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Happy Birthday, OpenOffice.org!

15 years ago the original OpenOffice.org source code was published by Sun Microsystems, on Friday, October 13, 2000, a Full Moon day. The source code that changed the Free Software office suite world and laid the basis for LibreOffice.

www.openoffice.org as scraped by the archive.org WayBack Machine on 2000-10-13
StarOffice Code Released in Largest Open Source Project – Linux Today article from 2000-10-13

Five years of LibreOffice – Happy Birthday, LibreOffice!

The huge success of LibreOffice, not only as a software package but as a Free Software project as a whole, can only be measured and expressed by giving credit to all who are involved and all that has been done. So thank you, all contributors to the project! To celebrate, The Document Foundation has compiled a history "leaflet" (well, it's more like a midsize tree ;-) of blog posts, articles, release notes, work that has been done etceteraetcetera. It is available in two versions, the "mini" (700 pages, 11MB) and the "maxi" (1300 pages, 18MB) versions as PDF files. For URLs see the TDF's Five years of LibreOffice blog post.

Happy Birthday, LibreOffice!

Happy Birthday TDF!

The Document Foundation: The Third Anniversary reads:
The Document Foundation has been incorporated on February 17, 2012. Today is the third anniversary, and this video is a testimonial of the activity of many members of the fantastic LibreOffice community in representation of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of developers. Thanks everyone for the wonderful journey.
and Italo Vignoli assembled this video of nice LibreOffice community shots:



Happy Birthday TDF!


14 Years Freedom of Choice, 14 Years Choice of Freedom

Today we can celebrate an anniversary, on Friday 13 October 2000 Sun Microsystems published the OpenOffice.org source code. I won't say "Happy Birthday, OpenOffice.org" because OpenOffice.org as a project died in April 2011 when the company who bought Sun Microsystems gave it the final stab, and there is a well alive successor now. But the birth of OpenOffice.org marked a milestone in the history of office productivity software. It provided the freedom of choice to a wider audience of users, being available on several platforms it freed users from being dictated what productivity software to use. For many people, developers, quality engineers, translators, authors and users it also meant the choice of freedom, the choice to contribute to Free Software, the choice to change the software world even if just a little, line by line. And it triggered another birth, the birth of the OpenDocument Format for office applications, starting the standardization of office productivity file formats.

For me it also provided the freedom to be able to work like I work today, being employed by a great company that pays my bills while I work on this freedom is a privilege I much appreciate.

Thank you OpenOffice.org!


Happy Birthday, Linux!

23 (!) years ago Linus Torvalds wrote a message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup (does anyone remember newsgroups?) in which he announced that he was doing a free operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) LOL and he liked to know what features most people would want.

He failed in predicting the future though:
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(

Well done, Linus, and Happy Birthday, Linux! Live long and prosper, both!