The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced LibreOffice 3.4.2, the third version of the 3.4 family, targeting both private individuals and enterprises.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 fixes the majority of the most-important bugs identified by users in the previous version, and can be deployed for production needs by most enterprises.

The Document Foundation encourages large organizations deploying LibreOffice to do so in conjunction with a support partner, who can carefully assess specific requirements, help manage migration and provide bespoke fixes for identified issues.

Purchasing LibreOffice support from a TDF partner also provides enterprises with an indirect means to contribute financially to the project, thereby funding its development, improving its stability, and accelerating its growth.

LibreOffice 3.4.2 is the result of the combined activity of 300 contributors having made more than 23,000 commits, with the addition, deletion or modification of around five million lines of code. The developer community is well balanced between company-sponsored contributors and independent community volunteers.

Oracle and SUSE have each provided around 25% of the commits, with a further 25% coming from community volunteers new to the project since our inception, and with a further 20% from RedHat. The remaining commits came from a
combination of pre-TDF contributors, Canonical developers, and organizations like Bobiciel, CodeThink, Lanedo, SIL, and Tata Consultancy Services.

If we look at the same data by single developer, the top 12 by number of commits since the inception of LibreOffice show - again - a mix of company-sponsored and volunteers which underline a balanced situation and a healthy community, with representatives of 4 different companies (Canonical, Oracle, RedHat and SUSE), and several independent volunteers.

"TDF was born with the aim of evolving the OpenOffice.org code to develop a cleaner and leaner free office suite and, after ten months, we are right on track to achieve this objective," says Bjoern Michaelsen, one of the four Canonical contributors, and a key member of the Engineering Steering Committee.

Support Partners
TDF is working on a certification program which will help customers choose the support partner for LibreOffice. At the moment you can pick any of the companies who are sponsoring developers including Canonical, Red Hat, Suse, Bobiciel, CodeThink, Lanedo, SIL, and Tata Consultancy Services.

A huge codebase comes from Oracle as it acquired OpenOffice from Sun. But as Oracle is severing its ties with OpenOffice by donating it to Apache Software Foundation, there won't be any support from Oracle for LibreOffice.

If you are interested in finding the appropriate partner, we recommend contacting the TDF team at info@documentfoundation.org.