[tdf-announce] The Document Foundation celebrates its first anniversary

LibreOffice has just been awarded IDG's InfoWorld BOSSIE Awards 2011
and OWF Experiment Awards 2011 for best of Open Source software

The Internet, September 28, 2011 - The Document Foundation (TDF)
celebrates its first anniversary, one year after the unveiling of the
project and the release of the first beta of LibreOffice. "What we have
achieved in just twelve months is incredible," says Charles Schulz, a
member of the Steering Committee. "Let's have a look at some numbers: we
have 136 members who have been nominated for their contributions to the
project; we have some 270 developers and 270 localizers (although we
always want to attract more), many of whom are also members; we have
over 100 mailing lists, with over 15,000 subscribers, half of whom
receive all our announcements; and there have been thousands of articles
in the media worldwide".

LibreOffice is the result of the combined activity of 330 contributors -
including former OpenOffice.org developers - having made more than
25,000 commits. The developer community is well balanced between
company-sponsored contributors and independent community volunteers:
SUSE and community volunteers new to the project have provided around
25% each of the commits, with a further 20% coming from RedHat and
another 20% coming from the OpenOffice.org code base. The remaining
commits came from pre-TDF contributors, Canonical developers, and
organizations like Bobiciel, CodeThink, Lanedo, SIL, and Tata
Consultancy Services.

All that effort is yielding results. Faster, more reliable, with richer
features than predecessors, the LibreOffice experience is the best yet
in the evolving heritage of the former StarOffice codebase. As InfoWorld
said, "The newest features show that much more attention to improving
performance and making the product more like a business tool and less
me-too effort."

"Thanks to a very welcoming attitude to newcomers, to the copyleft
license, and to the fact that it is not requesting any copyright
assignment, The Document Foundation has attracted more developers with
commits in the first year than the OpenOffice.org project in the first
decade", says Norbert Thiebaud, a first-day hacker who jumped on
LibreOffice code on September 28, 2010, and is now a member of TDF
Engineering Steering Committee.

Downloads since January 25, 2011, the day of availability of the first
stable release, have just exceeded 6 million from 81 TDF mirrors, and
amount to 7.5 million when you add external sites (like Softpedia)
offering the same package. In addition, there are many more users who
install LibreOffice from a CD burned from the ISO images available
online or bundled with a magazine. TDF estimates that there are 10
million users worldwide having installed from downloads and CDs. Over
90% of those are on Windows, with another 5% on MacOS.

Linux users, in contrast, get LibreOffice from their distribution
repository. Based on IDC reckonings for new or updated Linux
installations in 2011, TDF estimates a subtotal of 15 million Linux
users, as LibreOffice is the office suite of choice for all Linux
distributions.

TDF calculates that there is a total of 25 million LibreOffice users
worldwide, in line with the expectations and well on the way to the
target of 200 million users worldwide before the end of the decade.

"When the community around OpenOffice.org decided to fork into an
independent, community-driven project, I was excited and wanted to see
it be a success. The best way to ensure that was to actively get
involved and, right from the first day, I decided I wanted to be part of
the team. I work on LibreOffice documentation and website content
development, operate an Alfresco platform for the project, and provide
support to the marketing group. LibreOffice is indeed a live, thriving
and active project, and we are all determined to ensure it continues to
be a great success story," says David Nelson, another first-day
volunteer accepted into the fold as a member of The Document Foundation
for his contributions.

The community around TDF will gather in Paris from October 12 to October
15, 2011, for the first LibreOffice Conference
(http://conference.libreoffice.org/). Interested people should register
at http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/.

LibreOffice can be downloaded from http://www.libreoffice.org/.

NOTE TO JOURNALISTS: If TDF had used the old OpenOffice.org metrics,
counting all hits to the mirror system, the number of downloads would be
counted as over 22 million.

IMAGES: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/116590/tdf-anniversaryimages.zip

SHORT LINK TO BLOG POST: http://wp.me/p1byPE-by

-- 
Italo Vignoli - The Document Foundation
email italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org
phone +39.348.5653829 - VoIP +39.02.320621813
skype italovignoli - italo.vignoli@gmail.com

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