28 September 2011, 12:37

LibreOffice reaches it first birthday

It is now one year since the Document Foundation was created and LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice. On 28 September 2010 much of the community of the OpenOffice project split away from the control of the main sponsor Oracle to develop a free open source suite under the auspices of the newly created Document Foundation. Support for the rebels came from companies such as Google, Novell/SUSE and Red Hat, promising their staff would spend time helping the development. Of the more than 270 developers working with the Document Foundation, a quarter of the code changes in LibreOffice have come from volunteer project members. In this first year, the Document Foundation has attracted more developers with commits than the OpenOffice project did in its first decade.

The Document Foundation currently estimates 25 million users of LibreOffice worldwide, of which more than 10 million installed the package from a downloaded ISO-image or from a CD packaged with a magazine. The additional 15 million users are believed to be Linux users, as LibreOffice has become the preferred office suite in most distributions.

Things have been quiet recently regarding OpenOffice; Oracle declined to take part in the Document Foundation and in June 2011 offered OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The developers currently seem to be putting considerable effort into adapting the project to the customs of the ASF. The currently available download of OpenOffice is version 3.3.0 dating from January 2011; by contrast there are regular updates to LibreOffice. During this time, according to Michael Meeks, the LibreOffice developer hired by Novell, the two suites have grown so far apart that is becoming increasingly difficult to share code between them.

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