The foundation behind LibreOffice has decided it wants to set up a German "Stiftung" because its statutes cannot be later changed and abused. The proposition also takes into account tax benefits and limited liability.

The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project.

LibreOffice3.3 RC2 has been released, this release comes with some improvements and bugfixes.

I guess everybody has heard that a majority of the key developers in the OpenOffice.org community decided to set up the Document Foundation: an independent foundation to continue and manage work on the Openoffice.org codebase. If you’ve not, then I can recommend Terry Hancock’s piece as a starting point (and a good summary of why forking is vital).

Oracle continues to be at the center of controversy despite their press release stating they will continue to support and release OpenOffice.org as an open source project.

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.

It's not that Oracle wishes ill of The Document Foundation and its take on OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle just isn't going to be having anything to do with it.

LibreOffice will be uncompromisingly free software, and as one developer observes, "it is hard to think of anyone of any note in the community that isn't involved," including developers from Red Hat and Debian. The hope is that OpenOffice / Libreoffice "will go where people want it to go, because it hasn't been going where people want it to.