[Liverpool] Fwd: OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation

[Richard Smedley]

Vive LibreOffice!

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [ooo-announce] OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document
Foundation


OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation

The community of volunteers developing and promoting OpenOffice.org sets
up an independent Foundation to drive the further growth of the project

The Internet, September 28, 2010 - The community of volunteers who
develop and promote OpenOffice.org, the leading free office software,
announce a major change in the project’s structure. After ten years’
successful growth with Sun Microsystems as founding and principle
sponsor, the project launches an independent foundation called "The
Document Foundation", to fulfil the promise of independence written in
the original charter.

The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where
individuals and organisations can contribute to and benefit from the
availability of a truly free office suite. It will generate increased
competition and choice for the benefit of customers and drive
innovation in the office suite market. From now on, the OpenOffice.org
community will be known as "The Document Foundation".

Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its
acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of
the new Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during
the past ten years. Pending this decision, the brand "LibreOffice" has
been chosen for the software going forward.

The Document Foundation is the result of a collective effort by leading
independent members of the OpenOffice.org community, including several
project leads and key members of the Community Council. It will be led
initially by a Steering Committee of developers and national language
projects managers. The Foundation aims to lower the barrier of adoption
for both users and developers, to make LibreOffice the most accessible
office suite ever.

The Foundation will coordinate and oversee the development of
LibreOffice, which is available in beta version at the placeholder site:
http://www.libreoffice.org. Developers are invited to join the project
and contribute to the code in the new friendly and open environment, to
shape the future of office productivity suites alongside contributors
who translate, test, document, support, and promote the software.

Speaking for the group of volunteers, Sophie Gautier - a veteran of the
community and the former maintainer of the French speaking language
project - has declared: "We believe that the Foundation is a key step
for the evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the
development of the code and the evolution of the project from the
constraints represented by the commercial interests of a single company.
Free software advocates around the world have the extraordinary
opportunity of joining the group of founding members today, to write a
completely new chapter in the history of FLOSS".

FSF President Richard Stallman welcomed LibreOffice release and it's
stated policy of only recommending free software. "I'm very pleased that
the Document Foundation will not recommend nonfree add-ons, since they
are the main freedom problem of the current OpenOffice.org. I hope that
the LibreOffice developers and the Oracle-employed developers of
OpenOffice will be able to cooperate on development of the body of the
code".

"The Document Foundation supports the Open Document Format, and is keen
to work at OASIS to the next evolution of the ISO standard", says
Charles Schulz, member of the Community Council and lead of the Native
Language Confederation. "The Document Foundation brings to the table the
point of view of developers, supporters and users, and this might
accelerate the adoption process of ODF at government and enterprise level".

Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager at Google, Inc., has
commented: "The creation of The Document Foundation is a great step
forward in encouraging further development of open source office suites.
Having a level playing field for all contributors is fundamental in
creating a broad and active community around an open source software
project. Google is proud to be a supporter of The Document Foundation
and participate in the project".

"Viva la LibreOffice", said Guy Lunardi, product management Director at
Novell. "We look forward to working with the Document Foundation to help
develop a solid open source document software offering. Ultimately, we
envision LibreOffice do for the office productivity market what Mozilla
Firefox has done for browsers".

Jan Wildeboer, EMEA Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, has commented: "All
over the world, users, companies and governments are moving to
innovative technology solutions based on Open Standards. Red Hat is
proud to join this effort".

Mark Shuttleworth, founder and major shareholder of Canonical, the
makers of Ubuntu, has declared: "Office productivity software is a
critical component of the free software desktop, and the Ubuntu Project
will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in
future releases of Ubuntu. The Document Foundation's stewardship of
LibreOffice provides Ubuntu developers an effective forum for
collaboration around the code that makes Ubuntu an effective solution
for the desktop in office environments".

"The Open Source Initiative has observed a trend back towards open
collaborative communities for open source software", said Simon Phipps,
a Director of the Open Source Initiative. "We welcome The Document
Foundation initiative and look forward to the innovation it is able to
drive with a truly open community gathered around a free software
commons, in the spirit of the best of open source software".

"We welcome the LibreOffice project to the free software community as we
believe there is a great opportunity for them to enrich the free desktop
experience." says Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME
Foundation. "Over the years the GNOME community has been supportive of
OpenOffice together with applications in the GNOME Office suite, such as
Gnumeric, GnuCash and Abiword. As LibreOffice joins the free software
community, we believe that free desktop users will benefit from a rich
set of choices."

Patrick Luby, Chief Engineer of NeoOffice says "I am happy to see a new,
independent LibreOffice foundation to continue creating an office suite
with enhanced features, pushing OpenOffice.org in new, exciting
directions". Ed Peterlin, Chief Visionary at NeoOffice says "I am
excited we will be able to continue bringing excellent features from
LibreOffice to the Mac platform. In the future I also hope to extend our
web based collaboration tools to support LibreOffice users on all
platforms".

Chris Halls, UK Managing Director of Credativ, an independent consulting
and services company specialising in the development, implementation and
support of open source solutions: "Welcomes the foundation as an
opportunity to provide a new focus for the community contributors and
allow them to move the project forward together. In our business, we
support thousands of office desktops in many different environments. It
is vital that the feedback and code that we can contribute as part of
our day to day work can flow easily into the project".

"The creation of The Document Foundation is in line with the vision
BrOffice.org - Projeto Brasil has for the Brazilian OpenOffice.org
community. Our country already has a large investment in the Open
Document Format and the software tools fully suporting it. BrOffice.org
and The Document Foundation share the same values and objectives and we
are more than happy to be part of it.”, says Claudio Filho, Chairman of
the BrOffice.org NGO of Brazil.

The Norwegian foundation "Åpne kontorprogram på norsk" ("Open Office
Suites In Norwegian") is responsible for the Norwegian translation of
OpenOffice.org, and for promoting OpenOffice.org in Norway. So far the
Norwegian project has been administered and financed mainly by counties
and municipalities, but recently the foundation has started a process
for getting commercial companies more actively involved. We realise the
need for a more substantial commercial participation to establish a
long-term sustainable project. Our foundation notes that the other
Nordic countries, a majority of the European countries, as well as a
range of worldwide big companies like Google, Novell, Canonical and Red
Hat are now cooperating with The Document Foundation. We believe this is
the right way forward also for Norway. A cooperation with The Document
Foundation will make it easier to create more innovative and
user-friendly solutions integrated with the LibreOffice suite.
Eliminating license barriers and obtaining easy access to source code
and standards will facilitate further development of related and
integrated surrounding products.

Additional information, including the mission, are available on the web
site of The Document Foundation: http://www.documentfoundation.org
Biographies and pictures of the founding members of The Document
Foundation are available here: http://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/
There is a specific page for people interested in contributing to the
development of the code: http://www.documentfoundation.org/contribution/

The Document Foundation has a Twitter account at
http://twitter.com/docufoundation and an Identi.ca account at
http://identi.ca/docufoundation

The announcements mailing list is at
announce+subscribe at documentfoundation.org
The discussion mailing list is at discuss+subscribe at documentfoundation.org
The IRC channel is #documentfoundation at irc.freenode.net

The Document Foundation

The Document Foundation is an independent self-governing democratic
Foundation created by leading members of the OpenOffice.org Community.
It continues to build on the Foundation of ten years' dedicated work by
the OpenOffice.org community, and was created in the belief that an
independent Foundation is the best fit to the Community's core values of
openness, transparency, and valuing people for their contribution. It is
open to any individual who agrees with our core values and contributes
to our activities, and welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by
sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in
the community.

Media Contacts

Florian Effenberger (Germany)
Phone: +49 8341 99660880
Mobile: +49 151 14424108
Skype: floeff
E-mail: floeff at documentfoundation.org

Olivier Hallot (Brazil)
Mobile: +55 21 88228812
E-mail: olivier.hallot at documentfoundation.org

Charles H. Schulz (France)
Mobile: +33 6 98655424
E-mail: charles.schulz at documentfoundation.org

Italo Vignoli (Italy)
Mobile: +39 348 5653829
E-mail: italo.vignoli at documentfoundation.org