The Document Foundation released LibreOffice 3.5.0 today with a fair number of new features. Question is, where are all those contributions coming from?
According to the infographic released earlier this month, the bulk of contributors are volunteers, but the majority of work going into LibreOffice comes from SUSE, Red Hat, legacy code from OpenOffice.org and volunteers.
The core of LibreOffice consists of about 50 paid or volunteer hackers who contribute key patches and features and develop strategy for the suite. Outside of that, a “regular” group of about 100 volunteers contribute easy hacks, large patches and small features. Then you have a group of about 250 more volunteers that have contributed small patches.
The number of contributors, per month, seems to have dropped since the Document Foundation started tracking them in September 2010. This might be because little work or none is being imported from OpenOffice.org since its move over to Apache. Work is going on with the Apache project, but probably not a lot that would be carried over to LibreOffice at this point. However, the foundation says that it’s an average of 80 active contributors per month, with more than 30,000 code commits.
The .0 release for any LibreOffice cycle (like 3.5.0 or 3.4.0) is considered a bit cutting edge, so conservative users might want to hold off for the 3.5.1 release. But if you want to check out the latest features in LibreOffice immediately, you can download it today for Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows.
