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

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.--

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.

LibreOffice 3.4 RC2 available

Dear Community,

The Document Foundation is happy to announce the second release
candidate of LibreOffice 3.4. The upcoming 3.4 will be the second
major release of the LibreOffice project, and comes with many exciting
new features. Please be aware that LibreOffice 3.4 RC2 is not yet
ready for production use, you should continue to use LibreOffice 3.3.2
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/

A list of new features specific to LibreOffice is to be found here:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/3.4

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 RC2 is available from our wiki:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.4/RC2

Please find the list of changes against LibreOffice 3.4 RC1 here:

http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-4-0-release-3.4.0.2.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

Feng Office - formerly opengoo - AGPL cloud office suite

Pretty in tone with my thoughts about dismanteling the code of OOo to generate a new app. Well honestly I think this was more later than soon but someone else step up to the game delivering a full web-cloud office suite based on the cloud.

http://www.fengoffice.com/web/community/downloads.php

This suite is now builted in PHP5 which is a better understood language with an A-GPL licence and a sourceforge project where you can contribute directly.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/opengoo/

LibreOffice: conversation between Louis Suarez-Potts and Cor Nouws

Louis Suarez-Potts, ex OOo community manager dưới thời Sun,
sau đó được Oracle bầu là OOo community manager sau khi Oracle mua Sun.
Điều đánh bình luận là, mặc dù Louis là đại điện của CỘNG ĐỒNG nhưng Sun
bầu ông ta là đại diện của cộng đồng không hề có bầu cử.

Vào thời điểm hiện tại Louis đã rút khỏi vị trí trên.

Dưới đây là email mà Louis cố gắng "giải trình" và PR về họat động của LibO.
http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@marketing.openoffice.org/msg11963.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@marketing.openoffice.org/msg11957.html

Và đây là email của Cor Nouws, nhẹ nhàng nhắc nhở rằng Louis chưa
hoàn thành tốt công việc của mình - một trong những lý do làm cộng đồng
OOo tan vỡ và LibO được fork sau đó.
http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@marketing.openoffice.org/msg11972.html

Trao đổi rất thú vị và là một kinh nghiệm về xây dựng cộng đồng và phát triển
phần mềm mã nguồn mở.

Bernhard Dippold vs. Louis

Hi Louis, all,

it is great, that you still feel responsible for the OOo community -
even if the way you perform this responsibility causes some thoughts...

You have been Sun's OpenOffice.org Community Manager
and later on Oracle's Community Manager until you left Oracle
some months ago.

As far as I know this post has never been open for election by the
community, it has been given to you by your former
employer and I don't know about it's validity after you left Oracle.

But I want to address you as OpenOffice org community member - a community I myself feel affiliated for more than six years.

Louis Suarez-Potts wrote:

Hi,

On 2011-05-13, at 04:39 , Ian Lynch wrote:

I know this might be a bit of an emotive topic for some, but
wouldn't it be an idea to open up dialogue with the LibreOffice
people? A split community was never an ideal situation from a
simple logical point of view.


A split had to be accepted when the foundation had been set up, but TDF
has always been open to any contributor and invited not only Oracle but
all the people hesitant to join a broader basis with less influence by
single companies.

Ok, there are emotional wounds to heal but talking about
possibilities without any commitment on either side can't do any
harm.


I fully support any discussion between OOo and TDF community members.
In my opinion our split community can be reunited quite easily, if
everybody looks for the goals she/he has with our office suite and how
we can achieve them.

Maybe this is already happening?


In an open community (or if you prefer: among two open communities) this
should done on the mailing lists, so thank you for this question.

Actually I hope that there will be more friendly discussion among TDF and OOo community members, leading to the perception of positive interaction and common goals.


Actually, Florian and I are discussing that exactly. The days of
stiff difference are over with; were over with when Oracle renounced
OOo as a revenue source. And in their lieu, discussions of
reconciliation.


Sorry, not being a native speaker, I can't really understand what you're
talking about - and Google translator doesn't help very much either.

So you mean that the time where Florian was "persona non grata" for
OpenOffice.org is over, because Oracle dropped commercial support for
the community?

And does reconciliation mean that you start to imagine, that the TDF
founders might have been right in working on the ten year old vision of
an independent foundation *before* Oracle might drop any support for the
community?

We still don't know if dropping commercial support means to close the
entire infrastructure and sell the trademark to somebody else (I still
hope they don't, but it is a monetary issue, and Oracle is said to be
aware of costs and money).

Without the Document Foundation our community's situation would be even
more problematic.

It took several months to create a working infrastructure - of course
there are tasks not finished by now, but the infrastructure is able to provide the product for download and support the community in their work.

To be sure, there are still personal differences. These are, to me,
not irrelevant but ought not to stop the development of the code by
the larger community.


Every now and then during the last 10 years there have been personal differences, but they have always been considered less relevant than the work we did and still do for our community.

Code development is done by the larger community.

While the gap created by the uncertainties after the Oracle announcement
seems to get broader and broader with no visible release activities
after beta1 for OOo3.4.0 (two days before this announcement), the
community developers working on LibreOffice removed bugs (even quite
visible bugs) on their version, so the development is going on.


What counts, what makes up, what comprises that larger community is
of some debate. We need a lot of money to develop the code.


Right. We need corporate contributors. Some of the already contribute to
LibreOffice, overcoming the hindrances of one main contributor with
nearly unlimited control.

We need, that is, far more than LibreOffice or TDF or any single
company can probably provide.


LibreOffice and TDF are no company, they just do, what we should have
done earlier in the past: Provide a basis where contributors can do
their work, where companies and corporations can share their interest,
but know that none of them will have the force to define any rules or
modify the foundations mission.

Based on this ideas, TDF raised 50.000 Euro (mainly by small donations -
probably users and small companies) in only 8 days.

Imagine large corporations start to support the community, because they
don't have to fear the influence of any single main sponsor - provide
money, code contributors, helping out the community with other issues...

Figure more than 10M USD/annum. That's to develop the code, test it,
distribute it, and move ahead into areas that go beyond the limits of
legacy.


It's a challenge - but based on the efforts the community already did by
creating TDF it is much more likely to be achieved than if the few
people staying here try to raise such an amount on their own.


Unfortunately, for something like OOo, a "community effort," still
needs huge buckets of money. It's not about corporations, per se.
It's about needing to get dedicated developers, one way or another,
working on the code, so that it can be reliably produced, and
satisfy the most demanding expectations.


Right - that's what is done with LibreOffice.


Meanwhile, I continue to drive ODF interest, and continue to
represent OOo at ODF events; and continue to represent, as much as I
can, as energetically as I can, to the world.


You drive what?

You still try to make the world believe that LibreOffice is nothing but
Novell's contribution to Microsoft's universe because there is a very
small area of code development based on a contract among them.

You don't do ODF and the entire FOSS ecosystem a favor if you declare,
that there would be no reliable alternative to MS Office anymore for
people fearing that the lack of activity in the OOo project might cause
their adoption to fail.

I have no animus toward LibreOffice, though I do have my share of
doubts;


What you tell us here and in your blog, is much more than animus -
please see below.

but my spirit is stamped with OOo, its community, its goal, of
providing reliable and reliably, the best productivity tools there
are to the most people.


My goals have not changed during the last years, and I'm not alone -
there is a large number of community members having spent hundreds or
thousands of hours in their spare time for this community and its goals.

But we don't insist on the name - it's the community's spirit that lives on.

Create and maintain the best open source office productivity suite.

Be part of the community that stands behind this suite and have
influence by real merit: Every community member contributing for more
than just a short period is able to elect the Board of Directors and be
elected to it.


-louis



[...]

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 9:21 PM, Louis Suarez-Potts
wrote:

[...]

It is not even the case that other projects using OOo technology
have that much greater insight. They do not.


This clearly addresses LibreOffice and TDF.

They may have more activity, but absent the energy of
production, there is no production of energy.


And you tell the world that there would not be productive work over there?

Together with the accusations against the Novell employees, ignorance of
the large number of other developers, and repeatedly mentioning your
"doubts" about LibreOffice you create an image that doesn't describes
you as possible contact for reconciliation and re-unification of our
large community.

If Oracle wants to drop support for the infrastructure and code
development (and I can't understand the cessation of the release cycle
and the mailing list migration differently), this will be the only way
to survive as the open source alternative to MS Office:

Coordinate and integrate the community's work in both parts of the
community back to the open and integrative community I love to work for
during the last 6 years.

But you are not the person I want to be represented by.
I want to work together with the entire community in order to overcome
this very dangerous situation not only for OpenOffice.org, but for the
broader FOSS community and their acceptance in public too.

Your comments, blogs and interviews don't show any integrative ideas,
but try to damage LibreOffice and TDF on different levels instead of
using the unique chance to re-unite our community leading to the highest
strength and best position for our office suite in the current tangled
situation.

Best regards

Bernhard

PS: You probably know that I neither have any formal role in the OOo community nor in TDF. This mail is just my personal opinion as community member trying to further our office suite in any way I can.

LibreOffice 3.4 RC1 available

The Document Foundation is happy to announce the first release
candidate of LibreOffice 3.4. The upcoming 3.4 will be the second
major release of the LibreOffice project, and comes with many exciting
new features. Please be aware that LibreOffice 3.4 RC1 is not yet
ready for production use, you should continue to use LibreOffice 3.3.2
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/

A list of new features specific to LibreOffice is to be found here:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/3.4

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 RC1 is available from our wiki:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.4/RC1

Please find the list of changes against LibreOffice 3.4 Beta5 here:

http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-4-release-3.4.0.1.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

OpenOffice.org. ping-pong (again)

@louis: I told you, OpenOffice.org was dead. Don't hold you breath.

On 2011-05-13, at 04:39 , Ian Lynch wrote:

> I know this might be a bit of an emotive topic for some, but wouldn't it be an idea to open up dialogue with the LibreOffice people? A split community was never an ideal situation from a simple logical point of view. Ok, there are emotional wounds to heal but talking about possibilities without any commitment on either side can't do any harm. Maybe this is already happening?

Actually, Florian and I are discussing that exactly. The days of stiff difference are over with; were over with when Oracle renounced OOo as a revenue source. And in their lieu, discussions of reconciliation.

To be sure, there are still personal differences. These are, to me, not irrelevant but ought not to stop the development of the code by the larger community.

What counts, what makes up, what comprises that larger community is of some debate. We need a lot of money to develop the code. We need, that is, far more than LibreOffice or TDF or any single company can probably provide. Figure more than 10M USD/annum. That's to develop the code, test it, distribute it, and move ahead into areas that go beyond the limits of legacy.

Unfortunately, for something like OOo, a "community effort," still needs huge buckets of money. It's not about corporations, per se. It's about needing to get dedicated developers, one way or another, working on the code, so that it can be reliably produced, and satisfy the most demanding expectations.

Meanwhile, I continue to drive ODF interest, and continue to represent OOo at ODF events; and continue to represent, as much as I can, as energetically as I can, to the world. I have no animus toward LibreOffice, though I do have my share of doubts; but my spirit is stamped with OOo, its community, its goal, of providing reliable and reliably, the best productivity tools there are to the most people.

-louis

:-)

I am.

My strategies are, obviously, to invoke the established stakeholders—IBM, Red Hat, to name but two, but also Google—in the gambit. But the issue is even more interesting than money alone. Much of the secret of OOo's sauce lies not in the recipe, which is open, but in the makers, who are like chefs the world round, only more so. And with Oracle's renunciation, they are obviously affected. How, it's not clear. But if I were in the team, I'd be no doubt updating my résumé—and be fending off hot solicitations.

In short, time is of the essence.

LibreOffice, TDF, do not have the full resources to continue, let alone advance OOo. They can differentiate it, which is to be lauded, but they have their own uncertainties. They do not appeal, too, to enterprises; we do. Enterprises can be public sector or private. They have the same concerns: reliability, predictability, stability, and super-good QA.

That all takes money not just in the present but in the future. So, these are not trivial points.

I've been working sub rosa because that's the way this is done. And even so, I've been pretty much shut out of a lot of discourse. Oracle has been absolutely mum about OOo's copyright and development future, though I've asked. They are surely in talks with the usual suspects, at least, I hope so. But the discussions are hardly including the OOo community—not me, at least, and not really any I know involved with OOo.

What I'll do is what I promised earlier: write an open letter to Edward Screven, the Oracle VP who issued the announcement 15 April.

And I also would very much appreciate it, and I think the entire OOo community would, too, if IBM and other stakeholders, such as Google and Red Hat execcs-I'll spare names—would engage the community representatives, in the plural or even singular, to proceed. What counts here is not my presence or participation per se, that's irrelevant and immaterial, but the continuation of OOo as that set of tools enterprises and users the world round expect to be there, as a community thing is.

So, we are doing things. And I just wish I could speak more, or write more on this. I also wish I had more to speak, write, say. But you see the issues. They are not secret, they are not hard to comprehend, they are not hard to digest. We need not just the funds but the chefs, and we need not jus to continue status quo—that did not work, obviously—but to re-do things, re-set things, improve: no one liked the old logistics of power, all wanted change. This is our opportunity, and let's begin with the reconciliation, with the stakeholders, so that we can continue working on this.

And one more point: OOo makes money. It makes money not just for the ecosystem stakeholders, like Ian, Jean, and many many others, including me, now—but for the stakeholders, in much the same way that an Eclipse like platform or Apache does. By providing the source technology that creates new markets.

-louis

Install LibreOffice 3.4 beta 5 on Linux

1015 tar xzf LibO-URE_3.4beta5_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz
1016 tar xzf LibO_3.4.0beta5_Linux_x86_helppack-rpm_vi.tar.gz
1017 tar xzf LibO_3.4.0beta5_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz
1018 tar xzf LibO_3.4.0beta5_Linux_x86_langpack-rpm_vi.tar.gz

1021 sudo rpm -Uvh LibO_3.4.0beta5_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US/RPMS/*rpm
1023 sudo rpm -Uvh LibO_3.4.0beta5_Linux_x86_langpack-rpm_vi/RPMS/*rpm
1024 sudo rpm -Uvh LibO_3.4.0beta5_Linux_x86_helppack-rpm_vi/RPMS/libobasis3.4-vi-help-3.4.0-5.i586.rpm

1028 sudo rpm -Uvh LibO-URE_3.4beta5_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US/RPMS/libreoffice3.4-ure-3.4.0-5.i586.rpm
-> error, because I already installed libreoffice3.4-ure-3.4.0-5.i586.rpm