Getting Close to LibreOffice 4.1

I still remember the second I pushed the “send” button of the very first TDF press release, on September 28, 2010. A simple gesture, and a giant leap forward for the free office suite ecosystem.

On that day, though, the feeling was completely different.

With some friends, I have made the following parallel to give a sense of the challenge: the decision to launch an independent foundation focused on the future of OpenOffice – and, as a consequence, to fork the software – was like diving from Salto Angel into the pond some 900 meters downhill instead of getting a regular shower during a hot summer day.

In both cased, you end up wet and refreshed…

Michael Meeks, who is British and definitely more rational than myself (the old grumpy emotional latin of the group) has a more rational take.

We were a group of friends who gathered – for different reasons and objectives – around OpenOffice between 2001 and 2005, and then spent the following 5 years in endless discussions about a different vision for the future of OOo.

A fundamental part of this vision was to create a happy home for developers and a welcoming atmosphere for all contributors.

At the time of the announcement, LibreOffice had 20 developers, and we all knew that 20 developers were not enough to manage and improve the 12 million lines of LibreOffice source code. Because of this fact, our announcement raised more than one eyebrow amongst people who – for different reasons – were not directly involved in the project.

But we had the vision of the happy home, which was strong enough to attract over 80 developers during October 2010, and then another 580 since then. Developers who come to see and then decide how much they want to get involved in the project.

The histogram shows that we have been able to attract developers on a regular basis. Even after three years, we continue to enjoy working with new developers each week. We’re grateful for all the work that lots of people have contributed to our project so far, and we will try to maintain the welcoming atmosphere in the future.

In fact, the number of regular contributors has grown from just over 50 per month in the second half of 2011 to around 100 per month in the first half of 2013. This has been reflected in the number of developers active during the last 12 months which is now over 350.

This means that about 50% of all developers attracted by the project have contributed during the last 12 months. Furthermore, there is a growing number of core developers who get paid to hack LibreOffice code and therefore are working on a full time basis.

If we look at the distribution of the 352 developers active during the last 12 months by number of commits, we realize that there is a long tail of contributors (which is healthy for the project). In addition, if we look at the pie of the 49 top developers with 50+ commits during the last 12 months, we find a lot of volunteers (which is even healthier for the project).

The two donut charts visualize the growth of diversity in our project, both in term of contributions by companies and groups and in term of individual contributors. Both charts compare the situation at the end of the first 12 months (September 2011) with the situation at the end of June 2013.

The first shows the growth of the number of companies contributing to the project and the increasing weight of code developed by volunteers, SUSE and RedHat. At the same time, it shows the shrinking weight of legacy code inherited from OOo.

The second shows the distribution of contributors by affiliation. The largest group are volunteer developers, followed by the shrinking slice of OOo hackers, and by the many companies and organizations contributing to LibreOffice.

For completeness, these numbers also credit a few developers at Apache for work of theirs imported to LibreOffice. Naturally, we do not claim them as LibreOffice contributors, although we are grateful for their work.

LibreOffice 4.1 will be our sixth major release, and another giant leap forward in term of interoperability with proprietary file formats.

We have already provided a wealth of information on this subject, through the blog posts of Fridrich Strba, Eilidh McAdam and Miklos Vajna, three of the hackers most involved in creating or improving filters for proprietary file formats.

In addition, Michael Meeks has extensively described the less visible development activity focused on making LibreOffice source code leaner and cleaner. You can read the different steps here, here and here.

We have also summarized in a web page the most significant features of the best free office suite ever. LibreOffice 4.1 will be a landmark for interoperability, with dozens of improvements and new features focused on this specific issue.

Of course, if you want to dig deeply into the single new features, the pages we prepared for each major announcement might help in getting a better picture: 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 4.0 and eventually 4.1.

I look forward to firing another major release announcement in a few days. This time, I will push the button with a completely different mood, as most of our dreams have already come true.

Today, we have (1) a free office suite we can be very proud of, based on the superior qualities of the copyleft license; (2) a solid and independent foundation which represents a large and diverse global community, based on meritocracy and independence from a single corporate vendor; and (3) a bright future.

HINT: double clicking on visuals will open a larger image, which can be used for publication.

Sources of Data: Ohloh for histograms and pie charts, The Document Foundation for donut charts.