Oracle gives up on OpenOffice after community forks project

[jdog]

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news ... roject.ars

In a statement issued on Friday, Oracle announced that it intends to discontinue commercial development of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The move comes several months after key members of the OOo community and a number of major corporate contributors forked OOo to create a vendor-neutral alternative.

OOo is one of many open source software projects that Oracle obtained in its acquisition of Sun. OOo has long been plagued by governance issues and friction between its corporate stakeholders. Sun's copyright assignment policies and bureaucratic code review process significantly hindered community participation in the project. Oracle declined to address these issues after its acquisition of Sun and exacerbated the friction by failing to engage with the OOo community in a transparent and open way.

A group of prominent OOo contributors eventually decided to fork the project, creating an alternative called LibreOffice. They founded a nonprofit organization called The Document Foundation (TDF) in order to create a truly vendor-neutral governance body for the software. LibreOffice is based on the OOo source code, but it also incorporates a large number of other improvements driven by its own developer community.

[hotheat]

welcome back, jdog !

[jdog]

I pop in here and there. :)

[5829]

I believe that I read that the new versions of Fedora and Ubuntu that are due out in the next couple of months will replace OpenOffice with LibreOffice.

[jdog]

I believe that I read that the new versions of Fedora and Ubuntu that are due out in the next couple of months will replace OpenOffice with LibreOffice.

Yeah, I think several distros are switching. I recall a few that used the Beta of LibreOffice.

[AYHJA]

Noticed the change, but did not know the story...I don't reckon it matters tho, LO seems just as good yeah..?

[jdog]

Noticed the change, but did not know the story...I don't reckon it matters tho, LO seems just as good yeah..?

LO will make improvements. OO seemed to stick to old code and that can be bad. Oracle has done well with continuing to improve VirtualBox although I fear they will work it till they can start charging to compete with VMWare.