Document Foundation seeks set-up funds

The Document Foundation has announced that it is now seeking €50,000 in order to become established properly as a legal entity. To date, the foundation has operated with its legal assets being held by the German non-profit association OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. The non-profit also manages donations and pays for infrastructure costs for the Document Foundation.

Florian Effenberger, Steering Committee member of The Document Foundation has commented that “After thorough investigation, the Steering Committee came to the conclusion that a foundation based in Germany would provide the best stability, not only for our users, but also for adopters, developers and enterprises. For achieving this stability, a capital stock of at least €50,000 is considered best practice in Germany”. The funding drive is open until the 21 March; enterprises and private users are invited to donate to the capital stock of the new foundation which will be formed as what is known as a "Stiftung".

The ODF community has established a dedicated web site to track the progress of the donation effort which will show when each donation milestone in reached.

The Document Foundation was formed by members of the OpenOffice.org community when it became clear that Oracle, having inherited the project when it acquired Sun Microsystems, did not plan to operate in a way that much of the community found acceptable. There was already a feeling of some frustration among many independent developers that the open source office suite did not evolve as swiftly as they would like, even under Sun's stewardship. These factors lead to the community forking the code to create LibreOffice which is now available in its first stable release as version 3.3; it inherits the version number from OpenOffice.org 3.3 on which it is based.

See also:

• LibreOffice - A fresh page for OpenOffice, a feature from The H.

(trk)