OpenOffice rival LibreOffice hits 25 million user mark

The open source LibreOffice suite has reached 7.5 million downloads since its launch a year ago, and now boasts 25 million users worldwide, according to the Document Foundation.

Charles Schulz, a founding member of the Foundation, told V3 that the project has come a long way in a short time.

"We are where we envisioned we would be, but it still feels incredible and we owe this to the tremendous amount of work contributors put into the project," he said. 

"If we have learned anything in our one year it is that we were right in our assumption that community and freedom matter."

LibreOffice has had 330 contributors, according to the Document Foundation's data, as well as support from open source companies such as Red Hat.

The Document Foundation pointed out that the 7.5 million download figure does not take into account the 10 million people who have installed the code from CDs.

LibreOffice is now the office suite of choice for an estimated 15 million Linux users, the group said, adding that it expects to have 200 million LibreOffice users by 2020.

The Document Foundation began life last year. Oracle acquired OpenOffice in January 2010 with the purchase of Sun Microsystems, and in September a faction of OpenOffice developers set up the Document Foundation because of doubts over Oracle's commitment to the open source community.

Oracle has since given OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation.

"I am particularly proud to have gathered most of the former OpenOffice contributors in the project. It feels like most of our mission has been accomplished," said Schulz.

Announcements on the Document Foundation's future will be revealed next week at the first LibreOffice conference in Paris on 12 October.

LibreOffice 3.4 was released in July.