LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users

Thanks to the work of 300 contributors, the new LibreOffice comes with
substantial improvements

The Internet, August 1, 2011 - The Document Foundation (TDF) announces
LibreOffice 3.4.2, the third version of the 3.4 family, targeting both
private individuals and enterprises. LibreOffice 3.4.2 fixes the
majority of the most-important bugs identified by users in the previous
version, and can be deployed for production needs by most enterprises.

The Document Foundation encourages large organizations deploying
LibreOffice to do so in conjunction with a support partner, who can
carefully assess specific requirements, help manage migration and
provide bespoke fixes for identified issues. Purchasing LibreOffice
support from a TDF partner also provides enterprises with an indirect
means to contribute financially to the project, thereby funding its
development, improving its stability, and accelerating its growth. Users
should always refer to the release notes before deploying the new version.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 is the result of the combined activity of 300
contributors having made more than 23,000 commits, with the addition,
deletion or modification of around five million lines of code. The
developer community is well balanced between company-sponsored
contributors and independent community volunteers: Oracle and SUSE have
each provided around 25% of the commits, with a further 25% coming from
community volunteers new to the project since our inception, and with a
further 20% from RedHat. The remaining commits came from a combination
of pre-TDF contributors, Canonical developers, and organizations like
Bobiciel, CodeThink, Lanedo, SIL, and Tata Consultancy Services.

If we look at the same data for individual developers, the top 12 by
number of commits since the inception of LibreOffice is composed of a
mixture of corporate-sponsored contributors (from 4 companies:
Canonical, Oracle, RedHat and SUSE) and a number of private individual
contributors, indicating a balanced situation and a healthy community.

"TDF was born with the aim of evolving the OpenOffice.org code to
develop a cleaner and leaner free office suite and, after ten months, we
are right on track to achieve this objective," says Bjoern Michaelsen,
one of the four Canonical contributors, and a key member of the
Engineering Steering Committee. "Of course, with such a large code
renovation effort, we are aware of the short-term risk of reduced
stability, but this is counterbalanced by the long-term improvement in
features, speed and - again - stability."

Other news is that the number of TDF official contributors and
LibreOffice users is increasing. Youbing Jin, President of RedFlag2000
Software Company, says, "We are delighted to see that TDF is getting
ever stronger, and we are proud to be part of it."

The community around The Document Foundation and LibreOffice will gather
in Paris for the first LibreOffice Conference, from October 13 to
October 15, 2011 (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). The call for
papers is open until August 8, while registration will close at the end
of September.

Although TDF is happy that 3.4.2, deployed with support from a suitable
partner, can be considered "enterprise-ready", it is clearly only one
more milestone on our march towards ever greater stability, with the
3.4.3 release to incorporate further stability improvements and security
fixes by the end of August.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 can be downloaded from
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

Short link to The Document Foundation blog: http://wp.me/p1byPE-ao.

-- 
Italo Vignoli - The Document Foundation
email italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
phone +39.348.5653829 - VoIP +39.02.320621813
skype italovignoli - italo.vignoli@gmail.com