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.
In 2012, developers hacking LibreOffice code have been around 320, with a majority of volunteers and a minority of people paid by companies such as SUSE, RedHat and Canonical (plus a multitude of smaller organizations such as Lanedo, which is also a member of our Advisory Board and builds a significant part of its business by providing development related value added services on top of LibreOffice code).
The graphic visualization of the individual commits has the shape of a “long tail“. The pie is an explosion of the work done by the top 33 hackers with 100+ commits: 16 volunteers, and 17 paid developers (11 from SUSE, 5 from RedHat and one from Canonical). At TDF, we do not have “paid volunteers” because we love transparency and truth.
If you are not familiar with the importance of the “long tail”, especially for free software projects, you might get some interesting insights from the following TED speech, by Clay Shirky:
The cumulative number of new hackers attracted by the project since September 2010 (being LibreOffice a true free software project, there are many volunteers who come and go, and many with just one or two commits).
I have tried to summarize in a single text what we – members, developers, volunteers, native language communities, advocates and supporters – have achieved during 2012. Looking back, it has been amazing.
TDF has started 2012 with a hackers community of 379 individuals, mostly volunteers, which has continued to grow steadily – month after month – and has now reached the amazing figure of 567 developers (320 active during the last 12 months, which means that LibreOffice is the third largest open source desktop software project after Chrome and Firefox).
Monthly contributors during the last two years, with the global 12 month average shown by the green line on the upper right corner).
In early 2012, The Document Foundation – an truly community based independend organization – has been registered in Berlin, under the form of a German Stiftung (supervised by the German authorities). The oldest German Stiftung dates back to 1509, and over 250 of them have existed for over 500 years (so, stability is not an issue).
Once established, The Document Foundation has immediately attracted additional sponsors and supporters. Intel and Lanedo have joined the Advisory Board, while Project LiMux (City of Munich) and MIMO (the French Government organization responsible for the migration to FOSS) are actively supporting the project.
The long tail of LibreOffice development during 2012 (the 320 committers active between January 2012 and December 2012), with a pie explosion of the top 33 hackers with over 100 commits.
The Document Foundation and LibreOffice role inside the free software ecosystem have been recognized by the French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault in a formal letter to the members of the French government.
In 2012, The Document Foundation has announced LibreOffice 3.4.5, LibreOffice 3.5, LibreOffice 3.5.1, LibreOffice 3.4.6, LibreOffice 3.5.2, LibreOffice 3.5.3, LibreOffice 3.5.4, LibreOffice 3.5.5, LibreOffice 3.6, LibreOffice 3.5.6, LibreOffice 3.6.1, LibreOffice 3.6.2, LibreOffice 3.5.7 and LibreOffice 3.6.3. LibreOffice 3.4 has been awarded Linux Questions Office Suite of the Year 2011.
Linux Questions has awarded LibreOffice the title of Office Suite of the Year 2011.
In addition, the hackers community has started working on LibreOffice 4.0, which is already at Beta 2 and will be announced in February 2013. LibreOffice 4.0 will be a milestone release, and the first of a new generation of free office suites.
In order to further improve the quality of LibreOffice 3.5, 3.6 and 4, the QA community has organized several bug hunting sessions during 2012 and a full bug hunting marathon in December 2012 (with almost 500 bugs chased during a full week of tests).
LibreOffice community has met at FOSDEM in Brussels, at LinuxTag in Berlin, at LibreOffice Conference in Berlin, and in Hamburg and Munich for TDF Hackfests. In addition, local hackfests have been organized in the Netherlands and Brazil, and LibreOffice volunteers have attended several local events around the world.
Linux Journal has awarded LibreOffice the title of Best office Suite 2012.
In February 2012, TDF has launched LibreOffice Ask page, and the Windows version of LibreOffice has been made available for downloads from the Intel AppUp Center targeted to mobile PC and UltraBook owners.
In September 2012, TDF has joined the OASIS Consortium (Organisation for the Advancement of Standards in Information Society (OASIS). At the end of the same month, the new Membership Committee has been elected by TDF members: five members – Sophie Gautier, Fridrich Štrba (Chairman), Eike Rathke, Cor Nouws and Jean Weber – and two deputies – Simon Phipps and Leif Lodahl.
LibreOffice has been awarded the title of Free Office Suite of the Year 2011 by LinuxQuestions, and Best Office Suite 2012 by Linux Journal (in both cases, getting over 70% of the votes). In Brazil, LibreOffice has received the “Technology For Citizens Award” from Guarulhos City.
LibreOffice downloads from unique IPs during 2012. Scale on the left shows daily downloads, scale on the right shows cumulative downloads in 2012.
During 2012, many private and public organization have announced the migration of their desktop office suite to LibreOffice: several French ministries (500,000 desktops), city of Munich in Germany (15,000 desktops), the Capital Region of Denmark, Vieira do Minho in Portugal, Limerick in Ireland, Grygov in the Czech Republic, Las Palmas in Spain, the City of Largo in Florida, the municipality of Pilea-Hortiatis in Greece, Regione Umbria, Provincia di Milano and Provincia di Bolzano in Italy, and the Public Library System of Chicago.
This growth is reflected in the downloads of the Windows and MacOS X versions during 2012. The number of unique IPs who have downloaded LibreOffice has grown from just over 200,000 per week in January to well over 600,000 in December, for a total of 15 million unique IPs in 2012. Linux users, with very few exceptions, do not download LibreOffice as they can get the software from the repository of their distribution of choice.
The Document Foundation has also announced the Certification Program for LibreOffice, and the first group of certified developers. In 2013, the program will be extended to professionals active in migrations and trainings, and later to L1 and L2 support.
Florian Effenberger
The last, and in my opinion the best news of 2012, waits TDF under the Xmas tree: in fact, just a few days before Xmas TDF has hired the first employee, to manage the infrastructure and take care of administrative tasks (which, thanks to the extremely fast growth of the project, are now a full time task): Florian Effenberger, who is already popular inside the project for his volunteer work.
The Board of Directors – with the obvious exception of Florian – has unanimously chosen him for infrastructure and administrative tasks, as he is already familiar with both, being the architect behind the entire infrastructure and the person who has been talking with the authorities during the process of putting in place The Document Foundation.
Florian Effenberger has been active inside the OOo project from 2004 to 2010, as infrastructure and then marketing lead, and has been a founder of TDF. During all these years he has put an incredible amount of hours – of his personal time – behind free software, OOo and LibreOffice.
From now on, Florian will devote his working hours to TDF, and will add the usual amount of volunteer hours for his BoD duties (which must be volunteer based, according to our statutes).
Florian Effenberger is going to be a tremendous asset for TDF, because he knows perfectly our ecosystem, he is a true free software advocate, and he is knowledgeable not only on administration and infrastructure but also on marketing.
Looking at 2013 and beyond, The Document Foundation is ready to face every challenge, and win over the competition not only by providing a better product but also by creating a different and better ecosystem for free office suites.
So far, TDF has been an exciting journey, and I am sure that what has happened is just the first chapter of a long and successful history.
I don’t think that the screenshots need additional comments: LibreOffice is THE free office suite of reference for the Linux environment, surpassing every other software by a factor of six, and LibreOffice Writer is THE best single office program (sharing the spot with OOo Writer, hopefully for the last time, as LibreOffice is the de facto standard for all Linux distributions since 2011).
Best Office Suite
Best Single Office Product
Independence, democracy and meritocracy pay off (could anyone have doubts about this, after 10 years under the corporate umbrella?).
The intense pace of development work on LibreOffice as we approach our 4.0 release has rather delayed an update on our recent extremely successful LibreOffice hack-fest. To give an idea of the work going on, instead of the around 1500 commits per month we normally get, we had nearly a month’s worth of commits in the last two weeks before our feature freeze, with lots of bug fixing ever since; things have been busy.
Some portion of this work was done by the more than thirty LibreOffice developers that arrived to augment the existing Munich Limux developers – who kindly hosted us. Munich is a forward looking enterprise who have deployed Linux to their fifteen-thousand users, and have committed to moving to LibreOffice. First of all – many thanks to our friendly hosts who provided a great venue, helped feed us, so we could continue coding late into the night, and tidied up the detritus afterwards: your contribution is greatly appreciated.
It was also nice to meet a number of the Debian guys – who had a separate room for a parallel bug squashing party some of whom took an interest in and did a little LibreOffice work too. We had over thirty participants for LibreOffice alone, with other new people we’d never met before showing up and getting involved over the weekend which was particularly encouraging.
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.
