The Document Foundation (TDF) blog has today announced the release of LibreOffice 5.2.5 “still”, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family and is inviting all users to update to this latest release from LibreOffice 5.1.6 or previous versions.
This latest release comes with over 70 bug fixes and improvements compared with the previous version.
As usual, TDF recommends professional support for large-scale deployments of LibreOffice in major companies and public sector organisations.
Besides this latest release, LibreOffice 5.3, the next version of the more cutting edge LibreOffice “fresh” line, is due out on 1st February.
As is customary with every new release, free software advocates and community members are invited to support the work of The Document Foundation with a donation.
Yesterday the LibreOffice project celebrated its sixth anniversary since the project forked from OpenOffice.org.
Just one day later The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced on its blog the release of LibreOffice 5.2.2, the second minor release of the 5.2 series.
LibreOffice 5.2.2 is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users and features a number of fixes over the major release announced in August. Those interested in release’s technical details about the release can consult the change log to discover the bugs fixed in RC1 and those fixed in RC2.
For more conservative users and enterprise deployments, TDF recommends using LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still”, complete with the back-up of certified professional support.
Mr. Casson used Google Translate to get his message across in te reo Maori.
As a consequence, his election address dropped through the letterboxes of Maori voters made an impact for all the wrong reasons, with the unintelligible jumble of words and phrases being described by Waikato University language expert Tom Roa as “very, very, very poor“.
Another Waikato University lecturer, Te Taka Keegan, who teaches computer science and worked on Google Translate remarked: “The gibberish that is written in the second part of this bio is barely recognisable as te reo Maori, it is disrespectful to the Maori language.”
When queried, Mr. Casson said he was unaware of how his profile was translated, stating that he gave his English version to a “Maori woman” at his office to get it done.
Stuff carried out its own test, copying Casson’s English language text into Google Translate and receiving in return “a word-for-word, error-ridden version of the official Hamilton City Council“, missing prepositions, articles and connecting words.
According to Newshub, another New Zealand news site, a translation back into English of Mr. Casson’s botched Maori translation reads as follows:
Work James 26 years inside New Zealand Police, before officer Charge of Northland, Hamilton community Police centre Flagstaff.
Work overseas like a peace keeper in Bougainville, Papua new Guinea, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Timor to the United Nations.
Return the good community, work the people work to safe. James worked for Police to build safe Hamilton for you.
Straight ahead [the text then seems to be another Pacific language]. faitotonu mo e angatonu aia takitahi. KORE ki Mita Water, paying Rate for dinner Council/feast for councillors using a free Corporate Box at Stadium Waikato or by councillors.
Free waka on some of the adds being used of Auckland.
Working towards finishing vagrants in Auckland.
Resources HCC maintenence, paddlers trying to hold into a beautiful looking Hamilton.
The moral of this story is that if you want a decent translation, you’re still better of with a human being than machine translation and this is likely to be the case for many years to come.
Your ‘umble scribe has today received an email from Kurt James, Neighbourhood Partnership Co-ordinator at Bristol City Council, announcing an event next month in east Bristol.
Bristol Libraries is organising a free (as in beer. Ed. 😀 ) digital skills workshop next month in collaboration with the Ashton, Easton and Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Partnership and local volunteers to help local residents who haven’t already done so get online.
The event will be held at Junction 3 Library, Baptist Mills Court, Easton, Bristol, BS5 0FJ (map).
The date and time: Tuesday 11th October, 1.30 p.m. – 3.30 p.m.
Attendees will learn how to:
Get online for the first time;
Shop and bank online;
Access government services online;
Use social media.
Those interested can book a space at the workshop by contacting the library by telephoning 0117 9223001. Call that number too if you want more information on the workshop.
LibreOffice developers have released a series of videos to reveal what’s new in the latest release of the free and open source office suite (posts passim).
New features – general
New features – Writer word processor
New features – Calc spreadsheet
New features – Impress presentation software
The release notes for LibreOffice 5.2 are available on the Document Foundation wiki.
Speculation about the demise of Apache OpenOffice may be premature (posts passim).
German IT news site heise reports that a mailing list for new developers has been set up.
By establishing this new list, the OpenOffice team wants to make entry to the open source project easier for programmers.
OpenOffice 4.0- not quite the end of the line, possibly.
After recent discussion of a possible end for the free and open source OpenOffice productivity suite, more developers who are interested in helping with future development have approached the project. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has now established a recruitment mailing list to facilitate their access to the source code. Via the list, newcomers will receive answers to questions and suggestions about their next steps from more experienced developers.
The situation does remind your correspondent of the predicament of one Samuel L. Clemens, better known to the world as the author Mark Twain.
The Document Foundation (TDF) has celebrated the opening session of LibOCon (which is currently taking place in Brno. Ed.) with the announcement of LibreOffice 5.2.1, the latest release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family.
LibOCon is a showcase for the LibreOffice project’s activity and will feature over 60 talks in three days, covering development, quality assurance, localisation, Open Document Format (ODF), marketing, community and documentation, a business session in Czech focused on major LibreOffice deployments, as well as a meeting of the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA).
LibreOffice 5.2.1, which is aimed targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users, provides a number of fixes over the major release (5.2) announced in August. For all other users and enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still”, with the backing of certified professional support.
Download LibreOffice
LibreOffice 5.2.1 is available for immediate download, whilst LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support the work of The Document Foundation with a donation.
When your ‘umble scribe first started using the GNU/Linux operating system over a decade ago, the default office suite for most Linux distributions was OpenOffice.
However, it now looks as if OpenOffice just could be heading towards the software graveyard if other members of the development team concur with an email from the chairman of the OpenOffice Project Management Committee, Dennis Hamilton, as reported by LWN.net.
OpenOffice 4.0. The end of the line?
A long history
To find the earliest origins of OpenOffice, one has to go back nearly 30 years to 1985 and an early office suite called Star Office. The timeline below shows the genesis of OpenOffice and other packages from StarOffice 1.0. StarOffice itself survived as a proprietary software package until discontinued by Oracle in 2011.
Timeline showing Open Office and other derivatives of StarOffice. Click on image for the full-sized version. Timeline courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
To understand the various twists in the OpenOffice story, one also needs to know that StarDivision, the creator of StarOffice, was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999, whilst Sun Microsystems was in its turn taken over by Oracle Corporation in 2010.
After the 1999 takeover of StarDivision, Sun released a free and open source version of StarOffice as OpenOffice.org under both GNU LGPL and the SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source License). OpenOffice.org supported proprietary Microsoft Office file formats (though not always perfectly), was available on many platforms (Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Solaris) and became widely used in the open source community. OpenOffice.org had native support for the OpenDocument format (ODF).
Following Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems in 2010, some members of the OpenOffice.org project became worried about its future with Oracle. As a consequence they formed The Document Foundation and created the LibreOffice fork. The LibreOffice brand was hoped to be provisional, as Oracle had been invited to join The Document Foundation and donate the OpenOffice.org brand to the foundation.
Oracle’s response was to demand that all members of the OpenOffice.org Community Council involved with The Document Foundation step down from the Council, citing a conflict of interest. This prompted many community members decided to leave for LibreOffice, which already had the support of Red Hat, Novell, Google and Canonical. LibreOffice produced its first release in January 2011.
In June 2011 Oracle donated the OpenOffice.org trade marks and source code to the Apache Software Foundation, which Apache then re-licensed under its own open source licence. IBM donated the Lotus Symphony codebase to the Apache Software Foundation in 2012. The developer pool for the Apache project was seeded by IBM employees and the Symphony codebase was incorporated into Apache OpenOffice.
However, Apache OpenOffice has not flourished, whilst LibreOffice has gone from strength to strength, OpenOffice has languished. LibreOffice releases updates every few months, whereas the last major update to Apache OpenOffice was in September 2015. Furthermore, a hotfix released at the end of August to remedy a memory problem has still not been announced by the project on its home page.
Apache applies pressure
In the meantime the Apache Software Foundation has been applying increasing pressure due to security concerns and has since demanded monthly reports (instead of the previous quarterly reports. Ed.) as to how problems can be solved.
In his email Hamilton describes in detail what the retirement of the OpenOffice project could look like and what consequences will be involved for the source code, downloads, website, mailing lists and other matters. For the time being Hamilton only wants to start a discussion. A decision to end the OpenOffice project has still not been taken, although it is already being suggested that the project should consider donating the OpenOffice trade mark registration to the LibreOffice project.
A strange phenomenon is occurring in Bristol: people not playing football is resulting in the closure of bank branches in the city.
The source of this curious news is the ever (un)reliable Bristol Post, which yesterday carried a story headlined: “Two HSBC banks to shut in Bristol following slump in customers“.
The relevant section is shown in the following screenshot*.
Either football is vital to the survival of HSBC bank branches or there’s a typographical error in the third sentence.
To help readers decide which of the two above alternatives is correct, your correspondent has not noticed that the floors of HSBC bank branches are marked out with white lines to resemble football pitches.
As a final thought and a bit of idle speculation, are more errors creeping in to news reports appearing online due to modern “journalists” working with predictive text options switched on?
* = The article’s copy has since been amended with “footfall” replacing “football” in the third paragraph.
It’s been announced today that the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is joining the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation, the body behind the very successful free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite. At the same time, The Document Foundation is becoming an associate of the FSFE.
The FSFE’s aim is to help people control technology instead technology controlling them. However, this is a goal which no single organisation can achieve on its own. FSFE associated organisations are bodies that share the FSFE’s vision and support the foundation and free software in general by:
encouraging people to use and develop free software;
helping organisations understand how free software contributes to freedom, transparency and self-determination; and
removing barriers to free software adoption.
With this mutual expression of support, both organisations mutually strengthen each other in their efforts to keep the general public in the technological driver seat. While the FSFE embodies the principles of the community movement working for the adoption of free software by companies, public sectors organisations and individuals, The Document Foundation turns principles and ethics into actual products, putting a first class, fully-featured, but completely free productivity suite in the hands of users.
“We are happy to welcome the Free Software Foundation Europe as a member of our Advisory Board. Together, we will be able to further develop the adoption of Free Software in Europe, amongst public administrations and enterprises”, said Eike Rathke, a Director of The Document Foundation.
“We believe it is important to join forces with all the organisations active in Free Software around Europe,” said Matthias Kirschner, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe, “and work together to reach our common goals. With our associated organisations we want to show that we are a strong and cohesive movement, and we work to achieve common objectives. To do this, we exchange ideas, coordinate efforts, motivate each other, and find opportunities to work together on specific projects. This is the case with The Document Foundation, steward of one of the most successful Free Software projects: LibreOffice”.
Several members of The Document Foundation will be attending the FSFE Summit 2016 in Berlin from 2nd to 4th September to celebrate the FSFE’s 15th anniversary (posts passim).
In 
It’s been announced today that the 
The FSFE’s aim is to help people control technology instead technology controlling them. However, this is a goal which no single organisation can achieve on its own. FSFE associated organisations are bodies that share the FSFE’s vision and support the foundation and free software in general by: