OfficeBuzz

So, this was a busy and inspiring day. About hacking, sadly that happened only a little. Someone had his laptop stolen this morning, others were getting the build environment in shape again after different use, experimental OS-installations, another still hacking the Windows build system.. In effect there was only *one* building system: mine ;-) Which Rob gratefully used to work on the Scanner window. So Joost, who delivered a patch earlier (renaming sheets in Calc while copying) and I looked the code, hunting for ideas / hacks at various places in the code. You know, the things that you hope/expect to be not tooooo complicated. Yes, those ;-) Was good and I learned some useful things. Sad still, that little work in the code was done this day. Nevertheless, all 7 that attended were pretty happy with the gathering. There was a lot to talk about things that happened since last year. What is so obvious for the people that are active in the international project week after week, can be com...

Last weekend there was a tremendous event for LibreOffice hackers in Münich. [1]. More than 30 people joining for some days and working on features, bugs, UX (and pasta ..) It's obvious that there is a great base of LibreOffice users and devs in Germany (and Italy ;-) ) What about The Netherlands and Flanders? We had some small events already last year. With between 5 to 10 people joining and learning about, cooperating on localisation, development, features.. The next Saturday we have a new event planned. In the science city of Eindhoven. We also invite the old friends from OOo to share about all that's going on and cooperation. More on the wiki [2]. 1] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest2011 2] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/NL/bijeenkomst_11-09-10

It's been a while since I wrote here. And now some bits about LibreOffice development... I won't start explaining much technical details here - that is beyond my competences. But recently I have been hanging around some day's on the developers IRC channel. That was for some help to get used to building LibreOffice from source because I like to work/test with new features, and to dig a bit in the code here and there. Well building LibreOffice turns out to be really simple [1]. Not that is is necessary to do for bleeding edge testing: there are nightly builds available regularly [2]. When I say: building LibreOffice is really simple, I have to add that this is on Linux mainly. Which brings me more to the core message of this blog post. While being on IRC and also lurking on the developer list -as usual- I became very much impressed by all the hard and tough work that the developers do. The ones doing it as full time job, but not less the ones that do it alongside other ...

For those able to read Dutch, or só much interested that they want to make the effort to learn it ;-) there is my Dutch blog post , explaining my opinion on the start of OpenOffice.org as an incubator project at the Apache Software Foundation. Very short summary: quite some concerns, and missing the opportunity of the forces grown around LibreOffice, but not fully negative - maybe there grows something good.

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...