Spanish IT services company ElkarMedia S.L. reports (Spanish) that the municipality of Azpeitia in Spain’s Basque Country will be avoiding the maintenance costs involved in using Microsoft Office and saving up to €30,000-40,000 in 3-4 years since the company installed the free and open source LibreOffice office suite on the council’s computers.

In addition, ElkarMedia also provided training for council employees to enable them to use the new software.

The council has also made the following two decisions:

• Any computers bought in the future will have a free and open source operating system. This will result in a saving of €100 per machine by avoiding the cost of a Microsoft Windows licence;
• Servers will also use a free operating system; the council’s servers are replaced every 4-5 years and this will produce a saving of €5,000.

This article was originally posted on Bristol Wireless.

LibreOffice developer Jan Holesovsky writes that he has had a late patch included in the LibreOffice 4.0.0 release candidate (posts passim).

The patch in question enables support for Firefox Personas (now better known as lightweight Firefox themes. Ed.) in LibreOffice. Personas are “are easy-to-use themes” that let you personalize the look of your Firefox web browser.

Oliver Hallot, a director of the Document Foundation (the organisation behind LibreOffice. Ed.) thought it would be a good idea to reuse Personas in LibreOffice.

If you’re running LibreOffice 4, to set up Personas, go to Tools > Options > Personalisation > Select Persona. This opens a handy little dialog box, which will launch your web browser. Once you’ve found the Persona you like, you paste its URL (e.g http://www.getpersonas.com/persona/123456) into the appropriate input field, press OK, then OK again in Options and that’s it! Your LibreOffice install will then look similar to the one below.

Today the first release candidate for LibreOffice 4.0.0 has been made available for download for evaluation, quality assurance (QA) testing and the like.

The developers do nevertheless stress that they do not recommend the use of LibreOffice pre-release builds for “mission-critical” purposes. Information about QA testing can be found on the LibreOffice QA testers page.

The developers also suggest reading the release notes.

If you’re interested in even more bleeding-edge binaries of LibreOffice’s current development, check out the nightly builds. However, these are potentially even less suitable for productive work, provided by individual contributors and not QA-approved in any way. Caveat emptor.

To download LibreOffice 4.0.0.0 RC1 visit the pre-release page. To download the right package for your particular system, you’ll need to select the right package from the two dropdown lists on the page; there is an automatic detection system to help, but this might not work in all cases. The release candidate is available for GNU/Linux (rpm and deb-based package management systems), Mac OS X (both Intel and PowerPC versions) and Windows.

The free and open source advocacy organisation GreekLUG reports that the northern Greek Municipality of Kalamarià near Thessaloniki is in the process of installing the cross-platform LibreOffice productivity suite on all of the council’s 170 workstations.

According to the press release (PDF), some 120 installations have been done to date.

It is believed that this move will save the council some €38,000 in licensing fees (including VAT) compared with renewing and/or buying new licences for MS Office. As the Greek public sector is extremely short of money (and getting increasingly shorter thereof in many cases. Ed.), to say the least, this is a very smart move.

GreekLUG welcomes this move, which means that Kalamarià now joins the pioneering municipalities of Heraklion in Crete and Pilea-Hortiatis in pioneering the use of free and open source software in the Greek public sector.

As the year draws to a close, Italo Vignoli of The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, the free and open source office suite (and a great replacement for the overpriced, bloated MS Office. Ed., has posted the message below to the TDF discussion mailing list under the subject line ‘TDF @ End of 2012’.

Perhaps the best news is towards the end: the appointment of the TDF’s first paid employee, Florian Effenberger.

This is a very long message, although I have tried to summarize in a single text what we – members, developers, volunteers, native language communities, advocates and supporters – have achieved during 2012. I am sure I forgot some achievements, because they have been too many.

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).

In early 2012, The Document Foundation – an truly community based independent 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 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.

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 over 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Best wishes to all of you. Ciao, Italo

That’s a very impressive year’s work, TDF. What will you do in 2013?

The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 3.6.4, for Linux, MacOS and Windows. According to the Foundation, this new release of the free and open source office suite is another step forward in the process of improving the suite’s overall quality and stability for any kind of deployment on personal desktops or inside organisations and companies of any size.

LibreOffice 3.6.4 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions to enhance the functionality of LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center. If you work in multiple file formats like I do, I thoroughly recommend the MultiSave extension (posts passim)

To coincide with this release The Document Foundation is inviting LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members to support its work with a donation. There is a donation page – with many options including PayPal and credit cards – at http://donate.libreoffice.org to support the TDF’s fundraising campaign for 2013.

For regular news about LibreOffice, follow The Document Foundation blog.