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.

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 media has been abuzz with OpenOffice being forked into LibreOffice by The Document Foundation in past few days. The Document Foundation, has already released a beta version of Libre Office that can be installed on Ubuntu.

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.

LibreOffice 3.5 has been released, this is a major release that comes with many new features and improvements, in this release for the first time will be enabled the online update checker which informs users when a new version of the suite is available.
Installation instructions for Fedora/Centos/Debian/Ubuntu and Linuxmint included

Following a six-week public beta, The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced that the project's new extensions and templates repositories for LibreOffice are now online.

LibreOffice, the community-driven fork of OpenOffice, appears to have a very healthy and growing group of code contributors. The Document Foundation has published new stats that portray the climbing rates of developer involvement both in terms of numbers of people and numbers of code commits.

Charles H. Schulz answers questions about the present and future of LibreOffice and the Document Foundation.

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.