LibreOffice 3.3 launched as rival to OpenOffice

The Document Foundation has launched the free office productivity suite LibreOffice 3.3, now available for download.

The LibreOffice initiative rivals Oracle's OpenOffice.org and Microsoft's Office suite in a bid to provide an independent open source package.

A group of open source enthusiasts founded the Document Foundation last year and claimed independence for the free office software Openoffice.org, from Oracle's recently acquired subsidiary Sun Microsystems after 10 years.

Open source enterprise supplier Red Hat's Caolán McNamara, also a Document Foundation community leader, said, "We are excited: this is our very first stable release, and therefore 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.

"Starting from March, we will be moving to a real-time-based, predictable, transparent and public release schedule, in accordance with the Engineering Steering Committee's goals and users' requests."

The LibreOffice suite is available in 30 languages and supports all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva and Suse Linux).

As well as including the new features of OpenOffice.org 3.3, other features of the first stable release of LibreOffice include:

Ability to import and work with SVG files

Easy way to format pages and numbering in Writer

Improved navigator tool for Writer

Improved ergonomics in Calc for sheet and cell management

Microsoft Works and Lotus Word Pro document import filters

PDF import

Click here to download LibreOffice 3.3.