Category: Announcements

Developers invited to contribute their add-ons
Community-based review process ensures quality and reliability

LibreOffice, the free office productivity suite, can be enhanced with hundreds of extensions and templates. Users can download these smart extras to improve the suite’s functionality to fit their job or hobby, and developers can easily write their own add-ons and share it with millions of users worldwide.

Since, at the moment, there is no reliable and stable source for downloading these handy add-ons, the LibreOffice community has put great efforts into launching a public repository. It does not only provide extensions and templates for LibreOffice, but also for OpenOffice.org and other compatible office suites. Users of these can benefit from the work and the commitment of our community, and are invited to have a look at recent versions of our product, which already has included has the most popular extensions, and comes with many new features.

The new site is now in public beta testing at

http://extensions-test.libreoffice.org
and
http://templates-test.libreoffice.org

and has been created in cooperation with the Plone community, on whose technology it is based. To ensure the quality and reliability of the offered extensions, a community-based review process is currently set in place: Community volunteers test and review available extensions, and those meeting criteria of quality will be tagged accordingly.

We warmly invite all developers to submit their extensions and fill the repository, where millions of users worldwide will be able to download and benefit from their work. All extensions submitted during the public beta test will remain in the repository after the beta test, so this is your chance to join the efforts right from the beginning!

LibreOffice remains committed to providing users with quality software authored under free software licenses, and, as such, our catalogue of extensions and templates are published under free software licenses.

Thanks to the great work by PortableApps.com, LibreOffice Portable 3.4.3 is now available at http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/portable/3.4.3/

The Internet, August 31, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) maintains the speedy pace of LibreOffice development with the announcement of version 3.4.3, intended for enterprise deployments. The new release arrives two weeks after version 3.3.4 (intended for more-conservative users) and one month after the previous release of the 3.4 family, which provides a larger feature set based on cleaner and leaner code.

TDF maintains two editions of LibreOffice to satisfy the needs of a large and diverse user base, although we strongly recommend everyone to update to the 3.4 series in the near future. LibreOffice 3.4.2 has already been deployed by users at Itaipu Binacional in Brazil, the largest electrical power plant in the world, and has been key for the launch of a large migration project involving 25,000 desktops by Copenhagen hospitals in Denmark.

From September 2nd to September 4th, the LibreOffice community will host this year’s Hackfest together with the Linux Migration Project of the city of Munich in Germany (http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest2011). The meeting has the objective of improving the collaboration between TDF and corporate users of LibreOffice, in order to better match the time based release schedule with the needs of organizations with very large deployments of the office suite.

LibreOffice 3.4.3 is immediately available for download in over 100 language versions from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-4-release-3.4.3.1.log and http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/commit-log-libreoffice-3-4-release-3.4.3.1.log.

In October, the community around TDF and LibreOffice will gather in Paris for the first LibreOffice Conference (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). The keynotes and the agenda of the event will be announced soon, together with a program of workshops and trainings for TDF members. Participation in the event is free of charge, and only requires you to register at http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/.

The Document Foundation announces the availability of LibreOffice 3.3.4, a new release of the free office suite’s 3.3 branch. The new version is available for download at http://www.libreoffice.org/download

LibreOffice 3.3.4 fixes several bugs, the next maintenance release 3.3.5 is scheduled for October. In the meantime, development is continuing on the 3.4 series, which offers new features. The next version in that branch – LibreOffice 3.4.3 – is expected by the end of August.

The Document Foundation maintains two editions of LibreOffice: version 3.3.x caters to conservative users, who wish to stick to a proven release in deep maintenance mode, with increasingly infrequent updates, while the 3.4 branch provides a more modern and featurefull release. We therefore strongly recommend everyone to update to the 3.4 series in the near future.

LibreOffice 3.3.4 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, in over 100 different languages (more than twice the language coverage of comparable proprietary products).

Detailed technical change logs are available at http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-3-release-3.3.4.1.log and http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/commit-log-libreoffice-3-3-release-3.3.4.1.log

The next events where you can meet developers and community members will be the LibreOffice Hackfest, taking place this September in Munich (http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest2011) and the LibreOffice Conference, taking place this October in Paris (http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/)

Thanks to the work of 300 contributors, the new LibreOffice comes with substantial improvements

The Internet, August 1, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.4.2, the third version of the 3.4 family, targeting both private individuals and enterprises. LibreOffice 3.4.2 fixes the majority of the most-important bugs identified by users in the previous version, and can be deployed for production needs by most enterprises.

The Document Foundation encourages large organizations deploying LibreOffice to do so in conjunction with a support partner, who can carefully assess specific requirements, help manage migration and provide bespoke fixes for identified issues. Purchasing LibreOffice support from a TDF partner also provides enterprises with an indirect means to contribute financially to the project, thereby funding its development, improving its stability, and accelerating its growth. Users should always refer to the release notes before deploying the new version.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 is the result of the combined activity of 300 contributors having made more than 23,000 commits, with the addition, deletion or modification of around five million lines of code. The developer community is well balanced between company-sponsored contributors and independent community volunteers: Oracle and SUSE have each provided around 25% of the commits, with a further 25% coming from community volunteers new to the project since our inception, and with a further 20% from RedHat. The remaining commits came from a combination of pre-TDF contributors, Canonical developers, and organizations like Bobiciel, CodeThink, Lanedo, SIL, and Tata Consultancy Services.

If we look at the same data for individual developers, the top 12 by number of commits since the inception of LibreOffice is composed of a mixture of corporate-sponsored contributors (from 4 companies: Canonical, Oracle, RedHat and SUSE) and a number of private individual contributors, indicating a balanced situation and a healthy community.

“TDF was born with the aim of evolving the OpenOffice.org code to develop a cleaner and leaner free office suite and, after ten months, we are right on track to achieve this objective,” says Bjoern Michaelsen, one of the four Canonical contributors, and a key member of the Engineering Steering Committee. “Of course, with such a large code renovation effort, we are aware of the short-term risk of reduced stability, but this is counterbalanced by the long-term improvement in features, speed and – again – stability.”

Other news is that the number of TDF official contributors and LibreOffice users is increasing. Youbing Jin, President of RedFlag2000 Software Company, says, “We are delighted to see that TDF is getting ever stronger, and we are proud to be part of it.”

The community around The Document Foundation and LibreOffice will gather in Paris for the first LibreOffice Conference, from October 13 to October 15, 2011 (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). The call for papers is open until August 8, while registration will close at the end of September.

Although TDF is happy that 3.4.2, deployed with support from a suitable partner, can be considered “enterprise-ready”, it is clearly only one more milestone on our march towards ever greater stability, with the 3.4.3 release to incorporate further stability improvements and security fixes by the end of August.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

The Internet, July 1, 2011 – The Document Foundation announces the release of LibreOffice 3.4.1, the second version of the newer 3.4 family, targeting both private individuals and enterprises. LibreOffice 3.4.1 fixes several bugs that affected the previous version, and can be safely deployed for production needs by most users.

LibreOffice 3.4.1 can be downloaded from the following page: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

Large enterprises deploying LibreOffice on desktop PCs, are still recommended to deploy LibreOffice 3.3.3, which has been tested over several months by thousands of people worldwide, and are encouraged to call on professional support services. LibreOffice 3.4.2, available at the end of July, will target enterprise deployments.

Recognizing that large enterprises and conservative users have special needs, The Document Foundation has decided to provide two different versions of the software, so as to garner to the needs of power users looking for the latest enhancements while still catering to the priorities of more-prudent users who prefer stability over availability of new features.

Versions announced as stable can be safely deployed in work environments, as bugs might hamper individual features but won’t have an impact on the overall quality and security of document production.