Getting Started Guide 7.4

Appendix B,Open Source,
Open Standards,
OpenDocument

CopyrightThis document is Copyright © 2022 by the LibreOffice Documentation Team. Contributors arelisted below. You may distribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either the GNU General
Public License (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html), version 3 or later, or the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), version 4.0 or later.
All trademarks within this guide belong to their legitimate owners.

Contributors
To this edition
Skip MasonsmithKees Kriek

To previous editions
Jean Hollis Weber
Olivier Hallot
Dave Barton

Steve Fanning
Valerii Goncharuk
Andrew Jensen

Kees Kriek
Rafael Lima
Peter SchofieldFeedback
Please direct any comments or suggestions about this document to the Documentation Team’s
forum at https://community.documentfoundation.org/c/documentation/loguides/ (registration isrequired) or send an email to: loguides@community.documentfoundation.org.

Note
Everything you send to a mailing list, including your email address and any otherpersonal information that is written in the message, is publicly archived andcannot be deleted.

Publication date and software version
Published November 2022. Based on LibreOffice 7.4 Community.
Other versions of LibreOffice may differ in appearance and functionality.

Using LibreOffice on macOS
Some keystrokes and menu items are different on macOS from those used in Windows andLinux. The table below gives some common substitutions for the instructions in this document.
For a detailed list, see the application Help.
Windows or LinuxmacOS equivalent

EffectTools > Options
menu selection

LibreOffice > Preferences

Access setup options

Right-click

Control+click or right-click
depending on computer setup

Open a context menu

Ctrl (Control)⌘ (Command)

Used with other keys

Alt⌥ (Option) or Alt, dependingon keyboard

Used with other keys

F11

⌘+T

Open Styles deck in Sidebar

Documentation for LibreOffice is available at https://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/Contents
Copyright..........................................................................................................................2
Contributors................................................................................................................................2
Feedback....................................................................................................................................2
Publication date and software version........................................................................................2
Using LibreOffice on macOS......................................................................................................2

Introduction......................................................................................................................4
A short history of LibreOffice.........................................................................................4
The LibreOffice community............................................................................................ 4
How is LibreOffice licensed?..........................................................................................5
What is open source?......................................................................................................5What are open standards?..............................................................................................5
What is OpenDocument?................................................................................................5
OpenDocument filename extensions..........................................................................................6

Appendix B, Open Source, Open Standards, OpenDocument | 3

Introduction
LibreOffice is a productivity suite that is compatible with other major office suites and available ona variety of platforms. It is open source software and therefore free to download, use, anddistribute. If you are new to LibreOffice, this appendix will provide some information regarding its
history, its community, and some of its technical specifications.

A short history of LibreOffice
The OpenOffice.org project began when Sun Microsystems released the source code(“blueprints”) for its StarOffice® software to the open source community on October 13, 2000.
OpenOffice.org 1.0, the product, was released on April 30, 2002. Major updates toOpenOffice.org included version 2.0 in October 2005 and version 3.0 in October 2008. On
January 26, 2010, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems.
On September 28, 2010, the community of volunteers who develop and promote OpenOffice.org
announced a major change in project structure. After ten years’ successful growth with Sun
Microsystems as founding and principle sponsor, the project launched an independent foundation
called The Document Foundation, to fulfill the promise of independence written in the originalcharter. This foundation is the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals andorganizations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite.
Unable to acquire the trademarked OpenOffice.org name from Oracle Corporation, TheDocument Foundation named its product LibreOffice. Continuing the version numbers fromOpenOffice.org, LibreOffice 3.3 was released in January 2011 and version 7.4 was released inAugust 2022.
In February 2012, The Document Foundation was incorporated in Berlin as a German Stiftung.
You can read more about The Document Foundation at: www.documentfoundation.org.

The LibreOffice community
The Document Foundation’s mission is:“...to facilitate the evolution of the OpenOffice.org Community into a new open,independent, and meritocratic organizational structure within the next few months. An
independent Foundation is a better match to the values of our contributors, users, andsupporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient, transparent, and inclusive
Community. We will protect past investments by building on the solid achievements of our
first decade, encourage wide participation in the Community, and co-ordinate activity
across the Community.”
Some of our corporate supporters include GNOME Foundation, Google, Red Hat, and Collabora.
Additionally, over 450,000 people from nearly every part of the globe have joined this project with
the idea of creating the best possible office suite that all can use. This is the essence of an “opensource” community!
With its open source software license, LibreOffice is key in the drive to provide an office suite thatis available to anyone, anywhere, for commercial or personal use. The software has beentranslated into many languages and runs on all major operating systems. New functionality canbe added in the form of extensions.
The LibreOffice community invites contributors in all areas, including translators, softwaredevelopers, graphic artists, technical writers, editors, donors, and end-user support. Whatever
you do best, you can make a difference in LibreOffice. The community operates internationally inall time zones and in many languages, linked through the internet at www.libreoffice.org andwww.documentfoundation.org.
4 | Appendix B, Open Source, Open Standards, OpenDocument

How is LibreOffice licensed?
LibreOffice is distributed under both the Mozilla Public License (MPL) 2.0(www.libreoffice.org/about-us/licenses/) and the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
3.0+ (www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html).

What is open source?
The four essential rights of open-source software are embodied within the Free Software
Foundation’s family of the GNU General Public License (GPL):• The right to use the software for any purpose.
• Freedom to redistribute the software for free or for a fee.
• Access to the complete source code of the program (that is, the “blueprints”).
• The right to modify any part of the source, or use portions of it in other programs.
The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute,and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it,people adapt it, people fix bugs.
For more information on Free and Open Source software, visit these websites:• Open Source Initiative (OSI): www.opensource.org• Free Software Foundation (FSF): www.fsf.org

What are open standards?
An open standard provides a means of doing something that is independent of manufacturer orvendor, thus enabling competing software programs to freely use the same file formats. HTML,
XML, and ODF are examples of open standards for documents.
An open standard meets the following requirements:• It is well documented with the complete specification publicly available, either free or at anominal charge.
• It can be freely copied, distributed, and used. The intellectual property of the standard ismade irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
• It is standardized and maintained in an independent, open forum (also called “standardsorganization”) using an open process.

What is OpenDocument?
OpenDocument (ODF) is an XML-based file format for office documents (text documents,spreadsheets, drawings, presentations, and more), developed at OASIS (https://www.oasisopen.org/), an independent, international standards group. OpenDocument version 1.2 wasadopted by the International Standards Organization and named ISO/IEC 26300:2015 standard1.
In December 2019, ODF 1.3 was approved as a committee specification.

1

https://www.iso.org/standard/66363.html, https://www.iso.org/standard/66375.html, andhttps://www.iso.org/standard/66376.htmll

What is OpenDocument? | 5

Unlike other file formats, ODF (ISO/IEC 26300:2015) is an open standard. It is publicly available,royalty-free, and without legal or other restrictions; therefore ODF files are not tied to a specificoffice suite and anybody can build a program that interprets these files. For this reason ODF isquickly becoming the preferred file format for government agencies, schools and othercompanies who prefer not to be too dependent on any one software supplier.
LibreOffice 7.4 saves documents in ODF 1.3 Extended by default. LibreOffice can also open andsave in earlier versions of the ODF standard, as well as many other file formats, as summarized
below.
For a full list of file formats that LibreOffice can read and write, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Supported_file_formats

OpenDocument filename extensions
The most common filename extensions used for OpenDocument documents are:*.odt for word processing (text) documents*.ods for spreadsheets*.odp for presentations*.odb for databases*.odg for graphics (vector drawings)*.odc for charts*.odf for formulas (scientific formulas and equations)

6 | Appendix B, Open Source, Open Standards, OpenDocument