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LibreOffice 4.0 released

09/02/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

The Document Foundation, the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice office suite, has released version 4.0 suite. Even though the office package has not changed much visually from earlier releases, it includes several underlying improvements such as changes to the API, support for the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard and better import/export of Microsoft Office file formats.

LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

The new release also includes some changes to the user interface, as well as a new feature – support for Firefox Personas themes (posts passim). An Android application allowing users to control an Impress presentation from a mobile phone is ready to be used with some Linux versions of LibreOffice (posts passim) and is expected to be released soon. LibreOffice developers are also working on bringing the feature to outstanding Linux versions of the suite, as well as its Windows and Mac OS X ports.

LibreOffice 4.0 is available for download Linux, Mac and Windows. Please consult the release notes for full details of changes since the last version release.
Control Impress presentations from an Android phone

04/02/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech

Online tech news website The H reports that the developers of LibreOffice, whose version 4.0 is due for release within days (posts passim), are also planning to release the “Impress Android Remote” application that will enable the office suite’s presentations to be controlled from Android smartphones.

Communication between the phone and the presentation rendering system will be handled via Bluetooth, according to a presentation given by LibreOffice developer Michael Meeks to FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels over the last weekend.
Basque council saves thousands with LibreOffice

23/01/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech
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.

LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

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.
Bundestag study recommends amendment of law to promote open source

17/01/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports today that a German parliament study group is recommending amendments to budgetary legislation to allow software produced by or for public sector organisations to be released as open source software. Germany’s budget law currently prevents public sector organisations from giving away software for free.

In its report (PDF, German), the Bundestag’s Interoperability, Standards and Free Software group is proposing six measures to promote the uptake of free and open source software by Federal and regional authorities, including resuming funding the currently defunct open source competence centre. This could assist public sector organisations wanting to migrate proprietary to free and open source software. The group is also calling on all public sector organisations to create new software that is “as platform-independent as possible”.

Furthermore, the group, which is chaired by FDP deputy Jimmy Schulz, also wants the Federal government actively to encourage the use of open standards. This would make access to the government easier for both citizens and companies, as well as being an incentive for software development.
Using Firefox Personas in LibreOffice 4.0

14/01/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

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.

Firefox Personas applied to LibreOffice Writer
LibreOffice 4.0.0 RC1 available for download

12/01/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

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.

LibreOffice meets all your office suite needs

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.
Greek municipality of Kalamarià installs LibreOffice

12/01/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

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.
The long tail of LibreOffice

10/01/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

In recent years, the term ‘long tail‘, which was originally coined in 2004 by Chris Anderson, has certainly caught on. Anderson’s coining of the phrase drew on a February 2003 essay by Clay Shirky entitled “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”, which noted that a relatively few blogs have many links to them, but there’s a “the long tail” of millions of blogs with only a handful of links each. Anderson described the effects of the long tail on current and future business models and later developed it into a book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, published in 2006.

You may be asking what has all this to do with LibreOffice, the popular open source office suite? Well, the Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, has recently published a blog post showing a long tail graph in relation to the developers working on LibreOffice.

The long tail in action on LibreOffice. Click on the image for a full size version. Image courtesy of The Document Foundation

The image depicts developers who worked on LibreOffice’s code base in 2012. Last year a total some 320 developers worked on improving LibreOffice’s code. Of these, a majority were volunteers and a minority were people paid by major open source companies such as SuSE, RedHat and Canonical, as well as many smaller organisations such as Lanedo, which provides customisation services for open source products such as LibreOffice.

The graph of the individual contributions has the shape of a “long tail”, whilst the pie chart illustrates the work done by the top 33 developers with 100+ commits, consisting of 16 volunteers and 17 paid developers (11 from SUSE, 5 from RedHat and 1 from Canonical).
Microsoft deal protested by Egyptian openistas

02/01/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Politics, Tech

A group of technology activists gathered in front of the Cabinet office in Cairo on Sunday 30th December to protest an Egyptian governmental deal with software giant Microsoft to buy software for the public sector, the English language Egypt Independent news site reports.

On 26 December, the official Facebook page of Hesham Qandil, the Egyptian Prime Minister, announced that the Cabinet had concluded a deal with Microsoft for the next 4 tax years to buy and maintain licensed software worth nearly $44 mn. for the government.

“What the government is buying is the licence to use software and not new [software],” says Ali Shaath, co-founder of the Egyptian Association for Free and Open Software and the Arab Digital Expression Foundation.

The activists’ main contention with the deal is that Microsoft products bought by the government are imported, expensive and their code source is usually closed and protected by rigid copyright rules which do not allow for knowledge sharing and generation. Meanwhile, an alternative lies with locally conceived, less expensive software, whose open code source enables copying, sharing and building more software.

“We’re talking about the same computers, the same software, no extra development and no extra training,” Shaath said, explaining that the free and open software alternative will cost zero in comparison since its licences are free of charge and its only cost is derived from customisation and training.

The activists believe that free and open software developers is could readily provide the software the government needs. A case in point was the portal developed with free and open software to provide voters with information ahead of the March 2011 referendum.

NB: this post was originally published on Bristol Wireless.
Seasonal good GNUs

28/12/2012 Steve WoodsLinux, Politics, Tech

Once again, there’s been a bit of seasonal silliness going on courtesy of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), but in a good cause, as the FSF’s news pages report that, in the run-up to Christmas, FSF activists visited a local Microsoft store in Boston, Massachusetts during its “Tech for Tots” session to wish shoppers a Merry Christmas with copies of the Trisquel GNU/Linux operating system, a free software replacement for Windows 8. The activists were accompanied by a gnu (free software’s buffalo-like mascot) and sported Santa hats in the spirit of the season. Their action drew smiles from shoppers who had expected to see costumed people giving gifts, but not quite like this.

Spreading the good GNUs about free software

On its Windows 8 campaign site, the FSF criticises Windows 8 for restricting computer users’ freedom to modify and share the software on their computers. This action follows a similar one at a Windows 8 launch event in October, when the FSF made international news announcing its campaign to ask computer users to skip Windows 8 in favour of free software (posts passim).

FSF executive director John Sullivan said, “Tablets and laptops are popular gifts for the holidays, but people often overlook the restrictions that manufacturers slip under the wrapping paper. These restrictions end up locking people into one company’s products, and complicating things that should be simple like moving programs from an old laptop to a new one. We invite people to join us by going to http://fsf.org/windows8 and signing the pledge to switch to a free operating system. If you already use one, help a friend or family member switch.”

Hat tip: Roy Schestowitz

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