Print
Google Docs and Office Web apps have gone a long way towards offering a compelling solution for storing our documents online, but for those in need of offline access, Open Office used to be the best free alterative to Microsoft around. Fast forward to 2012 however, and Open Office hasn’t just fallen off the map, it has been lapped several times by a new community fork called LibreOffice.
According to new statistics offered up by the community, LibreOffice monthly commits is now in the 1500-3000 range, with the vast majority of new code coming from TDF volunteers, as opposed to large corporations such has Red Hat, Oracle, or Canonical.
The LibreOffice community is also celebrating over 10 million users, a significant milestone for a project that only launched in late 2010. With version 3.5 just around the corner promising tons of improvements sometime next week, the future of LibreOffice is looking very bright indeed.
Comments are closed on this article
Indian-Art
February 06, 2012 at 4:26am
"The LibreOffice community is also celebrating over 10 million users". This I think it is grossly under reporting the no. of users as there are more than 20 million Ubuntu users, all of whom have LO as standard office productivity suite.
"Fast, secure and stylishly simple, the Ubuntu operating system is used by 20 million people worldwide every day." - http://www.ubuntu.com/
Ubuntu users are just a fraction of the Linux community. I think most Distros have LO as standard word processor.
What about Windows users who use this great software?
I think even 'over 20 million users' may not be enough. I'm glad its growing fast.
My request to TDF is to revise their estimate & have a daily download counter.
LO is going to be huge! :)
Ghok
February 05, 2012 at 10:17pm
There's a bug in Open Office (media keys on the keyboard won't work when Open Office is the active window) that has been known about for years but not fixed (last I checked). I added a bug report and get an email whenever someone else adds to the report. Usually just a "Why isn't this fixed yet???" every few months. Honestly hadn't heard about this fork, so I'm eager to give it a look.
bpstone
February 05, 2012 at 8:49pm
I like LibreOffice too. :)
@Zoandar
They are already working on it: http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/10/14/libreoffice-conference-announcements/ Rumors say mid 2012. Help them out if you'd like to see it sooner. ;)
RUSENSITIVESWEETNESS
February 06, 2012 at 4:09pm
Word processing on your phone? Yeah, that sounds like a blast....
compro01
February 06, 2012 at 7:04am
As of October, they said "late 2012 to early 2013".
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/10/libreoffice-gaining-momentum-heading-to-android-ios-and-the-web.ars
