Based on the upstream LibreOffice 6.4 source code, Collabora Office 6.4 is a major release that brings a plethora of new features and enhancements on top of the existing LibreOffice 6.4 features, as well as better performance and long-term support that businesses and professionals need to keep their businesses running.

Highlights include outstanding interoperability with any file format generated from MS Office, including word documents, presentations and spreadsheets, support for up to five characters in Padded Numbering, and the ability to add visible signatures to existing PDF documents.

Security and privacy are probably the most important thing when dealing with our digital lives, and Collabora Office 6.4 introduces new security features, such as the ability to encrypt PDF documents when sending them with the Mail Merge feature in Collabora Office Writer.

Today we’re talking to Sandra Louvero, who is helping to spread the word about LibreOffice and FOSS in Congo. Also, she recently became a Member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice…

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In Pointe-Noire I belong to a community called “Librists”. Our goal is to help people discover the world of open source software here in Congo – which very few people know about. I am responsible for training people to use the LibreOffice suite, and we have named the training “SPRINT”, which lasts 60 days per component starting from Writer, Calc, Impress etc.

The aim of this sprint is to help users learn the applications, and get their comments, to then bring back to the LibreOffice Francophone community, to which I also belong. Then we can continue to improve LibreOffice.

Also: LibreOffice GSoC Week 8 Report

In response to these problems, members of the LibreOffice community have been working on a five-year marketing plan, the core of which can be seen in the slides linked above. The intent is to create differentiated versions of LibreOffice while avoiding open-core or proprietary business models. Part of that involves getting a better handle on the LibreOffice brand.

The plan starts by creating the concept of the "LibreOffice Engine", which is a term to describe the core LibreOffice code. It is meant to be a way to enable products selling under their own brand to associate themselves with LibreOffice while maintaining their own identity. "LibreOffice Engine" is described in the plan as a sort of equivalent to the highly successful "Intel Inside" branding effort. Presumably this term would be trademarked by the Document Foundation; the plan does not get into what constraints would be put on who could use the trademark (and how).

Then, there is the Personal Edition, which would be "forever free" and only available from the Document Foundation. This release would be tagged, according to the plan, "volunteer supported, not suggested for production environments or strategic documents". The alternative would be "LibreOffice Enterprise", which would only be available from "ecosystem members". This version would come with commercial support and a corresponding price tag.

LibreOffice Online seems to be a place where a lot of tension resides, perhaps unsurprisingly, since that is where the bulk of the money is being made with LibreOffice now. Companies would like to keep parts of LibreOffice Online to themselves, but that threatens to disrupt the volunteer part of the development community. The plan involves the same split between "personal" and "enterprise" offerings, but adds a little note: "There will be an X month gap between the release of the two versions: LibreOffice Online Enterprise and LibreOffice Online Personal".

The hope is that this plan will give the true "ecosystem members" something attractive to sell and, to an extent, free them from the difficult challenge of competing with the free LibreOffice offering. It is, in many ways, reminiscent of the path Red Hat took years ago to differentiate its Enterprise Linux offering, complete with insinuations that the free version might not be fully trustworthy. That approach has clearly worked well for Red Hat; it would be hard to argue that it has not worked well for the wider Linux community too.

Free software is an inherently challenging base upon which to try to build a company. Many in the free-software community are happily indifferent to the fate of companies working with the code, but without successful companies we would not have much of the code that we depend on every day. As Meeks pointed out, LibreOffice without companies would look a lot like the cobweb-strewn OpenOffice project; it is hard to see that as a win for anybody. So one can only wish LibreOffice and the Document Foundation luck as they seek a way to solve this problem while remaining true to the free-software principles that sparked the project's launch in the first place. Ten years of LibreOffice is nowhere near enough.

• A new virtual meeting of the Hispanic Community was held

  Yesterday, in the Ibero-American afternoon/evening, the Hispanic LibreOffice Community gathered for the third consecutive month, with panelists who covered different topics related to the office suite.

  The event was broadcast live on YouTube. The activity began at 16:00 UTC, extended for just over 6 hours and featured speakers from 6 nationalities, recognized for their participation and collaboration in the project.

• Adding visible signatures to existing PDF files in Draw

  Draw now has support for adding visible signatures to an existing PDF file. This is in contrast with the old functionality which was limited to invisible signatures.

  First, thanks to the Dutch Ministry of Defense in cooperation with Nou&Off who made this work by Collabora possible.

• LibreOffice GSoC Week 7 Report

• LibreOffice GSoC Week 6 Report

• LibreOffice GSoC Week 5 Report