LibreOffice 3.3.2: Open-Source Alternative of Microsoft Office

LibreOffice is a fork of the popular open-source office suite, OpenOffice. LibreOffice is a free power-packed Open Source personal office productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. It provides six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base. LibreOffice is a free software office suite developed by The Document Foundation. The Document Foundation maintains LibreOffice release schedule thanks to a growing and vibrant community of developers. Its developers’ goal is to produce a vendor-independent office suite with ODF support and without any copyright assignment requirements. The name is a hybrid word with the first part Libre, which means free (as in freedom) in both Spanish and French, and the English word Office.

The Document Foundation has recently announced the release of LibreOffice 3.3.2, the second micro release of the free office suite for personal productivity. The latest update improves the stability of the software and sets the platform for the next release 3.4, due in mid May. The community of developers has been able to maintain the tight schedule thanks to the increase in the number of contributors, and to the fact that those that have started with easy hacks in September 2010 are now working at substantial features. In addition, they have almost completed the code cleaning process, getting rid of German comments and obsolete functionalities.

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I have started hacking LibreOffice code on September 28, 2010, just a few hours after the announcement of the project, and I found a very welcoming community, where senior developers went out of their way to help newbies like me to become productive. After a few hours I submitted a small patch removing 5 or 6 lines of dead code… enough to get my feet wet and learn the workflow“, says Norbert, a French developer living in the United States. “In a short time, I ended up removing the VOS library – deprecated for a decade – from LibreOffice, and finding and fixing various threading issues in the process“.

LibreOffice 3.3.2 Final release notes:

  • This release is bit-for-bit identical to the 3.3.2 Release Candidate 2, so you don’t need to download or reinstall if you have that version already.
  • The distribution for Windows is an international build, so you can choose the user interface language that you prefer. Help content is available via an online service, or alternatively as a separate install.
  • For Windows users that have OpenOffice.org installed, we advise uninstalling that beforehand, because it registers the same file type associations.
  • If you run Windows 2000, you may require this update before being able to install LibreOffice.
  • If you run Linux, the GCJ Java variant has known issues with LibreOffice, we advise to e.g. use OpenJDK instead.
  • LibreOffice contains all the security fixes from OpenOffice.org in 3.3.0, and perhaps more as a side-effect of the code clean-ups.

There are a few non-critical issues still contained in this release, which will be addressed soon with upcoming bug fix versions:

  • If you install third-party extensions that bring their own help, you may only be able to view that after installing the separate help packs on Windows.

LibreOffice 3.3.2 is being released just one day after the closing of the first funding round launched by The Document Foundation to collect donations towards the 50,000-euro capital needed to establish a Stiftung in Germany. In five weeks, the community has donated twice as much, i.e. around 100,000 euros. All additional funds will be used for operating expenses such as infrastructure costs and registration of domain names and trademarks, as well as for community development expenses such as travel funding for TDF representatives speaking at conferences, booth fees for trade shows, and initial financing of merchandising items, DVDs and printed material.

Italo Vignoli, a founder and a steering committee member of The Document Foundation, will be keynoting at Flourish 2011 in Chicago on Sunday, April 3, at 10:30AM, about getting independent from OpenOffice and Oracle, starting The Document Foundation, raising the capital and the first community budget, organizing developers and other work, and outlining a roadmap for future releases and features.

Recently, LibreOffice have been accepted (Original link not available, linked to Web Archive) as a Google Summer of Code 2011 organization.

You can download LibreOffice from the official website.

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