LibreOffice developers have released a series of videos to reveal what’s new in the latest release of the free and open source office suite (posts passim).
The release notes for LibreOffice 5.2 are available on the Document Foundation wiki.
Speculation about the demise of Apache OpenOffice may be premature (posts passim).
German IT news site heise reports that a mailing list for new developers has been set up.
By establishing this new list, the OpenOffice team wants to make entry to the open source project easier for programmers.
After recent discussion of a possible end for the free and open source OpenOffice productivity suite, more developers who are interested in helping with future development have approached the project. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has now established a recruitment mailing list to facilitate their access to the source code. Via the list, newcomers will receive answers to questions and suggestions about their next steps from more experienced developers.
The situation does remind your correspondent of the predicament of one Samuel L. Clemens, better known to the world as the author Mark Twain.
The Document Foundation (TDF) has celebrated the opening session of LibOCon (which is currently taking place in Brno. Ed.) with the announcement of LibreOffice 5.2.1, the latest release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family.
LibOCon is a showcase for the LibreOffice project’s activity and will feature over 60 talks in three days, covering development, quality assurance, localisation, Open Document Format (ODF), marketing, community and documentation, a business session in Czech focused on major LibreOffice deployments, as well as a meeting of the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA).
LibreOffice 5.2.1, which is aimed targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users, provides a number of fixes over the major release (5.2) announced in August. For all other users and enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still”, with the backing of certified professional support.
LibreOffice 5.2.1 is available for immediate download, whilst LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support the work of The Document Foundation with a donation.
In addition, development versions of LibreOffice are available for those wishing to become involved in testing.
When your ‘umble scribe first started using the GNU/Linux operating system over a decade ago, the default office suite for most Linux distributions was OpenOffice.
However, it now looks as if OpenOffice just could be heading towards the software graveyard if other members of the development team concur with an email from the chairman of the OpenOffice Project Management Committee, Dennis Hamilton, as reported by LWN.net.
To find the earliest origins of OpenOffice, one has to go back nearly 30 years to 1985 and an early office suite called Star Office. The timeline below shows the genesis of OpenOffice and other packages from StarOffice 1.0. StarOffice itself survived as a proprietary software package until discontinued by Oracle in 2011.
To understand the various twists in the OpenOffice story, one also needs to know that StarDivision, the creator of StarOffice, was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999, whilst Sun Microsystems was in its turn taken over by Oracle Corporation in 2010.
After the 1999 takeover of StarDivision, Sun released a free and open source version of StarOffice as OpenOffice.org under both GNU LGPL and the SISSL (Sun Industry Standards Source License). OpenOffice.org supported proprietary Microsoft Office file formats (though not always perfectly), was available on many platforms (Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Solaris) and became widely used in the open source community. OpenOffice.org had native support for the OpenDocument format (ODF).
Following Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems in 2010, some members of the OpenOffice.org project became worried about its future with Oracle. As a consequence they formed The Document Foundation and created the LibreOffice fork. The LibreOffice brand was hoped to be provisional, as Oracle had been invited to join The Document Foundation and donate the OpenOffice.org brand to the foundation.
Oracle’s response was to demand that all members of the OpenOffice.org Community Council involved with The Document Foundation step down from the Council, citing a conflict of interest. This prompted many community members decided to leave for LibreOffice, which already had the support of Red Hat, Novell, Google and Canonical. LibreOffice produced its first release in January 2011.
In June 2011 Oracle donated the OpenOffice.org trade marks and source code to the Apache Software Foundation, which Apache then re-licensed under its own open source licence. IBM donated the Lotus Symphony codebase to the Apache Software Foundation in 2012. The developer pool for the Apache project was seeded by IBM employees and the Symphony codebase was incorporated into Apache OpenOffice.
However, Apache OpenOffice has not flourished, whilst LibreOffice has gone from strength to strength, OpenOffice has languished. LibreOffice releases updates every few months, whereas the last major update to Apache OpenOffice was in September 2015. Furthermore, a hotfix released at the end of August to remedy a memory problem has still not been announced by the project on its home page.
In the meantime the Apache Software Foundation has been applying increasing pressure due to security concerns and has since demanded monthly reports (instead of the previous quarterly reports. Ed.) as to how problems can be solved.
In his email Hamilton describes in detail what the retirement of the OpenOffice project could look like and what consequences will be involved for the source code, downloads, website, mailing lists and other matters. For the time being Hamilton only wants to start a discussion. A decision to end the OpenOffice project has still not been taken, although it is already being suggested that the project should consider donating the OpenOffice trade mark registration to the LibreOffice project.
A strange phenomenon is occurring in Bristol: people not playing football is resulting in the closure of bank branches in the city.
The source of this curious news is the ever (un)reliable Bristol Post, which yesterday carried a story headlined: “Two HSBC banks to shut in Bristol following slump in customers“.
The relevant section is shown in the following screenshot*.
Either football is vital to the survival of HSBC bank branches or there’s a typographical error in the third sentence.
To help readers decide which of the two above alternatives is correct, your correspondent has not noticed that the floors of HSBC bank branches are marked out with white lines to resemble football pitches.
As a final thought and a bit of idle speculation, are more errors creeping in to news reports appearing online due to modern “journalists” working with predictive text options switched on?
* = The article’s copy has since been amended with “footfall” replacing “football” in the third paragraph.
It’s been announced today that the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is joining the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation, the body behind the very successful free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite. At the same time, The Document Foundation is becoming an associate of the FSFE.
The FSFE’s aim is to help people control technology instead technology controlling them. However, this is a goal which no single organisation can achieve on its own. FSFE associated organisations are bodies that share the FSFE’s vision and support the foundation and free software in general by:
With this mutual expression of support, both organisations mutually strengthen each other in their efforts to keep the general public in the technological driver seat. While the FSFE embodies the principles of the community movement working for the adoption of free software by companies, public sectors organisations and individuals, The Document Foundation turns principles and ethics into actual products, putting a first class, fully-featured, but completely free productivity suite in the hands of users.
“We are happy to welcome the Free Software Foundation Europe as a member of our Advisory Board. Together, we will be able to further develop the adoption of Free Software in Europe, amongst public administrations and enterprises”, said Eike Rathke, a Director of The Document Foundation.
“We believe it is important to join forces with all the organisations active in Free Software around Europe,” said Matthias Kirschner, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe, “and work together to reach our common goals. With our associated organisations we want to show that we are a strong and cohesive movement, and we work to achieve common objectives. To do this, we exchange ideas, coordinate efforts, motivate each other, and find opportunities to work together on specific projects. This is the case with The Document Foundation, steward of one of the most successful Free Software projects: LibreOffice”.
Several members of The Document Foundation will be attending the FSFE Summit 2016 in Berlin from 2nd to 4th September to celebrate the FSFE’s 15th anniversary (posts passim).
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has now been in existence for 15 years campaigning for the rights of technology users against those who’d seek to restrict their freedom.
To mark its 15th birthday, the FSFE has released a short video.
Read about the various campaigns the FSFE has conducted over the last decade and a half and view the organisation’s timeline.
Trip Advisor, the world’s largest travel site, is under fire from Welsh speakers for refusing to publish reviews in Welsh, the Daily Post reports.
Tour guide Emrys Llewelyn had posted a bilingual review of Caernarfon‘s Blas restaurant, but was told by Trip Advisor it wouldn’t be published because it wasn’t one of the site’s current 28 languages, which include Finnish, Serbian, Slovak and Vietnamese.
According to the Daily Post, Mr Llewelyn said: “Trip Advisor’s attitude is disgusting. They do not recognise our language nor culture.”
In response Trip Advisor stated the company was looking at expanding the number of languages used on the site, but added the following:
Unfortunately, the process of adding new languages to Trip Advisor is one that does take a significant amount of time and investment – it is not simply a ‘flick of the switch’ process. The reason for this is that, in order to maintain the integrity of our site, we must ensure that every language in which we operate is fully integrated into our moderation and fraud detection tools and processes.
As this blog has pointed out previously, Microsoft’s Bing is not very good at translating (posts passim).
This view was further reinforced today, as shown in the screenshot below.
A more accurate translation of Mr Grote’s little rhyme is as follows:
Whoever grills a sausage for another
Has a sausage grilling device.
Read all about the sausage grilling robot.
And Bing: do try and keep up! 🙂
The British government is to ban all Latin abbreviations on all its websites, allegedly to save confusion amongst users of accessibility software and non-English speakers.
Writing in a post on the gov.uk blog, Persis Howe writes that he and his colleagues have several programs that read webpages for those with visual impairment read ‘eg’ incorrectly and that while ‘e.g.’ gets read correctly by screen readers, there are better, clearer ways of introducing examples for all users.
Howe goes on to say that:
We promote the use of plain English on GOV.UK. We advocate simple, clear language. Terms like eg, ie and etc, while common, make reading difficult for some.
Anyone who didn’t grow up speaking English may not be familiar with them. Even those with high literacy levels can be thrown if they are reading under stress or are in a hurry – like a lot of people are on the web.
Those in charge of the gov.uk website are therefore changing the site’s style guide and phasing out their usage, which will take some time as some 4,000 instances alone of eg have been found.
Abbreviations such as eg and ie should be written properly with full-stops as e.g. and i.e. and the fact they are being allowed on government websites is a sign of the fall in standards of both writing and teaching English since I finished my formal education some four decades ago. The fact they these erroneously-written abbreviations are getting misinterpreted by software such as screen readers is a symptom, not the disease.
While confusion amongst non-English speakers may be a valid reason to curtail the use of e.g. and i.e., meaning respectively exempli gratia (for the sake of an example) and id est (that is), etc. does not deserve to be lumped in with them as its use has spread around the world far from its origins in ancient Rome.
One field in which the use of Latin phraseology abounds is the law and the administration of justice. However, it seems likely that Whitehall’s mandarins will be reluctant take on the horsehair wig and gown brigade on their use of terms from an empire that ceased to exist over 1,600 years ago.
Commenting on the changes, the Daily Telegraph reports that campaigners said the decision was to give up Latin was “short-sighted” because they have been part of common parlance for hundreds of years.
The Telegraph quotes Roger Wemyss Brooks of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, who said the following:
Latin is part of our cultural heritage and it’s part of the basis of English. It unites us with other cultures throughout Europe and the world who have a connection with the Romance languages.
It’s a very concise language which is used specifically for its precision and I think it’s short sighted to be giving it up.