Founded | 28 September 2010 (announced) 17 February 2012 (legally established) |
---|---|
Founders | Existing members of the OpenOffice.org community |
Type | Community |
Focus | Office software |
Location |
|
Products | LibreOffice, Document Liberation Project |
Key people | Thorsten Behrens, Eliane Domingos de Sousa, Adam Fyne, Joel Madero, Michael Meeks, Björn Michaelsen, Fridrich Štrba, Andreas Mantke, Eike Rathke, Norbert Thiebaud, Florian Effenberger |
Staff | 6 |
Website | documentfoundation.org |
The Document Foundation (TDF) is a non-profit organization that promotes open-source document handling software. It was created by members of the OpenOffice.org community to manage and develop LibreOffice, a free and open-source office suite, and is legally registered in Germany as a Stiftung . [1] Its goal is to produce a vendor-independent office suite with ODF support in a development environment free from company control. [2]
The Document Foundation was created partially over fears that Oracle Corporation, after acquiring Sun Microsystems, would discontinue developing OpenOffice.org as it had done with OpenSolaris. [3] [4] [5]
The Document Foundation has multiple bodies [6] running its operations:
In addition an informal advisory board exists to connect with other organizations and entities.[ citation needed ]
The seventh elected Board of Directors has seven members and three deputies. [7] As of May 2024, the Board of Directors composition is: [8]
The Document Foundation employs Florian Effenberger as executive director, [9] who oversees a team of 10 people. [10]
In June 2011 the foundation announced that it had formed an advisory board. The initial members included Google, SUSE, Red Hat, the German registered society Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software in the Public Interest, and the Free Software Foundation. [11] In February 2012, Intel became a member of the advisory board. [12] In November 2012, Lanedo joined the advisory board. [13] In June 2013, the French Inter-Ministry Mutualisation for an Open Productivity Suite (MIMO)—the government working group responsible for 500,000 desktops—and King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia joined the advisory board. [14] [15] In July 2013, TDF announced that AMD joined the advisory board. [16] Swiss FOSS company Adfinis joined the advisory board in May 2019. [17] In July 2019, the UK Government Digital Service joined. [18]
The Document Foundation was announced on 28 September 2010 with the Foundation being governed by a "Steering Committee" during the phase of initial creation. The announcement received support from companies including Novell, [19] Red Hat, Canonical and Google. [20] In December 2010, The Document Foundation announced that the BrOffice Centre of Excellence for Free Software, the organization behind BrOffice joined the Foundation. [21]
The Foundation also made available a re-branded fork of OpenOffice.org which was based on the upcoming 3.3 version, with patches and build software from the Go-oo fork. It was hoped that the LibreOffice name would be provisional as Oracle was invited to become a member of The Document Foundation, and was asked to donate the OpenOffice.org brand to the project. [2] Following the announcement, Oracle asked members of the OpenOffice.org Community Council who were members of The Document Foundation to step down from the council, claiming that this represented a conflict of interest, [22] leaving the community council composed 100% of Oracle employees. [23]
Jacqueline Rahemipour, Co-Lead of the OpenOffice.org Board, stated:
Although it has been stressed several times that there will be collaboration on a technical level, and changes are possible – there is no indication from Oracle to change its mind on the question of the project organization and management. For those who want to achieve such a change, but see no realistic opportunity within the current project and are therefore involved in the TDF, unfortunately this results in an "either / or" question. The answer for us who sign this letter is clear: We want a change to give the community as well as the software it develops the opportunity to evolve. For this reason, from now on we will support The Document Foundation and will – as a team – develop and promote LibreOffice. [24]
When the project was announced, The Document Foundation did not exist as a legal entity. The Steering Committee wished to formally set up a foundation, and following research chose to establish the foundation in Germany. [25] On 16 February 2011, a fundraising drive was announced to raise the €50,000 needed to create a German foundation. [26] The required amount was raised in eight days. [27]
After clearing legal requirements, the foundation was finally incorporated on 17 February 2012. [28]
In assessing Oracle's role in the events surrounding the establishment of The Document Foundation, writer Ryan Cartwright in late October 2010 said:
The worst thing about this move by Oracle is that it will divide a community that didn't need to be divided. The free software community thrives on forked projects and will actively take the path of greater freedom. Mambo became Joomla, Xfree86 has all but disappeared and StarOffice is now regarded as the less-free cousin of OpenOffice.org (and not in a good way). What Oracle have just done is put their fingers in their ears and say "la la la" to their critics from within the free software community. With that move they will recruit several more opponents... The bottom line is that in all of this Oracle had golden opportunity after golden opportunity to make real progress for everyone – not just the OpenOffice.org or the free software community. They could have been the key player and the biggest part of the most popular free software office suite and they treated it like a runny nose. They blew it. [29]
In October 2010 Linux Magazine 's Bruce Byfield suggested that the formation of The Document Foundation is just the Go-oo project reinventing itself to the long-term detriment of users. [30]
What happened, I suspect, was that Go-OO, already chafing under Sun's tight control of OpenOffice.org's direction, saw more of the same – if not worse – awaiting in Oracle. Hoping to succeed before Oracle could articulate its plans, Go-OO members reinvented themselves, and announced the foundation that they had long been calling for. But Oracle refused to be stampeded, and escalated the fork into something that resembles corporate warfare. Whatever the merits of either side (and I am most inclined to support The Document Foundation, although only on the principle that any number is greater than zero), I suspect that the losers in this situation will be the users. The risk is that time will continue to be spent in flame wars that could be better spent in coding. What seems likely is not only a general division and duplication of effort, but, in Oracle's case, a decision to focus on proprietary development as a defensive measure. By making the gambit that it did, The Document Foundation may have perpetuated another version of the stalemate that it was trying to break. [30]
In April 2011, Oracle announced its intention to move OpenOffice.org to a "purely community-based project". [31] [32] Oracle also terminated its commercial product, called Oracle Open Office. In the view of some these moves were a reaction to the formation of The Document Foundation, but according to former Sun executive Simon Phipps:
The act of creating The Document Foundation and its LibreOffice project did no demonstrable harm to Oracle's business. There is no new commercial competition to Oracle Open Office (their commercial edition of OO.o) arising from LibreOffice. No contributions that Oracle valued were ended by its creation. Oracle's ability to continue development of the code was in no way impaired. Oracle's decision appears to be simply that, after a year of evaluation, the profit to be made from developing Oracle Open Office and Oracle Cloud Office did not justify the salaries of over 100 senior developers working on them both. Suggesting that TDF was in some way to blame for a hard-headed business decision that seemed inevitable from the day Oracle's acquisition of Sun was announced is at best disingenuous. [33]
As of 2 June 2011 Oracle has relicensed OpenOffice.org under the Apache License 2.0 and transferred ownership of the project's assets and trademarks to the Apache Software Foundation. [34]
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (October 2014) |
On 2 April 2014, The Document Foundation announced a second top-level project, the Document Liberation Project. [35] It defines itself as "a home for the growing community of developers united to free users from vendor lock-in of content". [36]
Miguel de Icaza is a Mexican programmer, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects.
OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice, Apache OpenOffice and Collabora Online.
StarOffice is a discontinued proprietary office suite. Its source code continues today in derived open-source office suites Collabora Online and LibreOffice. StarOffice supported the OpenOffice.org XML file format, as well as the OpenDocument standard, and could generate PDF and Flash formats. It included templates, a macro recorder, and a software development kit (SDK).
NeoOffice was an office suite for the macOS operating system developed by Planamesa Inc. It was a commercial fork of the free and open source LibreOffice office suite, including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, and graphics program. It added some features not present in the macOS versions of LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice. The last few versions were based on LibreOffice 4.4, which was released mid-2014.
OpenSolaris is a discontinued open-source computer operating system based on Solaris and created by Sun Microsystems. It was also, perhaps confusingly, the name of a project initiated by Sun to build a developer and user community around the eponymous operating system software.
openSUSE is a free and open-source Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project. It is offered in two main variations: Tumbleweed, an upstream rolling release distribution, and Leap, a stable release distribution which is sourced from SUSE Linux Enterprise.
Michael Meeks is a British software developer. He is primarily known for his work on GNOME, OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice. He has been a contributor to the GNOME project for a long time working on its infrastructure and associated applications, particularly CORBA, Bonobo, Nautilus and GNOME accessibility. He has worked at Novell, SuSE and then Collabora.
Go-oo is a discontinued free office suite which started as a set of patches for OpenOffice.org, then later became an independent fork of OpenOffice.org with a number of enhancements, sponsored by Novell.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft terms, such as with its own GNU General Public License. The FSF was incorporated in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, where it is also based.
The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corporation was completed on January 27, 2010. After the acquisition was completed, Oracle, only a software vendor prior to the merger, owned Sun's hardware product lines, such as SPARC Enterprise, as well as Sun's software product lines, including the Java programming language.
OpenIndiana is a free and open-source illumos distribution descended from UNIX System V Release 4 via the OpenSolaris operating system. Forked from OpenSolaris after OpenSolaris was discontinued by Oracle Corporation, OpenIndiana takes its name from Project Indiana, the internal codename for OpenSolaris at Sun Microsystems before Oracle’s acquisition of Sun in 2010.
LibreOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. It consists of programs for word processing; creating and editing spreadsheets, slideshows, diagrams, and drawings; working with databases; and composing mathematical formulae. It is available in 120 languages. TDF does not provide support for LibreOffice, but enterprise-focused editions are available from companies in the ecosystem.
LibreOffice Writer is the free and open-source word processor and desktop publishing component of the LibreOffice software package and is a fork of OpenOffice.org Writer. Writer is a word processor similar to Microsoft Word and Corel's WordPerfect with many similar features, and file format compatibility.
LibreOffice Calc is the spreadsheet component of the LibreOffice software package.
LibreOffice Base is a free and open-source database development and administration tool for relational database management systems that is part of the LibreOffice office suite. LibreOffice Base was built off of a fork of OpenOffice.org and was first released as version 3.4.0.1 on October 4, 2011.
Apache OpenOffice (AOO) is an open-source office productivity software suite. It is one of the successor projects of OpenOffice.org and the designated successor of IBM Lotus Symphony. It was a close cousin of LibreOffice, Collabora Online and NeoOffice in 2014. It contains a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation application (Impress), a drawing application (Draw), a formula editor (Math), and a database management application (Base).
Florian Effenberger is executive director at The Document Foundation, the legal entity behind LibreOffice.
Björn Michaelsen was the Deputy Chairman at The Document Foundation, the legal entity behind LibreOffice.