The Document Foundation Reaches Goal of €50,000 in Eight Days

The Document Foundation sent out an announcement this morning of reaching its goal of €50,000 in order to set up a legal foundation in Germany. The Document Foundation turned to the community for donations to help raise the capital. It didn't take very long to secure those funds.

 The Document Foundation reports that just 2,000 donors were needed to raise the sum of €50,000 needed for the startup capital. These funds will be frozen and can not be spent, although any interest accrued can be used by the foundation. Any funds collected from this point on will go to pay the costs of producing the office suite "such as marketing, hardware, infrastructure, attending trade shows, initial financing of merchandising material and, of course, developing new and exciting ideas." Florian Effenberger, co-founder and Steering Committee member, says, "We still need your support: Every donation helps to pay for our future operational running."

The first release of LibreOffice, the office suite based on OpenOffice.org, arrived January 25, 2011 with lots of little extra features not found in OpenOffice.org. A bug fix minor version update was released February 23 right in the middle of the fund raiser. These two well receives released and the publicity surrounding them surely helped the cause.

LibreOffice was created in order to protect all the work resulting in OpenOffice.org in light of Oracle's purchase of Sun. Oracle has a track record of discontinuing Open Source projects whose profits are minimal or non-existent. OpenOffice.org remains in development and released as the commercially supported OpenOffice and freely downloadable OpenOffice.org. LibreOffice is free to download at libreoffice.org.