This Saturday I joined a local event. In the morning pressing grapes (see foto), and in the afternoon great food.
This is the version of a “hachfest”. The intention was different but I ended up having an agreement to provide a secondary school with a personalised release of LibreOffice 5.2
Some people might not believe it, but I had to work hard to land the deal (and get a cup of wine, although it was easier than in Kaufbeuren).
And the lady of the house, allowed us to make a picture, of the wonderful main meal:
No worries it was finger off for me 🙂
We are eager planning a real developers hack fest in Granada, so please sent me an email if you are around.
At the end of day I promised to supply a “colegio” with the newest 5.2.2 release….just part of my work as release manager
This week (Wednesday) was the 6th anniversary for LibreOffice and The Document Foundation. A happy birthday from me, but even more, “job well done”.
Approximate a year ago, I resigned as Chair of the Apache OpenOffice project. I took on the role after Andrea Pescetti, who had been a good mediator in transforming AOO from Apache Incubator to a real Apache Project. I thought as Chair, to have more possibility to help bring the two projects together (a work Andrea had started, and I had helped with). There were many discussion at different levels, starting at FOSDEM 2015 and ApacheCON Austin with the PMC, Apache board members as well as TDF board members. Sadly enough my well meant efforts caused some very personal discussions at PMC level, that eventually lead to my resignation. Dennis Hamilton, who became the new chair, have done quite a good job for the last year.
It is important to all of FOSS that OpenOffice.org does not die, a lot of people see OpenOffice.org as an equivalent of OpenSource !! It makes me sad to see, how many people put personal interest ahead of the bigger picture.
I gave a presentation at the LibreOffice Conference (2 days full of talks in 3 tracks only about the community around LibreOffice and of course the product itself), with my mentoring hat on. see
The LibreOffice project is very much alive, and is growing stable. A few numbers from a neutral source open hub:
289 different people made 16.484 commits within 12 months (just measuring core)
For comparison here is a link to AOO. It is my strong hope, that this will be the year where AOO and LO starts to cooperate, as I once said publicly, AOO inherited a strong brand, and LO has a high activity level, together that would make 1+1 = 3.
With my role as development mentor for LO and history of AOO, I am prepared to help as much as I can, in giving the story a happy ending.
Google Summer of Code 2016 have ended, now we can evaluate.
I was Org. admin for
We got 12 slots from Google, which was used to create some awesome changes in LibreOffice, which will be released later this year with 5.3.
I am proud to see that Google recognises our consistent work, to deliver the best open office package on the planet…and even keep it free.
Thanks to all the students who participated, you can be proud of yourself. We had 86 Students apply for the 12 projects, so election was tough decisions, but I would like to thank all students who applied for projects, thanks for taking an interest in LibreOffice.
It is our hope that we will be able to run more projects at GSoC 2017.
Looking forward to talk/mail with students again next year. In the meantime we do not sleep, and I continue to help new contributors:
At LibreOffice and DocumentFoundation we work hard to make life easier for our many volunteers.
This week is dedicated to a meetup in Kaufbeuren (Germany), where we go through the infrastructure, spreading the knowledge as well as discussing future posibilities.
Our infrastructure is actually quite big, with a lot of services to help Developers/Documenters/Testers and other volunteers.
devcentral gives a nice (but not complete) overview of the developer resources.
Our tinderboxes runs continuously building/testing LibreOffice while our CI system builds every patch submitted, to control the quality before actually integrating the patch into master.
Infra is like the rest of the community, very lively, friendly to new people, so do not be afraid to join us. We have many small and big sysadmin tasks open, so it can be a way for you to get experience.
We all work toward a common goal:
Make sure it continues to be the opensource office suite of high quality and usability.
Tomorrow I go back to spain again for at (in my opinion a well deserved weekend).
I am building a multiroom audio system (do not have money to buy a Sonos system). The system is based on 3 Raspberry PI 3 (2 Rooms + Television) and a NAS.
I have installed Raspbian (Debian Linux) and Kodi (former XBMC) and was testing on my Television. Raspian comes with a simple graphic desktop, so of course I took a look around and found to my surprise LibreOffice.
This had to be tested, LibreOffice, which everybody says is a mammut chunk of software, on a small Raspberry PI 3, sounded impossible. But as you can it actually worked pretty well. Admitted using the remote control to write was kind of interesting 🙂
This is the raspberry PI. It perform like a late PC from aroun 98, with a price of only 35 EUR.
So my multiroom audio is going to cost:
3 raspberry PI 3 + IQAudio digiamp+, approx. 300,- EUR
2 set Denon speakers, approx. 350,- EUR
1 NAS, approx. 150,- EUR
Total 800,- for music in 3 rooms and videos on my Television.
And of course a free version of LibreOffice.
The LibreOffice community consist of all kinds of people, distributed around the globe and have experience in different fields. Anybody can help, Users can help test our new features, Developers can help to solve bug or add new exciting features.
259 people (or to be exact “nick”) visited our IRC development channel (#libreoffice-devconnect via web chat). A lot of these people are developers who want to help, and have questions about how to solve a problem.
Come and join us, except for the weekends, this is one of the best places to get your development questions answered (remark, we only exceptionally answer user questions on this channel).
If you are new, and want help to get started, have a look at: Get involved
What an amazing organization, even though I am also staff and therefore paid to help new people, the Membership Committee deemed my work (assuming they looked on my voluntary work) interesting enough to invite me as member.
I am also an Apache Software Foundation member and proud of being that.
It is interesting to see the difference between the two foundations, which both are fantastic and both in general have the same aims. I find that The Document Foundation not only focusses on the people in the community, but also follows it trough in a grass root manner. Just an example, the wast majority of the donations to the project have an average of less the 10,- USD showing support from real people.
If you want to be part of a never sleeping, positive community, come and join us:
Why not use this summer to enhance your job chances ?
When you apply for a development position in one of the bigger companies, changes are high that they will look at your opensource involvement. They expect to see something in your CV, and might also have a look at openhub.net.
The LibreOffice project is one of the biggest opensource projects and very well known, with a multi million user base around the world. The libreoffice community is a vibrant set of volunteers who welcomes new people.
We have people dedicated to help you get started (I am one of those), and we have furthermore identified simple problems to be solved easyhacks together with a recipe for success getInvolved
If you decide to join our community, you will be able to write in your CV, that you have worked on a project with more then 7 million lines of code. If you are active in our community and need references we can help with that.
Let us together make the world just a little bit better and you get an extra point on your CV.
Feel free to contact me if you have questions or comments.
jan the viking 