The Apache OpenOffice Project Announces Apache OpenOffice™ 3.4
http://www.OpenOffice.org —8 May 2012— The Apache OpenOffice Project today announced the availability of Apache OpenOffice™ 3.4, the first release of OpenOffice under the governance of the Apache Software Foundation.
Apache OpenOffice is the original open source office productivity suite, designed for professional and consumer use.
"With the donation of OpenOffice.org to the ASF, the Foundation, and especially the podling project, was given a daunting task: re-energize a community and transform OpenOffice from a codebase of unknown Intellectual Property heritage, to a vetted and Apache Licensed software suite," said Jim Jagielski, ASF President and an Apache OpenOffice project mentor. "The release of Apache OpenOffice 3.4 shows just how successful the project has been: pulling in developers from over 21 corporate affiliations, while avoiding undue influence which is the death-knell of true open source communities; building a solid and stable codebase, with significant improvement and enhancements over other variants; and, of course, creating a healthy, vibrant and diverse user and developer community."
Apache OpenOffice is the leading open source office productivity suite, with more than 100 million users worldwide in home, corporate, government, research, and academic environments, across 15 languages. Apache OpenOffice 3.4 is available for download free of charge. OpenOffice 3.4 features:The complete list of new features, functions, and improvements is available in the Release Notes.
- word processing, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, databases, drawing, and mathematical editing applications support for Windows, Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) and Macintosh operating environments
- native language support for English, Arabic, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Galician, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese
- improved ODF support, including new ODF 1.2 encryption options and new spreadsheet functions
- enhanced pivot table support in Calc
- enhanced graphics, including line caps, shear transformations and native support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
- improvements in performance and quality
Apache OpenOffice users also benefit from a broad ecosystem of 3rd party products, including over 2300 templates and over 800 extensions.
Community-Driven Development, The Apache Way
The OpenOffice code base was created by Star Division in the 1990's, acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999 and later Oracle Corporation in 2010, before being submitted to The Apache Software Foundation mid-2011.
Today the project is being developed by an all-volunteer group of developers, testers, translators, and other contributors under the ASF's meritocratic process informally dubbed "The Apache Way", and is supported by hundreds of Open Source software volunteers from around the world.
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For the first official Apache release of OpenOffice, the developer team successfully conformed to the policy defined by the Incubator Project Management Committee by identifying, removing and replacing with comparable function those libraries with licenses incompatible with Apache Software Foundation license policy.
Future Developments
Plans for future enhancements by the Project include support for additional native languages, enhanced accessibility, usability and performance improvements, and adopting new features and improvements from the upcoming IBM Lotus Symphony contribution.
The Apache OpenOffice Project Management Committee invites people to join. There are many different area where contribution is most welcome. Check out the Get Involved page.
"Apache OpenOffice is the leading Open Source office productivity suite with more than 15 years of engineering investment. We are pleased and excited to offer OpenOffice fully licensed under the Apache License 2. This offering will form the foundation of OpenOffice innovation moving forward here at Apache," said Juergen Schmidt, Apache OpenOffice Release Manager and veteran core developer. "With the achievement of this major milestone, we have established a diverse and vibrant community with sufficient depth and skills to ably steward this important product into the future. We look forward to graduating as an Apache Top Level Project soon."
To get it, use the button bottom right of this page!For more information
More information on the Apache OpenOffice product can be found at our website, http://www.openoffice.org. Information on the Apache OpenOffice project, including information on volunteering with the project can be found at our project website.
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Enjoy!
Notice also the new user support page for forums, it also includes a custom search field that will let you narrow the search to specific areas (like forums, wikis, OOo domain).
Check it here: http://user.services.openoffice.org/