Oracle’s history of not caring too much about Free Software led several contributors to fork OpenOffice.org. And that is a very brief account of how LibreOffice came to be.

The Document Foundation is a newly founded organisation with a mission: to make an office suite available as truly free software, developed within the wider community. Supported by companies like Google, Novell and Red Hat, the Foundation has forked the Oracle-owned OpenOffice software and created LibreOffice.

A group of OpenOffice.org developers has announced the creation of an independent foundation - called the Document Foundation - to guide the further development of the office suite, which is provisionally named LibreOffice. At the heart of this effort is longtime OpenOffice.org developer Michael Meeks.

LibreOffice will be uncompromisingly free software, and as one developer observes, "it is hard to think of anyone of any note in the community that isn't involved," including developers from Red Hat and Debian. The hope is that OpenOffice / Libreoffice "will go where people want it to go, because it hasn't been going where people want it to.

A group of thirteen Copenhagen hospitals and their almost 25,000 workers will, over the next year, move to using LibreOffice, the community maintained and developed fork of the OpenOffice.org office suite.

I guess everybody has heard that a majority of the key developers in the OpenOffice.org community decided to set up the Document Foundation: an independent foundation to continue and manage work on the Openoffice.org codebase. If you’ve not, then I can recommend Terry Hancock’s piece as a starting point (and a good summary of why forking is vital).

IBM has announced that it is joining the OpenOffice.org development community, with an initial involvement concerning code contributions it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product. The code includes accessibility enhancements, and IBM is expected to make ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org.

The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project.

The Internet, October 6, 2010 -- One full week has gone by since the announcement of The Document Foundation, and we would like to share some numbers with the people who have decided to follow us since the first day. The beta of LibreOffice has been downloaded over 80.000 times.