OpenOffice refugees release rival LibreOffice suite

The team of developers who left the OpenOffice programme over Oracle's attitude has released LibreOffice 3.3.

The free office suite has all the features of the current version of OpenOffice, but with extras including the ability to embed standard fonts in PDF documents, a million-row spreadsheet, an improved printing interface and new fonts.

"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," said RedHat's Caolán McNamara, one of the developer community leaders.

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

Twenty developers left the OpenOffice team to set up the rival Document Foundation, and many more have joined in the past four months, increasing programmer numbers to 100 and enabling the group to release LibreOffice earlier than expected.

LibreOffice is a suite of six applications: Writer for word processing, Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations and Draw for diagrams, plus the Base database front end and Math equation editor. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.