LibreOffice has just announced that it's launching a new community repository for free LibreOffice (and OpenOffice.org) templates and extensions.
This move comes two weeks after Microsoft's surprise decision to drop support for user-submitted Office templates. According to an official post on the Office blog, the current mechanism for submitting, categorizing, ranking, and retrieving user-created Microsoft Office templates is going away on Oct. 1.
LibreOffice is eschewing Microsoft's approach of corporate review. Instead, at the LibreOffice site "community volunteers test and review available extensions, and those meeting criteria of quality will be tagged accordingly."
The templates and extensions are available under (various kinds of) GNU free software licenses.
You're invited to join in the public beta test for extensions and/or for templates. If you submit a template or extension during the beta phase, it will still be available when the sites emerge from testing.
OpenOffice.org continues to maintain the largest repository of free templates, with several hundred community-rated templates on offer.
This article, "Open source rushes in where Microsoft fears to tread," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.