A new foundation, The Document Foundation, has been established to develop and extend OpenOffice.org into a truly free, independent, community supported office suite, called LibreOffice. From the mission statement:
Our mission is to facilitate the evolution of the OpenOffice.org Community into a new open, independent, and meritocratic organizational structure within the next few months. An independent Foundation is a better match to the values of our contributors, users, and supporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient, transparent, and inclusive Community. We will protect past investments by building on the solid achievements of our first decade, encourage wide participation in the Community, and co-ordinate activity across the Community.
LibreOffice is being welcomed by Red Hat, Canonical, Google, and Novell, among others, and by both FSF and OSI. Canonical has already committed to shipping LibreOffice. And others are welcome to join the party, including Oracle. If Oracle does jump in, then the name may revert, but in either case, I think it's a wonderfully refreshing development. I can't wait to use it. You can download a beta version
here already.
Here are the folks taking the lead in the project so far, but feel free to hop on board and help out too.
Here's the page that will show you how. Code is
welcomed, as well as donations, and they need testers too. There's
a petition to sign if you'd like to show your support publicly. What does it all mean? I'm assured it means full support for ODF, for one thing, open standards, a level playing field, and the end to nonfree add-ons.
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