LibreOffice 4.3 announcement, release notes with new feature screenshots, developer perspective. Perhaps most useful, a feature comparison of LibreOffice 4.3 and Microsoft Office 2013.

Overall a great six month release. Coming early next year: 4.4.

Steady progress is also being made on policy. “The default format for saving [UK] government documents must be Open Document Format (ODF)” — the genuinely open standard used by LibreOffice; Glyn Moody has a good writeup. I occasionally see news of large organizations migrating to LibreOffice, most recently the city of Tolouse. Hopefully many more will manage to escape “effective captivity” to a single vendor (Glyn Moody for that story too).

(My take on the broad importance of open policy and software adoption.)

Also, recent news of work on a version of LibreOffice for Android. But nothing on LibreOffice Online (in a web browser) which as far as I can tell remains a prototype. WebODF is an independent implementation of ODF viewing and editing in browser. Any of these probably require lots of work to be as effective of a collaboration solution as Google Docs — much of the work outside the editing software, e.g. integration with “sharing” mechanisms (e.g., WebODF and ownCloud) and ready availability of deployments of those mechanisms (Sandstorm is promising recent work on deployment, especially security).

From what I observe, Google Docs has largely displaced (except for large or heavily formatted for print or facsimile) Microsoft Office, though I guess that’s not the case in large organizations with internal sharing mechanisms. I suspect Google Docs (especially spreadsheets) has also expanded the use of “office” software, in part replacing wiki use cases. Is there any reason to think that free/open source software isn’t as far behind now as it was in 2000 before the open source release of OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice’s predecessor?

Still, I consider LibreOffice one of the most important free software projects. I expect it will continue to be developed and used on millions of “legacy” desktops for decades after captivity to Microsoft is long past, indeed after desktop versions of Microsoft Office long EoL’d. Hopefully LibreOffice’s strong community, development, governance, and momentum (all vastly improved over OpenOffice.org) in combination with open policy work (almost non-existent in 2000) and other projects will obtain much better than even this valuable result.