Hi all,
Since NLnet has confirmed to the board that the project websites in question were set up by them with their best intentions, including the choice and display of our logos, I apologize to the representatives of allotropia and Collabora, also to our full-time code contributor trustees employed by them, that Florian, our executive director did not contact allotropia, Collabora, NLnet or the board as a whole, but went to the widest public, even if it was done with the best of his intentions.
As I myself am involved in this matter (as like one of the accused winners), and as I do not represent the board with this apology, I respectfully ask the board and the executive director to join me in bringing this matter to a calming conclusion, to make open source a real success that all contributors can share!
If any of the directors or the executive director still have any reservations, please share them (and me) with the people concerned so as not to embarrass them (and me) again. I stress this because the last message from our fellow board member who started the issue – “NLNet very kindly explained the situation and replaced the logo with a more suitable one straight away. The information now available leads to a simple mistake and not to an intentional use of the logo in that specific incident.” – may also suggest to some (like me) that there may still be cases where “intentional” error on the part of NLnet winners (including me) can be shown. As I am not aware of any such thing, and NLnet has not confirmed it, so that is why I ask for a truly reassuring closure of the matter from the board and the executive director.
For your information, while the NLnet funded LibreOffice developments were fully public on NLnet site and in my project page, I have also reported these developments in our immediate community several times, e.g.
LibreOffice l10n list (2023): [libreoffice-l10n] State-of-the-art hyphenation for Danish, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Norwegian and Sweden – The Document Foundation Mailing List Archives
LiboCon 2024: Write better! :: LibreOffice Conference 2024 :: pretalx
COOL Days 2025: https://numbertext.org/typography/Hyphenation_Control_Achieving_Optimal_Readability_in_Your_Documents_COOL_Days_2025_Budapest.pdf
Over the next few weeks, I will gradually add the newest results of LO/COOL Typography project to the Release Notes of LibreOffice version 25.8, e.g. the very basic interoperability of the hyphenated text in MSO 2016 and later has already been listed: ReleaseNotes/25.8 - The Document Foundation Wiki.
I am very happy about the near fully interoperable implementation of smart justify (optimized optional shrinking of word spacing), because of the extraordinary difficulty to decrypt and implement the algorithm, which was the most important secret improvement of MS Office 2013 and later, resulting losing our very basic text layout interoperability completely. My implementation in LibreOffice code base is probably the first in the world, both in free software and in propriety software, which allows to show and edit DOCX documents with the same layout. This would not have been possible without NLnet’s and EC generous support. These developments were funded through the NGI0 Entrust Fund, a fund established by NLnet Foundation with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme.
Best regards,
László Németh
member of the board