First version of OpenOffice fork, LibreOffice 3.3, released

Emil

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The Document Foundation has announced the official release of LibreOffice 3.3, a fork of Oracle's Open Office open source office suite. The LibreOffice 3.3 release follows Oracle's Open Office 3.3, which came out in December. You can download it directly for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

While LibreOffice 3.3 is based on Open Office 3.3, there a number of key differences, including an improved Windows installer that bundles a number of extensions that typical users would not have bothered downloading from the extensions repository. It also fixes a number of bugs in Open Office 3.3, including memory and startup issues. If you want to know all the details in the new release, check out the official Feature list.

The LibreOffice project began four months ago, when the OpenOffice.org project announced it was renaming itself as The Document Foundation and was separating itself from database giant Oracle. LibreOffice may actually end up being a temporary name, as Oracle has been asked to donate the OpenOffice.org brand to the foundation. Initial supporters include the Free Software Foundation, Open Source Initiative, Canonical, Red Hat, Novell, the GNOME foundation, and Google.

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I'm happy that they included Lotus Word Pro by default, since I have some such old documents. I will probably uninstall Lotus Symphony, another OpenOffice version, which dropped that support in the last version. I think that Lotus Symphony has a better interface, but since I mostly use SoftMaker Office anyway it doesn't really matter which OpenOffice version I have installed.
 
I actually have both versions installed. Open Office 3.3 on my laptop and Libre Office 3.3 on my desktop. Neither is as snazzy or feature rich as Microsoft Office but there's no arguing with free stuff.
 
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