jExcel: first project to be financed by FDL
The jExcel project was accepted by the board of FDL making it the first project to be financed through FDL. The financing is provided by Nexedi, who is looking to better integrate jExcel within their OfficeJS application store and other applications. The sponsorship will include a range of features for the upcoming v4 of jExcel.
Paris, November 18th, 2019 - The jExcel project has been approved for financing by the commitee of FDL, making it eligible for financing which will be provided by Nexedi who also brought forward the project together with the jExcel lead developer.
jExcel is a lightweight vanilla javascript plugin to create browser-based interactive tables and spreadsheets compatible with other spreadsheet softwares. It allows to create online spreasheeds from Javascript Arrays, JSON, CSV or XSLX files and copy them back and forth between jExcel and Excel. It is easy to integrate and customize to create custom editors or spreadsheets. Nexedi has been using Jexcel and a number of other spreadsheet editors. Following it's "everything web" mantra, Nexedi was evaluating the different spreadsheet editors in terms of existing featuresets and missing requirements for a deeper integration within its application landscape - including ERP5 and the OfficeJS app store. Nexedi found jExcel to be the most suitable library and approach its lead developer regarding the possibilities of sponsoring the development of specific features through FDL.
It was agreed to based upcomig version 4 of jExcel on the these features, which include workbook/tab support, multiple colomn resize, JSON updates, highlighting selected cells after CTRL-C, footer with formula support, a new column type for HTML editing, several new flags and events as well as extended documentation with usage examples. A project file was subsequently developed by the jExcel lead developer and Nexedi and submitted to FDL for approval. With the project now having received approval, development of the new jExcel version is set to begin.
Jean-Paul Smets, CEO of Nexedi: "We are very happy to be able to use FDL for financing the development of jExcel and hopefully helping it to become the de-facto library to use when working with spreadsheets online. We also strongly believe in the need to financially support critical European open source libraries and know ourselves the difficulties of financing free and open source software. With our donation to FDL and sponsorship we also want to set a positive example of how open source software can be maintained and improved through the use of FDL and the possible tax benefits of sponsoring essential free software publishers."
References
About FDL
FDL (Fonds de Dotation du Libre) is a french non-profit organisation to sponsor both the long term maintenance of essential free software as well as the short-term feature development - handled through it's sister association AWL (Association pour un Web Libre). Both associations aim to use tax breaks for donations made to general use and essential open source software to fill the gap between public R&D funding and private system integration funding.
More information: https://fdl-lef.org/
About jExcel
jExcel is a lightweight vanilla javascript library for creating web based spreadsheets. It aims to recreate key functionality of desktop spreadsheet applications on the browser. With around 5000 stars on Github it is one of the most used open-source spreedsheet libraries on the web. jExcel is developed and maintained by Paul Hodel.
More information: https://bossanova.uk/jexcel/
About Nexedi
Nexedi is the largest publisher of Open Source / Free Software in Europe with 15 million lines of original source code. Nexedi enterprise software portfolio covers business applications (ERP5), edge cloud computing (SlapOS), big data (Wendelin), distributed transactional NoSQL database (NEO), HTML5 productivity (OfficeJS), progressive offline web applications (RenderJS, JIO), software defined resilient networking (re6st), devops (Webrunner) and multimedia conversion (cloudooo). With presence in Europe, Asia and Americas, Nexedi addresses a wide range of industries ranging from aerospace, automotive, banking, telecommunication, healthcare to government sectors. The Free Software nature of Nexedi solutions eliminates licensing costs, provides full freedom to update or customise the system as business requirements change and allows corporations to capitalise on their know how without vendor lock-in. Nexedi provides 24/7 support to corporations and governments wishing to migrate their mission critical applications to Free Software solutions.
More information: https://www.nexedi.com