The Document Foundation and LibreOffice
An inspirational story from corporate control to freedom
Michael Meeks
Michael is a Christian and enthusiastic believer in Free Software. He is the General Manager of Collabora Productivity, leading our LibreOffice team, supporting customers, consulting on development alongside an extremely talented team. He serves as a member of the board of The Document Foundation, and the LibreOffice Engineering Steering Committee; in the past he served on ECMA/TC45 improving Microsoft's description of their format OOXML. Prior to this he was a Novell/SUSE Distinguished Engineer working on various pieces of Free Software infrastructure across the Linux desktop stackm and before that he worked on both hardware and software for real-time video editing at Quantel.
Come hear the story of The Document Foundation, from the birthing pains up until the latest LibreOffice features of today. Hear why we did what we did, the key players including openSUSE and the parts they played. Hear how a vision of a collaborative ecosystem around the code-base created something bigger than all of us, to which we are loyal. See how we managed to build consensus, co-ordinate and make decisions between hundreds of contributors in a meritocratic and vendor neutral fashion.
Finally, I hope to showcase the latest juicy features we have in LibreOffice 4.2 and under development.
- Date:
- 2014 April 26 - 10:00
- Duration:
- 1 h
- Room:
- Ragusa
- Conference:
- openSUSE Conference
- Language:
- Track:
- Townhall
- Difficulty:
- Beginner