The Document Foundation celebrates its second anniversary and starts fundraising campaign to reach the next stage

Fourth quarter’s donors define the communities budget for the next year

Berlin, September 28, 2012 – The Document Foundation celebrates its second anniversary since the announcement of the project on September 28, 2010. During the last 12 months, the foundation was legally established in Berlin, the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee were elected by TDF members, where membership is based on meritocracy and not on invitation, Intel became a supporter, and LibreOffice 3.5 and 3.6 families were announced. In addition, TDF has shown the prototypes of a cloud and a tablet version of LibreOffice, which will be available sometime in late 2013 or early 2014.

On October 1st, The Document Foundation will start a fundraising campaign with the objective of supporting the next wave of the growth. “So far, volunteers have provided most of the work necessary to sustain the project, but after two years it is is mandatory to start thinking really big”, says Italo Vignoli, the dean of the Board of Directors. “We had a dream, and now that thousands around the world made that dream come true we want to get to the major league of software development and advocacy. By donating during the fourth quarter of 2012, donors will define the budget we have available for 2013”.

Community members have set up a dedicated donation page – with several options including PayPal and credit cards – at http://donate.libreoffice.org, to support the fundraising campaign. The page will be updated on the fly, to show current achievements, and concrete goals achieved with the donations.

“In just 24 months, we have achieved what many people thought was impossible when the project was launched”, says Thorsten Behrens, SUSE developer, Deputy Chairman of the Board. “We have managed to aggregate a large number of people around the idea that an independent foundation was the only reasonable choice to provide a sustainable future to the legacy OOo code. According to Ohloh, in just two years we managed to become the third largest free software project focused on the development of a desktop application with 325 active committers over the last 12 months, after Firefox and Chrome”.

LibreOffice is the result of the combined activity of 540 contributors – including former OpenOffice.org developers – having made more than 40,000 commits. The program is faster and more reliable, and has a richer feature set than predecessors and competitors thanks to a growing hacker community where more experienced developers are mentoring newbies in order to bring them up to speed. Today, the group is well balanced between people looking after infrastructure, new features and patches.

Downloads since January 25, 2011, the date of the first stable release, have just exceeded 18 million, and amount to over 20 million when you add external sites offering the same package. In addition, millions of users install LibreOffice from CDs burned from the ISO images available online or bundled with magazines in many geographies. Around 90% of installations are on Windows, with another 10% on MacOS.

Linux users, in contrast, get LibreOffice from their distribution repository. Based on IDC reckonings for new or updated Linux installations in 2012, TDF estimates a subtotal of 30 million Linux users, as LibreOffice is the office suite of choice for all Linux distributions.

The community around TDF will gather in Berlin from October 16 to October 19, 2012, for the second LibreOffice Conference (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). Interested people need to register at http://conference.libreoffice.org/registration/ by October 8th.

LibreOffice can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org/.