LibreOffice Out in New Version, with Oracle a Big Contributor

The LibreOffice suite of productivity applications is now available for download in version 3.4.2, for Linux, Windows and the Mac. If you've been using a previous version, it's a good idea to upgrade to this one via the download page, as there are a number of bug fixes. This is the third release of the new LibreOffice 3.4 code line.

The latest release of LibreOffice is much more stable than previous versions, and is being positioned as being ready for enterprises who want to deploy the productivity suite, potentially saving lots of money as compared to buying licenses for Microsoft Office. Of course, enterprises can easily import files from Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint and many other formats, and can easily save to Microsoft Office and other formats.

The LibreOffice team continues to be nicely transparent about its ongoing work. There are numerous known bugs still in the latest release, and they are disclosed. For example, the Writer word processor crashes when using many footnotes.

So who is contributing the most to LibreOffice? ZDNet notes that Oracle, SUSE, and Red Hat drive 70 percent of the development work on the suite.  Oracle, after donating OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation, contributed roughly 25 percent of LibreOffice's latest code. Canonical and several other companies are also among the major contributors, and it looks likely that corporations--not individual contributors--will continue to do the vast majority of development on LibreOffice.