The paragraph below from the Document Foundation Blog handily summarizes the year's achievements: "2011 was the year of our first stable release. ... Today, over 30 million people use LibreOffice in 109 languages, a software developed by 40 core developers and over 300 active developers plus 280 localizers. ... 230 of those developers are totally new, have never been contributing code to the free office suite before, and were attracted by our open, transparent, meritocratic and inclusive community. Over 16.000 mailing list subscribers are on our 100 mailing lists, and TDF now counts 138 members.
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The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the adoption by LibreOffice of ODF 1.2 as an OASIS standard. A formal announcement of this development by OASIS is anticipated. Standard document formats, the blog continues, are key for liberating the user from the lock in of proprietary formats. ODF has been developed by OASIS based on OOo document format, and is now supported by most personal productivity software and many other computer programs. TDF is committed to supporting ODF and contribute to its development. ODF will be one of four main topics at the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in Paris.
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Simon Phipps, formerly of Sun Microsystems and Oracle, now founder of the startup ForgeRock and director of the Open Source Initiative, recently addressed The Document Foundation's first LibreOffice Conference, where explained that Open Source as a movement does not require a "white knight" to foster and sustain it. Instead, he maintained. Open Source calls for " ... developers willing to collaborate, and a community willing to contribute both time and money." Fortunately, LibreOffice was brought about by the efforts of both factions.
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LibreOffice can be enhanced with hundreds of extensions and templates that users can download to improve the suite’s functionality to fit their respective needs, and developers can easily write their own add-ons and share them with millions of users worldwide. The LibreOffice community has put great effort into launching a public repository that includes not only extensions and templates for LibreOffice, but also for OpenOffice.org and other compatible office suites. All extensions submitted during the public beta test will remain in the repository after the beta test.
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Among the accolades accruing to LibreOffice is its InfoWorld Best of Open Source for 2011 award. While by its own admission the Document Foundation (TDF) does not claim to have replaced OpenOffice.org in every respect, still the faster launch and the incrementally better set of features give TDF something to crow about. There is work to be done on such matters as spelling/grammar checking, for example but the more business-like look and feel has won praise.
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