Five years of LibreOffice

announce
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LibreOffice was launched as a fork of OpenOffice.org on September 28,
2010, by a tiny group of people representing the community in their
capacity of community project leaders. At the time it was a brave -
although necessary - decision, because it was rather clear to everyone
that OpenOffice.org was not going to survive for a long time under
Oracle stewardship.

In fact, the group of 16 founders launched an independent free software
project under the stewardship of The Document Foundation, to fulfil the
promise made by Sun ten years before - at the time of the first
announcement of OpenOffice.org - of an independent free software
foundation capable of pushing forward the free office suite to the next
level.

After five years, LibreOffice is acknowledged in the marketplace as the
sole Microsoft Office contender, based on a sheer feature by feature
comparison, and on the number of successful migrations. Migrating to
LibreOffice has never been easier, thanks to the Migration Protocol
drafted by the most experienced people at The Document Foundation, which
outlines the best practices adopted by several large projects worldwide.

A success confirmed by the Future of Open Source Survey 2015, which has
put LibreOffice amongst the seven most valuable open source projects,
based on the answers provided by over 1,300 professionals worldwide.

It has been an amazing journey. In five years, LibreOffice developers
have not missed a single time based release, with major announcements in
late January and late July, and minor announcements on a monthly basis.
Thanks to this sustained pace, LibreOffice has reached a richness of
features and a level of interoperability which are second to none.

LibreOffice 5.0, launched in early August, has been the most successful
major release ever, triggering an unprecedented 8,000 donations in 30
days. Of course, the success has been reflected in the number of
adoptions, which has soared. The icing on the cake has been the
announcement of the Italian Defence Organization, which will be
migrating some 150,000 PCs to LibreOffice starting from October 2015.

To celebrate our 5th anniversary, we have put together a book based on
the blog post of the people who have made the history, which is
available in a mini (700 pages, http://tdf.io/libreofficeminihistory)
and a maxi (1,300 pages, http://tdf.io/libreofficemaxihistory) version.
Enjoy.

Link to blog post:
https://blog.documentfoundation.org/2015/09/28/five-years-of-libreoffice/.