[tdf-announce] LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users

LibreOffice 3.4.2 for enterprise users

Thanks to the work of 300 contributors,
the new LibreOffice comes with substantial improvements

The Internet, August 1, 2011 - The Document Foundation (TDF) announces 
LibreOffice 3.4.2, the third version of the 3.4 family, targeting both 
private individuals and enterprises. LibreOffice 3.4.2 fixes the 
majority of the most-important bugs identified by users in the previous 
version, and can be deployed for production needs by most enterprises.

The Document Foundation encourages large organizations deploying 
LibreOffice to do so in conjunction with a support partner, who can 
carefully assess specific requirements, help manage migration and 
provide bespoke fixes for identified issues. Purchasing LibreOffice 
support from a TDF partner also provides enterprises with an indirect 
means to contribute financially to the project, thereby funding its 
development, improving its stability, and accelerating its growth. Users 
should always refer to the release notes before deploying the new version.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 is the result of the combined activity of 300 
contributors having made more than 23,000 commits, with the addition, 
deletion or modification of around five million lines of code. The 
developer community is well balanced between company-sponsored 
contributors and independent community volunteers: Oracle and SUSE have 
each provided around 25% of the commits, with a further 25% coming from 
community volunteers new to the project since our inception, and with a 
further 20% from RedHat. The remaining commits came from a combination 
of pre-TDF contributors, Canonical developers, and organizations like 
Bobiciel, CodeThink, Lanedo, SIL, and Tata Consultancy Services.

If we look at the same data for individual developers, the top 12 by 
number of commits since the inception of LibreOffice is composed of a 
mixture of corporate-sponsored contributors (from 4 companies: 
Canonical, Oracle, RedHat and SUSE) and a number of private individual 
contributors, indicating a balanced situation and a healthy community.

"TDF was born with the aim of evolving the OpenOffice.org code to 
develop a cleaner and leaner free office suite and, after ten months, we 
are right on track to achieve this objective," says Bjoern Michaelsen, 
one of the four Canonical contributors, and a key member of the 
Engineering Steering Committee. "Of course, with such a large code 
renovation effort, we are aware of the short-term risk of reduced 
stability, but this is counterbalanced by the long-term improvement in 
features, speed and - again - stability."

Other news is that the number of TDF official contributors and 
LibreOffice users is increasing. Youbing Jin, President of RedFlag2000 
Software Company, says, "We are delighted to see that TDF is getting 
ever stronger, and we are proud to be part of it."

The community around The Document Foundation and LibreOffice will gather 
in Paris for the first LibreOffice Conference, from October 13 to 
October 15, 2011 (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). The call for 
papers is open until August 8, while registration will close at the end 
of September.

Although TDF is happy that 3.4.2, deployed with support from a suitable 
partner, can be considered "enterprise-ready", it is clearly only one 
more milestone on our march towards ever greater stability, with the 
3.4.3 release to incorporate further stability improvements and security 
fixes by the end of August.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 can be downloaded from 
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.
Short link to The Document Foundation blog: http://wp.me/p1byPE-ao.

*** Media Contacts

Florian Effenberger (based near Munich, Germany, UTC+1)
Phone: +49 8341 99660880 - Mobile: +49 151 14424108
E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org - Skype: floeff

Olivier Hallot (based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, UTC-3)
Mobile: +55 21 88228812 - E-mail: olivier.hallot@documentfoundation.org

Charles H. Schulz (based in Paris, France, UTC+1)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424 - E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org

Italo Vignoli (based in Milan, Italy, UTC+1)
SIP Phone: +39 02 320621813 - Mobile: +39 348 5653829
E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org - Skype: italovignoli
GTalk: italo.vignoli@gmail.com

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