LibreOffice 7.1 is the next major release of the beloved and free office suite used by millions of computer users worldwide, and it’s been in development for more than five months. Now, two months after the beta release, the RC (Release Candidate) milestone is ready for public testing.

So if you want to help shape the future of the open source LibreOffice office suite and give The Document Foundation’s QA (Quality Assurance) community a helping hand to make sure LibreOffice 7.1 is a rock-solid release, go ahead and download the Release Candidate (RC1) installers for DEB- or RPM-based distros, as well as the source tarball, from the official website.

I, the undersigned Roberto Guido… point out a very widespread anomaly among small municipalities distributed all across Italy.

With minimum effort, I was able to identify some calls and assignments, all published over the last 12 months, with which several small municipalities have requested and acquired licenses of the Microsoft Office software application.

Consequently, I individually contacted the representatives of each tender, to ask clarifications about their non-compliance with several official guidelines (see below), despite the well-known availability of alternative and more compliant solutions.

Unfortunately, several of those municipalities completely ignored the request for generalized civic access made pursuant to article 5 of Legislative Decree 33⁄2013 and subsequent amendments. The answers from the others (attached to this complaint) were surprisingly similar to each other.

In addition to several more or less specific factors, the common one expressed by all those administrations is incompatibility of the IT management system they currently use with documents generated in formats other than those native of Microsoft Office.

Some administrations cited their own negative experiences with other digital formats (which they had, however, on their own laudable initiative, tried to adopt). Others mentioned explicit recommendations from the supplier of their document management system.

Investigating further, I had to acknowledge that all those municipalities, in different parts of Italy, share the same IT management service provider, i.e. the company Halley Informatica srl, which appears (following a research perhaps superficial and not exhaustive, but in any case indicative) to cover the same role in about 1700 Italian municipalities (about 20% of the total).

• Firebird LibreOffice status

• Community Member Monday: Sarper Akdemir

  I live in Istanbul, where I am pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering at Istanbul Technical University. I like to hack code, cook, play bass, and rice some desktops in my free time. My primary computer is a Thinkpad X220 – such a cutie – and I use Emacs to hack on it.

  On April 28 2018, Istanbul Technical University Software Freedom Club (ITUGnu) organized an event called “Free Software Summit”, which introduced me to free software. After that event, I decided to join and be an active member of the club, in the hope of learning more about free software and the hacker culture.

  People in ITUGnu informed me about a summer camp called “Mustafa Akgül Free Software Camp”, which is a non-profit organization where people all around Turkey volunteer to teach attendees about free software, with courses ranging from GNU/Linux system administration to IT law.

  I took a workshop there that Muhammet Kara gave called “LibreOffice Development Workshop” which got me started hacking on LibreOffice.

  After the workshop, I decided to keep contributing to LibreOffice and apply to the Google Summer of Code. And I was lucky enough to get selected as a Google Summer of Code student in the past summer.

• Better PDF signature verification in Draw

  Draw now has much better support for detecting unsigned incremental updates between signatures at the end of PDF documents. We now also make sure that incremental updates introduced for adding signatures really just add annotations and don’t change the actual content.

• LibreOffice Template Contest – Win awesome prizes!

  LibreOffice comes with various templates, and extras are available on our dedicated extensions and templates website. But even more are always welcome! Today, Swiss company Adfinis, a contributor to LibreOffice and member of The Document Foundation’s Advisory Board, is starting a contest to get shiny new templates for LibreOffice.

  So, what does this entail? Well, until January 31, you can create templates for Impress, Writer and Calc, and submit them in the contest. There are some rules and requirements, but if you abide by them, your template(s) will be rated by a jury and the winners will be announced at FOSDEM.

• Get cool LibreOffice merchandise – T-shirts, hoodies, mugs and more

  Show your love for LibreOffice with some snazzy merchandise! You can get T-shirts, hoodies, bags, mugs, baseball caps and more from online shops. And even better: some of the proceeds from sales go to The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. This helps us to grow our community, organise events, share knowledge and keep making LibreOffice even better.