Happy Birthday LibreOffice

From the ‘Time Flies’ files:

Has it been a year already? Time sure does fly.

This week the The Document Foundation celebrated its’ 1-year anniversary. That’s 1 year since they forked OpenOffice to go a new route with LibreOffice.

A year ago, I was skeptical that OpenOffice would survive the split. As it turns out, Oracle has a lot of fight in them and hey they never give up easily either.

Oracle’s Apache OpenOffice project is alive and time will tell how well it is progressing. But it is still around.

LibreOffice on the hand has become the default/defacto standard open office suite for Linux distros. It is also the tool that I rely on to make my living as a journalist. I use LibreOffice every day and am thankful to all those that contributed to it and made it what it is:

A functional office environment that I can run without the need to buy more RAM on a regular basis.

Let’s face facts here, OpenOffice is bloated and takes way too much system resources, LibreOffice has improved that significantly, but there is still clearly much work to be done.

According to the Document Foundation there are some 25 million users of LibreOffice today. The code has come from 330 contributors that have made more than 25,000 commits. They also note that, SUSE and community volunteers new to the project have provided around 25 percnet each of the commits, with a further 20 percent coming from RedHat and another 20 percent coming from the OpenOffice.org code base.

Happy Birthday and I can’t wait to see what’s in store for year two!