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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.

Statement about Oracle’s move to donate OpenOffice.org assets to the Apache Foundation

The Internet, June 1st, 2011 – The Document Foundation constitutes a global team of hundreds of developers working together to improve the LibreOffice product for the benefit of all users. We are governed by an open, and meritocratic community headed by a diverse interim Steering Committee, and a vendor neutral Engineering Steering Committee overseeing development.

Today we welcome Oracle’s donation of code that has previously been proprietary to the Apache Software Foundation, it is great to see key user features released in a form that can be included into LibreOffice.

The Document Foundation would welcome the reuniting of the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects into a single community of equals in the wake of the departure of Oracle. The step Oracle has taken today was no doubt taken in good faith, but does not appear to directly achieve this goal. The Apache community, which we respect enormously, has very different expectations and norms – licensing, membership and more – to the existing OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects. We regret the missed opportunity but are committed to working with all active community members to devise the best possible future for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org.

On the bright side, one benefit of this arrangement is the potential for future-proof licensing. The Apache License is compatible with both the LGPLv3+ and MPL licenses, allowing TDF future flexibility to move the entire codebase, to MPLv2 or future LGPL license versions. The Document Foundation believes that commercially-friendly, copy-left licensing provides the best path to constructive participation in, and growth of the project.

Thus, the event is neutral for The Document Foundation, which – as always – remains open to every company, individual or foundation that wishes to participate in co-development. There has never been a better time to get involved and advance the state of the art in free software office suites.

TDF is therefore willing to start talking with Apache Software Foundation, following the email from ASF President Jim Jagielski, who is anticipating frequent contacts between the Apache Software Foundation and The Document Foundation over the next few months. We all want to offer corporate and individual users worldwide the best free office suite for enterprise and personal productivity.

Finally, TDF continue executing on our time-based release plan for LibreOffice 3.4.0, due out this week, while continuing work on our bug fix release train, with 3.4.1 due in a months time, as well as ongoing feature development for our 3.5 release.

About The Document Foundation

The Document Foundation has the mission of facilitating the evolution of the OOo Community into an open, meritocratic and democratic organization. An independent Foundation is a better reflection of the values of our contributors, users and supporters, and will enable a more inclusive, effective, efficient and transparent community. TDF will protect past investments by building on the achievements of the first decade, will encourage wide participation within the community, and will co-ordinate activity across the community.

Media Contacts for TDF

Florian Effenberger (Germany)
Mobile: +49 151 14424108 – E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org
Olivier Hallot (Brazil)
Mobile: +55 21 88228812 – E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org
Charles H. Schulz (France)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424 – E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org
Italo Vignoli (Italy)
Mobile: +39 348 5653829 – E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org

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

Lanedo supports LibreOffice

In our recent announcement of the Engineering Steering Committee, we wrote that Michael Natterer from Lanedo is having a seat in this body, contributing further to the development of LibreOffice. Here’s their statement of support: “Lanedo is proud to support LibreOffice, and participate in development and inside the Engineering Steering Committee (ESC)” said Martyn Russell, Managing Director, “our contribution underlines the quality and effectiveness of our software development and support services around LibreOffice.”

Developer Interview : Rob Snelders

LibreOffice can only exist because people are working on it: so please, tell us a bit about yourself.

I am Rob Snelders, a 28 years old Dutch guy. I am a programmer at a manufacturer of household equipment. I have studied Computer Sience at the Fontys University in Eindhoven.

In what other software projects have you been involved ?

I am also involved in T-Dose (www.t-dose.org), Ubuntu-NL.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice ?
(more…)

LibreOffice Hackfest in Munich

Together with their Linux migration team (LiMux), we’re planning a LibreOffice Hackfest in the City of Munich, Germany. To determine the best date for it, let us know all your possible dates! Like last time, the Hackfest is open for newbies as well as for routined hackers. More details will follow soon, but first, we need the date. So, let’s vote!

The poll is at http://doodle.com/i7pw9wubvdhdyzm4

NOTE: The Hackfest will run from Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime. For the ease of voting, we have just mentioned the respective Saturday.

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