LibreOffice is a free and open-source office productivity suite comprising a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing program, and database front end. The project’s own description states that LibreOffice is “free and open source software, originally based on OpenOffice.org (commonly known as OpenOffice), and is the most actively developed OpenOffice.org successor project.” Its developers frame the work in explicitly philosophical terms, saying they “believe in the principles of Free Software” and that “Free Software is first and foremost a matter of liberty, not price.”
The suite was announced on September 28, 2010, when a group of long-term OpenOffice.org contributors created an independent organization and a new name to carry the codebase forward. The Document Foundation’s history page recounts that “when The Document Foundation was announced in September 2010, we started with a team of long-term contributors to OpenOffice.org,” with a stated goal to “protect past investments by building on the achievements of the first decade with OpenOffice.org.” The first stable release, LibreOffice 3.3, followed in January 2011.
The fork was driven by governance concerns rather than a technical disagreement. Oracle’s 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which had sponsored OpenOffice.org, left the community uncertain about the project’s future openness. Rather than depend on a single corporate steward, the contributors chose to establish a vendor-neutral home where no one company could control the project’s direction. The new name avoided the OpenOffice.org trademark, which remained with Oracle.
Stewardship of LibreOffice rests with The Document Foundation (TDF), a charitable foundation under German law. LibreOffice’s own materials note that the software “is managed by The Document Foundation,” and the project relies on a worldwide mix of volunteers and some paid contributors. The independent foundation model was meant to guarantee that the suite would remain free software governed by its community in perpetuity.
LibreOffice quickly outpaced its parent project in development activity. While OpenOffice.org’s codebase was later donated to the Apache Software Foundation as Apache OpenOffice, that project’s momentum faded, leaving LibreOffice as the principal free alternative to proprietary office suites and a flagship example of a community fork succeeding its corporate-sponsored origin.