Berlin, April 4, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.2, for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, the third release of the LibreOffice 4.0 family that fixes several small bugs and glitches.
This is another important milestone in the process of improving the quality and stability of the bleeding edge version of LibreOffice, and facilitating the migration process to free software. The Document Foundation has recently published a white paper to provide a reference roadmap for migrations to LibreOffice, which is available here: http://tinyurl.com/mwp-v1.
To foster the development of LibreOffice, The Document Foundation needs your support! There is a dedicated donation page at http://donate.libreoffice.org that lists various options to contribute to the budget of the charitable entity.
Berlin, March 27, 2013 – The Document Foundation releases a white paper to help organizations migrate to LibreOffice. Published on Document Freedom Day, the text explains how governments and enterprises can leverage Free Software to lower their IT expenditures and get rid of proprietary software lock-in.
The white paper can be accessed from here: LibreOffice Migration White Paper (of course, it is a Hybrid PDF document, which can be edited with LibreOffice).
According to the white paper, migrations to Free Software – and especially to LibreOffice – should follow a carefully crafted change management process, which needs to handle not only the technical aspects, which are actually the easiest ones to cope with, but also the barriers met when breaking long-term working habits.
LibreOffice liberates the users from proprietary document formats by adopting natively ODF (Open Document Format), which is the standard document format recognized by the largest number of organizations and supported by the largest number of desktop software (including Microsoft Office).
In addition, LibreOffice offers the largest set of import filters for proprietary document formats (including Microsoft Office, Publisher, Visio and Works, plus Corel Draw, Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPro, Quattro Pro and WordPerfect), and thus protects user investments in legacy applications, while providing a migration path to ODF.
Last but not least, LibreOffice templates are using only free fonts available on every OS which can be installed independently from any software package and thus foster interoperability between GNU/Linux, Mac OS and Windows users as documents maintain their original layout on every platform.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to maintain the infrastructure, and support events and marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at a global and local level.
Update: click here for the latest protocol documents
Impress Remote for Android now available on every platform
Berlin, March 6, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.1, for Windows, MacOS and Linux, the first release after the successful launch of LibreOffice 4.0 in early February, which has yielded rates of entirely new client IP addresses requesting updates each day over the 100,000 mark (they were just 25,000 one year ago).
LibreOffice Impress Remote is now available for all platforms – Linux, MacOS and Windows – from Google Play. How to instructions are available on the wiki.
The new release is a step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.0. For enterprise adoptions, though, The Document Foundation suggests the more solid and stable LibreOffice 3.6.5, backed by certified level 3 support engineers.
The Documentation team has also released the guide “Getting Started with LibreOffice 4.0”, which is available in PDF and ODF formats from the website and as a printed book from Lulu.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation – infrastructure, marketing, community development – with a donation. There is a donation page with many options including PayPal and credit cards.
LibreOffice 4.0.1 is available for immediate download from the website. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the extension repository.
The free office suite the community has been dreaming of for twelve years
Berlin, February 7, 2013 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0, the free office suite the community has been dreaming of since 2001. LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement, in September 2010: a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem.
LibreOffice 4.0: a community on fire
In less than 30 months, LibreOffice has grown dramatically to become the largest independent free software project focused on end user desktop productivity. TDF inclusive governance and the copyleft license have been instrumental in attracting more than 500 developers – three quarters of them being independent volunteers – capable of contributing over 50,000 commits.
The resulting code base is rather different from the original one, as several million lines of code have been added and removed, by adding new features, solving bugs and regressions, adopting state of the art C++ constructs, replacing tools, getting rid of deprecated methods and obsoleted libraries, and translating twenty five thousand lines of comments from German to English. All of this makes the code easier to understand and more rewarding to be involved with for the stream of new members of our community.
“LibreOffice 4.0 is a milestone in interoperability and an excellent foundation for our continued work to improve the User Interface,” explains Florian Effenberger, Chairman of the Board of Directors. “Our project is not only capable of attracting new developers on a regular basis, but it also creates a transparent platform for cooperation based on a strong Free Software ethos, where corporate sponsored and volunteer developers work to attain the same objective.”
Integration with several content and document management systems – including Alfresco, IBM FileNet P8, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, Nuxeo, OpenText, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Service and others – through the CMIS standard.
Better interoperability with DOCX and RTF documents, thanks to several new features and improvements like the possibility of importing ink annotations and attaching comments to text ranges.
Possibility to import Microsoft Publisher documents, and further improvement of Visio import filters with the addition of 2013 version (just announced).
Additional UI incremental improvements, including Unity integration and support of Firefox Themes (Personas) to give LibreOffice a personalized look.
Introduction of the widget layout technique for dialog windows, which makes it easier to translate, resize and hide UI elements, reduces code complexity, and lays a foundation for a much improved user interface.
Different header and footer on the first page of a Writer document, without the need of a separate page style.
Several performance improvements to Calc, plus new features such as export of charts as images (JPG and PNG) and new spreadsheet functions as defined in ODF OpenFormula.
First release of Impress Remote Control App for Android, supported only on some Linux distributions. (The second release, coming soon, will be supported on all platforms: Windows, MacOS X and all Linux distros and binaries.)
Significant performance improvements when loading and saving many types of documents, with particular improvements for large ODS and XLSX spreadsheets and RTF files.
Improved code contribution thanks to Gerrit: a web based code review system, facilitating the task for projects using Git version control system (although this is not specific of LibreOffice 4.0, it has entered the production stage just before the 4.0 branch).
Overall excellent backwards compatibility is retained for legacy extensions, but moving forward TDF is committed to a more pro-active approach to evolving the UNO APIs, with more functionality to be deprecated, and eventually dropped, in due time – according to the six month release cycle – throughout the LibreOffice 4.x release series.
During the last seven months, since the branch of LibreOffice 3.6 and during the entire development cycle of LibreOffice 4.0, developers have made over 10,000 commits. On average, one commit every 30 minutes, including weekends and the holiday season: a further testimonial of the incredible vitality of the project.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to grow the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.
Volunteers will present the progress in code development at FOSDEM
Berlin, January 30, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.6.5, for Windows, MacOS and Linux, which is going to be the last of LibreOffice 3.6 family before LibreOffice 4.0, the next major release. This new release is another step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice, and facilitating the migration process to free software.
LibreOffice 3.6.5 arrives a couple of days before FOSDEM 2013 (Brussels, Belgium, February 2/3), where TDF developer’s community will gather for the third time since the birth of the project. LibreOffice will have a booth in building K and a DevRoom – with several talks about hacking the source code – in building H (https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/track/libreoffice/) on Sunday, February 3, from 9:30AM onwards (room H.2213).
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation. There is a donation page – with many options including PayPal and credit cards – at http://donate.libreoffice.org, to support the infrastructure.
The full fledged free office suite is available on the credit card sized single-board computer developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation
Cambridge (UK) and Berlin (Germany), December 17, 2012 – The Raspberry Pi Foundation (http://www.raspberrypi.org/) and The Document Foundation (http://www.documentfoundation.org/) announce the availability of the full fledged version of LibreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.org/) on the Raspberry Pi, the credit-card sized computer created with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. The Raspberry Pi is a little PC which plugs into a TV and a keyboard and can be used for many of the things that most desktop PC can do, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games.
LibreOffice is the first comprehensive office suite to run on a 40 dollar credit card sized PC, without any compromise on features and performances. LibreOffice has been ported to ARM by multiple contributors from Canonical, Debian and RedHat, and was packaged for the Raspberry Pi by Rene Engelhard as a part of his work as the Debian maintainer for LibreOffice.
“The availability of LibreOffice, the best free office suite ever, on the Raspberry Pi – the most affordable PC ever, targeted to hardware and software enthusiasts, and schools – is extremely important for The Document Foundation, because it will contribute to the growth of the brand awareness in key market segments”, comments Bjoern Michaelsen, a Canonical developer and a deputy member of the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation.
“I’m very impressed that the LibreOffice team didn’t have to make any changes to the code in order for it to compile and smoothly run on Raspberry Pi”, said Eben Upton from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. “It’s also great to have a comprehensive office suite available in the Pi Store at launch, making people even more aware of the potential of this device”.
The Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer, designed to fit in a pocket, and cheap enough to be bought with pocket money. It was developed by the not-for-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation in Cambridge to help children engage with computer programming, and has won dozens of awards in its first year of release. Additional information at http://www.raspberrypi.org.
About The Document Foundation (TDF)
The Document Foundation is an open, independent, self-governing, meritocratic organization, which builds on ten years of dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community. TDF was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent foundation brings out the best in corporate and volunteer contributors, and will deliver the best free office suite. TDF is open to any individual who agrees with its core values and contributes to its activities, and warmly welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community. As of November 30, 2012, TDF has over 150 members and over 2.000 volunteers and contributors worldwide.
