From the ‘Forks That Work’ files:
Some forks die off quickly. Other linger and a precious few actually prosper and excel beyond their origins. I personally would put the LibreOffice project and its masters in the Document Foundation in the latter category.
The Document Foundation is officially celebrating its second anniversary today – hard to believe it has been two years already, isn’t it? (I know I wrote the same thing when they turned one last year!).
What has changed over the last year however is a resurgence of OpenOffice, in the form of the Apache OpenOffice project. Whereas in the first year of the Document Foundation’s life OpenOffice wasn’t all that active, the same can’t be said for the second year. Apache OpenOffice 3.4 was releasedin May marking the first new release of OpenOffice under its new leadership. That event potentially could have led to new momentum for Apache OpenOffice and a decline for LibreOffice – but that didn’t happen.
Instead, after two years and a new challenge from OpenOffice, LibreOffice has stood tall. According to the Document Foundation there have been over 20 million downloads of LibreOffice inside of the last two years.
Yeaah LibreOffice and The Document Foundation still face challenges, but they have solved a few too. LibreOffice is released with a regular cadence that provides bug and stability fixes. New feature release also have a regular cadence showing an evolutionary path for a product that previously had been going nowhere fast.
So Happy Second Anniversary Document Foundation and thank you for all your effort now and in the future.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist. ##
