2024-10-12, 11:30–12:00 (Europe/Luxembourg), Auditorium
How public money led to better, more secure, and more feature-full public code in LibreOffice land.
Over the course of the past year, the German Federal Agency for Computer Security (BSI) has funded a multitude of improvements, as well as a code audit, for LibreOffice.
The resulting report is available here: https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Themen/Unternehmen-und-Organisationen/Informationen-und-Empfehlungen/Freie-Software/Sicherheit_LibreOffice/Sicherheit_LibreOffice_node.html
This talk with focus on the high-level ideas and motivations, as well as the success story of instilling "Public Money, Public Code" ideas into (parts of) the German public sector.
Thorsten is a LibreOffice hacker and standards wonk. During his now 20 years of tenure in the project, he's spent most of his time hacking the code in areas ranging from build system, platform abstraction libraries, Impress and Writer.
Thorsten's a computer scientist by education, and a Free Software enthusiast by heart, a geek from early childhood - and someone who was lucky enough to turn a hobby into an occupation. After first working for Sun Microsystems on then-OpenOffice.org, he then went with a number of others founding The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project.
These days, his day job includes substantial amounts of project management and customer interactions, which does not prevent him from still messing with LibreOffice code. He's recently spun up his own company allotropia to have even more fun with open source all day!