2011/06/26

[ANN] LibreOffice 3.4.1 RC2 available

Dear Community,

The Document Foundation is happy to announce the second release
candidate of LibreOffice 3.4.1. The upcoming 3.4.1 will be the first
in a series of frequent bugfix releases for our 3.4 code line. Please
be aware that LibreOffice 3.4.1 RC2 is not yet ready for production use,
you should continue to use LibreOffice 3.3.3 or 3.4.0 for that.

The release is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X from our QA
builds download page at

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases/

Should you find bugs, please report them to the FreeDesktop Bugzilla:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org

For other ways to get involved with this exciting project - you can
e.g. contribute code:

https://www.libreoffice.org/get-involved/developers/

translate LibreOffice to your language:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Translation_for_3.4

or help with funding our foundation:

http://challenge.documentfoundation.org/

A list of known issues with 3.4.1 RC2 is available from our wiki:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.4.1/RC2

Please find the list of changes against LibreOffice 3.4.1 RC1 here:

http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-4-release-3.4.1.2.log

Let us close again with a BIG Thank You! to all of you having
contributed to the LibreOffice project - this release would not have
been possible without your help.

Yours,

The Steering Committee of The Document Foundation

2011/06/20

OpenOffice.org worries about LibreOffice?

http://www.itworld.com/software/175225/fork-history-does-not-favor-openofficeorg

Newtonian physics can help illustrate this. If a rocket has enough thrust to achieve escape velocity, then off it goes to the depths of space. Or maybe it's slower and just achieves a stable orbit. Or too slow and crashes into the ground.

In this metaphor, the rocket, which is the forked project, will take energy from the parent project. If it doesn't get enough energy (in the form of talent, community passion, motivation, etc.), the child may fail. Or, as in the case with so many Linux distros, achieve a nice stable orbit with the upstream parent.

It may come down to timing. If history were the only factor here, it would seem LibreOffice and The Document Foundation have enough energy, momentum, and passion to suck the life out of OpenOffice.org and bring it to an end, if OpenOffice.org does not have a chance to recover fast enough. That may still happen, particularly if OpenOffice.org and its sponsors can't tap into the energy of the marketplace in time. In this scenario, it's OpenOffice.org that should be worried about resources, not LibreOffice.

2011/06/04

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.0

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.0

The new release offers several new features but is focused on contributors

The Internet, June 3rd, 2011 - The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.0, a major release of the free office suite for personal productivity developed by a community of sponsored and volunteer developers, and supported worldwide by local communities of volunteers. LibreOffice 3.4.0 is the second major release of the suite since the announcement of The Document Foundation in September 2010 and incorporates the contributions of over 120 developers (six times as many as the first beta released on the launch date).

The majority of these contributors have started to hack LibreOffice code less than eight months ago, and this is an incredible achievement if one recalls that the OOo project has attracted a lower number of contributors in ten years. "We care for our developers, and it shows", comments Italo Vignoli, a Steering Committee member and a spokesperson for TDF. "Our core developers have invented the mechanism of the easy hacks, which makes it simple and enjoyable for volunteer contributors to get to know LibreOffice code challenging their development skills with basic or elementary tasks".

"Once they have completed the first easy hacks, contributors are ready to scale to more difficult tasks", says Michael Meeks, a senior developer working for SUSE. "We spend quite a lot of time mentoring new contributors, in order to increase the number of people working on bug fixing, patches and features. This is soon going to be reflected in the quality of the software and the number of new features of future releases".

LibreOffice 3.4.0 offers several new features for Calc, with faster performances and an improved compatibility with Excel spreadsheets, and Pivot Table - the new name of DataPilot - with support for unlimited numbers of fields and named range as data source. The user interface of Writer, Impress and Draw has been improved with many new features, and several cosmetic changes have been applied to the Linux version, with a better text rendering engine and an improved GTK+ theme integration. Code wise, several thousand lines of German comments have been translated into English, and over 5.000 lines of dead code have been removed from Writer, Calc and Impress.

The first release of the 3.4 series, LibreOffice 3.4.0, is targeted to community members and power users, and should not be implemented in a corporate environment. The Document Foundation has explained that following its time based release schedule - the best strategy for a distributed and cooperative development environment - the best releases for such deployments start from x.x.1. Because of this, LibreOffice 3.3.x is going to be maintained for several months to come, until the end of calendar year 2011, for the most conservative users.

LibreOffice 3.4 can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org/download. A complete list of new features and fixes is available online at the following address: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-4-new-features-and-fixes/. Screenshots of the new features can be downloaded from this page.


Media Contacts

Florian Effenberger (Germany)
Phone: +49 8341 99660880
Mobile: +49 151 14424108
Skype: floeff
E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org

Olivier Hallot (Brazil)
Mobile: +55 21 88228812
E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org

Charles H. Schulz (France)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424
E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org

Italo Vignoli (Italy)
Mobile: +39 348 5653829
E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org

2011/06/03

Comment on: Oracle to donate OOo to ASF incubator

IMO, về danh nghĩa, câu trả lời có lẽ là "không", nhưng cả hai dự án sẽ làm việc
close với nhau.

Thông tin mới: Oracle đã chính thức donate OOo cho Apache Incubator
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/oracle-proposes-openofficeorg-apache-incubato

Apache Software President Jim Jagielski đã confirm điều này.

Trước đây đã có một số tranh luận về Harmony project, Java, OpenJDK
và cuối cùng, Apache vẫn tiến hành phát triển Harmony không có sự tham gia
của các đại gia.

Oracle có lý do chính đánh để giữ Java sau khi họ tiếp quản từ Sun.
Rất nhiều những phần mềm, giải pháp liên quan tới Oracle DB engine có sử dụng Java,
và đây là bộ công nghệ thông dụng trong giới doanh nghiệp.

Với OOo, Oracle chưa tìm được một điểm nhấn thuyết phục. Giữ OOo cũng không có lợi
gì nhiều cho core business của Oracle. Cộng tác cùng TDF sau những tranh cãi có lẽ
sẽ làm mất mặt Oracle.

Như vậy, donate lại OOo ASF là giải pháp Oracle đã chọn để họ giữ được danh tiếng
trong khi cộng đồng vẫn có lợi.

ASF, với Apache license rất mở (hơn so với MPL và họ GPL) luôn là tổ chức trung lập,
vì cộng đồng với những chương trình chất lượng cao.

Vì vậy, do dù ASF và TDF là hai, nhưng triết lý và mục đích của họ trùng hợp ở đa số điểm.

Người dùng, cộng đồng mã mã chắc chắn sẽ có lợi từ donation này.

Đây đúng là tin vui cuối tuần cho các bác.--

2011/06/02

Statement about Oracle's move to donate OpenOffice.org assets to the Apache Foundation

Gửi các bác tin mới nhất

- Oracle hiến tặng OpenOffice.org code tới ASF
-> Đây là một hành động nghĩa cử!
OOo tự do hơn nữa.
- Code sẽ relicense thành một cái tương thích với apache-like license
-> Càng tốt cho cộng đồng cũng như TDF, LibO
- Có thể OOo sẽ họat động ở một dự án trong http://incubator.apache.org/
- Có thể tin tưởng vào một sự hợp nhất giữa TDF/LibO và OOo (trong ASF)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Florian Effenberger



The Document Foundation

Statement about Oracle's move to donate OpenOffice.org assets to the Apache Foundation

The Internet, June 1st, 2011 - The Document Foundation constitutes a global team of hundreds of developers working together to improve the LibreOffice product for the benefit of all users. We are governed by an open, and meritocratic community headed by a diverse interim Steering Committee, and a vendor neutral Engineering Steering Committee overseeing development.

Today we welcome Oracle's donation of code that has previously been proprietary to the Apache Software Foundation, it is great to see key user features released in a form that can be included into LibreOffice.

The Document Foundation would welcome the reuniting of the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects into a single community of equals in the wake of the departure of Oracle. The step Oracle has taken today was no doubt taken in good faith, but does not appear to directly achieve this goal. The Apache community, which we respect enormously, has very different expectations and norms - licensing, membership and more - to the existing OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects. We regret the missed opportunity but are committed to working with all active community members to devise the best possible future for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org.

On the bright side, one benefit of this arrangement is the potential for future-proof licensing. The Apache License is compatible with both the LGPLv3+ and MPL licenses, allowing TDF future flexibility to move the entire codebase, to MPLv2 or future LGPL license versions. The Document Foundation believes that commercially-friendly, copy-left licensing provides the best path to constructive participation in, and growth of the project.

Thus, the event is neutral for The Document Foundation, which - as always - remains open to every company, individual or foundation that wishes to participate in co-development. There has never been a better time to get involved and advance the state of the art in free software office suites.

TDF is therefore willing to start talking with Apache Software Foundation, following the email from ASF President Jim Jagielski, who is anticipating frequent contacts between the Apache Software Foundation and The Document Foundation over the next few months. We all want to offer corporate and individual users worldwide the best free office suite for enterprise and personal productivity.

Finally, TDF continue executing on our time-based release plan for LibreOffice 3.4.0, due out this week, while continuing work on our bug fix release train, with 3.4.1 due in a months time, as well as ongoing feature development for our 3.5 release.


*** About The Document Foundation

The Document Foundation has the mission of facilitating the evolution of the OOo Community into an open, meritocratic and democratic organization. An independent Foundation is a better reflection of the values of our contributors, users and supporters, and will enable a more inclusive, effective, efficient and transparent community. TDF will protect past investments by building on the achievements of the first decade, will encourage wide participation within the community, and will co-ordinate activity across the community.