LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users

Posted Aug 5, 2011 7:07 UTC (Fri) by hingo (guest, #14792)
Parent article: LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users

Wow. Do we have more details on what those 300 contributors are? The email makes it sound they all committed something, perhaps not only code but also translations. Or does it also include things like "people writing to an email list"? 300 is a very good number. Linux, Drupal and some other projects have 1000+ committers. To get a third of that in 2 years is an amazing feat for a piece of software that has stagnated under bad governance for a decade.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users

Posted Aug 5, 2011 8:02 UTC (Fri) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link] (3 responses)

According to ohloh (BTW is there a free alternative to that service?) it is even more than 400 committers over the last year: http://www.ohloh.net/p/libreoffice/factoids/7758072

cia.vc also reports a staggering amount of commit messages:
"32812 messages since the first one, 0.84 years ago, for an average of 13.39 minutes between messages" http://cia.vc/stats/project/libreoffice

Their wiki says there are 277 active users (who made changes the last 3 months), with a total of 32,311 edits:
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Special:Statistics

The LibreOffice credits page has even more people listed (611 committers, 1005 wiki contributors), but read the fine print about double counting and also recognizing previous OpenOffice.org contributors: http://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/credits/

I could not find statistics for their mailinglists:
http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/
But their main development mailinglist http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/ is seeing between 1200 and 1700 messages a month. gmane might be able to give some statistics about the others:
http://gmane.org/find.php?list=documentfoundation

LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users

Posted Aug 5, 2011 8:22 UTC (Fri) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (2 responses)

Excellent! This is an excellent showcase for the difference between mismanaged Sun project vs thriving community project. I always felt OpenOffice was underperforming, after all, a cross platform office suite should by all means have more potential (both in adoption and business) than something like Linux kernel. One thing I was wondering about the committers, do I remember correctly this includes people committing translations and documentation in many languages? It's still impressive, but would make all of this easier to believe. I think counting openoffice.org contributors is perfectly kosher. They contributed to LibreOffice whether they like it or not. As the email here explains, they are not the majority of committers anyway.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users

Posted Aug 5, 2011 9:59 UTC (Fri) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]

I don't know, so I asked on The Document Foundation list to see if someone has more broken down statistics:
http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ms...

They will have a huge conference later this year http://conference.libreoffice.org/ in Paris, October 12th-15th, with several tracks. One of those is the Community Building track which will most likely contain some more background about the massive explosion of new contributors: http://conference.libreoffice.org/sponsors/

If I read the numbers right then under corporate control OpenOffice.org got about 200 (code) contributors in total throughout its whole existence. Within less than a year The Document Foundation got more than 400 contributors to LibreOffice code (600 if you also count the old/switched OpenOffice.org ones). That is a huge increase. Not to mention the amount of corporate and organizational sponsors they attracted: http://www.documentfoundation.org/supporters/

LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users

Posted Aug 9, 2011 9:45 UTC (Tue) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]

Michael Meeks gave a presentation at the Desktop Summit. In his slides http://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2011-08-07-libre.pdf he gave the following numbers:

11 months in: how is it going ? - extremely well
205+ entirely new code contributors with included patches
200+ active translators, for ~100 languages (in Pootle)
Two stable branches: 3.3.3 and 3.4.2 7 stable releases in 10 months
Development continues apace: 3.5.0 due early Feb 2012

So new code-vs-translation contributor patches seem about 50/50. I still don't know if those 205+ new contributors are everybody, or whether there are another ~200 "old" contributors who might or might not have also migrated to the new LibreOffice project. But the numbers are impressive for a community grown in less than a year anyway.