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LibreOffice 3.3.3 is ready for download

The Document Foundation announces the availability of LibreOffice 3.3.3, a new release of the most stable version of the free office suite for personal productivity, targeting corporate users. LibreOffice 3.3.3 is already available for download at the following address: http://www.libreoffice.org/download.

According to Thorsten Behrens, a developer and member of the TDF Steering Committee, “LibreOffice 3.3.3 fixes several bugs and improves the security of the suite, to specifically address the needs of corporate deployments, where stability is more important than new features. This branch will be maintained until the end of the year, to allow a smooth and safe transition to LibreOffice 3.4.x.”

LibreOffice 3.3.3 is available for Windows, MacOS X and Linux (DEB and RPM), in over 100 different languages (more than twice the language coverage of comparable proprietary products). Users of LibreOffice 3.3.2 are invited to update their software.

Press and Media Contacts

Florian Effenberger (based near Munich, Germany, UTC+1)
Phone: +49 8341 99660880 – Mobile: +49 151 14424108
E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org – Skype: floeff

Olivier Hallot (based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, UTC-3)
Mobile: +55 21 88228812
E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org

Charles H. Schulz (based in Paris, France, UTC+1)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424
E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org

Italo Vignoli (based in Milan, Italy, UTC+1)
VoIP: +39 02 320621813 – Mobile: +39 348 5653829
E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
Skype: italovignoli – Google Talk: italo.vignoli@gmail.com

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.0

The new release offers several new features but is focused on contributors

The Internet, June 3rd, 2011 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.0, a major release of the free office suite for personal productivity developed by a community of sponsored and volunteer developers, and supported worldwide by local communities of volunteers. LibreOffice 3.4.0 is the second major release of the suite since the announcement of The Document Foundation in September 2010 and incorporates the contributions of over 120 developers (six times as many as the first beta released on the launch date).

The majority of these contributors have started to hack LibreOffice code less than eight months ago, and this is an incredible achievement if one recalls that the OOo project has attracted a lower number of contributors in ten years. “We care for our developers, and it shows”, comments Italo Vignoli, a Steering Committee member and a spokesperson for TDF. “Our core developers have invented the mechanism of the easy hacks, which makes it simple and enjoyable for volunteer contributors to get to know LibreOffice code challenging their development skills with basic or elementary tasks”.

“Once they have completed the first easy hacks, contributors are ready to scale to more difficult tasks”, says Michael Meeks, a senior developer working for SUSE. “We spend quite a lot of time mentoring new contributors, in order to increase the number of people working on bug fixing, patches and features. This is soon going to be reflected in the quality of the software and the number of new features of future releases”.

LibreOffice 3.4.0 offers several new features for Calc, with faster performances and an improved compatibility with Excel spreadsheets, and Pivot Table – the new name of DataPilot – with support for unlimited numbers of fields and named range as data source. The user interface of Writer, Impress and Draw has been improved with many new features, and several cosmetic changes have been applied to the Linux version, with a better text rendering engine and an improved GTK+ theme integration. Code wise, several thousand lines of German comments have been translated into English, and over 5.000 lines of dead code have been removed from Writer, Calc and Impress.

The first release of the 3.4 series, LibreOffice 3.4.0, is targeted to community members and power users, and should not be implemented in a corporate environment. The Document Foundation has explained that following its time based release schedule – the best strategy for a distributed and cooperative development environment – the best releases for such deployments start from x.x.1. Because of this, LibreOffice 3.3.x is going to be maintained for several months to come, until the end of calendar year 2011, for the most conservative users.

LibreOffice 3.4 can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org/download. A complete list of new features and fixes is available online at the following address: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-4-new-features-and-fixes/. Screenshots of the new features can be downloaded from this page.

GreekLUG supports TDF and LibreOffice

The “Association of Greek Users&  Friends of FLOSS” (GreekLUG) is a Greek NGO actively promoting and providing support both to Free Software and to Open Standards.

We are delighted to express our full support to The Document Foundation and to the development of LibreOffice, a project that perfectly embodies all the principles of the Free Software Community.

It delivers a great Office suite, genuinely vendor-independent and relying with selfconfidence on the collaborative effort of all human resources in the Community. We feel it represents the best possible guarantee of long-term success of the project.

As we share the same principles, our Association strongly applauds this move.

We are, therefore, very happy to declare our commitment to use, help to spread and support LibreOffice. We are looking forward to cooperating and helping out in all possible ways.

On behalf of GreekLUG’s Directors Board,
Constantine Mousafiris, Special Registrar

The Document Foundation announces the members of the Engineering Steering Committee

The body coordinates development activities and defines the technology evolution of LibreOffice

The Internet, May 23, 2011 – The Document Foundation presents the members of the Engineering Steering Committee, the second body to be announced – after the Membership Committee – of those envisioned by the foundation bylaws. The ESC has come into being in early 2011, and is now officially in place to coordinate all development activities and set future technology directions.

The 10 members of the ESC are Andras Timar (localization), Michael Meeks and Petr Mladek of Novell, Caolan McNamara and David Tardon of RedHat, Bjoern Michaelsen of Canonical, Michael Natterer of Lanedo, Rene Engelhard of Debian, and the independent contributors Norbert Thiebaud and Rainer Bielefeld (QA). The ESC convenes once a week by telephone to discuss the progress of the time-based release schedule and coordinate development activities. Their meetings routinely include other active, interested developers and topic experts.

The members have been appointed by the Steering Committee, and are drawn from key members of the community of developers, which has been steadily growing since late September 2010 and is now close to 200 code hackers, with another 200 people involved in localization and QA. “This is a phenomenal success,” says Caolan McNamara of RedHat, “Especially if you look at the OOo project, where external contributors were a small group, and had to deal with significant obstacles.”

There are around 120 developers hacking LibreOffice code on a regular basis; these can be divided in three groups based on their experience: 20 core developers working on features, fixes, and packaging the software; 40 more regular devs working on features, fixes and easy hacks; and 60 less-regular devs working on easy hacks and code cleaning. In addition, there are around 80 developers who are contributing occasionally, or have just started to dig into the code. TDF is also grateful for the influx of students who will be paid to work full-time over the summer by the Google Summer of Code program.

“The ESC has brought the necessary discipline in the development process, which is organized in a completely different way from the past at OOo, where there was a single company in charge of the decisions, which was at the same time a strength – as it was easy to coordinate – and a single point of failure,” says André Schnabel, a member of TDF Steering Committee. “We have instead built an independent process, where corporate sponsors are still valued, but the community is able to take the software forward even without the backing of any of these companies.”

Announcing a new beta release

Today we are announcing the fifth beta release of LibreOffice 3.4.

In a slight change of communication strategy for our releases, from now on we will use the “announce” mailing list only for announcements of final and stable versions.

LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 5 is being announced on “projects”, “development” and “localization” mailing lists, in order to allow volunteers to perform the QA process. Also, the beta has been pre-announced on the community mailing lists for a first round of QA tests, to avoid the quality problems of the earlier 3.4 betas.

We feel that we need to clarify a few points here:

  1. LibreOffice is the result of a collaborative development effort, and adopts a time based release model (such as other collaborative development projects like GNOME and KDE). This is rather different from the past at OOo, where most of the development was happening inside a closed group, and the time based release model frequently slipped.

Development Process

  1. LibreOffice is free software, and is based on free tools. We are working to improve the day-to-day quality of our pre-release builds for Windows, with an ongoing migration to GNU Make as a first step to more reliable cross-compilations from Linux to Windows . Our aim, over time, is to make it easy to build releases for LibreOffice for anyone with some time and a PC. This is rather different from the past at OOo, where release builds came from a proprietary build environment run by a small team of build engineers.

  2. Understanding the time based release model is critical to selecting the right release of LibreOffice for each situation:

3.1. For the most conservative users, we recommend a commercially supported version, which enables you to indirectly support the project’s development. Such stable versions will typically be based on a point release, such as LibreOffice 3.3.2 today;

3.2. For those interested in the bleeding edge, who want to enjoy new features and fixes, we recommend LibreOffice 3.4.0, release candidates, betas or even nightly builds, which enable a participation in the development, evaluation and quality control process;

3.3. Of course, as the 3.4 series matures, we will reach a point where we will recommend a 3.4.x release as being suitable even for the most conservative users.

Target Groups

This model should be familiar to many, from other Free Software projects, with vendors providing distinctive releases of the underlying software.

All this said, if you want to help us in building a more stable LibreOffice 3.4, you are kindly invited to join the projects, development and/or localization mailing lists and contribute to the process.

You can find the necessary information at the following links:
http://www.mail-archive.com/projects@libreoffice.org/info.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/libreoffice@lists.freedesktop.org/info.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/l10n@libreoffice.org/info.html

Together, we are cleaning up the code-base, improving our build and release process, and adding new features, with the pace of improvement accelerating. It is indeed a rewarding journey for all those who have decided to be part of it.

Developers

LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 4 available

Dear Community,

The Document Foundation is happy to announce the fourth beta release of LibreOffice 3.4. The upcoming 3.4 will be the second major release of the LibreOffice project, and comes with many exciting new features. Please be aware that LibreOffice 3.4 Beta4 is not yet ready for production use, you should continue to use LibreOffice 3.3.2 for that.

The beta release is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X from our QA builds download page at

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases/

A list of new features specific to LibreOffice is to be found here:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/3.4

Should you find bugs, please report them to the FreeDesktop Bugzilla:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org

For other ways to get involved with this exciting project – you can e.g. contribute code:

https://www.libreoffice.org/get-involved/developers/

translate LibreOffice to your language:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Translation_for_3.4

or help with funding our foundation:

http://challenge.documentfoundation.org/

A list of known issues with 3.4 Beta4 is available from our wiki:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.4/beta4

Please find the list of changes against LibreOffice 3.4 Beta3 here:

http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-4-release-3.3.99.4.log

Let us close again with a BIG Thank You! to all of you having contributed to the LibreOffice project – this release would not have been possible without your help.

Yours,
The Steering Committee of The Document Foundation

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