Today The Document Foundation (TDF), the organisation behind the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite, celebrates its 9th birthday.
On 17th February 2012 The Document Foundation was registered in Berlin as a German charitable foundation (Stiftung).
TDF had been created by members of the OpenOffice.org community to manage and develop LibreOffice, partially out of fears that Oracle Corporation would cease development of OpenOffice.org after its takeover of Sun Microsystems, the custodians of the OpenOffice.org project. The original OpenOffice.org project is now curated by the Apache Software Foundation.
The TDF’s goal is to produce a vendor-independent office suite with ODF support in a development environment free from control by an individual company.
This goal has been achieved too. LibreOffice is now on release version 7.1, is included as the standard office suite in many GNU/Linux distributions and been downloaded millions of times.
Many happy returns, TDF!