LibreOffice 6.4 is being developed by our worldwide community, and is due to be released in early February 2020 – see the release notes describing the new features here. Of course, we’re still early in the development cycle, so many more features are still to come!

In order to find, report and triage bugs, the LibreOffice QA team is organizing the first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.4 on Monday October 21, 2019. Tests will be performed on the first Alpha version, which will be available on the pre-releases server a few days before the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), macOS and Windows, and can be installed and run in parallel along with the production version.

Mentors will be available from 07:00 UTC to 19:00 UTC for questions or help in the IRC channel #libreoffice-qa and the Telegram QA Channel. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 6.4.0 Alpha 1) will be available until mid November. Check the Release Plan.

Also: Microsoft Office for free? Try these great alternatives

• LibreOffice 6.3.2 for Slackware-current – and how to deal with “Shared library .so-version bump”

  Let me first elaborate a bit on the strategies that are available to a Slackware user on how to deal with incompatible library updates in -current.

  One of the reasons people are wary of installing and running Slackware-current is the fact that at any given moment, distro updates can break 3rd-party packages (i.e. packages you have installed that are not part of the Slackware distribution itself). Slackware-current is in constant flux, it is our development environment, and software versions can make sudden jumps with unexpected consequences.

  Big tip: before running any update on a slackware-current system, first check the ChangeLog.txt and scan the updates since your previous upgrade for the text “Shared library .so-version bump.” which is another way of saying “incompatible ABI change”.
  If this text accompanies a package update you can be pretty certain that some 3rd-party packages that depend on it will stop working. And if that particular package is boost, icu4c or poppler, expect massive breakage. The safest approach in a case like this, is: wait with upgrading your Slackware-current; check for packages that have a dependency on the package with the ABI breakage: and track the 3rd-party repositories for updates that address the ABI breakage.

  There is another strategy- one which allows you to upgrade to the latest -current while avoiding broken packages. That is to keep the older libraries on your system – the libraries your 3rd-party packages are depending on. You can simply extract these older libraries from the previous version(s) of the upgraded Slackware package. Darren Austen and I worked together to create a package repository containing historical Slackware-current packages (32bit, 64bit official packages and my own multilib archive). See https://slackware.uk/cumulative/ if you are in need of older package versions.

• Starting The Document Collective

  The Document Foundation (TDF) is the home of the LibreOffice free-software office suite; it provides financial, governance, and other administrative services to LibreOffice. The foundation was established in part to ensure that commercial entities did not have undue influence on the project, which limited the types of activities in which it can engage. In particular, selling branded versions of LibreOffice in the macOS and Windows app stores has not been something that TDF could tackle. The TDF board of directors is looking to change that with the creation of a new entity, The Document Collective (TDC), to engage in commercial activity that is complementary to that of TDF members—hopefully as an income source to help support TDF.

  The TDC proposal [PDF] was adopted by the TDF board on September 9 and unveiled at the LibreOffice conference (slides [PDF]) and in a post to the board-discuss mailing list on September 11. The board has decided to start the creation of TDC by appointing a transitional leadership group. The TDC leadership has been directed to set up an unincorporated association as part of Public Software CIC, which is a European umbrella organization (a "community interest company" or CIC) that provides administrative services to free and open-source software projects. That is meant to be a temporary measure until a full legal entity can be set up. TDC will also have €50,000 in funds available to draw on from TDF; the money is a loan that is meant to be repaid with interest from the proceeds of selling LibreOffice in the app stores. There may be other moneymaking activities that TDC ends up undertaking as well.

  TDC is tasked with getting LibreOffice into the app stores for macOS and Windows. To that end, Public Software CIC will be granted a trademark license for the LibreOffice mark that can be used for app store packages. Initially there will be no separate TDC entity, but that will eventually be set up in some European jurisdiction and all of the TDC work that has been done will be transferred to the new entity. Effectively, the agreement with Public Software CIC will just allow TDC to start working immediately while it initializes its governance and legal entity in parallel.

  There were a few comments on the announcement. Uwe Altmann wondered about the business plan for TDC; given that there is already some experience from two companies selling LibreOffice in the app stores, it would seem reasonable to put together an initial budget, for example. In addition, starting out by setting up an association with Public Software CIC with a fairly large budget seemed unnecessary; there are other organizational structures that could be set up more easily and cheaply, he said.

The year 2020 will be the 20th anniversary of the free office suite (OpenOffice.org was announced on July 19, 2000) and the 10th anniversary of LibreOffice (announced on September 28, 2010). We have the opportunity to celebrate both during the year, to reaffirm the fact that LibreOffice today is the leading free office suite available in the market.

For the anniversary project, we need a specific logo which celebrates the 10/20 anniversary without making a difference between the two dates, as the concept is that LibreOffice was born 20 years ago as OpenOffice.org, and evolved into LibreOffice 10 years ago.

The 10/20 logo should be easy to associate to the current LibreOffice logo (with tagline), and follow TDF design and style guides (Corporate Image) published on the wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/Branding.

The 10/20 logo will be used for presentations, event signage, swag and gadgets (like stickers). It should be easy to recognize and read at small sizes.

Also: Interview with Ilmari Lauhakangas, Development Marketing

Coming three weeks after the first point release, LibreOffice 6.3.2 is here to address a total of 49 bugs and regressions across various of its core components, including Writer, Draw, Math, Calc, and Impress. The goal is to make the LibreOffice 6.3 office suite series more stable and reliable until it is ready for enterprise deployments, which is supported until May 29, 2020.

"LibreOffice 6.3.2 “fresh” is targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, who are suggested to update their current version," said Italo Vignoli. "For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommend sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and bug fixes, and other benefits."