Earlier this month we took a snapshot look at LibreOffice.
LibreOffice is an Open Source office suite for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems. The suite includes six solid applications: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math, and Base. Judging by the titles, I’m sure you can figure out which applications are directly correlated with the Microsoft Office offerings. LibreOffice is supported, documented, and free, by way of a dedicated community base of contributers and developers.
As usual, the 8BIT community left some great comments. One of which asked if LibreOffice was a fork from OpenOffice, indeed he was correct.
And now we know why there was a fork.
OpenOffice.org was one of the numerous projects that Oracle obtained when it acquired Sun and ultimately lead to the demise of OpenOffice.org:
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 OpenOffice.org community in a transparent and open way.
Thankfully, a group of heavy-hitting contributers to OpenOffice.org forked the project into LibreOffice. They created a new nonprofit organization called The Document Foundation (TDF), as to reestablish a vendor-neutral governance body over the software.
This new fork, LibreOffice, is more of a re-birthed, re-tooled, and re-inspired version of OpenOffice.org. Digging deeper roots into its original foundational values, they’re getting the kind of backing needed for future success:
Most of the major companies that have historically been involved in OpenOffice.org development have moved to stand behind TDF and LibreOffice, including Red Hat, Novell, Google, and Canonical. LibreOffice has also succeeded in attracting a significant portion of OpenOffice.org’s independent contributors. The ecosystem-wide shift in favor of LibreOffice has left Oracle as the only major party still developing OpenOffice.org, forcing the company to compete against the broader community.
With the spouting and dynamic success of LibreOffice, Oracle has positioned themselves between a rock and a hard place. They severely underestimated the power of the Open Source community, and now are faced with one option:
Discontinue commercial development of the OpenOffice.org.
Go ahead and download LibreOffice. OpenOffice is now closed.
[via Ars Technica]
Speak your mind...