Almost a full year after Oracle Corporation announced that it had completed its acquisition of Sun Microsystems on 27 Jan 2010, LibreOffice 3.3 has been released by a breakaway group of developers previously from the OpenOffice.org Project, which had been sponsored by Sun.
LibreOffice 3.3 is an office productivity suite that includes software for wordprocessing (Writer), spreadsheets (Calc), presentations (Impress), databases (Base), equation editing (Maths) and drawing (Draw). It is available on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
The developers in the breakaway group comprised about a third of the original OpenOffice.org team and formed The Document Foundation in September 2010.
They were concerned that Oracle would discontinue OpenOffice as they did OpenSolaris since these open-source projects did not contribute a significant part to the bottom line.
In the space of four months, they have created a stable release of the office suite, which was unveiled on 25 Mar 2011. Based on a fork of the OpenOffice code, much of the development focus was on adding new features as well as extensively cleaning up portions of the legacy code, said Italo Vignoli, a founding member of The Document Foundation.
The version 3.3 continues from the versioning under OpenOffice. LibreOffice means “Free Office” and is free for users to download, modify, use and distribute. The name was original intended to be temporary, in the hope that Oracle would accept their invitation to become a member of The Document Foundation and donate the OpenOffice.org brand to the project.
Oracle has rejected the project.
Canonical, Novell and Red Hat intend to include LibreOffice in upcoming versions of their operating systems. The office suite for the Ubuntu 11.04 daily builds was changed to LibreOffice for alpha testing purposes on 20 January 2011.
LibreOffice 3.3 features improved usability and interoperability with other formats, such as improved support for importing documents from Lotus Word Pro and Microsoft Works. It can now import SVG content and edit SVG images in LibreOffice Draw.
Tags: free, Office, Open source