LibreOffice gets first 'enterprise-ready' release
The Document Foundation has pushed out a finalised release of LibreOffice 3.4, the first version of the open-source productivity suite that it claims is enterprise-ready.
LibreOffice 3.4.2 was made available for download on Monday, with a smaller Windows installation file — 189MB rather than version 3.3.3's 217MB — being just one of the improvements made to the new iteration.
The LibreOffice project was forked off the OpenOffice development path in September last year, after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. Earlier in 2010, Oracle had decided to start charging for the previously-free Open Document Format (ODF) plug-in, and The Document Foundation (TDF) was formed to create a fully free and community-based variant of OpenOffice.
That variant is now, according to TDF, ready for business. According to its release notes, "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 last stable release, LibreOffice 3.3, came out in January.
LibreOffice 3.4.2 contains many interface tweaks and font rendering improvements, along with improved HTML export. The Calc app has had a revamp of external reference handling, while the DataPilot spreadsheet app has been reworked and renamed as Pivot Table.
Initial support for Canonical's Unity GUI has also been added, and start-up times are now faster.
There are some bugs that will be fixed in LibreOffice 3.4.3, due for release at the end of August. According to TDF, these include the fact that Microsoft-format PPTX PowerPoint files created in LibreOffice cannot be opened in Microsoft Office Web Apps. The Writer app also crashes when using too many footnotes, or when using undo-redo on moved formulas.
LibreOffice has had a fair amount of success in the Linux world, where major distributions including Canonical's Ubuntu now ship with that suite rather than OpenOffice.
However, Oracle has now washed its hands of OpenOffice, having donated it to the Apache Software Foundation in June. It remains to be seen whether the new stewardship will revitalise OpenOffice, the mostly widely-known open-source productivity suite, or whether LibreOffice will take its place.