The Document Foundation welcomes a new member of the Advisory Board

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The Document Foundation welcomes a new member of the Advisory Board:
King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia

Berlin, June 25, 2013 - The Document Foundation announces that King
Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia is now
an effective member of its Advisory Board. KACST sponsors the National
Program for Free and Open Source Software Technologies (Motah:
http://HYPERLINK "http://www.motah.org.sa/"www.motah.org.sa), which has
been contributing to LibreOffice for almost one year, to enhance the
Arabic language and the RTL (right-to-left) support, and to develop new
features.

Motah LibreOffice Project (http://motah.org.sa/en/?q=node/HYPERLINK
"http://motah.org.sa/en/?q=node/94"94) is only one of the activities of
Motah at KACST, where several software products are studied to explore
the extent of Arabic support and their suitability for Arab users.
LibreOffice was selected to be the first localization project because
most Arab users need a full feature office suite.

"Motah software engineers have been regularly contributing to
LibreOffice since 2012, and are now one of the largest groups of full
time developers hacking LibreOffice code, together with SUSE and Red
Hat", states Michael Meeks of SUSE, a Member of TDF Board of Directors.
"Thanks to the injection of these new groups of hackers, during the last
months we have been able to increase the number of contributors, which
is now around 100 on a monthly basis and over 330 on a yearly basis".

"It is fascinating to see The Document Foundation combining people from
different cultures, languages and geographical locations around the
development of LibreOffice, the best free office suite ever", says
Dr.Turki Alsaud, KACST VP for research institutes. “Having KACST inside
TDF Advisory Board reflects our support to the development of
LibreOffice, extending our reach from the improvement of the Arabic
language version to the development of new features and the improvement
of the user interface".

With the addition of KACST, the Advisory Board of The Document
Foundation has now seven members: FSF, Google, Intel, KACST, MIMO, Red
Hat, SPI, Lanedo, Freies Office Deutschland e.V. and SUSE
(https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Advisory_Board).

Short link to TDF blog post: http://wp.me/p1byPE-pu.

About KACST

King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) is an independent
scientific organization administratively reporting to the Prime
Minister’s Office. KACST is both the Saudi Arabian national science
agency and its national laboratories. The science agency function
involves science and technology policy making, building national
scientific database, funding of external research, and conducting
applied scientific research in varius disciplines through its own
research institutes and providing services such as the patent office,
scientific information, and scientific consultations to public and
private sector etc. KACST has currently over 2500 employees.

Media Contact KACST

Mohamed Alkanhal - Director of Computer Research Institute
Phone: + 966 11 4813765 - Email: cri@kacst.edu.sa (website:
http://www.kacst.edu.sa)