The open-source warriors over at The Document Foundation have announced that LibreOffice 3.3 - the first stable release - is now finished and ready to download.
For those who aren't familiar with either LibreOffice or the Foundation, the latter was formed from disenchanted OpenOffice developers following Sun's acquisition by Oracle. Apparently the devs weren't happy about the way that their new corporate masters were treating the community, so reformed free from the company's oversight.
Of course, being an open-source project, they were able to continue using the same code-base - thus the odd version-number for a first release - meaning that LibreOffice 3.3 is going to be largely the same as the last OpenOffice release.
There have been changes though. Although there are many more, the highlights included a hugely cleaned up code-base and the ability to import and work with SVG file.
The release is actually ahead of schedule, which - according to the official announcement - is a result of the large number of developers that the project has attracted.
And there's more good news to boot. Although there hasn't been an official announcement, Canonical VP Neil Levine has confirmed that LibreOffice would ship as the productivity suit of choice in Ubuntu 11.04, scheduled for release in April.
This won't come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the operating system's alpha releases and echoes earlier comments by founder Mark Shuttleworth. Nonetheless, it's quite the endorsement given Ubuntu's popularity, although hardly surprising, considering the fact that the OS has included OpenOffice for some time.
LibreOffice 3.3 is available to download now for Windows, OSX and Linux, while more details on the key changes are available on the Features and Fixes page.
