Re: [tdf-discuss] First TDF Advisory Board members demonstrate wide corporate support for LibreOffice

Florian Effenberger wrote:
> First TDF Advisory Board members demonstrate wide corporate support 
> for LibreOffice
>
> Strong backing for a truly free and vendor-neutral office suite
> The Document Foundation provides solid grounds to build upon
>
> The Document Foundation today announced the first members of its 
> Advisory Board: Google, SUSE, Red Hat, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., 
> Software in the Public Interest, and the Free Software Foundation. The 
> new appointees will serve for an initial term of one year.
>
> The body represents The Document Foundation's sponsors, with each 
> sponsor having the right to one representative. They will provide the 
> future Board of Directors with advice, guidance and proposals, and 
> will consult regularly on the further development of the Foundation 
> and its associated projects.
I am truly gratified to see such a wide and important group of sponsors 
supporting The Document Foundation.  It gives me a lot of confidence 
that TDF will do at least as good a job with supporting and improving LO 
as the former OOo did with OpenOffice. 
> "We're very proud, and warmly welcome the first members of the 
> Advisory Board. Its composition shows that LibreOffice is a 
> vendor-neutral, truly-free office suite, and confirms that The 
> Document Foundation has created a solid base to build upon, for the 
> community, for corporations and enterprises, and for adopters and 
> end-users," said Florian Effenberger on behalf of The Document 
> Foundation's Steering Committee. "With LibreOffice being downloaded 
> from all over the world, with the community growing quickly, and with 
> organizations and corporations showing strong support, The Document 
> Foundation has succeeded in creating a safe, stable and secure base to 
> ensure the future of free office suites," he added.
<big snip>


I myself am mostly just one of the huge number of end users.   I 
recently downloaded LO and put it on my second computer.  While I have 
not had much chance to use it yet, so far it seems to be significantly 
improved from the last release of OOo that I was using.  I think I speak 
for most small (Non corporate) end users when I say that I think that 
OOo has basically become irrelevant.  As in who cares what Apache does 
with it, LO is where its at now. 


I have a few observations to make, as to future changes/improvements.  I 
for one am very reluctant to frequently upgrade any major software 
application that must be downloaded and replaced in its entirety, 
particularly if there is not a published list of the improvements in the 
new release.  This is why I do not upgrade my copy of Apple iTunes, 
particularly when it is an incremental upgrade, for example version 
5.3.7 to 5.3.8 as opposed to major upgrades like from 5.x to 6.x.  This 
is particularly true when there are components you could loose like the 
personal dictionary that goes with the spell checker.  I really think 
that it should be made a priority at some point to get LO to where 
"Incremental Upgrades" are possible, that is only the parts of the 
entire office suite that are actually being changed would be downloaded 
and installed, not the entire thing, and personal modifications, like 
settings and personal dictionaries would be left undisturbed. 


I think that it would be a good idea at some point to do a survey of 
users to find out how many of them actually use only one of the modules 
of the suite, example Writer, Calc, Math, Base, and which one that is.  
For example, I use only Writer, I never use any of the other modules.  
So that if we were to find that a large percentage of users only use 
Writer, or Calc for instance, it might make sense to break those modules 
out and offer them as a separate program without any of the other 
modules.  I know that this was frequently discussed on the OOo Discuss 
list, and the OOo suite was too highly integrated for this to be 
practical,  but perhaps at some point this might become feasible with LO. 



I noticed in the following list that there is no one from North 
America.   I am just a bit concerned about this.  Should I be?
> Press and Media Contacts
>
> Florian Effenberger (based near Munich, Germany, UTC+1)
> Phone: +49 8341 99660880
> Mobile: +49 151 14424108
> E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org
> Skype: floeff
>
> Olivier Hallot (based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, UTC-3)
> Mobile: +55 21 88228812
> E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org
>
> Charles H. Schulz (based in Paris, France, UTC+1)
> Mobile: +33 6 98655424
> E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org
>
> Italo Vignoli (based in Milan, Italy, UTC+1)
> Phone: +39 02 320621813
> Mobile: +39 348 5653829
> E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
> Skype: italovignoli
> Google Talk: italo.vignoli@gmail.com
Finally, I would like to be able to help with semi-technical 
improvements to LO Writer, like getting a better word list into the 
Spell Checker, or adding more functionality to the Auto-correct 
function, like having it automatically capitalize all the days of the 
week, and the months of the year, as well as many other automatic 
corrections.  I know that it only takes a couple of hours of adding 
things to the Auto-correct to turn it into a fair grammar correction 
function.  It would be nice if ordinary users like me could be able to 
help with this kind of thing. 


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