open source

  • LibreOffice 7.4 released

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The release was announced today of LibreOffice 7.4 Community, the latest version of the free and open source office suite. It is available immediately for download for Linux, MacOS (Apple Silicon and Intel processors) and Windows.

    LibreOffice 7.4 banner

    The new release comes packed with many new features and improvements.

    GENERAL
    • Support for WebP images and EMZ/WMZ files
    • Help pages for the ScriptForge scripting library
    • Search field for the Extension Manager
    • Performance and compatibility improvements
    Writer (Word processor)
    • Better change tracking in the footnote area
    • Edited lists show original numbers in change tracking
    • New typographic settings for hyphenation
    Calc (spreadsheets)
    • Support for 16,384 columns in spreadsheets
    • Extra functions in drop-down AutoSum widget
    • New menu item to search for sheet names
    Impress (Presentations)
    • New support for document themes

    The new features are summarised in the following video.

    LibreOffice 7.4 provides a large number of improvements and new features targeted at users sharing documents with MS Office or migrating from MS Office: such users should check regularly for new LibreOffice releases since the development progress is so fast, that each new version offers dramatic improvements compared with its predecessor.

    LibreOffice provides the highest level of compatibility within the office suite market segment, with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats for security and robustness – to superior support for MS Office files, to filters for a large number of legacy document formats, thus returning ownership and control to users.

    LibreOffice for Business

    For business deployments, TDF strongly recommends approaching the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from its partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a large number of dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs; see the dedicated business page for details.

  • Happy 25th birthday, GNOME

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Tech

    GNOME's 25th anniversary banner

    Yesterday the GNOME Foundation announced the happy news that the project had reached the venerable age of 25 years old, with special thanks to its founders, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero, plus its contributors and supporters over the last quarter of a century.

    As is fairly common within the technology world, the GNOME name is an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment.

    In its lifetime,GNOME has the default desktop environment of many major Linux distributions, including Debian, Endless OS, Fedora Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Ubuntu and Tails; it is also fulfils the same role for Solaris, a Unix operating system.

    GNOME42 desktop environment

    What began as a two-person project has certainly grown and flourished over the years, attracting support from not only volunteers but major players in the free and open source world such as Red Hat. Furthermore, there’s a new, special commemorative website to visit too: https://happybirthdaygnome.org/.

    Many happy returns!

  • Fedora Project wants to ban CC0 licence for software

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The CC0 Creative Commons licence exempts work form copyright claims, but does not exclude patent claims; and this presents a problem for free and open source software, as German IT news site heise reports.

    Fedora logoThe Fedora Project would like to remove the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence from the list of permitted software licences, as Richard Fontata from the Fedora Legal Documentation Team wrote in a post to the Fedora mailing list. The reason for the change is that the Fedora Project has agreed that software under a licence which does not exclude patent claims cannot be regarded as free and open source software (FOSS).

    Public Domain logoThe Creative Commons Zero (CC0 1.0) licence is the most liberal Creative Commons licence. It places works in the public domain, with the copyright holder waiving all copyright and related rights worldwide insofar as this is legally possible. However, the patent or trade mark rights of any party are specifically not affected by CC0, so it is thus possible to place works subject to patent rights under CC0.

    Patents against open source

    In the 2000s various companies, including Microsoft, have attempted to asset patent claims against Linux and open source software. The Open Invention Network (OIN), whose members mutually waive all patent claims against one another, came into existence as a response to these moves.

    Furthermore, in the open source world, there is the risk that companies could release code which is protected by that company’s own patents. If other developers use this code, they are unwittingly exposed to the risk of patent lawsuits. There is therefore widespread agreement in the FOSS world that open source licences must explicitly exclude the possibility of patent claims by the author*.

    In its permitted licences list the Fedora Project distinguishes between licences for software, content, documentation and fonts. CC0, which was previously listed as a permitted licence for software and content, will in future only be allowed for content. According to Fontana, it still has to be clarified whether any program packages will be affected by this change.

    *= for intellectual property purposes software is regarded as a work of literature.

  • Good riddance, Internet Explorer

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Social Media, Tech

    Internet Explorer logoTwo days ago (and not before time. Ed.) Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer (IE) 11, the final version release of its web browser first introduced in 1994.

    Over the years, Microsoft has been steering Windows users away from IE and towards Edge, its newer browser which is based upon the free and open source Chromium browser.

    However, for those that still use sites and or pages that exploit the standards-ignoring qualities of IE, Edge does have an IE compatibility mode.

    IE’s inability to adhere to standards had in the past created lots of extra work for web developers who had to code work-arounds for IE just to get their pages to work in what was then the world’s most popular browser. It was the world’s largest browser mainly due to Microsoft bundling IE with its Windows operating system and integrating it deeply into the structure of the OS. This led to lots of angry comments in the code of webpages and style sheets, frequently employing intemperate language.

    Media – and social media – reactions to and reports of the news have been mixed. Business Matters on the BBC World Service got all misty-eyed and nostalgic earlier in the week. However, my favourite response to date is from the Twitter user known as beConjuror, drawing attention to the ‘not responding‘ feature of many of Microsoft’s fine products.

    Tweet reads Internet Explorer is NOT responding

  • Free software explained in under 3 minutes

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Your ‘umble scribe has long been an avid user of free and open source software. For a long time, read for over 2 decades.

    Indeed, GNU/Linux (often simply termed Linux. Ed.) has been my operating system of choice for over 17 years.

    But what exactly do the terms free software and open source actually mean? How does software bearing these labels differ in comparison to the proprietary software used by most people and organisations? And finally, why does any of this actually matter?

    To answer these questions, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has recently produced the video embedded below. It takes under 3 minutes to watch and provides succinct answers to the questions posed above.

  • New Turkish LibreOffice guide

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Yesterday the blog of The Document Foundation – the German non-profit organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice suite – reported on the release of a Turkish language guide for the productivity software.

    Cover of LibreOffice Turkish user guide
    Image courtesy of The Document Foundation

    The guide has been translated from the English Getting Started Guide by Ayhan Yalçinsoy, a member of The Document Foundation and Board of Directors deputy.

    Ayhan comments:

    I’ve been using LibreOffice since 2010. It makes me happy to support and contribute to this application that I use with pleasure. For this reason, I have been trying to contribute by translating the interface and help text since the day I started using it. I know that every contribution counts in the open source world.” says Ayhan. “I would like to thank Muhammet Kara for what he has done for LibreOffice here. I learned from him how I can contribute to LibreOffice apart from interface translation. I solved some easyhack issue with his support.
    After all these contributions, we established a certification team. We started the translation work for the LibreOffice Getting Started Guide 6.2 about a year ago, but for some reasons we could not continue. This issue remained in my mind. Finally, with the encouragement of Muhammet Kara and the sponsorship of TUBITAK/ULAKBIM, I completed the translation of Getting Started Guide 7.2.

    Ayhan is currently working on a Turkish guide for Calc, LibreOffice’s spreadsheet program and is also appealing for volunteers to help him with this task, as his ultimate aim is to make Turkish language guides for all of LibreOffice’s constituent applications.

  • NASA – Open MCT 2.0.0 has landed

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech, Uncategorized

    US space agency NASA is an extensive user of free and open source software (posts passim). Today German tech news site heise reports on the release of Open MCT 2.0.0.

    With version 2.0.0 has released an update of the Open Mission Control Technologies open source framework. Open MCT was developed at California’s Ames Research Center and is used by NASA as a mission control framework for data virtualisation on desktop and mobile devices.

    Screenshot of the WARP software showing a layout that includes plots, images, and other display elements
    Image courtesy of NASA

    NASA utilises Open MCT for analysing space missions and for planning and implementing experimental rover systems. Included in the latest release is a plug-in which enables adaptation of the framework to be used as an API from Angular to node.js, which is now supported. Critical bugs have also been fixed. Firstly, newly created items which shared a name with an existing object were not displayed in the tree structure. Furthermore, a faulty CSS selector prevented the correct mapping of plans in the timestrip display.

    Additional changes include two bug fixes and seven Open MCT maintenance and testing problems, including a display error in which a grid remained visible when the inspector was closed and an error message that popped up during client-side URL redirection. The project is working on four aspects on the maintenance side: the event generator has been adapted from the Angular-based legacy API for node.js and re-implemented.

    Besides its use for space missions with NASA Open MCT is an open source framework that could be adapted, according to the developers, for applications as varied as:

    • Monitoring of IoT devices;
    • Drones;
    • CubeSats;
    • Robotics;
    • High altitude balloons;
    • Electronic health monitoring;
    • Computer and network performance monitoring;
    • Enterprise data visualisation; and
    • Process control monitoring.

    More information on this latest release may be found on GitHub.

  • Google and Microsoft finance open source security campaign

    Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Security, Tech

    A new initiative by the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) should improve the security of open source applications, German news site heise reports. The campaign, called the Alpha-Omega Project, is the result of negotiations at the White House between representatives of technology companies, US authorities and non-profit organisations. The initial funding of $5 mn. is being financed jointly by Google and Microsoft.

    Image courtesy of opensource.com

    OpenSSF is organising the project in two parts – Alpha and Omega. In the Alpha section expert groups are analysing the security situation of the most-used open source applications to find and remedy vulnerabilities. This should train software operators and users in security awareness. In the Omega section a team of software developers is working on automated tests for over 10,000 distributed open source project to propose possible security measures to their user communities.

    Open source projects and libraries are widely used in software development. The Log4Shell vulnerability in the widely-distributed Log4j Java library recently showed how critical an attack can be. Even after a month and a half it still remains unclear whether companies have survived the worst. Users and companies should therefore investigate their own systems for vulnerable instances of the Log4j library and install current patches.

    More details of the Alpha-Omega Project can be found in the official announcement.

  • LibreOffice 7.3 to support Klingon

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    The forthcoming point release of LibreOffice, the free and open source office suite, will feature support for two constructed languages – Klingon and Interslavic – Neowin reports. TDF logo

    Klingon insigniaKlingon is of course well known to lovers of the US science fiction Star Trek media franchise created by Gene Roddenberry as the language of the alien race of the same name and created by US linguist Mark Okrand, actor James Doohan (who played chief engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott. Ed.) and scriptwriter and producer Jon Povill.

    The Klingon language is first mentioned in the original Star Trek series episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” (1967), but is not heard until 1979 in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

    Interslavic flagInterslavic is a pan-Slavic auxiliary language whose purpose is to facilitate communication between people from different Slavic nations, as well as allowing those who do not know any Slavic language to communicate with Slavs by being understandable to most, if not all Slavic speakers without them having to learn the language themselves.

    When it comes to classification, Interslavic can be described as a semi-constructed language, being in essence a modern continuation of Old Church Slavonic, but it also draws on the various improvised language forms Slavs have been using for centuries to communicate with Slavs of other nationalities.

    These are not the first constructed languages for which there is support in LibreOffice. Esperanto is already catered for in the form of a LibreOffice Esperanto extension which provides a spellchecker and hyphenation.

    Commenting on the support for Klingon, The Document Foundation remarked:

    Even if Klingon and Interslavic support sounds like a novelty, it shows how versatile free and open source software is. As mentioned, LibreOffice is available in over 100 languages, and we’d like to expand that even further. The more languages the better, especially if we can help to boost IT skills in places which don’t otherwise have software in their native languages!

    The LibreOffice wiki provides a full list of languages supported by the office suite.

  • Digital Markets Act: Device Neutrality finally becomes a reality

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    EU flagAfter many iterations and amendments, the European Parliament adopted the Digital Markets Act (DMA) by 642 votes in favour, 8 votes against and 46 abstentions, the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) reports.

    The Act introduced the principle of Device Neutrality. At the same time, the Parliament missed the chance to introduce strict interoperability requirements based on Open Standards.

    The FSFE has urged EU legislators to safeguard Device Neutrality in the DMA. We regret the voting has not contemplated setting Open Standards as default to define interoperability. However, getting Device Neutrality in the legislation is the first step. The right for end users to use their own devices and operating systems is an important factor to guarantee the access of free software operating systems to dominant platforms. As a daily reality for many users, this option enlarges the audience for free software adoption.

    Lucas Lasota, the FSFE’s Deputy Legal Co-ordinator, remarked as follows:

    We strongly believe the digital markets will benefit by facilitating access to Free Software in devices. Device Neutrality translates in the DMA as stricter consent rules for pre-installed apps, safeguards against vendor lock-in and real-time data portability. Interoperability of services was also introduced, but not with the requirement to be based on Open Standards. This is a lost chance to leverage competition with accessible and non-discriminatory technical specifications. Open Standards are an important element for innovation by allowing market actors to innovate on top of technical specification standards and build their own services.

    The FSFE has been working for two decades empowering people to control the technology in their devices. It will closely follow the implementation of the Act and continue its activities and initiatives to safeguard the interests of end users.

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