Canonical Joins The Document Foundation Advisory Board

The Document Foundation today announced that Ubuntu parent company Canonical has joined The Document Foundation Advisory Board. The foundation said Canonical is to provide "experience and insights" to increase the use of LibreOffice in the enterprise and government. Canonical joins the likes of KDE, GNOME, Red Hat, SUSE, and Google on the board.

The board's main purpose is to represent the foundation's sponsors and their needs to the Board of Directors, although the BoD isn't under obligation to accept or act on any proposals made by the advisory board. The BoD does, on occasion, solicit advice and guidance from the advisory board and the advisory board does make proposals on behalf of their members. Some of the other members on the Advisory Board include those listed above as well as the Free Software Foundation, Collabora, Intel, the French government, CloudOn, City of Munich government, and AMD.

A Canonical representative was quoted as saying, "We are extremely pleased to become a member of the LibreOffice Project Advisory Board and having the opportunity to provide our guidance and insights to help improve LibreOffice for users around the world."

Ubuntu has developers contributing to LibreOffice, although they are focused on improvements intended primarily for Ubuntu, such as their theme/icon set, and historically contribute much less than most others. The announcement said, "Canonical has been an active member of the LibreOffice community since the early days, and one of the most frequent sponsors of the LibreOffice Conference."

In other LibreOffice news, the next Membership Committee election has begun. Nominations will be accepted until August 31 and the voting will begin September 8. Voting will conclude September 14 and the initial list of winners will be announced September 15. Challenges will be heard through September 17 and the final results will be posted September 18. The new committee will take charge September 19, 2106.