The second beta release of LibreOffice 3.4 is already available, just one week after the initial beta. Meanwhile the process of giving The Document Foundation legal status moves slowly on.

LibreOffice 3.4 will be the second major release of the LibreOffice project (the first was LibreOffice 3.3 which has been available since 25 January 2011) and promises "many exciting new features". It is the mark of an enthusiastic development team when decimal point upgrades are exciting! Originally planned to be released on May 2 it is now scheduled for May 31.

Beta 1 has had a lot of bug fixes and a few new additions including navigation buttons in Writer, a quick selection feature that allows 'select as you type' and new 'animated images' for Throbber controls. Like the earlier version Beta 2 is not yet ready for production use. 

Download the beta here and for more information see its release notes.

A blog post from The Document Foundation on Wednesday provided an update on its status including the process of its legal incorporation for which it appealed for funds in February.  Although the translation of the Community bylaws from German to English has been completed legally binding statutes have still to be written and the German state in which to base the Foundation hasn't yet been chosen.

One completed resolution is that the German association OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. which is the current interim legal entity for The Document Foundation, has renamed itself as Freies Office Deutschland e.V., literally translated “Free Office Germany e.V.”.

Possibly prompted by Oracle's abandonment of OpenOffice.org, handing it over to whatever community remained, the online site for Application for TDF Community Membership opened on 19 April and received about 100 applications in just 24 hours.

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