Document Foundation Launches Open Source LibreOffice 3.3 Suite

The Document Foundation launched LibreOffice 3.3 on Jan. 25, just a mere five days after announcing a release candidate. This is the first stable release of the open-source office suite since its breakaway from Oracle’s OpenOffice.org project in September.

Concerned about Oracle’s plans for OpenOffice after the Sun acquisition, about a third of OpenOffice developers formed the Document Foundation and forked the software into their own version. LibreOffice and the new foundation have a number of big names backing it, including Red Hat, Google, Novell and Canonical.

In fact, Canonical plans to include LibreOffice in its next version of Ubuntu, codenamed Natty Narwhal. The alpha version of Ubuntu 11.04 released in December had OpenOffice, but now that LibreOffice is available, Canonical will be making the switch. Novell’s openSUSE also includes LibreOffice.

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