The Document Foundation, a splinter group of OpenOffice. org developers formed after Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, recently announced the release of LibreOffice 3.3 – the latest fork of Oracle’s Open Office software suite. According to the Document Foundation, while the original splinter group behind LibreOffice comprised 20 developers – chiefly from companies with open-source investments like Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu -, the number of participants in the September 28-announced new project rose to 100.

A press release by the Document Foundation also stated that the development of LibreOffice 3.3 took less than four months, with the release coming ahead of the group’s self-imposed development schedule.

Revealing that, for the Windows users, the latest LibreOffice version has been bundled with several extensions that would otherwise have remained unused in the project’s extensions repository, the distinguished Novell engineer Michael Meeks said: “For Windows users, there are a lot of big wins.” About the release of LibreOffice 3.3, RedHat's Caolan McNamara said: “We are excited: this is our very first stable release, and we are eager to get user feedback, which will be integrated as soon as possible into the code, with the first enhancements being released in February.”

McNamara further added that March will mark the strategic shift to “a real-time-based, predictable, transparent and public release schedule, in accordance with Engineering Steering Committee's goals and users' requests.”