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The Document Foundation celebrates its second anniversary

From:  Italo Vignoli <italo.vignoli-AT-documentfoundation.org>
To:  lwn-AT-lwn.net
Subject:  The Document Foundation celebrates its second anniversary
Date:  Fri, 28 Sep 2012 01:05:10 +0200
Message-ID:  <1EXN1J3U-CQOZ-YX05-FAOR-188LGHLZCWDC@documentfoundation.org>
Archive-link:  Article, Thread

The Document Foundation celebrates its second anniversary and starts fundraising campaign to reach
the next stage

Fourth quarter's donors define the communities budget for the next year

Berlin, September 28, 2012 - The Document Foundation celebrates its second anniversary since the
announcement of the project on September 28, 2010. During the last 12 months, the foundation was
legally established in Berlin, the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee were elected by
TDF members, where membership is based on meritocracy and not on invitation, Intel became a
supporter, and LibreOffice 3.5 and 3.6 families were announced. In addition, TDF has shown the
prototypes of a cloud and a tablet version of LibreOffice, which will be available sometime in late
2013 or early 2014.

On October 1st, The Document Foundation will start a fundraising campaign with the objective of
supporting the next wave of the growth. "So far, volunteers have provided most of the work
necessary to sustain the project, but after two years it is is mandatory to start thinking really
big", says Italo Vignoli, the dean of the Board of Directors. "We had a dream, and now that
thousands around the world made that dream come true we want to get to the major league of software
development and advocacy. By donating during the fourth quarter of 2012, donors will define the
budget we have available for 2013".

Community members have set up a dedicated donation page - with several options including PayPal and
credit cards - at http://donate.libreoffice.org, to support the fundraising campaign. The page will
be updated on the fly, to show current achievements, and concrete goals achieved with the
donations.

"In just 24 months, we have achieved what many people thought was impossible when the project was
launched", says Thorsten Behrens, SUSE developer, Deputy Chairman of the Board. "We have managed to
aggregate a large number of people around the idea that an independent foundation was the only
reasonable choice to provide a sustainable future to the legacy OOo code. According to Ohloh, in
just two years we managed to become the third largest free software project focused on the
development of a desktop application with 325 active committers over the last 12 months, after
Firefox and Chrome".

LibreOffice is the result of the combined activity of 540 contributors - including former
OpenOffice.org developers - having made more than 40,000 commits. The program is faster and more
reliable, and has a richer feature set than predecessors and competitors thanks to a growing hacker
community where more experienced developers are mentoring newbies in order to bring them up to
speed. Today, the group is well balanced between people looking after infrastructure, new features
and patches.

Downloads since January 25, 2011, the date of the first stable release, have just exceeded 18
million, and amount to over 20 million when you add external sites  offering the same package. In
addition, millions of users install LibreOffice from CDs burned from the ISO images available
online or bundled with magazines in many geographies. Around 90% of installations are on Windows,
with another 10% on MacOS.

Linux users, in contrast, get LibreOffice from their distribution repository. Based on IDC
reckonings for new or updated Linux installations in 2012, TDF estimates a subtotal of 30 million
Linux users, as LibreOffice is the office suite of choice for all Linux distributions.

The community around TDF will gather in Berlin from October 16 to October 19, 2012, for the second
LibreOffice Conference (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). Interested people need to register at
http://conference.libreoffice.org/registration/ by October 8th.

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

Short link to TDF blog: http://wp.me/p1byPE-jO.

About The Document Foundation (TDF)

The Document Foundation is an open, independent, self-governing, meritocratic organization, which
builds on ten years of dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community. TDF was created in the
belief that the culture born of an independent foundation brings out the best in corporate and
volunteer contributors, and will deliver the best free office suite ever. TDF is open to any
individual who agrees with its core values and contributes to its activities, and welcomes
corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other
contributors in the community. As of June 30, 2012, TDF has over 140 members and well over a
thousand volunteers and contributors worldwide.

Media Contacts

Florian Effenberger (based near Munich, Germany, UTC+1)
   E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org - Skype: floeff
Charles H. Schulz (based in Paris, France, UTC+1)
   E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org
Eliane Domingos de Sousa (based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, UTC-3)
   E-mail: elianedomingos@documentfoundation.org - Skype: elianedomingos
Italo Vignoli (based in Milan, Italy, UTC+1)
   E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org - Skype: italovignoli
   GTalk: italo.vignoli@gmail.com

Full contact details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/contact/
TDF legal details: http://www.documentfoundation.org/imprint

--

Italo Vignoli - The Document Foundation
mob +39 348 5653829 - skype italovignoli
italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org



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