This week was a great week for fans of LibreOffice.
It was a week that once again proved that LibreOffice is for real, it’s here for the long term and for Linux-users at least, there is no need to consider Apache Openoffice.
This week we saw the release of a stable version of LibreOffice with the 3.3.3 release, which in my mind is a big deal. Sure they just put out LibreOffice 3.4 recently, but putting out new releases (in a way) is almost easier than doing the nitty, gritty of maintaining ‘older’ releases.
Keeping two (or more) software tracks on track is no easy task for any open source project, but it seems to be one that the Document Foundation is pulling off with flying colors.
The other big development was the announcement of The Document Foundation Advisory Board. Google, SUSE, Red Hat, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest, and the Free Software Foundation have all signed on (where is Canonical?!).
This is a large vote of confidence from the leading Enterprise Linux Distros (Red Hat and SUSE) that LibreOffice is the right way to go. I personally was (and am) concerned that IBM, given their extensive marketing/partership agreements with Red Hat would pressure Red Hat to swing back to OpenOffice, but thankfully that hasn’t happened.