LibreOffice Conference opens in Berlin
LibreOffice Conference, Berlin, October 17, 2012 – Florian Effenberger, Chairman of the Board of The Document Foundation, has officially opened the 2nd LibreOffice Conference (http://conference.libreoffice.org) addressing the authorities and the community members gathered in the capital city of Germany from the five continents.
“As of today, LibreOffice is being used by close to 60 million people. It is the standard free office suite on all major platforms, available in over 100 languages. Large cities and organizations are deploying it very successfully, more and more schools and universities are rolling it out, and there’s not a single month where it is not covered by major media around the globe – because we always have good news to share. The Document Foundation has become a member of leading organizations for free software and open standards, and at the very same time, is widely seen as a the leader in its area, built on strong reputation and credibility. Last but not least, the ecosystem is growing rapidly, as more and more enterprises discover the business benefit of truly free software.”
“We are now a family of thousands of contributors around the globe. I not only have colleagues all over the world, but more important, true friends, and I am honoured to be part of a large family. Everyone with their very own story, their very own background, and their very own skills. Different ages, cultures and languages, all united by one goal: providing the best free office suite ever, and giving power to those who contribute by passion. By living our values day by day, we make possible what we never dared to dream of two years ago.”
LibreOffice Conference 2012 is hosted by the Federal Ministry of the Interior (http://www.bmi.bund.de) and the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (http://www.bmwi.de) of the Federal Republic of Germany, and Freies Office Deutschland e.V. The event is sponsored by Canonical (http://www.canonical.com), Google (http://www.google.com), SerNet (http://www.sernet.de), bitbone (http://www.bitbone.de), Lanedo (http://www.lanedo.com), Red Hat (http://www.redhat.com) and Univention (http://www.univention.de).
The main conference sessions will be broadcasted online, while all sessions will be recorded and made available on the conference website. To access both real time and recorded video, the infrastructure team has created a single webpage at http://conference.libreoffice.org/streams.
LibreOffice 3.6.2 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center. When downloading the software, you might consider about donating some money to The Document Foundation for the development of LibreOffice and the growth of the community, by accessing our donation page at http://donate.libreoffice.org.
LibreOffice is booming
Over 2 million downloads in September, over 540 developers,
a community of over 3,000 volunteers from the five continents,
over 100 languages (representing 95% of the world population)
LibreOffice Conference, Berlin, October 17, 2012 – The Document Foundation announces that the German city of Munich is migrating to LibreOffice, following a growing trend of migrations and adoptions worldwide. “After a careful risk-assessment, Munich city council has decided to migrate to LibreOffice. In favour of that decision, among others, was the greater flexibility of the project regarding consumption of open source licenses. In addition, Munich wants to rely on a large and vibrant community for any Open Source product it employs,” says Kirsten Böge, head of public relations.
Just before the city of Munich, a similar announcement was made by the French Prime Minister, who mentioned LibreOffice as a pillar in the overall migration of free software of all government bodies. MimO, the technology group taking care of the migration project, has already certified LibreOffice as the free office suite of choice.
Several other large migrations to LibreOffice have happened or are happening in Denmark (Hospitals of Copenhagen), Italy (Regione Umbria, City Councils of Provincia di Bolzano, and one of the largest IT company in the banking sector), Spain (City of Las Palmas), Ireland (City of Limerick), Greece (Municipality of Pilea Hortiatis) and the US (City of Largo in Florida).
Chicago Public Library deploys LibreOffice on several PCs, as a service for the people who need to create or edit documents, and provides trainings to learn the free office suite.
LibreOffice is developed by a large and diverse hacker community, which has grown from 20 to 550 members in two years. This group is backed by an even larger number of active volunteers taking care of localizations, quality assurance, community development and marketing at global and local levels. Overall, the number of these people is over 3,000, if we take as a measure those who have contributed to the project wiki.
LibreOffice has been downloaded over 20 million times – and over 2 million in September, following the announcement of version 3.6.2 – from The Document Foundation mirror system (over 80% Windows + 10% MacOS), with a large number of additional downloads from software and magazine websites. In addition, LibreOffice is featured on a large number of covermount CDs, which account for other installs. TDF estimates a grand total of 60 million users, half of them being desktop Linux users who get LibreOffice from their distribution repository.
“Looking at these figures, one can hardly believe that it all happened in just two years,” comments Italo Vignoli, Director of The Document Foundation in charge of marketing communications. “During these months I have traveled the world to speak at free software conferences about the project, and I have met hundreds of people who recognize in LibreOffice the legitimate heir of OpenOffice. Today, the numbers we are releasing show that also governments and enterprises share this perception, and support the idea that only a focused independent free software foundation could provide a path forward for the OpenOffice code base.”
LibreOffice 3.6.2 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center. When downloading the software, you might consider about donating some money to The Document Foundation for the development of LibreOffice and the growth of the community, by accessing our donation page at http://donate.libreoffice.org.
