First release of LibreOffice arrives with improvements over OOo

The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced the availability of LibreOffice 3.3, the first official stable release of the open source office suite. It introduces a number of noteworthy new features and there are improvements throughout the included applications. More significantly, the release reflects the growing strength of the nascent LibreOffice project.

TDF was founded last year when a key group of OpenOffice.org (OOo) contributors decided to form an independent organization to develop a community-driven fork of OOo. The move was necessitated by Oracle's failure to address the governance problems that had plagued OOo under Sun's leadership, particularly the project's controversial copyright assignment policies. Oracle's acquisition of Sun and subsequent mismanagement of Sun's open source assets have created further uncertainty about the future of OOo and the sustainability of its community under Oracle's stewardship.

TDF got off to a good start and has attracted a lot of enthusiasm from former OOo contributors; Google, Red Hat, Canonical, and Novell are among its corporate supporters. The development effort so far has been reasonably productive. Contributors have been able to enhance LibreOffice with features that Sun had resisted accepting upstream, including parts of Novell's popular Go-OOo patch set. The LibreOffice developers have also incorporated significant improvements taken from the OpenOffice.org 3.3, which hasn't yet been officially released.

The new features included in LibreOffice 3.3 improve the office suite's feature set, usability, and interoperability with other formats. For example, it has improved support for importing documents from Lotus Word Pro and Microsoft Works. Another key new feature is the ability to import SVG content and edit SVG images in LibreOffice Draw.

Navigation features in Writer have been improved, the thesaurus got an overhaul, and the dialogs for printing and managing title pages got major updates. LibreOffice Calc touts better Excel interoperability and faster Excel file importing. The maximum size of a Calc spreadsheet has increased to 1 million rows.

In addition to delivering feature improvements, the LibreOffice developers have also focused heavily on code clean-up efforts with the hope of reducing legacy cruft, thus making the code easier to maintain and extend. Progress has been made, but the effort is still ongoing.

Due to the strong backing by the Linux community, the LibreOffice fork will likely be bundled in upcoming versions of several major Linux distributions. It's already planned for inclusion in Ubuntu 11.04, which is coming in April.

LibreOffice 3.3 is available to download from the project's official website, with support for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. The source code can be found in the official LibreOffice version control repository, which is hosted on FreeDesktop.org.

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