Oracle, SUSE, Red Hat drive 70% of LibreOffice development

Upon the release of LibreOffice 3.4.2, the Document Foundation announced that Oracle and SUSE each contributes roughly 25 percent of the latest commits, while Red Hat contributed another 20 percent. The above chart was supplied by the Document Foundation.

That means the two leading Linux distributors represent almost 50 percent of the ongoing work on the open source Microsoft Office competitor while Oracle -- which donated OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation, with IBM's support in June-- also donated about 25 percent of the new code.

The remaining 30 percent came from pre-TDF developers, Canonical, Tata Consulting Services, Bobiciel, CodeThink, Lanedo and SIL. RedFlag 2000 is one new LibreOffice contributor.

The last upgrade came in June. Version 3.4.2 incorporates work from more than 300 contributors and cointains numerous bug fixes. The 3.4.3 release, due at the end of August, will contain more bug fixes and security fixes.

It appears that the Document Foundation -- which is favored by the Free Software Foundation -- wants to reassure the technology public that corporate support for Libreoffice remains strong and that this Office suite is "enterprise ready."

"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.