LibreOffice software “here to stay”

Life

If there was any doubt as to long-term ability of LibreOffice to sprint ahead of Oracle-backed OpenOffice.org, those concerns pretty much just flew out the window.

In a wildly successful fundraising effort, the Document Foundation has succeeded in collecting €50,000 in just eight days, effectively ensuring a future for the open source productivity suite.

Some 2000 donors contributed the fund, which will serve as the capital stock necessary to set up the Document Foundation as a legal entity in Germany.

“We still can’t believe it,” said steering committee member Florian Effenberger. “It happened in such a short period of time and was beyond our wildest expectations.”

The funds raised will serve as frozen assets for the foundation, however, which will be able to access just the annual interest they generate. From now through 21 March.

The Document Foundation also publicly welcomed the participation of Ubuntu maker Canonical in LibreOffice development.

Canonical, in fact, has dedicated Bjoern Michaelsen to the effort as a full-time team member.

“Bjoern brings deep expertise on the LibreOffice core, and has spearheaded many improvements in his previous role at Oracle,” a Document Foundation blog post reads. “We are excited to see his positive impact on LibreOffice, as well as in the Debian and Ubuntu versions of the future.”

In the meantime, The Document Foundation has also released the first maintenance release of its productivity package, dubbed version 3.3.1.

The most recent ‘micro-release’ is said to improve the stability of the software and eliminates bugs and crashes affecting Windows, Linux and MacOS X versions. LibreOffice 3.3.1 also adds colorful new icons based on the Document Foundation’s branding guidelines and includes updates to several language versions.

Another minor release is planned for launch in a month or so, followed by a second feature release in early May.

LibreOffice 3.3.1 can be downloaded for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X systems from the LibreOffice.org downloads page. The software is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPLv3).

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