| The Document Foundation 1 year on |
| Written by Janet Swift | |||
| Wednesday, 28 September 2011 | |||
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Today The Document Foundation (TDF) celebrates its first anniversary, one year after the unveiling of the project and the release of the first beta of LibreOffice. It is just twelve months since the fork that split LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org and led to the establishment of The Document Foundation (TDF) became "official" with the release of the first beta of LibreOffice. According to the figures compiled to chart its progress, LibreOffice is the result of the combined activity of 330 contributors almost all of whom are volunteers: -
The developer community is comprised of company-sponsored contributors and independent community volunteers: SUSE and community volunteers new to the project have each provided around 25% of the total of over 25,000 commits, with a further 20% coming from RedHat and another 20% coming from the OpenOffice.org code base. The remaining commits came from pre-TDF contributors, Canonical developers, and organizations like Bobiciel, CodeThink, Lanedo, SIL, and Tata Consultancy Services.
Adding a time dimension shows how the OpenOffice.org contribution has now tailed off leaving new developers and Suse the most active:
(click to enlarge) In terms of adoption, TDF claims success for LibreOffice. Taking into account downloads, installations from CD and the fact that it has become the office suite of choice for all Linux distributions, TDF reckons it already has: a total of 25 million LibreOffice users worldwide, in line with the expectations and well on the way to the target of 200 million users worldwide before the end of the decade. There is plenty of scope for growth as indicated by this chart which shows that while OpenOffice.org's share has decreased (from over 80%) it still has around 70% of the interest.
 LibroOffice has just notched up two awards - in the Open World Forum's Experiment Awards 2011 and in IDG's InfoWorld BOSSIE Awards 2011 - for best of Open Source software. A comment made by InfoWorld was deemed worthy of inclusion in TDF's anniversary press release:
"The newest features [in LibreOffice] show that much more attention to improving performance and making the product more like a business tool and less me-too effort."
As far as developers are concerned TDF's real achievement has been in its open attitude. Norbert Thiebuad, who joined the project at its launch and is now member of TDF Engineering Steering Committee summed up its success in this respect: "Thanks to a very welcoming attitude to newcomers, to the copyleft license, and to the fact that it is not requesting any copyright assignment, The Document Foundation has attracted more developers with commits in the first year than the OpenOffice.org project in the first decade."
So, congratulations to The Document Foundation for a promising first year.
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 28 September 2011 ) |
