In today's search was two Zorin OS reviews and a recommendation. The Document Foundation released the second update to the 4.2 branch of their popular office suite. Jamie Watson got a new Acer laptop and test drove several popular distributions on it. Computer Weekly online has published an article on Unix to Linux migrations and Simon Phipps put out a new post titled 2014 is the year of the Linux desktop.

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The story has other notable features as well: ODF is the first IT standard to be taken up as a popular cause, and also represents the first “cross over” standards issue that has attracted the broad support of the open source community. Then there are the societal dimensions: open formats are needed to safeguard our culture and our history from oblivion. And when implemented in open source software and deployed on Linux-based systems (not to mention One Laptop Per Child computers), the benefits and opportunities of IT become more available to those throughout the third world.

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As the Document Freedom Day is approaching I realized that we don’t push ODF and open standards as loudly as before. Certainly most of the battles for the mind and market share are past, at least when it comes to office file formats. But the recent public consultation of the UK government brought back some of the most crucial issues surrounding ODF and it’s useful, I think, to check where stand these days on these matters.

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Vignoli is one of the founders and a member of the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation, the organization behind LibreOffice, where his duties include marketing and communications as well as being an international spokesperson for the project. Before helping start The Document Project, he spent over six years on the marketing team for OpenOffice.org, which was the original code base for LibreOffice. In other words, this is a guy who knows his stuff and who has “been there/done that” when it comes to large enterprise level migrations from MS Office to LibreOffice or OpenOffice.

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Today registration opens for Document Freedom Day 2014 events. This year the campaign day is March 26th, when people who believe in fair access to communications technology and Open Standards will again present, perform, and demonstrate. Event organisers can now register on the re-launched documentfreedom.org website.

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All in all, this list would not significantly change the userbase of LibreOffice; but it would also position LibreOffice in places and circles where it’s not really used either, and I feel it’s a welcome set of suggestions that differ from the usual Android/iOS porting and cloud based office suite. On a deeper level, I think it also means that LibreOffice as a tool and office suites in general can change and grow to adapt to new usages even today.

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On 28 January, the UK government asked for public comments on its proposal for standards involved in sharing and working with government documents. Introducing the proposal to use ODF and HTML: "Citizens, businesses and delivery partners, such as charities and voluntary groups, need to be able to interact with government officials, sharing and editing documents. Officials within government departments also need to work efficiently, sharing and collaborating with documents. Users must not have costs imposed upon them due to the format in which editable government information is shared or requested."

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Last week I highlighted the fact that Microsoft was urging its business partners to comment at the British Cabinet Office's Standards Hub on a standards-related proposal. That proposal would limit government procurement to office software that complied with the ISO ODF standard, but makes no mention of the ISO OOXML standard promoted by Microsoft. I also noted that anyone could comment on the proposal, and that the deadline for comments would close on February 26, Greenwich time. I closed by urging readers to let their opinions on the subject be heard.

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There are a bunch of FLOSS office suites but two of them are the big dogs: LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice. “October 29th, someone downloaded the 75,000,000th copy of Apache OpenOffice™. The 75 million downloads have occurred in the less than 18th months since the first release of Apache OpenOffice on May 8th, 2012.
Apache OpenOffice (formerly called OpenOffice.org) is the leading free and open source office application suite for Windows, Mac and Linux. ”The Apache organization has just published some statistics on their downloads. The claim that their stuff is leading is debatable since most distros include LibreOffice and not Apache OpenOffice.

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The Document Foundation yesterday announced that the new Board of Directors is "officially in charge." These new members were recently elected and congratulated last December and have been in a sort of training since. In other news, TDF today announced the release of LibreOffice 4.2.1 for early adopters, an update to 4.2 released January 30.

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The open-source LibreOffice 4.2 office suite was officially released by The Document Foundation on Jan. 30, providing users with incremental new features and improved performance. LibreOffice got its start in September 2010 after being forked from the open-source OpenOffice.org suite. OpenOffice had been a project originally run by Sun Microsystems and then Oracle, after Sun was acquired in 2009. LibreOffice enjoys the broad support of most of the leading Linux distributions and is often the default office suite on the Linux desktop.

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Italo Vignoli of The Document Foundation today announced the immediate availability of the next major stable build of the popular office suite. LibreOffice 4.2 "features a large number of performance and interoperability improvements targeted to users of all kinds, but particularly appealing for power and enterprise users."

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The Document Foundation's newest release of LibreOffice 4.2 targets early adopters. It comes with many new performance and interoperability improvements for users of all kinds. Specifically, this update is designed to appeal to Windows power and enterprise users.

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A new stable, major release of the open-source LibreOffice suite is now available and with it comes several new and improved features.

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• Microsoft Office out of office across the UK government?

• UK Gov planning to abandon Microsoft Office

• UK government may draw down reliance on Microsoft Office

• UK government once again threatens to ditch Microsoft Office

• UK government could switch to open source software

• UK mulls ‘abandoning’ expensive software for open source

• Whitehall to close door on Microsoft’s ‘costly’ Office

• UK Government Considering Dropping Microsoft Office (Again)

• UK might dump Microsoft

• UK government looks to open source to cut costs

• UK government goes open source with £200m Microsoft Office contract threatened

• Government wants to drop Microsoft Office for open source alternatives

• Maude: Open Formats Could Free UK Government From Microsoft Office

• Plans UK government change Microsoft Office to open source

• UK government mulling open source alternatives to Microsoft Office

• No, the government isn't dumping Office, but it does want to start seeing other people

• Government to trade Microsoft Office for open source

• Government considering swapping Microsoft Office for open source

When we first started the LibreOffice Project, we had a gazilion tasks to work on. Among them, we had priorities, most of them involving the code readiness of our first version, LibreOffice 3.3. Another priority was to make sure that the native-lang communities of the now defunct OpenOffice.org project would be able to find the tools needed to work on the releases, (re)create documentation, QA of their localized builds and several other important tasks. These were some of our most crucial priorities; yet among them, you would not have noted “design a nice website”.

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LibreUmbria, the migration project of Regione Umbria to LibreOffice, has been awarded a prize for innovation – for metholodology and process – as one of top 10 Italian government projects in 2012/2013.

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I wanted to be able to tell you that despite rollApp being in beta it’s pretty much ready to go. Unfortunately, I can’t, because it isn’t. There are some limitations that make using the site a deal breaker for most users. When the developers get those worked out, however, rollApp will be ready to be a major player in the world of online apps.

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They are:

* Thorsten Behrens (previous Deputy Chairman)
* Eliane Domingos de Sousa
* Michael Meeks (returning member)
* Fridrich Strba
* Adam Fyne
* Joel Madero
* Bjoern Michaelsen (returning member)
* Andreas Mantke, Eike Rathke, Norbert Thiebaud (deputies)

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The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 4.1.4, the latest in the stable family of the popular office suite. This update is recommended for anyone using the 4.1 branch, especially those receiving professional support from certified developers. The announcement quotes Thorsten Behrens saying, "When we launched the project, the growth of the ecosystem was a top priority. Today, the large number of migrations to LibreOffice – backed by professional support – show that we were right. There is a bright future in front of us."

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