14 DAY TRIAL // The famous office suite built by the LibreOffice Foundation, LibreOffice, has just turned four and the developers have been quick to celebrate this momentous occasion.
Four years ago, a group of developers split from the OpenOffice.org project and started LibreOffice. Their aim was to improve OpenOffice.org and turn the entire suite into a much more accessible and lighter software solution.
A big part of the Linux community thought that the project would go into the direction of most forks and that it would eventually evolve into nothing and slowly disappear. That didn't happen, and LibreOffice managed to rise above everyone's expectations. It's now the premiere office suite on the Linux platform and it's head and shoulders about all the other similar projects.
Everything was done in just four years
If we take a look at some of the other major projects in the open source world, we'll see that four years is actually a very short time. LibreOffice is not only the best of what you can get, but it's also a piece of software that is capable of going toe to toe with other commercial applications.
"The project certainly has come of age since that special moment on September 28th, 2010, when after weeks of preparation (and an insane succession of all-nighters), LibreOffice entered the world. Run on a shoestring, off of a box thankfully sponsored by one of our initial supporters (but surviving slashdot), as of today the project has matured into an international community of thousands of contributors, hundreds of developers and a (small) number of employed staffers."
"Highlighting just two of the rather (from a 2010 perspective) incredible achievements of the project – that the LibreOffice development team managed to clean up the inherited OpenOffice.org code base to a point that we’re leading the pack from a defect density point of view – and that as a first, substantial donated funds will be used to further a LibreOffice port into the mobile space," notes the LibreOffice Foundation.
A good measure of the LibreOffice success is the fact that many cities around the world are now switching to LibreOffice and ditching proprietary software. The suite is good enough that people from all over the world are now able to use it without difficulty, and this is a true triumph of open source and free software.
In fact, the LibreOffice Foundation just released LibreOffice 4.3.2 a couple of days ago to celebrate this anniversary. This is the most advanced version available right now, no matter the platform used – Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X.
Happy birthday, LibreOffice!