developer at thàt level..), but I know it is an issue for others. Anyhow, I find it striking that it is this story that pops up, when talking about LibreOffice. Needless to say that Hans is very much interested in our project.

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/ ...