On September 28th, 2010, The Document Foundation was announced. The last
six months, it feels, have just passed within a short glimpse of time. Not
only did we release three LibreOffice versions within three months, have
created the LibreOffice-Box DVD image, and brought LibreOffice Portable on
its way. We also have announced the LibreOffice Conference for October 2011
and have taken part in lots of events worldwide, with FOSDEM and CeBIT being
the most prominent ones.
People follow us at Twitter, Identi.ca, XING, LinkedIn and a Facebook
group and fan page, they discuss on our mailing lists with more than 6.000
subscriptions, collaborate in our wiki, get insight on our daily work in our
blog, and post and blog themselves. From the very first day, openness,
transparency and meritocracy have been shaping the framework we want to work
in. Our discussions and decisions take place on a public mailing list, and
regularly, we hold phone conferences for the Steering Committee and for the
marketing teams, where everyone is invited to join. Our ideas and visions
have made their way into our Next Decade Manifesto.
We have joined the Open Invention Network as well as the OpenDoc Society,
and just last week have become an SPI-associated project, and we see a wide
range of support from all over the world. Not only do Novell and Red Hat
support our efforts with developers, but just recently, Canonical, creators
of Ubuntu, joined as well. All major Linux distributions deliver LibreOffice
with their operating systems, and more follow every day.
One of the most stunning contributions, that still leaves us speechless,
is the support that we receive from the community. When we asked for 50,000
€ capital stock for a German-based foundation, the community showed their
support, appreciation and their power, and not only donated it in just eight
days, but up to now has supported us with close to 100,000 €! Another one is
that driven by our open, vendor neutral approach, combined with our easy
hacks, we have included code contributions from over 150 entirely new
developers to the project, alongside localisations from over 50 localizers.
The community has developed itself better than we could ever dream of, and
first meetings like the project’s weekend or the QA meeting of the
Germanophone group are already being organized.
What we have seen now is just the beginning of something very big. The
Document Foundation has a vision, and the creation of the foundation in
Germany is about to happen soon. LibreOffice has been downloaded over
350,000 times within the first week, and we just counted more than 1,3
million downloads just from our download system — not counting packages
directly delivered by Linux distributors, other download sites or DVDs
included in magazines and newspapers — supported by 65 mirrors from all over
the world, and millions already use and contribute to it worldwide. With our
participation in the Google Summer of Code, we will engage more students and
young developers to be part of our community. Our improved release schedule
will ensure that new features and improvements will make their way to
end-users soon, and for testers, we even provide daily builds.
We are so excited by what has been achieved over the last six months, and
we are immensely grateful to all those who have supported the project in
whatever ways they can. It is an honour to be working with you, to be part
of one united community! The future as we are shaping it has just begun, and
it will be bright and excellent.
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