LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice.org one year later

It's hard to believe that it's been almost one year since The Document Foundation (TDF) came into existence. In that time, the foundation has made significant progress, Oracle has handed the OpenOffice.org keys to the Apache Foundation, and LibreOffice team has been working hard to improve the suite in the meantime.

OpenOffice.org has, itself, had a long strange trip. The suite began as a proprietary office suite called StarOffice developed and published by StarDivision. StarDivision was eventually snapped up by Sun Microsystems, which was ultimately swallowed by Oracle in 2010. After Oracle took over, little happened and it was unclear what plans (if any) the software giant had for OpenOffice.org.

Oracle's inaction, plus impatience over promises to create a vendor neutral foundation for OpenOffice.org, led to the decision to fork. Predictably, Oracle was not pleased and showed TDF members the door in October, 2010. Louis Suarez-Potts told the members "your role in the Document Foundation and LibreOffice makes your role as a representative in the OOo CC untenable and impossible", and gave them the option of disassociating themselves from TDF or resigning. Very little else happened with OpenOffice.org in the meantime until Oracle proposed OpenOffice.org to Apache as an Incubator project on June 1st.

LibreOffice developers didn't sit on their hands after announcing the intent to fork. LibreOffice was put on an aggressive time-based release plan, with two major releases a year. The first stable release (3.3.0) landed just four months after the split, with a number of new features. Development has continued at a fair clip, and the LibreOffice team continues to push out point releases on a regular basis. Meanwhile, most if not all Linux distributions have made the transition from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice without any major headaches.

LibreOffice Goals Met?

When LibreOffice launched, longtime OO.org developer Michael Meeks talked to LWN about the goals for LibreOffice. Meeks said that he wanted LibreOffice to have a "All Contributions Welcome and Valued" sign welcoming contributions, clean up LibreOffice code, and "target tackling many of the problems that have traditionally made it hard to develop with, such as the arcane and monolithic build system". In February 2011, the project started fundraising to set up TDF as a legal entity. It took only eight days to raise the €50,000 that the foundation sought to incorporate the legal entity in Germany. More than 2,000 contributors donated.

At six months, TDF member Florian Effenberger observed the milestone with a post tallying the project's accomplishments. More than 6,000 people subscribed to LibreOffice mailing lists, more than 150 new contributors checked in code for LibreOffice, and the project picked up more than 50 translators as well.

The foundation is having its first election with voting through October 10 to fill a board of seven board seats and three deputies.

How about contributions? A snapshot of contributors to LibreOffice 3.4.2 shows that about 25% came from SUSE, about 25% were brought in from OpenOffice.org (attributed to Oracle), and about 20% from Red Hat. Contributors not affiliated with one of the big vendors also account for about 25% of the contributions. According to the post, 3.4.2 received more than 23,000 commits from 300 contributors. This may not reflect all work on LibreOffice, but it does show a pattern of heavy contribution.

(Re)-Bootstrapping OpenOffice.org

While LibreOffice continues to churn out releases, the slow work of transitioning OpenOffice.org to Apache is continuing. The incubator site is up on Apache.org, and things like the mailing lists have been put in place. The project has more than 70 committers listed, and commits have started coming in as well.

However, according to the clutch status page for Apache Incubator projects the project has not added any committers since the project was established. The project also lacks an issue tracker. There are no releases for Apache OpenOffice — even a beta — though code is available in Apache's repository. This is not surprising, since much of the discussions on the list involve trying to successfully build AOO. The project blog has been relatively quiet, with only two posts. The first post in June, announces the addition of Apache OpenOffice.org to the incubator. The second on September 1st announcing a IRC-based developer eduction event for building OpenOffice.org on Linux.

The developer list for the AOO podling has been fairly active — though much of the recent conversation has been community governance problems that need to be solved with regards to moving from an established project to the Apache structure and new management.

The Future

Apache OpenOffice.org is still putting together its plans for builds and releases. The plans for the first Apache release include phasing out the old binary format for OpenOffice.org but not much in the way of new features. LibreOffice also will be doing away with the old binary StarOffice formats in the 4.0 timeframe. Assuming AOO.org does come online and start pouring out new features, they may be difficult to share with LibreOffice according to Meeks. This has been raised as an issue by Rob Weir on the AOO.org list.

The LibreOffice team recently had a hackfest in Munich. Some of the concrete features that came out of that include support for importing Visio format, a feature for editing headers and footers in Writer, and an initial Gerrit setup for code review. The project has also launched a extension and template repository for LibreOffice and compatible suites. The sites are in beta testing at the moment, put into place in cooperation with the Plone community.

In October, the first LibreOffice conference will take place in Paris. The conference will run from 12 to 15 October, and includes everything from media training for LibreOffice volunteers to a presentation about LibreOffice Online (LOOL) by Michael Meeks. Unfortunately, no details are provided regarding the plans Meeks has for the presentation. Perhaps we'll see a libre competitor to Google Docs at some point from the LibreOffice folks.

Coming in 3.5

The LibreOffice 3.5.0 release is planned for December. The work-in-progress release notes indicate some of the features that may appear in 3.5. Currently there's a plan to include two new numbering types for bullets (Persian words, and Arabic Abjad sequence) in Writer, and display non-printable characters at the end of a line if desired.

Calc may increase support to 32,000 sheets thanks to features from Markus Mohrhard, and users will be able to specify how many sheets are available in a new Calc document thanks to Albert Thuswaldner. There's also improvements to line drawing in Chart, and Kohei Yoshida has added some performance improvements for importing Excel documents.

Miklos Vajna has been improving import for RTF and DOCX formats, which should land in 3.5 as well. The proposed release notes also have a few GUI improvements, such as getting rid of the unused toolbar menus and sorting menus in a natural sort order (so Heading 10 would follow Heading 9, instead of Heading 1 in formatting as an example).

One year following the split, and LibreOffice looks like a fairly healthy and viable community. Apache OpenOffice.org may also grow into a viable project, though it's a bit too early to tell whether it has legs.