OpenOffice.org community members launch 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 "Apne kontorprogram pa 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@documentfoundation.org
The discussion mailing list is at discuss+subscribe@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.