The Document Foundation Marks Six Months of Freedom

The Document Foundation published a summary today listing its achievements since its inception on September 28, 2010. Most users know of the widely publicized events such as the three releases of LibreOffice and the call for donations in order to fund the formation of a legal foundation. But activity has also encompassed, among other things, social and other media interaction, intellectual property protection, and distribution relationships.

Florian Effenberger outlined the amazing progress made in just six short months. He mentioned the many social media outlets on which the foundation is engaged such as Twitter and Identi.ca. 6,000 subscriptions to the mailing lists and postings to the wiki were also highlighted. The developers, Steering Committee, and marketing teams use these outlets as well as others to keep users informed.

Effenberger also mentions joining the Open Invention Network, which strives to protect intellectual properties held by Open Source organizations; OpenDoc Society, which promotes open standards for office formats; and becoming an SPI-associated project. SPI works to promote and encourage Open Source software and hardware.

In response to a call for donations, originally to fund the formation of a legal foundation in Germany, almost €100,000 have been raised. Funds beyond those needed for the foundation will go to expenses and salaries associated with the foundation and LibreOffice. The paperwork is almost completed for the foundation and non-profit status is just around the corner.

Finally, Effenberger spoke of their vision for the future, which entails general improvements as well as specific plans. He said 1.3 million copies of LibrOffice have been downloaded from the project's 65,000 mirrors worldwide. Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Sabayon, and openSUSE are among the Linux distributions that have switched from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 3.3.2 was released March 22 with lots of bug fixes and code clean-ups. 3.4.0 is scheduled for May 2 and 3.4.1 is planned for May 23.

Read the full announcements with relevant links here.