The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice, the most popular free and open source office suite, has announced the release of a native application for viewing ODF documents on Android devices. The app can be installed from the Google Play Store, whilst direct download of the APK will be made available at http://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-viewer. LibreOffice Viewer […]
Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, reports that Eötvös University and Szeged University in Hungary are increasing their use of Open Document Format (ODF). Between them the 2 universities have some 45,000 students. In addition, both universities have also signed licences with MultiRáció of Budapest for the deployment and support of 34,000 […]
Google Docs and Microsoft’s Office 365 could soon face proper open source and open standards opposition to cloud-based office productivity services according to the post below from yesterday from the chief scribe’s own blog. LibreOffice, the best free and open source office suite produced, is set to become the cornerstone of the world’s first global […]
The Secretary has just blogged again about Bristol City Council and open standards on account of fresh information that came to light over the weekend. It is reproduced verbatim below: Following the post on Friday on Bristol City Council‘s response to my open standards FoI request (posts passim), more information has come to light. It […]
It’s been announced that the City of Munich has joined the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation (TDF) the non-profit foundation steering the development of LibreOffice, the leading free and open source office productivity suite. On the TDF’s Advisory Board, Munich’s city council will be represented by Florian Haftmann. Back in 2003, the city of […]
Earlier today the foundation was announced of LibreItalia, which has been founded by Italian members of The Document Foundation and has the objective of bringing together all the Italian users of the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite to speed up the adoption and promotion of the suite that is meant to be a […]
Via its blog, The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 4.3; this is the 8th major release of the free and open source office suite since the birth of the project in September 2010. LibreOffice 4.3 offers a large number of improvements and new features, including: Document interoperability: support for MS’ OOXML Strict, […]
Writing yesterday on the Free Software Foundation (FSF) blog, Libby Reinish states that UK citizens will soon be able to fill out government paperwork with their freedoms intact. The British government announced last week (news passim) that Open Document Format (ODF), HTML and PDF will be the official file formats used by all government agencies. […]
Great news for all lovers of open standards! It’s goodbye to the ubiquitous use of MS Office formats in Whitehall; and what’s more, the government has decided not to sanction the use of Microsoft’s OOXML ‘standard’ despite lobbying by the US software giant and its supporters. The open standards selected for sharing and viewing government […]
On Friday evening the Open Rights Group organised one of a series of nationwide European Digital Rights hustings at St Werburgh’s Community Centre in Bristol. This was a chance for local people to quiz MEP candidates from the South West about their views on digital rights and ask them to sign up to the 10 […]
Today is Document Freedom Day (DFD) 2014. DFD is an annual celebration of and opportunity to promote the use of open formats and standards for digital documents and takes place on the last Wednesday in March each year. Document freedom means documents that are free can be used in any way that the author intends. […]
With about an hour to go before the shutters came down on Friday afternoon, Bristol Wireless responded to the Cabinet Office’s consultation on file formats for sharing and collaborating on documents with government. Our response is reproduced below. Background: we are a volunteer-run IT co-operative which has been active in the west of England for […]
On Wednesday last week, the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) held an event called Sprint 14, in which it invited Ministers, civil servants, suppliers and the media along to showcase some major new digital public services for the first time. Among the speakers was Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude, who in his speech made some […]
At the end of last week, The Document Foundation blog announced the call for papers for the 2013 LibreOffice Conference, which will be held from 25th to 27th September at the Department of Computer Science of Milan State University in Italy. The Document Foundation is inviting members and volunteers to submit proposals for papers and […]
The Senate and the National Assembly, the two houses of the French parliament, have agreed to make free software a priority for education, according to Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. This Wednesday last the National Assembly confirmed a proposal by the Senate urging higher education institutions to give preference to free […]
With the migration from MS Office to LibreOffice, public sector organisations in Italy’s mostly German-speaking South Tyrol region are making their first major steps towards using freien software. Over the coming 3 years, will convert 7,000 PC workstations and thus save some €600,000 in licensing fees. Free software gained entry to Italian public sector organisations […]
A report on Joinup, the EU’s open source public sector news website, suggests that the government of Spain’s autonomous region of Galicia is considering a switch to open source office productivity tools. Galicia’s Agency for Technological Innovation and Agasol, the Galician Association for Free Software Enterprises, announced last week that they have started assessing the […]
The LibreOffice project has been offered a project weekend from Friday 22nd March to Sunday 24th March at Dresden Technical University which will focus specifically on Impress, LibreOffice’s presentation tool (an open source alternative to death by PowerPoint. Ed.). The main aims of the weekend will be to: get into the code that is on […]
Online tech news website The H reports that the developers of LibreOffice, whose version 4.0 is due for release within days (posts passim), are also planning to release the “Impress Android Remote” application that will enable the office suite’s presentations to be controlled from Android smartphones. Communication between the phone and the presentation rendering system […]
George Georgiadis, head of IT at the Greek municipality of Kalamarià, has commented that the almost ubiquitous use of MS Office in the Greek public sector is hindering the adoption of open source alternatives, according to a report on Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news website. Kalamarià is drawing to the close of […]