Re: [tdf-discuss] Question

2011-05-14 Thread Jean Hollis Weber
On Fri, 2011-05-13 at 21:36 +0300, Marius Popa wrote:
 Good evening! My name is Marius Popa, a user running both the latest stable
 version and the latest beta version of LibreOffice, and I want to know what
 should I do to digitally sign a document? Thanks in advance and I am looking
 forward for your message.
 

This is described in the Help under Applying Digital Signatures.
Available in the program itself or on this wiki page:
http://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Applying_Digital_Signatures

--Jean


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Re: [tdf-discuss] German Foreign Office is dropping only open source software policy

2011-05-14 Thread Ian Lynch

  Also the guidance was poor and the apps did not get updated for years. So
 the endusers in the diplomatic services
 got displeased more and more, but the responsible persons in
 the administration choose the wrong way out.
 This is the short version, you can read a bit more at the H :

 http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/German-Foreign-Office-explains-open-source-elimination-1241804.html


All this really highlights is the danger of government lock-in to single
commercial interests.

The snag with an all-encompassing monopoly is that if it goes wrong and it's
the established way, people will say oh that is just the way it is with
technology. If it goes wrong after a change from the established system
they say We need the established system. National education systems should
be teaching the underlying principles of technology and it's commercial
ramifications, particularly at government level. Changing technology is
easy, changing people and their attitudes is not.
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[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid Developers

2011-05-14 Thread Marc Paré

Hi Ian et al

Le 2011-05-13 15:07, Ian Lynch a écrit :




As a side note -- Dev's interested in the networking, connectivity of
LibreOffice would also need access to a network lab of computers to
expand/trouble-shoot network related issues. LibreOffice could maybe
establish regional headquarters where it would fund labs where devs could
physically work on networking issues. Research and development funds could
be raised with this purpose in mind.




All of this takes resources so its a bit of a Catch 22.



Well, not really a Catch 22. We are the opensource company trying to 
market our software. So, as we have quite a large user base (at one 
point there was talk that 100 million users using OOo), we should be 
able to fundraise enough to fund such projects.


I think it's all a matter of choices and strategy. The TDF/LibreOffice 
should devote part of its fundraising funds to establish corporate 
headquarters somewhere and use their offices or a network lab as testing 
facilities for networked LibreOffice install/use.


We need to offer a solid product that is easily installed over a network 
of computers as well as assure that updates are done with the least 
amount of disturbances and ease. Incremental updates are best done 
rather than deleting/replacing the whole product.


School districts/boards should be considered in the same way we would 
view large corporations. In most cases, school districts have to deal 
with hundreds of networked computers. Office suites are 
installed/updated remotely over the network. This is where LibreOffice, 
if interested in penetrating the educational/academic circles, needs to 
work on. Our devs would then need access to a lab of networked computers 
to test LibreOffice network-ability.


Cheers

Marc


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Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid Developers

2011-05-14 Thread Jonathan Aquilina

On 05/13/2011 02:49 PM, Marc Paré wrote:

Hi Ian

Le 2011-05-13 05:27, Ian Lynch a écrit :

Thanks for the info on the INGOTs.

Having served on committees in charge of software acquisition, both at 
local and provincial level, I find the greatest reluctance on adopting 
is simply networking. While many of our school districts would like 
to move to LibreOffice, the vast majority rely on recommendations from 
their IT departments which are MS certified. In order to provide 
greater acceptance of our product we need to supply solid support from 
the point of view its network-ability. IT departments need to know 
that LibreOffice will work on their network and if there are problems 
that help is readily available. If there is no such service then the 
cost/seat is irrelevant -- MS Office is then kept.


So, in my mind, we (the LibreOffice membership) should establish 
efficient national network help support. That is to say, for 
example, in my case, IT departments would have support help from 
LibreOffice.ca. There should also be for profit support available 
locally should IT departments prefer to acquire this support.


We could easily promote both support models on a national scale if we 
were to have enough national developers attracted to our project 
alongside a certification programme. Perhaps to start off, we could 
offer free certification for dev's interested in the networking 
programming area of LibreOffice ... just to seed such a programme.



As a side note -- Dev's interested in the networking, connectivity 
of LibreOffice would also need access to a network lab of computers 
to expand/trouble-shoot network related issues. LibreOffice could 
maybe establish regional headquarters where it would fund labs where 
devs could physically work on networking issues. Research and 
development funds could be raised with this purpose in mind.



Cheers

Marc


If an msi is provided network installs can be done through microsofts 
group policy.


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[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers

2011-05-14 Thread e-letter
On 13 May 2011 21:50, e-letter inp...@gmail.com wrote:

 On 12 May 2011 17:55, Marc Par=E9 m...@marcpare.com wrote:
 
  Le 2011-05-11 17:01, Samuel M a =E9crit :
 
   I believe, that The Document Foundation can employ Developers for
  LibreOffice. I believe the community is able to get the money for that
 on a
  monthly base.
 
  We saw that the community was able to rise 50.000=80 in 8(!) days. It
 will
  be possible to get that money in a year for one full-time developer.
  These two examples show that this works even over a longer period of
 time
  (note that these projects are much smaller than LibreOffice):
  - Ardour (http://ardour.org): $4500 are raised every month to pay the
  main developer
  - Linux Mint (http://linuxmint.com): $5500 were raised in April to pay
  the main developer
 
 
  Despite from having full-time developers, for volunteer developers it
  would be nice to get money for fixing a specific bug / implementing a
  feature. Ardour has such a system where you can donate for a specific
 issue:
  http://ardour.org/bugbounty
  I think something like this would bring great benefit to LO, since
 users
  can show what they want to be fixed most and developers get some money
 for
  coding (or at their option donate it to TDF).
 
  To be honest, if we could convince most school districts in any count=
ry
 to
  adopt the use of LibreOffice as their main suite, dropping MSO and
  contributing a small percentage of their per seat cost savings, then
 we
  could see some distrcits paying to have accessibility issues worked on
 or
  some other aspect of LibreOffice that would be of interest to them.
 
 
 In essence this was the idea behind setting up the INGOTs. Your idea is
 simpler *if* you can get agreement with large centralised bureaucracies.
 It's not easy, I have been trying for more than 10 years ;-)
 
 Schools in the UK make individual decisions about the resources they use.
 We
 had to make INGOT certification wider than just OOo/LO simply because mo=
st
 are entrenched in MSO. OTOH we know some have switched as a result of
 learning more about FOSS through the certification process.  If we can
 generate volume international take up, funding developers on the project
 would be easy.
 

 Whilst certification seems a good strategy, what about parental power
 being exerted upon schools? One would imagine that if parents
 (espcialy of low income families) were aware of free software, they
 would implore schools to follow suit.


How do you get to those parents? Through the schools? ..Wait, isn't it the
schools that are not ready to change?

See the problem?


Perhaps, but one would have expected parents and/or pupils to search
via internet for 'free word processor' and hopefully an open source
product would appear prominently in the search results.

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Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers

2011-05-14 Thread Jean Hollis Weber
On Sat, 2011-05-14 at 12:29 +0100, Ian Lynch wrote:

 How do you get to those parents? Through the schools? ..Wait, isn't it the
 schools that are not ready to change?

I think it varies with the country and perhaps the State. In Australia
we have Parent-Teacher Associations, which could be the best place to
reach parents directly.

Also, the degree of autonomy of individual schools can vary a lot with
the country and the state. Marc is, I believe, in Canada, which may have
quite a different system than in the USA, for example.

One person with experience getting free software into schools is
Christian Einfeldt, a California lawyer and free software activist, who
is based in San Francisco. Ian will remember Christian from that Linux
expo we attended in San Diego some years ago. He's very active on
Twitter these days; among other things, he talks about his successes
(and failures) getting free s/w into schools.
http://twitter.com/einfeldt

--Jean


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[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers

2011-05-14 Thread Marc Paré

Le 2011-05-14 17:10, Jean Hollis Weber a écrit :

On Sat, 2011-05-14 at 12:29 +0100, Ian Lynch wrote:


How do you get to those parents? Through the schools? ..Wait, isn't it the
schools that are not ready to change?


I think it varies with the country and perhaps the State. In Australia
we have Parent-Teacher Associations, which could be the best place to
reach parents directly.

Also, the degree of autonomy of individual schools can vary a lot with
the country and the state. Marc is, I believe, in Canada, which may have
quite a different system than in the USA, for example.

One person with experience getting free software into schools is
Christian Einfeldt, a California lawyer and free software activist, who
is based in San Francisco. Ian will remember Christian from that Linux
expo we attended in San Diego some years ago. He's very active on
Twitter these days; among other things, he talks about his successes
(and failures) getting free s/w into schools.
http://twitter.com/einfeldt

--Jean




I finally found a link that I had archived. The Indiana Department of 
Education had plans of moving over 300,000 computers to Linux along with 
OOo. Here is the link: http://www.doe.in.gov/olt/InACCESS/index.html. 
Not sure if they did move to linux as there is no other mention on their 
site.


We have had similar threads and discussions on this topic. When I have 
time, I'll try to document the main ideas on the wiki as this is one 
area of LibreOffice that does interest me.


Network installation/updating and accessibility issues are what, IMHO, 
would slow down the adoption in the educational field.


For LibreOffice adoption, countries where school autonomy from the point 
of view of software acquisition is where we can make in-roads with well 
placed marketing strategies.


Cheers

Marc in Canada :-)


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Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers

2011-05-14 Thread Ian Lynch
On 14 May 2011 17:56, Marc Paré m...@marcpare.com wrote:

 Hi Ian et al

 Le 2011-05-14 07:29, Ian Lynch a écrit :

 Whilst certification seems a good strategy, what about parental power
 being exerted upon schools? One would imagine that if parents
 (espcialy of low income families) were aware of free software, they
 would implore schools to follow suit.


 How do you get to those parents? Through the schools? ..Wait, isn't it the
 schools that are not ready to change?

 See the problem?


 If we want to get LibreOffice accepted at school level we need to make
 sure that our product has a solid reputation for network install and
 support. Incremental update capability would also have to be part of the
 package.


Totally agree with this. OOo had some severe problems in the early days
simply because it was not easy to install across hundreds of machines on a
network. All schools tend to be organised on networks so installations will
be hundreds of a machines at a time which is good and a real incentive to
make it easy to maintain. Not sure of the situation now. Could it be
improved?


Cheers

 Marc


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-- 
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Ofqual Accredited IT Qualifications
The Schools ITQ

www.theINGOTs.org +44 (0)1827 305940

You have received this email from the following company: The Learning
Machine Limited, Reg Office, 36 Ashby Road, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B79
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Re: [tdf-discuss] desktop integration

2011-05-14 Thread Bernhard Dippold

Hi Valentin, all,

Valentin schrieb:

Hello guys!

I tested today the latest LibreOffice builds (beta 5 of 3.4) and  I saw the
better desktop integration in the Ubuntu-Desktop (10.10). Good work!
But ... since years there is one thing, that I absolutely don't like. It's
this gradient on the drop down-Button:
http://www.pic-upload.de/view-9943211/gradient.png.html

It's possible to make look the button a bit more nicer? Keep up the good
work, thank you for all!


Can you provide a button with a better gradient?

If so, we could ask the developers to have a look at the code and find 
the relevant string to replace the image (if it is an image - if it's 
just a gradient, we might not be able to modify it easily more than just 
in the colors of the end points).


It would be great if you could join the design team 
(http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design#Communication) for such tasks.


Best regards

Bernhard

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Re: [tdf-discuss] desktop integration

2011-05-14 Thread Christian Lohmaier
Hi Bernhard, *,

On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 2:57 AM, Bernhard Dippold
bernh...@familie-dippold.at wrote:
 Valentin schrieb:

 I tested today the latest LibreOffice builds (beta 5 of 3.4) and  I saw
 the
 better desktop integration in the Ubuntu-Desktop (10.10). Good work!
 But ... since years there is one thing, that I absolutely don't like. It's
 this gradient on the drop down-Button:
 http://www.pic-upload.de/view-9943211/gradient.png.html

 It's possible to make look the button a bit more nicer? Keep up the good
 work, thank you for all!

 Can you provide a button with a better gradient?

This is not a fixed-color button.

 If so, we could ask the developers to have a look at the code and find the
 relevant string to replace the image (if it is an image - if it's just a
 gradient, we might not be able to modify it easily more than just in the
 colors of the end points).

Not even the colors are hardcoded, but depend on the theme

So this problem is a classical worksforme or notourbug kind of thing.

ciao
Christian

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[tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers

2011-05-14 Thread Marc Paré

Hi Ian

Le 2011-05-14 18:14, Ian Lynch a écrit :


Totally agree with this. OOo had some severe problems in the early days
simply because it was not easy to install across hundreds of machines on a
network. All schools tend to be organised on networks so installations will
be hundreds of a machines at a time which is good and a real incentive to
make it easy to maintain. Not sure of the situation now. Could it be
improved?



I am on the dev list and I don't think that any devs have shown interest 
in this. Plus the fact that there are few devs who would have access to 
a network. We need to provided committed devs to network labs to test 
fully test out network installations and updates.


I have 4 linux boxes and 2 windows boxes at home. I may turn my house 
into a server-run house this summer and test out network installation.


Cheers

Marc


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Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: Paid developers

2011-05-14 Thread Jonathan Aquilina

On 15/05/2011 03:58, Marc Paré wrote:

Hi Ian

Le 2011-05-14 18:14, Ian Lynch a écrit :


Totally agree with this. OOo had some severe problems in the early days
simply because it was not easy to install across hundreds of machines 
on a
network. All schools tend to be organised on networks so 
installations will
be hundreds of a machines at a time which is good and a real 
incentive to

make it easy to maintain. Not sure of the situation now. Could it be
improved?



I am on the dev list and I don't think that any devs have shown 
interest in this. Plus the fact that there are few devs who would have 
access to a network. We need to provided committed devs to network 
labs to test fully test out network installations and updates.


I have 4 linux boxes and 2 windows boxes at home. I may turn my house 
into a server-run house this summer and test out network installation.


Cheers

Marc


I can help as well I have one windows desktop another drive on same 
desktop with linux a linux server, another windows laptop linux netbook 
and to macbooks


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