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The Document Foundation publishes details of LibreOffice 3.4.3 security fixes

The Internet, October 4, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) publishes some details of the security fixes included with the recently released LibreOffice 3.4.3, and included in the older 3.3.4 version. Following industry best practice, details of security fixes are withheld until users have been given time to migrate to the new version.

RedHat security researcher Huzaifa Sidhpurwala identified a memory corruption vulnerability in the code responsible for loading Microsoft Word documents in LibreOffice. This flaw could have been used for nefarious purposes, such as installing viruses, through a specially-crafted file. The corresponding vulnerability description is CVE-2011-2713,”Out-of-bounds property read in binary .doc filter”.

LibreOffice 3.4.3 also includes various improvements to the loading of Windows Metafile (.wmf) and Windows Enhanced Metafile (.emf) image formats that were found through fuzz testing.

LibreOffice developers have developed some additional security patches and fixes. These are part of a general set of development improvements which are reflected in the overall quality and stability of the software. Most LibreOffice 3.4.3 security fixes have been developed by Caolan McNamara of RedHat and Marc-André Laverdière of Tata Consultancy Services.

“Working on fuzzing LibreOffice import filters has been a great experience, and I am glad I could contribute in securing the computing experience of millions of users,” said Marc-André Laverdière, Scientist, TCS Innovation Labs, Tata Consultancy Services, Ltd. “Working in cooperation with the TDF development team, we have found and fixed serious security and crasher bugs.”

All users are recommended to upgrade to LibreOffice 3.4.3 as soon as possible, in order to benefit from the improved security of the office suite. LibreOffice 3.4.3 can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org.

The Document Foundation celebrates its first anniversary

LibreOffice has just been awarded IDG’s InfoWorld BOSSIE Awards 2011 and OWF Experiment Awards 2011 for best of Open Source software

The Internet, September 28, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) celebrates its first anniversary, one year after the unveiling of the project and the release of the first beta of LibreOffice. “What we have achieved in just twelve months is incredible,” says Charles Schulz, a member of the Steering Committee. “Let’s have a look at some numbers: we have 136 members who have been nominated for their contributions to the project; we have some 270 developers and 270 localizers (although we always want to attract more), many of whom are also members; we have over 100 mailing lists, with over 15,000 subscribers, half of whom receive all our announcements; and there have been thousands of articles in the media worldwide”.

LibreOffice is the result of the combined activity of 330 contributors – including former OpenOffice.org developers – having made more than 25,000 commits. The developer community is well balanced between company-sponsored contributors and independent community volunteers: SUSE and community volunteers new to the project have provided around 25% each of the commits, with a further 20% coming from RedHat and another 20% coming from the OpenOffice.org code base. The remaining commits came from pre-TDF contributors, Canonical developers, and organizations like Bobiciel, CodeThink, Lanedo, SIL, and Tata Consultancy Services.

Libreoffice activedevelopersAll that effort is yielding results. Faster, more reliable, with richer features than predecessors, the LibreOffice experience is the best yet in the evolving heritage of the former StarOffice codebase. As InfoWorld said, “The newest features show that much more attention to improving performance and making the product more like a business tool and less me-too effort.”

“Thanks to a very welcoming attitude to newcomers, to the copyleft license, and to the fact that it is not requesting any copyright assignment, The Document Foundation has attracted more developers with commits in the first year than the OpenOffice.org project in the first decade”, says Norbert Thiebaud, a first-day hacker who jumped on LibreOffice code on September 28, 2010, and is now a member of TDF Engineering Steering Committee.

Downloads since January 25, 2011, the day of availability of the first stable release, have just exceeded 6 million from 81 TDF mirrors, and amount to 7.5 million when you add external sites (like Softpedia) offering the same package. In addition, there are many more users who install LibreOffice from a CD burned from the ISO images available online or bundled with a magazine. TDF estimates that there are 10 million users worldwide having installed from downloads and CDs. Over 90% of those are on Windows, with another 5% on MacOS.

Libreoffice downloadspermonthLinux users, in contrast, get LibreOffice from their distribution repository. Based on IDC reckonings for new or updated Linux installations in 2011, TDF estimates a subtotal of 15 million Linux users, as LibreOffice is the office suite of choice for all Linux distributions.

TDF calculates that there is a total of 25 million LibreOffice users worldwide, in line with the expectations and well on the way to the target of 200 million users worldwide before the end of the decade.

“When the community around OpenOffice.org decided to fork into an independent, community-driven project, I was excited and wanted to see it be a success. The best way to ensure that was to actively get involved and, right from the first day, I decided I wanted to be part of the team. I work on LibreOffice documentation and website content development, operate an Alfresco platform for the project, and provide support to the marketing group. LibreOffice is indeed a live, thriving and active project, and we are all determined to ensure it continues to be a great success story,” says David Nelson, another first-day volunteer accepted into the fold as a member of The Document Foundation for his contributions.

The community around TDF will gather in Paris from October 12 to October 15, 2011, for the first LibreOffice Conference (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). Interested people should register at http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/.

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

NOTE TO READERS: If TDF had used the old OpenOffice.org metrics, counting all hits to the mirror system, the number of downloads would be counted as over 22 million.

LibreOffice launches extension and templates repository for public beta test

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.

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 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/.

LibreOffice 3.3.4 is Ready for Download

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/)

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