Thank you for your support!
Dear supporters and friends of The Document Foundation,
on behalf of the worldwide LibreOffice community, and on behalf of the donor Freies Office Deutschland e.V., we would like to express our sincerest thanks to all of you for your kind and generous support in setting up the legal entity.
On February 17th, The Document Foundation has been incorporated as a German Stiftung des bürgerlichen Rechts, located in Berlin, and in the meantime, the transfer of all assets has been nearly finished. In other words: The long-awaited foundation is finally in existence and fully operating.
For us, it is still unbelievable how strong the worldwide support is, how many people support the idea of an independent foundation, and how many contributed by either getting engaged in the project, or by donating to fund our operations.
Following our open and transparent approach, we have made public our budget, and will constantly update it, so you see what your donations are being used for.
Our sincere thanks also go out to the members of our advisory board, who provide us not only with guidance, but also with financial support.
Although many of us are volunteers, working pro bono in their spare time, running such an entity needs funds. Travel support, participation in events, providing infrastructure, and many other areas need to be covered. Without all your support, The Document Foundation would not be what it is today.
Your contribution made a real difference and enabled us to create a strong community-driven, meritocratic, vendor-neutral foundation for the best free office suite. We could not have done it without you.
Thank you very much for your support of The Document Foundation!
The Board of Directors
It’s just too bad that some people can no longer install LO due to a bug that has been present since 3.5 and was carried over into 3.5.1 and 3.5.2. Even worse, it wipes out older versions, leaving those poor souls without any office software. So please cut the crap about “the best free office suite”. It is not, it is a suite developed by geeks for geeks, just a much free software is only there for geeks to show of their prowess to other geeks. Your “Joe & Jenny Average” don’t care about open standards, ISO and what more, they care about a product that starts fast (not just on AMD & Intel’s umpteen core CPU’s), does what it needs to do and nothing more.
Most of all, if they are offered an upgrade, they don’t want it to wipe out the previous version when the upgrade fails.
Dear Peter,
sorry, I don’t agree at all – LibreOffice is by far the best office suite I had on my linux box so far. And I supported the foundation from the beginning, and will continue to. Even if you ran into a bug, and didn’t find a solution yet (did you use the available means of support already?), I don’t think this posting is the right place to complain about. Would you rather live in a world with only 1 available product, and nothing else to choose (OS, office suite, … you name it)? Don’t we all feel pride in a team of enthusiasts that spend their most valuable time to improve a free product? Well, I do!
Best regards, Jörg.
Dear Peter – out of interest, which bug is this ? and what have you done to engage with the project from a QA perspective, to ensure that such bugs are categorized correctly, and made visible to the developers ? LibreOffice is a volunteer project, bugs don’t magically prioritize themselves (and much less fix themselves) – please do get involved with that process on the QA list.
The Get Help page at http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/ is a gateway to a number of free resources for user support.
Dear Peter
I’m Mr Joe Average & i think that open software is not just for geeks, and we do care about open standards, ISO & the likes. I would just like to thank everyone at TDF for “the best free office suite”, as a long time user i think that the product has got better & better, and if we find some bugs or something thats not right then we should get involved & try and help find a solution, not come on and have a go at people who are doin there best on their own time to give us a free office suite. Again thanks to everyone at TDF & everyone who contributes.
Dear Peter,
Please don’t go bashing people who use their valuable time to provide you with free stuff. They liberated us from the jaws of oracle corporation by continuing with the development of our ‘best free office software’. I am sure you can’t mind donating 300-500 USD to this foundation as you would have bought the alternative office the MS Enterprise Office if you didnt have this ‘geeks’ doing the job.
How and where did you report the bug? Libre Office doesnt do online installation, so you can always revert back to the old working office incase of an error during installation.
What bug is this? I have installed LO 3.50/1 & 2on various versions of Linux (ubunut, RHEL, Fedora) both 32 & 64 bit, also, I have installed it on Windows XP, Vista & 7 mainly 32 bit, but also 64 bit on Windows 7. I haven’t had to do anything other than go through the standard install.
Anyhow, cracking software, keep it up,and keep improving, especially Base !!