LibreOffice

Updated on Nov 28, 2023

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Original author(s) StarDivision

Developer(s) The Document Foundation Initial release 25 January 2011; 6 years ago (2011-01-25) Stable release "Fresh" version: 5.3.1 (16 March 2017; 1 day ago (2017-03-16)) [±] "Still" version: 5.2.6 (9 March 2017; 8 days ago (2017-03-09)) [±] Preview release 5.3.1 RC1 (22 February 2017; 23 days ago (2017-02-22)) [±] 5.2.6 RC2 (2 March 2017; 15 days ago (2017-03-02)) [±] Repository cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice

LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite, a project of The Document Foundation. It was forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010, which was an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite comprises programs for word processing, the creation and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams and drawings, working with databases, and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in 110 languages.

LibreOffice uses the international ISO/IEC standard OpenDocument file format (ODF) as its native format to save documents for all of its applications. LibreOffice also supports the file formats of most other major office suites, including Microsoft Office, through a variety of import/export filters.

LibreOffice is available for a variety of computing platforms, including Microsoft Windows, macOS (10.8 or newer), and Linux (including a LibreOffice Viewer for Android), as well as in the form of an online office suite. It is the default office suite of most popular Linux distributions. It is the most actively developed free and open-source office suite, with approximately 50 times the development activity of Apache OpenOffice, the other major descendant of OpenOffice.org.

Between January 2011 (the first stable release) and October 2011, LibreOffice was downloaded approximately 7.5 million times. The project claims 120 million unique downloading addresses from May 2011 to May 2015, excluding Linux distributions, with 55 million of those being from May 2014 to May 2015.

Operating systems

The Document Foundation developers target LibreOffice for Microsoft Windows (IA-32 and x86-64), Linux (IA-32 and x86-64) and macOS (x86-64). Community ports for FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OS X 10.5 PowerPC receive support from contributors to those projects, respectively. Libreoffice is also installable on OpenIndiana via SFE.

LibreOffice Online will allow for the use of LibreOffice through a web browser by using the canvas element of HTML5. Development was announced at the first LibreOffice Conference in October 2011, and is ongoing. LibreOffice announced a collaboration with Icewarp and Collabora to work on the cross-platform interface. A version of the software was shown in a September 2015 conference, and the UK Crown Commercial Service announced an interest in using the software. On 15 December 2015, Collabora, in partnership with ownCloud, released a technical preview of Libreoffice Online branded as Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE). By October 2016, Collabora had released nine updates to CODE.

In 2011, developers announced plans to port LibreOffice both to Android and to iOS. A beta version of a document viewer for Android 4.0 or newer was released in January 2015; In May 2015, LibreOffice Viewer for Android was released with basic editing capabilities.

In January 2015, a LibreOffice Impress remote app was unveiled for the Pebble smartwatch.

Unique features of LibreOffice

A detailed 60-page report in June 2015 compared the progress of the LibreOffice project with its cousin project Apache OpenOffice. It showed that "OpenOffice received about 10% of the improvements LibreOffice did in the period of time studied."

Miscellaneous features

LibreOffice can use the GStreamer multimedia framework in Linux to render multimedia content such as videos in Impress and other programs.

Visually, LibreOffice uses the large "Tango style" icons that are used for the application shortcuts, quick launch icons, icons for associated files and for the icons found on the toolbar of the LibreOffice programs. They are also used on the toolbars and menus by default.

LibreOffice also ships with a modified theme which looks native on GTK-based Linux distributions. It also renders fonts via Cairo on Linux distributions; this means that text in LibreOffice is rendered the same as the rest of the Linux desktop.

LibreOffice has a feature similar to WordArt called Fontwork.

Licensing

The LibreOffice project uses a dual LGPLv3 (or later) / MPL 2.0 license for new contributions to allow the license to be upgraded. Since the core of the OpenOffice.org codebase was donated to the Apache Software Foundation, there is an ongoing effort to get all the code rebased to ease future license updates. At the same time, there were complaints that IBM had not in fact released the Lotus Symphony code as open source, despite having claimed to. It was reported that some LibreOffice developers wanted to incorporate some code parts and bug fixes which IBM already fixed in their OpenOffice fork.

Scripting and extensions

LibreOffice supports third-party extensions. As of April 2015, the LibreOffice Extension Repository lists more than 280 extensions. Another list is maintained by the Apache Software Foundation and another one by the Free Software Foundation. Extensions and scripts for LibreOffice can be written in C++, Java, CLI, Python, and LibreOffice Basic. Interpreters for the latter two are bundled with most LibreOffice installers, so no additional installation is needed. The application programming interface for LibreOffice is called "UNO" and is extensively documented.

LibreOffice Basic

LibreOffice Basic is a programming language similar to Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) but based on StarOffice Basic. It is available in Writer, Calc and Base. It is used to write small programs known as "macros", with each macro performing a different task, such as counting the words in a paragraph.

ooo-build, Go-oo and Oracle

Members of the OpenOffice.org community who were not Sun Microsystems employees had wanted a more egalitarian form for the OpenOffice.org project for many years; Sun had stated in the original OpenOffice.org announcement in 2000, that the project would eventually be run by a neutral foundation, and put forward a more detailed proposal in 2001.

Ximian and then Novell had maintained the ooo-build patch set, a project led by Michael Meeks, to make the build easier on Linux and due to the difficulty of getting contributions accepted upstream by Sun, even from corporate partners. It tracked the main line of development and was not intended to constitute a fork. It was also the standard build mechanism for OpenOffice.org in most Linux distributions and was contributed to by said distributions.

In 2007, ooo-build was made available by Novell as a software package called Go-oo (ooo-build had used the go-oo.org domain name as early as 2005), which included many features not included in upstream OpenOffice.org. Go-oo also encouraged outside contributions, with rules similar to those later adopted for LibreOffice.

Sun's contributions to OpenOffice.org had been declining for some time, they remained reluctant to accept contributions and contributors were upset at Sun releasing OpenOffice.org code to IBM for IBM Lotus Symphony under a proprietary contract, rather than under an open source licence.

Sun was purchased by Oracle Corporation in early 2010. OpenOffice.org community members were concerned by Oracle's behaviour towards open source software, the Java lawsuit against Google and Oracle's withdrawal of developers and lack of activity on or visible commitment to OpenOffice.org, as had been noted by industry observers – as Meeks put it in early September 2010, "The news from the Oracle OpenOffice conference was that there was no news." Discussion of a fork started soon after.

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice

On 28 September 2010, The Document Foundation was announced as the host of LibreOffice, a new derivative of OpenOffice.org. The Document Foundation's initial announcement stated their concerns that Oracle would either discontinue OpenOffice.org, or place restrictions on it as an open source project, as it had on Sun's OpenSolaris.

LibreOffice 3.3 beta used the ooo-build build infrastructure and the OpenOffice.org 3.3 beta code from Oracle, then adding selected patches from Go-oo. Go-oo was discontinued in favour of LibreOffice. Since the office suite that was branded "OpenOffice.org" in most Linux distributions was in fact Go-oo, most moved immediately to LibreOffice.

Oracle was invited to become a member of The Document Foundation. However, Oracle demanded that all members of the OpenOffice.org Community Council involved with The Document Foundation step down from the OOo Community Council, claiming a conflict of interest.

Naming

The name "LibreOffice" was picked after researching trademark databases, social media and if it could be used for URLs in various countries.

It was originally hoped that the LibreOffice name would be provisional, as Oracle was invited to become a member of The Document Foundation. However, Oracle rejected requests to donate the OpenOffice.org brand to the project.

LibreOffice was initially named BrOffice in Brazil. OpenOffice.org had been distributed as BrOffice.org by the BrOffice Centre of Excellence for Free Software because of a trademark issue.

End of OpenOffice.org and beginning of Apache OpenOffice

Oracle announced in April 2011 that it was ending its development of OpenOffice.org and would lay off the majority of its paid developers. In June 2011, Oracle announced that it would donate the OpenOffice.org code and trademark to the Apache Software Foundation, where the project was accepted for a project incubation process within the foundation, thus becoming Apache OpenOffice. In an interview with LWN in 2011, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth blamed The Document Foundation for destroying OpenOffice.org because it did not license code under Oracle's Contributor License Agreement. But former Sun executive Simon Phipps denies this is the case:

The act of creating The Document Foundation and its LibreOffice project did no demonstrable harm to Oracle's business. There is no new commercial competition to Oracle Open Office (their commercial edition of OO.o) arising from LibreOffice. No contributions that Oracle valued were ended by its creation. Oracle's ability to continue development of the code was in no way impaired. Oracle's decision appears to be simply that, after a year of evaluation, the profit to be made from developing Oracle Open Office and Oracle Cloud Office did not justify the salaries of over 100 senior developers working on them both. Suggesting that TDF was in some way to blame for a hard-headed business decision that seemed inevitable from the day Oracle's acquisition of Sun was announced is at best disingenuous.

In March 2015, an LWN.net comparison of LibreOffice with its cousin project Apache OpenOffice concluded that "LibreOffice has won the battle for developer participation".

Versions

Since March 2014 and version 4.2.2, two different major released versions of LibreOffice are available at any time, in addition to development versions (numbered release candidates and dated nightly builds). The versions are designated to signal their appropriateness for differing user requirements. Releases are designated by three numbers separated by dots. The first number is the major version (branch) number, the second one usually indicates small changes, and the final one bugfixes. LibreOffice designates the two release versions as:

"Fresh" – the most recent bugfix release of the current major version (branch), which contains the latest enhancements but may have bugs not present in the "still" release.

"Still" (formerly "Stable") – the final bugfix of the previous major version, which has had several months of bug fixing and is recommended for users for whom stability is more important than enhancements. These are also referred to as "released" versions.

Release schedule

LibreOffice uses a time-based release schedule for predictability, rather than a "when it's ready" schedule. There has been a major release approximately every four to eight months, with the intention to do so every six months (eventually in March and September, with the intention of aligning it with other free software projects). A minor bugfix version of the current and previous release branches is released each month.

Users and deployments

The Document Foundation estimated in September 2011, that there were 10 million users worldwide who had obtained LibreOffice via downloads or CD-ROMs. Over 90% of those were on Windows, with another 5% on OS X. LibreOffice is the default office suite for most Linux distributions, and is installed when the operating system is installed or updated. Based on International Data Corporation reckonings for new or updated Linux installations in 2011, The Document Foundation estimated a subtotal of 15 million Linux users. This gave a total estimated user base of 25 million users in 2011. In September 2013, after two years, the estimated number of LibreOffice users was 75 million. A million new unique IP addresses check for downloads each week. In August 2016, the number of LibreOffice users was estimated at 120 million.

The Document Foundation has set a target of 200 million users worldwide before the end of 2020.

LibreOffice has seen various mass deployments since its inception:

2003–2010

In 2003–2004, the Brazilian corporation Serpro started migrating its software to BrOffice (the local version of LibreOffice at the time), with estimated value of BRL 3.5 million (approximately US$1.2 million at the time), and became a case study for similar initiatives in Brazil, particularly in e-government.

In 2005, the French Gendarmerie announced its migration to OpenOffice.org. It is currently migrating to a customised version of Ubuntu with LibreOffice (target for 2015: 72,000 desktop machines).

In 2010, the Irish city of Limerick gradually started migrating to open-source solutions to free itself from vendor lock-in and improve its purchase negotiation power. One of the key aspects of this move has been the use of LibreOffice.

2011

The administrative authority of the Île-de-France region (which includes the city of Paris) included LibreOffice in a USB flash drive given to students which contains free open source software. The USB flash drive is given to approximately 800,000 students.

It was announced that thirteen hospitals of the Copenhagen region would gradually switch to LibreOffice, affecting "almost all of the 25,000 workers".

2012

The Greek city of Pylaia-Chortiatis migrated its PCs to use LibreOffice. The local Linux User Group estimated cost savings to be at least 70,000 euros.

In July, the Spanish city of Las Palmas switched its 1200 PCs to using LibreOffice, citing cost savings of €400,000.

The administration of Umbria, Italy, started a project to migrate an initial group of 5000 civil workers to LibreOffice.

The city of Largo, Florida, US has been a long-time user of open-source software using Linux thin clients. Originally using OpenOffice.org, the city of Largo switched to LibreOffice in 2013.

2013

In June, the government of the Italian province of South Tyrol will be switching 7000 PCs in administration and "many more thousands" of PCs in health services using LibreOffice and ODF.

In August, the administration of the Spanish autonomous region of Valencia has completed the migration of all 120,000 PCs of the administration, including schools and courts, to LibreOffice.

The German city of Munich announced that it would transition from OpenOffice to LibreOffice in the near future. This is in line with Munich's long term commitment to using open source software. Munich uses LiMux, an Ubuntu Linux derivative, on nearly all of the city's 15,000 computers. The city of Munich is the second public administration to join the advisory board at the Document Foundation. News appeared in 2014 that the Council is considering migrating back to Windows + Microsoft Office but was later denied. Based on a study, the mayor of Munich, Dieter Reiter, initiated the re-investigation of the scenario of migrating back to Microsoft systems. The trustworthiness of the study is questionable because the company has been "Microsoft's Alliance Partner of the Year" during nine years. Further details of were issued by the Document Foundation.

2014

The French city of Toulouse announced it saved €1 million by migrating thousands of workstations to LibreOffice.

2015

The Italian Ministry of Defence announced that it would install LibreOffice on 150,000 PCs.

The Italian city of Bari replaced Microsoft Office with LibreOffice on its 1,700 PCs.

LibreOffice was officially made available for all UK Government agencies nationwide.

In 2015, the Taiwanese county of Yilan announced that no more Microsoft Office licenses will be purchased.

In July 2015, the IT project manager working for the administration of Nantes (France’s sixth largest city) talked about the ongoing switch of its 5000 workstations to LibreOffice started in 2013. According to the IT project manager, the switch to LibreOffice allowed the administration to save EUR 1,7 million.

As of 2015, LibreOffice is installed on almost all of the 500,000 workstations of the 11 French ministries members of the MIMO working group. The MIMO working group was the first public administration to join the advisory board at the Document Foundation.

Conferences

Starting in 2011, The Document Foundation has organized the annual LibreOffice Conference, as follows:

2011 – Paris, France – 12–15 October

2012 – Berlin, Germany – 17–19 October

2013 – Milano, Italy – 24–27 September

2014 – Bern, Switzerland – 3–5 September

2015 – Aarhus, Denmark – 23–25 September

2016 – Brno, Czech Republic – 7–9 September

Derivatives

Collabora supplies branded and customised LibreOffice versions LibreOffice-From-Collabora, LibreOffice Vanilla for Mac, GovOffice, Collabora Office, Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) and Collabora Online.

EuroOffice is a derivative of LibreOffice with free and non-free extensions developed by Hungarian-based MultiRacio Ltd.

NeoOffice includes stability fixes from LibreOffice.

OxOffice is a derivative of LibreOffice (originally a derivative of OpenOffice.org) with enhanced support for the Chinese language.

References

LibreOffice Wikipedia

(Text) CC BY-SA

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