The Document Foundation finally incorporated - Update

The legal process of incorporating The Document Foundation as a German Stiftung (foundation) has been completed in Berlin, Germany. The creation of a legally based foundation was part of the founding plan of the organisation when it forked from OpenOffice in September 2010. The foundation, which will be the legal entity managing the development of LibreOffice, now has a set of legally binding statutes that define the foundation's objectives, the use of its assets and its management structure.

The foundation consists of a seven-member board of directors, a board of trustees and a membership committee; there will also be an advisory board associated with the foundation. The directors are elected by the board of trustees, membership of which is free and open to anybody that has, subject to certain conditions, contributed to the foundation's work or has committed to contribute to it. A non-legally-binding English language equivalent of the statutes is available.

The non-profit association Freies Office Deutschland e.V., formerly OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V., has been the foundation's interim legal entity and has now acted as donor for the new foundation.

Ask LibreOffice, for all your asking LibreOffice needs Update – To complement existing support channels for the LibreOffice free office suite, the Document Foundation has announced Ask LibreOffice, a social and crowd-sourced question and answer platform. Users may pose questions, vote existing questions up or down, or offer answers which can also be voted on by the site's users. Users can also earn badges at various levels depending on their activity within the Ask community. The site is powered by Askbot, a Python and Django powered platform which emulates the stackoverflow.com model.

See also:

• The Document Foundation to be established in Berlin, a report from The H.
• Document Foundation still not a foundation, a report from The H.

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