LibreOffice gets first release candidate

The Document Foundation has pushed out the first release candidate of LibreOffice, its Oracle-free fork of OpenOffice.

LibreOffice RC1, which became available for download on Sunday, is the near-final release of the open-source productivity suite. It looks extremely similar to the latest version of OpenOffice, only with different branding.

The Document Foundation (TDF) formed after Oracle took over Sun earlier this year. OpenOffice had been sponsored by Sun for a decade, and many did not trust its new owner's intentions. TDF's supporters include the Free Software Foundation, Canonical, Collabora, the Gnome Foundation, the OSI, OASIS and members of regional OpenOffice development groups.

While Novell, Red Hat and Debian all have a hand in LibreOffice's development, Oracle itself has stayed away, focusing rather on OpenOffice. This split has meant that some developers have abandoned OpenOffice to avoid a conflict of interest.