The Document Foundation is a newly founded organisation with a mission: to make an office suite available as truly free software, developed within the wider community. Supported by companies like Google, Novell and Red Hat, the Foundation has forked the Oracle-owned OpenOffice software and created LibreOffice.

"At the first international workshop of users of the Open Document Format (ODF) in Berlin to which the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic had invited about 150 users and political observers, Brazil and India, in addition to German cities such as Munich, emerged as leading proponents of open standards in the office area.

Oracle’s history of not caring too much about Free Software led several contributors to fork OpenOffice.org. And that is a very brief account of how LibreOffice came to be.

A group of OpenOffice.org developers has announced the creation of an independent foundation - called the Document Foundation - to guide the further development of the office suite, which is provisionally named LibreOffice. At the heart of this effort is longtime OpenOffice.org developer Michael Meeks.

When a group of German coders at OpenOffice (belonging to database major, Oracle) finally forked away on Sept28th 2010 there was much for everybody to talk about while Oracle OpenOffice maintained dignified silence.

Continuing our series of bringing information about the free software movement in Latin America to English readers, North by South interviewed Cláudio Filho (original in Portuguese), one of the people responsible for starting the OpenOffice.org project in Brazil (pt-BR), known in the country as BrOffice.org.

The Brazilian free software movement is in such high gear that it is almost impossible to keep up on all the new developments and projects that are happening throughout the country. Brazil is larger in size than the continental United States and has a population of almost 200 million people.

When you think about office suites, two names come to mind: Microsoft Office and OpenOffice. Although the vast majority of Linux users depend upon OpenOffice for their office needs, the alternatives should not be overlooked.

The Brazilian government wants its public administrations to check an Open Source reference guide before launching new IT projects.