Italo Vignoli
Italo Vignoli is a founding member of The Document Foundation, the Chairman Emeritus of Associazione LibreItalia, a Software Heritage Ambassador, and a former BoD member at Open Source Initiative (OSI). He co-leads LibreOffice marketing, PR and media relations, co-chairs the certification program, and is a spokesman for the project. He has contributed to migration projects to LibreOffice in Italy. From 2004 to 2010 he has been involved in the OOo project. In his professional life, he is a marketing consultant with decades of experience in high tech PR and media relations.
Sessions
State of the project. Statistics about development, downloads and donations.
LibreOffice was announced in 2010 as a desktop productivity software focused on interoperability thanks to the native support of the Open Document Format. Today, is the only technology platform for desktop productivity supporting applications for the desktop, the cloud and mobile, independent from large commercial companies, and providing ownership of contents to users, thanks to the native support of the Open Document Format.
Enterprises are not supporting the LibreOffice project as much as individual users, and this can represent a threat for the sustainability of the project. Although we can further increase the number and amount of individual donations, we have to educate enterprises about giving back to FOSS, to ensure the long term sustainability of the LibreOffice project.
The main issue for document interoperability is a trivial one, and are fonts which are proprietary on Windows/macOS and free on Linux. LibreOffice is capable of handling on the fly font replacement to solve the issue, but the feature has to be configured and managed to work properly.
Digital documents are executable files interpreted by the office suite and represented according to the XML code instructions. There is a fundamental difference between how we are accustomed to considering documents (as innocent pieces of paper) and the reality of digital documents. This difference should be taught in schools to make students aware of the consequences of being locked into proprietary document formats.
How to define a true open standard format for office documents