 Please turn off your mobile phones Okay, let me introduce you Michael mix and his talk is a liberal office turns 10 and what's next? please after Michael finished his presentation Don't run away and wait until question session and Thank you Michael thank you very much excellent. So you know I'd love to encourage you to all move closer and enjoy the the proximity of being next to each other in this this Lovely or tutorial, but perhaps not this time anyway So say this is what I'm going to talk about so I won't tell you about that Here we go. So 10 years 10 years or 20 years Amusingly Libra office has been growing in in conjunction with Fosden for 20 years And so we're very just thrilled to be able to celebrate our 10th or 20th depending how you look at it or 35th anniversary at the same time that Fosden is so just fantastic and Yeah, was it? I'm sorry 45 35. It's a long time 1985 Yeah 35 years. I'm so Marko Buddies a wonderful guy a teenager working in his garage You have to be careful about garages, you know, don't go in you may come out with an office suite, you know so so he releases this and at this stage in This this time. It's really just a word processor star writer, but it gets the dibs, you know It beats Microsoft office by you know nearly five years. So that's so that's all good. This is the 93 version and Just a word processor and you need to understand the world at this time All sorts of interesting things were happening so a spreadsheet was created which was called quattro pro I don't know if you know why But Lotus created something called one two three and so ball and created something called for Which was you know, it was a friendly time And we lived in a diverse industry not dominated by one monopoly, which was fantastic And at this point Lotus was suing ball and about these structure sequence and organization of menu So, you know, nothing like today, obviously And and anyway, so these are some great quotes from Phillip calm the ball and co-founder, you know prehistoric anything 20 years old and over I don't know if any of you are over 20, but I am and it's good to it's good to know that the facelift isn't gonna do it You know But but Philly was particularly interested in a good exemplar of the the excitement at the time about revolutionary programming language change, you know Object orientation would make everything wonderful Everything would be ten times quicker and more beautiful, you know, we would develop so amazingly rapidly Software would become easy to read easy to to handle. It was absolutely amazing and Philippe Told so many people this you even get the New York Times Explaining, you know, this this radical new innovation, you know, so here are some great great quotes from him Creating the initial objects is difficult Especially for programmers and so again, you can see some of the Pascal programmers that came into open office in the time or star office And and did the one big class approach, you know, yeah Sure, it's objury orientated. Why not what one class with a thousand methods that does does everything? But ultimately the payoff will be faster less costly development of new programs and updates wonderful Mr. Gates has an interesting quote in the same article if it's so great Why are their products so late? Well, I think that's a that's a really great question Careful of panaceas. Anyway back at this time Marco is is is I guess in this era of excitement around objuranted Programming and so he creates a visual class libraries a new way of creating toolkits that will make applications trivial to write I'm and so well he tries to sell this toolkit But the demo apps it turns out of the thing that most interest people and he creates these these office apps and and actually in the end he then ends up refactoring and Creating these these office productivity suite out of his his visual class library project, which is brilliant I think these days they call us a pivot, you know, there's a posh term for it But I absolutely brilliant so he went back to the the office business He created star office 3 which completely rewrote this so he even ran on OS 2 which is fantastic and spark and Yeah, directly competed with windows and off the office 95 as a word and this is the code. We're built on today It's still the skeleton of of that Some of that design And why is that interesting? Well, hmm. It turns out that object orientation is not a panacea And it's a different way of arranging your code and your data and that's good. You know, there are many benefits to it but The problem is when you sit down and you design your object hierarchy based on what you see You don't necessarily get a very good design. So you see spells cells and spreadsheets. So well, that has to be an object Everything I can see should have an object. You know, yeah That's not necessarily a good idea. You know small talk popularize this approach. I guess, you know, every integer should be an object But well anyway, um say paragraphs tables should be objects The problem is that this really screws up change tracking So it was really very well understood how to create good office sweets back in the day when these decisions were made and almost none of these insights would take it into account Another cool thing about object orientation courses is encapsulation of information So wouldn't it be nice if your file format just serialized all these objects and they stored their internal state and all would be well. Oh dear Well roll on 20 years and some of those initial object hierarchy decisions turn out not to have been the best ones and The problem is when your file format is essentially a serialization of your object hierarchy You have a real problem So what was done was copying and pasting the whole office suite at the point that it could generate XML files Into a duplicate office suite, which we call the bin filter and this kept the old object hierarchy Loaded your file saved it as a as ODF reloaded it as ODF into the main office suite And we finally managed to get rid of this, you know, like five years ago Which is which is quite good going and this then freed us up to you know undo some of these stupid things So spreadsheets for example, we you know massive refactorings of the core there Totally restructured the data a cell is not an object. It's it's a set of you know complex data structures that describe styles and formatting and You know, and if it's got a number in it if you have a column full of doubles It is a root a contiguous span of doubles if you want to sum them you can do SSC optimized some you can parallelize this You can deal with the data in a meaningful way. I'm not simply not possible with the object approach And similarly writer, you know the problems of trying to do change tracking with tables and all of these different objects It just incredibly problematic incredibly problematic And so a Michael Stahl for tip has been doing some great great work there shipping now to To try and turn this into a view state. So previously when you pressed a when you pressed a key It would actually mutate the model To what it thought it should be and then put the key in and then mutate it again So if you weren't showing change tracking, it would actually literally edit all of your redlining in and out of the document every keystroke Which is kind of uncool Anyway, so so open office. So how did this happen? Well This is the heady days of floss being the panacea, you know, open source will fix everything. It's fantastic And I'm a big free software lover myself. So, you know, I But you know, I think Larry Ellison says, you know open source is going to kill proprietary software, you know, I'm You know the the mini computer will kill the mainframe, you know Larry who's not a man I? Proof of generally but but he says, you know, he's been in this industry a long time and watching the mainframe die It's like watching a glacier melt, you know, even with global warming. It's it's going slowly, you know, they're still still there anyway But so so, you know floss our mission is to drive floss and make it rule the world But we need to think about ways to speed that up So, yeah, so anyway somebody start a vision for less than the cost of the licenses. It was paying Reputedly and Marko is then a VP of whatever and he opens sources star office. It's absolutely fantastic and Really good a good thing to do I mean so he did this talking to Miguel and Nat who were doing a lot of GNOME stuff at Zimion are working on evolution Male client stuff and so actually there's some kind of compromise whereby GNOME kind of de-emphasized its office suite and They got rid of their male clients and life was happy. We all work together in a glorious glorious new world unfortunately in terms of attracting developers and The guy who wrote the build instructions for open office was a non developer who apparently hadn't done the job You know, he just cargo-cultured some rumors he'd heard from from here and there and when they came to attracting developers You know the the the goal of a dependency graph of open office was to terrify you Rather than to try and teach you anything it seems, you know, so actually it's not really that difficult, you know I mean like get this complexity. There's eight million lines of code But it's not it's not the madness that you can try and make it look like if you really if you really go for it Another fun thing about open office was the development process So so inside the team of you know, I know 50 hundred developers. There was a great development methodology, which was this You could do something fun, you know in your base library You could rename a method for no apparent reason or or or change the order of parameters or something like that And then you would simply send an email to all of your colleagues saying well, I did this. Please go and fix your code Before moving on to doing another similar, you know thing and and and the problem with this of course is that you know The code never actually builds of course you commit your code as well, right? So your code goes in your and everyone else has to to try and catch up and Yeah Unfortunately platform and API churn rapidly Overwhelms the ability of any anyone to do actually anything up here because it's all a breaking down there and Yes, of course, there's a panacea to fix that just rewrite it all in another language and then you know So the build tree was in a permanent state of brokenness And so they had release engineers whose job was effectively to branch the tree every two weeks or as soon as they could actually build it It usually took that sort of time and and then they would try and include all the fixes that would actually make it build And at the end of this they would do you know many a day or two of building on CPU time And then they give everyone binaries that they could build on top of for their next extravaganza of API change and an improvement I'm sick. So one of the corollaries of this is the top commit count people in the world If you look in Olo the release engineers that merged everyone else's patches. They they they just you know They're just outstanding So just to reflect on this this sounds like a ridiculous situation where the people who maintain the platform can rapidly change it and Break everyone that works on top of it. That's a mad way to develop software, isn't it? Well, welcome to Linux Fantastic, you know, everybody in the base system has brilliant ideas for improving things at the bottom and the great news is that everybody that builds on top of them gets to live with this and You know So let me encourage you to keep your API is stable and your ABI is stable and to to live with the pain because although Removing the threaded the option of having threaded users of your toolkit seems like a nice cleanup that removes 20 or 30 lines out of GTK Just to pick an example It totally screws LibreOffice and everyone they ever wrote a macro potentially So, you know might be nice to see this Hello, see the suffering you inflict on others before you you know do it. I guess So anyway, it took me a month to get my first build. I'm obviously an idiot but with with a whole lot of fixes which I quickly upstreamed I managed to get it to build and You know, I you could then update it and then it would break again Completely for weeks and there was never anything that you could actually be sure would actually work So I created this thing called OO build and based on Frederick Crozat's work and suddenly all Linux distributions used it Fantastic, and the good news was that you know a day into your build of wall clock time It was at least not intended to fail You know like like you were at least someone else had to build it and thought it should work Which is kind of kind of good, you know build times have improved, but we're still at you know an hour a minimum And so there's some serious strains there I mean at the time I visited a conference in the UK and everywhere I went I found frustration You know, there were people with holding up placards like this You know don't mandate incredibly burdensome process just to fix Simple simple things don't force people to have a team that they have to join with a product owner and a Spec writer and a UX designer and a QA person. Why not just you know, let things actually carry on and try and avoid the bugs, you know piling up and Yes, actually fix some will be would be be nice Contributor agreements. Well, when do you think Fedora drop the requirement for a contributor agreement that assigned copyright to a wonderful company Red Hat, right? So, you know, don't don't keep people out of the project when you we don't need to It's very difficult if you're the majority contributor not you know to to include other words But LibreOffice, of course, you know, I tried tried to fix this and then there's just the cultural problems You know, I don't know if you know people who are like this, you know, every solution has a problem that means you can't even think of doing it and it gets a bit much after a while and I don't want to mischaracterize the the start of issue. They were really You know, many of these burdensome process things were not just for the community They were just like corporate culture projected outside and there were some real heroes there that went so tried to make the community a fun place to be by Doing the burdensome process themselves and they're just absolutely fantastic. So, you know, but there was serious cultural problems here So LibreOffice. Well, here we go. So during the LibreOffice conference in in Budapest the open office conference We managed to bundle everyone else in the conference off on a boat on the river And had you been on the boat, you would have noticed that these people weren't there They were at a separate restaurant a plotting and say by September the 2nd We'd come up with a plan and had a nice meal to boot And interestingly almost all of these people are still involved in the project today Which is fantastic. Some of them as full-time staff almost all of them still doing wonderful things things a testament how fun This can be But yeah, so we had a we had a good we had a good time there and in less than a month We would have released LibreOffice And of course At this point you need to call in all your favours when you're starting a new risky risky project There are a lot of people you've met at false damn and elsewhere and programmed with that you have to go and Encourage to do something risky So this was the the management stack in red hat and this was Susan and these are two main external contributors to open office And here's one of the I will I anonymize the company that was having having Problems because frankly both of them were you know, it was really much after you know no after you you know This is going to be a success. How can we tell when I'm when I'm you know This guy at the top and to be fair these these are really cool guys You'll never have well, maybe you've not heard of many of these people probably probably you should do But you know that the problem was that we'll do it if Google does We're you know, we want something to you know, it's about so we you know We had PR agencies lined up corporate backing, you know, and then red hat and Susan you know backed back this extraordinarily Helpfully say ten days to launch. I send an email like this To Chris Chris the boner and Jeremy Allison. It's just here, which is cool at Google saying you know Quick we need help Please can you give us a double rainy rainbows and ponies? You know Sort of anything or just any kind of vague commitment that we can use to to bounce this along The bit that perhaps you missed here is that much of the plotting was done entirely without any any backup And then you go and ask for it, you know when it's all on the edge, of course something real happening there Well, ten days to launch. I Think this is a good sign, you know So yes seven days before launch they come up trumps, you know So so yeah, Google is proud to be a supporter of the document foundation Which doesn't exist yet and it's run by a whole lot of kids, right? You know and participate in the project, you know Resounding a resounding endorsement bingo unlocked everything. So in terms of getting people to line up and sign up This is this is just absolutely wonderful. And so you know, I think yeah Google paid perhaps an unsung but extraordinarily helpful a process of getting everybody on side of doing that Some kind of due diligence over a beer, you know in a community room Somewhere and making it making it fly So yeah, then we didn't have a logo. Well, so Christoph Noak is an awesome guy Who was one of the early plotters as you can see and we were playing around with lots of different logos My friend Larry Ewing created tux actually a programmer Not really a designer. He drew the tux logo And then you want to draw the Zimion logo after we'd spent a fortune on outsourced design agencies to try make a logo All of which sucked and he's like, oh, I just you know, like anyway, so it turns out Christoph created this Yeah Help me improve. I'm not experiencing graphics design. You know, I know some but actually if you look at Wikipedia And you look at the logo article. I think someone's got a sense of humor there This is the example of the minimalist logo and IBM is next to it. And you know, what can you do? It's it's it's a pretty cool and visually distinct brand And then of course, you know, we needed build so everyone's panically creating builds Synchronizing them to our mirror brain network so we can cope with the downloads a bandwidth So Peter Pomol created that and was involved with us getting the infrastructure set up the git repository with a website in it Later night craziness blah blah blah bingo The 28th here it is and so we have you know of the Viva liberal office You know Nevelle red hat and lots of other people then come in, you know, Richard Stallman and Mark Shuttleworth OSI Simon is still involved with early brofisk name new office be our office and be office interesting because it shed It had a powerful brand in Latin America and all of those guys could move across a straightaway to to us And so our very first release looked like that and hopefully you can see some degree of brand continuity Let's say from from the initial initial release So so then there was a whole lot of work, you know, like it was amazing loads of people arrived And actually before I talk about I just want to talk about how we structured the community So my experience of working in free software has not been Prior to Libre office has not been one free of conflict. Let's say It was it was routinely my experience that not only would there be four or five duplicate approaches to anything say window managers in GNOME You know, like that written in every conceivable language lists C++ has not your whatever But they would actually fight each other quite viciously for user share mind share market share And they would not talk to each other either They certainly not tell them what they were going to do in the future You know, I mean just close any anything and so so actually it's like cats fighting in a bag Almost almost everywhere and and this is pretty depressing and it sometimes got personal, you know, oh, don't talk to him He's the bad guy. Oh, yeah, you're one watch and all these coalitions would be built and Then the mailing list would arrive and they'd fight tooth and nail on the mailing list as well I speak from experience as one who used to fight tooth and nail a mailing list Anyway, if you if you read all of the literature on conflict resolution Using email to resolve conflicts is a reliable way of making everything worse. Okay, like this is this is kind of Easy, you know, this is they tell you something like this is the first day in HR and Yeah, so so it's absolutely ridiculous and of course giving control and ownership and like this Maintainership where you own something and it can be taken from you and you know You've got a fight to hold on to it and so on. Ah, yeah, it was absolutely nonsense So we from the very beginning had a phone calls Of the engineering steering committee in whom everyone was peers They were all the right people all the people doing the work Of course if you have a respected expert in calc and someone who works somewhere totally different telling them what to do Everyone's going to give them a pretty hard stare, right? Like I mean you need to respect experts, but yeah No one owns owns modules, but of course this is a bit of a problem for people that don't speak English like I do and So what we do is we transcribe live transcribe the meeting so as people speak it's written down so everyone can follow and Get involved and so in at least the technical sphere There have been as far as I'm aware no instances of conflict No significant duplications of anything and everybody has worked reasonably happily together, so Yeah, it's just a blissful experience leave office if you want to work in a project where it's fun And there's not massive conflict come and see us anyway So what do we do? Well can you make we made the make the build system easy to use? We fixed a whole load of caverity defects. We did systematic crash load testing Interestingly, we were always told that we were the dirty hackers that didn't know what they were doing And they were the professional developers with our I teams and you know process and so on but you know We just just fix so much junk in the in the code base over time I mean it's even fully translated now the code base Unit testing from not existing at all to you know starting to be you know quite significant Automated performance regression testing running in Valgrind This is this is a cash grind is a wonderful tool And it's wonderful for one reason which is that over over years of development where nothing changes line is flat Completely flat. There's no jitter. So you can see from can commit to commit. You didn't cause a regression even a small one Proper crash reporting fixing that Cade quality improvement we threw every tool at it we could find pretty much and people were willing to fund Probably the best is OSS fuzz and Google's thing there using AFL and clang But just lots of other stuff and what you discover is that as soon as you introduce a new tool Okay, verity say there's a massive burst of fixing and then it tails off And so you think oh, we're brilliant We fixed everything and then you introduce another one it finds a different set of problems and we fix those So here's the active commit account. Um, so it's a bit dodgy before we use git But you can see various historic things here So Sun Sun was bought by Oracle at this point. So you can see The things happen there as soon as it decides to exit a Libre office and does it beautifully cleanly and you can see it tapers Slightly, but they they then spin out Calabra and put some stuff in there and some funding to you to create the company I I run which is great Sib comes out of Suzer a bit and starts to do some stuff this screen line. You can see Yeah, so you can see all sorts of things then you can also see Oracle disappearing Bingo suddenly gone And you can also see the magnitude, you know that we we managed to recover the project and keep it alive Despite the the sudden loss of staff Native languages. Yeah, like 145 used languages four and a half thousand plus Users doing translation fantastic work there. Thank you for all Who'd do that and of course who'd regularly meet up Fosdem was yeah, just wonderful, you know Fosdem You know the support of the open-source community made this make this fun You know, it was nice to come and talk and tell you the stories of what we were doing I give you USB keys with the code on it help you get started get people's first hacks done You know plug the thing into the laptop transfer it get their first commit in and so on at some stage I went around collecting scalps Leonard pottering has a commit in it, you know, uh, Greg KAH You know, we have we have a number of number of people who who you know So come and see me if you want to get your first first commit in we'll find something something for you And of course, you know conferences all over the place You know the first one we were not good at taking pictures as you can see but we got better and better and you know lots and lots of people over the years Working on this Suzecom is next. Oh, it works again. I'll test it Excellent and then I'm just going to you a flick through these. I'm gonna flick through these very very quickly Aha VBA. Yes, so I'm gonna flick through these quickly and I'm not gonna tell you anything about them because the purpose of these features Is not the features, but anyway a G streamer auto shapes making smart artwork nicely ranges on text comments massive RTF improvements docx annotation CMIS integration XML importing conditional formatting icons everything stock option pricing Android remotes beautiful Android remotes iOS remote controls Libre logo for education improved image scaling All sorts of left-to-right fixes for Arabic and Israeli friends templates prettier previews Widget layout so you can dynamically size and adapt for language and make the UI look pretty I Reworking every user interface dialogue all you know 800-700 of them plus to use a proper layout language and native platform widgets using the toolkits CSS animations beautiful staff unity integration Can own three integration personas to make it pretty new trend lines character borders siffer You know new icon themes everywhere start screens making it look pretty windows integration You know policy management group management lockdown a firebird so you can rid ourselves of the last Java pieces ultra-fast calculation using your hardware prettier branding selling t-shirts everywhere Formula wizards you can you can go to our booth. I'm sure and get one of these a multi-threading support actually using the rest of Your hardware that's not used improve statistics better impress a sidebar, you know Pritification and so on a better transitions much better impress a view 3d transitions of all kinds of beautiful things Yes, we even have some bugs as well So you know but getting the high priority regressions down to almost almost nothing and getting our regressions flat Liberating your documents so in it You know ODF obviously helps you liberate your documents if you can already load them and transfer to that But you know there's all these old people word pro word perfect abby word keynotes The next keynote format Apple keeps changing its formats in incompatible undocumented ways a Vizio You know more better Vizio Microsoft publisher absolutely loads of these things out there, right? I mean I gave up in 2016. Oh Cloud stuff. I'm so connecting to cloud things our fresco integration a group where integration for our online Version of LibreOffice a co-lab next cloud own cloud PID a roof matter most well So why do I show you all these things because all of these things represent years man decades tens of man decades of work, okay? 20s of manner 30s of man decades of work And one of the problems we have as engineers is that we think if we make the software better They will come you know If you build a better mousetrap people will buy it And I still believe that you know if you look at how I invest my own personal money, you know, it's in software development My time is in some of them, but actually Here's the tragedy It took five years So most of the features I just showed you there were already in LibreOffice and yet still more people were downloading Something that fundamentally hasn't changed in any any feature function way since it was launched So this is the open office a trend line, right and I Google cannot lie You know, this is this is hard data from from, you know loads and loads of searches and so Actually all that branding that we built in the first ten years of open office took a huge amount of effort to turn into You know something positive and open and you know community driven and so on That actually works and get our brands the point where people can see it and that's a little bit concerning It's a bit concerning And and we still have 250,000 downloads a week of something that is a museum of Office productivity, which is a great shame. It's disappointing users. I mean, it's fair enough to have museums I mean, it's good. It's good. I mean, I love to visit them. It's interesting But it disappoints users and it gives them a bad image of what free software can do and the dynamism and excitement That's possible there. And so I think There's two things that this is pretty shameful and it should be fixed and we've tried really hard to do that But but also that the brand is really important branding really matters the equity you're putting into that name You know, and I still my friends still say open office by mistake from time to time It's one of these cognitive slips that you know, that just sort of happens And it's a shame so it's very easy to think it's about the code about the features, but actually Branding trademark ecosystem investment almost more important I it's sad to say it but economics drives almost everything So you can see the graph here of commits companies are doing nearly three quarters of the commits in LibreOffice and they're awesome We love all of our ecosystem but Yeah, that's pretty frightening. They're of course mentoring much of the rest of the quarter as well, right So how do you do that? And one of the problems is the LibreOffice has a brand and that brand drives people to a Non-profit foundation, which is which is wonderful But how can you then encourage people to invest in that? How can you give them a stake in that and a viable business are currently something like point one two percent of people that hit the LibreOffice Web page even discover there are professional services around it Okay, so almost all of them donate something and download which is which is great But yeah, how can you build that thriving ecosystem such that this this graph begins to be slightly similar to this graph? Or at least a closer and as you see we're making progress. I think it's gone up from point zero is five percent to point one two percent in the last year So there you go Anyway, people are downloading it. The good news is we have, you know, I don't know a million 800,000 downloads a week which is which is encouraging And certainly, you know in the right ballpark and going upwards which we like well They heavily seasonal and and of course interestingly, I mean, it's a business product that people use so they the weekend It drops off and a Christmas Yeah, donations seem to be going in the right direction and one of this is a huge strength We're just so grateful to our 64,000 donors who each gave, you know, eight bucks each or whatever to help us run the foundation Or 12 12 bucks each or whatever it is That's that's really cool. Absolutely cool So here we are. I'm supposed to invade on the future and this is a very risky part. You know, who knows? My unconvinced the future is a rocket ship, you know, so there we go But but who can predict the future here? So you can listen to your users and see what they want Here's a here's a selection Everything is going to move to the web and go online. Everything else will be totally totally ignored. It's all be in the browser The next quote is from the same person. Oh, it's just so cool. I can download the app and run it natively on my Chromebook I wish we could fix the bugs in that. You know, I really interesting and these are not this is a strategy You know strategy people to sensible. I respect their view, right? I want to collaborate on my mobile phone, you know So phones obviously the future. I want to be able to load edit docs offline You know, I'm I want to be able to use the in network when there is no network, you know This is all those sort of other things. It seems clear to me that the the obvious solution is some It's to create a an artificial intelligence of stunning subtlety and in a conversational brilliance that Can see what we should be doing at every point So if you'd like to help join us and do that, that's that's that's great The other great way I have of predicting the future is is telling you what's already done and just pending release So so there's a whole load of cool stuff in in collaboration online It's allows collaborative editing of documents on your premise. You own it digital sovereignty No control to anyone else. So nice sidebar stuff coming here on the right to make the UI richer Things that no one else does transitions animations and so on are well Just just you know prettiness coming I'm editing master pages of your presentation online, you know I don't think anyone else does this. It's too advanced a feature. I'm managing conditional formats Rich dialogues to do that pretty UI formula wizards, you know Just cool color correcting your images in your in your documents and so on a better handle some resizing for spreadsheet stuff URL pop-ups and so on and of course the mobile mobile version 2 has had a completely new one-handed UI rework so this is some You can download this as collaborer online mobile beta and it's improving very rapidly It looks familiar to people I hope but again, you can do cool things in there You can't do actually we're just taking the sidebar and wrapping this and re redoing that as native JavaScript widgets So you can you can get lots of cool functionality there Ios versions for for tablets and of course that they work on Android 2 So so that's I think partly the future more mobile more online more More richness, but all reusing that same core code base that's got you know, 35 years of awesome work underneath it underpinning that And you know some really good functionality. So we'd love people to get involved. We have easy hacks We've paid a lot of technical debt down, but that's lots more to do if you love JavaScript After you've seen your doctor you can come come and help us, you know, it's it's yeah It's a challenging and exciting language, but we have plenty of JavaScript that needs these doing C++ UX design there's all sorts of things whatever your skills are We would love to work with you come and talk to me. I'm user experience I think is one of the things that we really need to be working on more It's one of those never quite done things, but there are still loads of paper cuts there There is a UX team that meet they have things they'd love to do they're specified They have lush artwork for it, but they just need a couple of programmers to help them do the simple typing To make this work and then of course when you change the UI the documentation needs updating So I think I'm almost in time so I think that's pretty much the story of Libre office open office may be a bit about star office. I the star office times. I was not there, you know I I'm afraid I I only joined at the very end of star office and talked to the open office people So I could be there at the launch and help this this genome open office compromise But we did what we had to to make the code base survive um Yeah, and just the sheer number of people that did things there is way exceeds my ability to write all their names down in The taxi while I was coming here Which is when I finished much of the slides But but thank you. Thank you for all of the work from those people are there I think a key a key thing is that our digital sovereignty is really important You know if you look at China China collects your data in order to control you And to oppress you probably or to maintain social stability With them and with the with the right people at the top is that perhaps a positive construction America of course gathers your data to sell you things So, you know a different different different way of looking at data And of course the European Union has a chance to pass you know have a different path Where we you know we help drive and teach the world about the importance of guarding your and controlling You're not only your software, but also your data keeping it on your premise Controlling yourself, and we really enable that you know, and I'm excited It's not just us of course we do the office Collaborative piece, but I've shown you some of the integrations we have the partners There are great great tools and products Let me encourage you to work on those and help move people towards protecting themselves their sovereignty and arguably their society in the long run So we need your help come and help us to make it better is some challenging fulfilling work I love it. I'm still doing it. You know 10 10 years in 20 years in and it's it's it's cool Really, we'd love to have that and beyond that we rely on your support You know, maybe you never contributed anything to Libra office But we we love the fact that you tell your friends about it that you help us with our branding problem That you keep us alive and you turn up and listen to this sort of nonsense. So thank you Thank you for your support. We're greatly appreciated Yeah, and you'd be very good, you know So if we can have a few questions, I think we have you have plenty of time to get to the next talk That is the first thing to say I have finished ridiculously early. There's 20 minutes, you know, and then something else will happen So you can rest relax. We have a question Michael or ask questions. You know, that's that's that's fantastic Well get some water. Well, thanks Michael for a great talk. I would like to hear maybe he's a little bit more about the certification The document foundation happy with the current state of the certification We'd like to see more certifications exam and maybe partner up with Linux professional Institute So you can take them both together. I don't know Cool. So I think we discovered earlier. The acoustics are not wonderful in here for questions But I think you said you want more certification and Linux professional Institute certification exams and so on We'd love that anyone that can help contribute is good our certification currently is primarily focused on Professionals to help grow our ecosystem and get more companies and individuals to contribute to and improve the project So end user certification is not what we're doing really But we'd love other people to do that talk to a tallow. He's here and he runs or loafer becker See I go to a booth and chats them if you have good ideas and you can help we love it Good good idea, sir Hi, I'm Alex first many things for for the library office suits like it's great Still like I have two questions one of the first one is do you Still have Trouble with the lack of documentation for Microsoft's format Like that the new one that the newer ones and their support ability that's the first thing and the second thing is What do you see is your like greatest competition is like is it like still Microsoft office or the the Google documents Ecosystem or is that an opportunity to grow? Yeah, so good to good questions the first was about open XML and documentation and interoperability So I think I think our interoperability is outstanding and improving I don't think there's any other code base that does as well as we do in terms of allowing you to view and Understand and edit those documents You know look these are very old code bases Microsoft calls its source code legacy rich And I think that's a positive framing The documentation is pretty good. It's usually not the documentation is the problem It's the time spent to implement the feature because it's no good if you don't have the feature You can't interoperate terribly easily So that was that and then in terms of your other question which was a Competition who's our competition? Well, I hope people are aware of who are who's out there? producing a software, but I think You know clearly Microsoft is is a is the big beast in the room, you know in terms of the the desktop product In terms of the online product I think you know, they're all sorts of market niches You know digital sovereignty is a great niche to be in people who care about having their data under control, you know lawyers professional You know professionals in all sorts of spheres medicine and so on you don't don't want to be handing out your data to someone There's someone else so I think there's some great niches there and yeah, obviously we compete with everyone that makes an office suite But you know, I'm excited about what's going on, sir Hi, do you Do you ever work with the developers of open office or neo office do you talk with them or? So they're friends of mine Well to some degree like the neo office people I think still exist. I I don't I Haven't talked to Patrick and Ed for a long time But our Mac Mac builds are now pretty capable You know so so they're cool And yeah, of course we talked to the open office people to try and resolve the you know the divide whenever we can Yeah, I mean, you know what can you do? You know, I think there are all sorts of really positive stories We can tell if we can encourage the users to use something. That's better. So yeah, I mean like that this Yeah So come and see me if you if you're involved with Apache and have good ideas Good question one more to more any questions so far Anything at all well In which case you've been extremely good and well behaved. Thank you so much Have a great day