The Document Foundation launched its first stable version of the open source LibreOffice suite, after its breakaway from OpenOffice.org and Oracle's control.
The Document Foundation launched LibreOffice 3.3 on Jan. 25,
just a mere five days after announcing a release candidate. This is the first
stable release of the open-source office suite since its breakaway from
Oracle's OpenOffice.org project in September.
Concerned about Oracle's plans for OpenOffice after the
Sun
acquisition, about a third of OpenOffice developers formed the
Document
Foundation and forked the software into their own version. LibreOffice and the
new foundation have a number of big names backing it, including Red Hat,
Google, Novell and Canonical.
In fact, Canonical plans to include LibreOffice in its next
version of Ubuntu, codenamed Natty Narwhal. The alpha version of Ubuntu 11.04
released in December had OpenOffice, but now that LibreOffice is available,
Canonical will be making the switch. Novell's openSUSE also includes LibreOffice.
The development community has been concentrating on this
release as well as cleaning up the codebase inherited from OpenOffice, said
Italo Vignoli, a founding member of the Document Foundation. "It was necessary
to
prove that we are able to have our own software and development process for
the future," Vignoli told eWEEK.
The number of developers working on LibreOffice has nearly
quintupled since September, according to Vignoli. The community has been
discussing the "evolution" of office suites, said Vignoli. "We feel that office
suites are 20 years old and what is happening around the user is really going
in different directions from where the office suites were, when Windows was
born," he said.
He pointed to the proliferation of alternative platforms
available, including tablets, netbooks and smartphones, and said that office
suites were not designed for them. "Our developers were telling us that the
source code was a little bit too old to match the vision for the future," said
Vignoli.
While LibreOffice 3.3 is still not yet ready to support
mobile platforms-"we cannot change software in a few days"-the cleaning has
started, resulting in a leaner software than its OpenOffice 3.3 counterpart,
Vignoli said.
While LibreOffice 3.3 has new and original features, Vignoli
said the focus was on cleaning up the code and integrating new infrastructure
to make the project sustainable and independent of Oracle. "For too many years, the
focus has been on adding features, but the normal user is using 10 to 20
percent of the features," Vignoli said.
Saying it was "probably useless to continue to go to war on
the features," the community will concentrate on flexibility to fit user needs,
which are changing all the time, Vignoli said.
Even so, the list of new features is pretty extensive.
LibreOffice 3.3 has all the new features that exist in OpenOffice.org 3.3,
especially the ones that were contributed to the OpenOffice.org project before
the formation of the Document Foundation. Some of the common features include
new custom properties handling, new fonts, document protection, increasing the
number of allowed rows in a Calc spreadsheet to one million, and an
easier-to-use print interface.
LibreOffice 3.3 also has new and original features of its
own, such as the ability to import and work with SVG and Microsoft Works files,
a easier way to format and number text blocks in Writer, and improved sheet and
cell management in Calc. The developers also bundled new extensions, such as PDF
import, a slide-show presenter console, and an improved report builder.
LibreOffice also integrated all the language versions into a
single Windows installer executable with this release. In the past,
each language had its own installer, taking up over 75 GB on the
download sites, which could stress the servers during high traffic.
With this integration, the sites need less space as everything fits
within 11 GB, he said.
Despite getting the first release out, the team doesn't have
a lot of time to relax. Vignoli said the first enhancements, including critical
bug fixes, new icons and localization improvements, will be available in
February. A release candidate of version 3.3.1 is expected by Feb. 7, followed
by a final release on Feb. 14, he said.
A second set of enhancements, which will include critical
bug fixes and more localization improvements, is expected on March 7 as a
release candidate, and final version on March 14. After that, development will
be settling into a regular release schedule, with a beta for version 3.4 with
new features expected in late March, with a final release expected in May. The
version 3.4 dates are still tentative, he said.
He also said the differences between LibreOffice and
OpenOffice will be more pronounced with LibreOffice 3.4.
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