LibreOffice Celebrates First Anniversary

It was just a year ago today that LibreOffice was officially announced  and the first beta of the OpenOffice.org fork was released. The Document Foundation marked the occasion by sending out a announcement with lots of juicy statistics. For example, LibreOffice represents the results of the collaborative power of 330 contributors.

Charles Schulz, a member of the Steering Committee, is quoted as saying:

What we have achieved in just twelve months is incredible. Let's have a look at some numbers: we have 136 members who have been nominated for their contributions to the project; we have some 270 developers and 270 localizers (although we always want to attract more), many of whom are also members; we have over 100 mailing lists, with over 15,000 subscribers, half of whom receive all our announcements; and there have been thousands of articles in the media worldwide.

"Well balanced" is used to describe the pool of contributers once again; meaning commits are distributed across company-sponsored and independent community contributors. "SUSE and community volunteers new to the project have provided around 25% each of the commits, with a further 20% coming from RedHat and another 20% coming from the OpenOffice.org code base."

In LibreOffice's first year of existence, it has been downloaded over 6 million times (7.5 million if you count outside mirrors like Softpedia's). TDF estimates that another 10 million users installed LibreOffice from CD included in magazines and such. In addition, TDF estimates that 15 million Linux users, many of which get theirs from their distributions. The foundation feels they are on target for reaching their goal of 200 million users by decade's end.

Happy Birthday, LibreOffice. Thank you for all your hard and professional work. I'd hate to think of where we might be without The Document Foundation, its contributors and staff, and LibreOffice.  It's indispensable to me.

See the full announcement for more detail.