LibreOffice announced : Open-source giants hand in hand for new Office suite

These are exciting days in opensource community. Adding to the excitement, The Open Office development community today announced the setting up of The Document Foundation which will fork (develop its own version from source code of ) Open Office. The foundation will be supported by Open-Source giants like Google, Red Hat, FSF, Canonical (sponsors of Ubuntu project ), and Novell ( Powerhouse driving the openSuse Project ). Oracle, the current owner of OpenOffice has also been invited to join the group. The team currently consists of some of the pioneering developers of OpenOffice itself.

A beta1 release of LibreOffice is also available for download.

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“.

Lets hope The Document Foundation can come up with an amazing product. [:)]