Submitted by LibreOffice is the provisional name of a community-led fork of OpenOffice that is to be developed under the umbrella of a European based non-profit to be named The Document Foundation. This should break OpenOffice free from the shackles of Sun/Oracle, hopefully leading to a faster and more inclusive development cycle.
In the press release sent out by The Document Foundation, the team details why the fork was deemed necessary. The main focus seems to be to free OpenOffice from the oversight of any single commercial, and to turn it into a true community project. They don’t say it explicitly, but the rather uncomfortable position Oracle takes towards Free/open source software certainly plays a role in this.
“We believe that the Foundation is a key step for the evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the development of the code and the evolution of the project from the constraints represented by the commercial interests of a single company,” states Sophie Gautier, long-time OpenOffice community member and former maintainer of the French language project, “Free software advocates around the world have the extraordinary opportunity of joining the group of founding members today, to write a completely new chapter in the history of FLOSS.”
The Document Foundation and LibreOffice can already count on pretty much the entire Free software ecosystem, with all the major players pledging support; the Free Software Foundation, Google, Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, the OSI, the GNOME Foundation, NeoOffice, Credativ, NeoOffice, and others. Oracle has also been invited to support The Document Foundation, for instance by donating the OpenOffice brand.
Much of the early work will focus on polishing the code and lots of clean-up work, but in the future we can expect a more responsive and hopefully a more productive development cycle. One of the most important changes is the removal of Sun’s requirement that copyright be assigned to them, which acted as a barrier to participation.
For now, major distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and SUSE will ship LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice, and a beta release has been made available which at this point obviously doesn’t differ much from the regular OpenOffice build.
They could have come up with a better name than LibreOffice. I understand what they are trying to do, but the name just doesn’t roll off the tongue.
My native language is Spanish, and every time I see the word “Libre” in some stuff related to open source/free software; I think the project is going to have a more political than technical nature.
Ok, I know such assertion is not true with this project, but its name makes me think on it in that way.
What else did you expect with the FSF involved.
Actually the usage of Libre as part of the name for a software product in essence *is* exactly a political statement, as much as it can be rallying for “free speech” rights.
For french-speaking people
Not even! It means “Free Office”. An truely creative and brand-new name would have had much more impact. LibreOffice just doesn’t cut the mustard!
is “provisional”!!
RTFA
Nah it’s provincial
I agree. What’s with the ridiculous fork names recently? Sidux -> Aptosid (horrible!); Mandriva -> Mageia; now OpenOffice -> LibreOffice? Who is coming up with these names? They should be fired!
Open source projects, “they should be fired”, good joke there.
Agreed, and “OpenOffice.org” wasn’t that great either.
LibreO! Pronouced lee-bro, silent e. =D
Could have been worse. Could have been LibreOffice.org
What happened to GoOo?
It might get disbanded. The Document Foundation has already stated that it’ll include all the Go-OOO improvements.
It looks like a lot of the OpenOffice people defected over to the new foundation. And since copyrights don’t need to be assigned to Sun; they are excepting just about any improvement they can find.
“Accepting”
From the article below (at the end) pretty much says currently LibreOffice is just based on the Go-OO sources:
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Productivity-Sauce-Dmitr…
It’s really just the latest version of OO with some patches, more like a mod than a fork.
At this point … yes.
The real announcement though is the announcement of an independent non-profit organisation. This means that everyone can contribute to the software without having a feeling that they are helping their competitiors. All parties contribute, the best contributions are incorporated, everyone owns the result, everyone’s costs are reduced, everyone wins.
It was only partly like this when Sun had control of OpenOffice. Sun treated it as a QA-governed commercial product, and had only a few parties who could (or were inclined to) contribute to the effort, and progress was glacial.
In fact, haven’t you yourself criticised OpenOffice in the past along exactly those lines?
If LibreOffice can be run as a more typical open source community participation project, it should advance by leaps and bounds.
Heh? I was talking about GO-OO which has long been a mod.
I have been critical of the common assumption that OpenOffice is community developed when the vast majority of the commits have been from Sun employees.
I think it will certainly attract open source developers that didn’t like how Sun kept control over the project. But Sun also had paid developers working full time and OO is not really that appealing to hobbyists compared to other projects. A application of that size and scope requires a lot of difficult and unsatisfying work. I can’t imagine a lot of open source developers wanting to spend their weekend stepping through .doc parsing bugs. They really need a corporate sponsor if they want to compete with MS Office.
Sorry, I misunderstood. BTW, AFAIK, at this point, LibreOffice IS Go-OO.
If LibreOffice has only one corporate sponsor, then it will run into the same problems as Sun’s OpenOffice and IBM’s Symphony Office.
If there is an independent non-profit organisation, it can accept contributions (including code, funding and all other kinds of help) from anyone and everyone, to everyone’s benefit.
Such an arrangement is called a “co-operative” business. Co-operative businesses have a long history in free enterprise economies. Their objective is not to maximise profits, but rather to reduce costs. Look it up.
Edited 2010-09-29 00:20 UTC
I wasn’t suggesting that LibreOffice be funded and controlled in the same manner. Since their organization is independent it wouldn’t matter if the bulk of their funding came from a single donor. My point was that they need a reliable revenue source, whether it is from one corp or a thousand doesn’t matter.
the big problem is the same… there is only one big contribuor…
it was sun… now oracle
Used Linux for years, since 2000-2008. Used OpenOffice for a couple of months or at least tried to use this bull*. Finally switched over to Mac OS and never looked back at Linux although I adore Vim and the command line interface. On Mac I’ve used iWork: Overall ok but has its compatibility issues with ODF and several MS formats. Now I intent to use the industry’s proprietary standard… once MS Office 2010 is released for Mac.
I’m not 18 anymore and have no time for playing those ideology GNU/FOSS/freedom& bull games.
Edited 2010-09-28 21:15 UTC
Did your reply have a point other than to glorify Apple’s proprietary Macintosh and Microsoft’s Office? If you want to be a slave to proprietary software, it’s your choice but don’t knock F/OSS or GNU/Linux because you couldn’t be bothered to give it half a chance. Personally, I’ve used OpenOffice on my Linux workstation interchangeably with MS Office (which I’m forced to use at work) for several years without any major problems. I found that I have the best luck using the older *.doc/.xls/.ppt instead of the newer *.docx/.xlsx/.pptx, etc. Further, I use nearly 100% F/OSS software on my home workstations, laptops and servers and have done so for years now and without once longing for my former days of using Windows and proprietary software.
You gotta be kidding me. Ideology has nothing to do with the current state of the linux operating system. I’m 29 and work for an engineering firm. we use linux for a lot of computers connected to our machines. you could say we make big moneys because we use linux which is stable and handles all the load we put on it. That is a wrong stereotype you are making. A lot of us use linux because of what is offers and not because of ideological reasons.
Edited 2010-09-28 21:28 UTC
I second that, I’m pushing 50 and not only have used Linux exclusively (other than testing MS running in a VM) for years. I work for a company that not only makes big money built on Linux but most of us Engineer’s use Linux on our Workstations. Years ago the Linux Desktop wasn’t really mature enough but unless you’re gaming Linux really is the best option for productivity.
Linux “just works” and you don’t have to pay an obscene amount of money for productivity software.
Depends whether the “obscene” amount of money is worth it to you or not. It certainly was for me … I came from programming on Open Source OS (Linux/OpenBSD) with PHP, Java, Perl and a bit of python.
Pretty much every company in my area of England develop in one version of the .NET framework or another with MS SQL server.
Paying the less than £100 for Windows 7 Professional license and I can get Visual Studio Web Developer and SQL Server Express for nothing.
This got me a job, now I earn the same amount of money in a day and a half, from saying on my CV I can do C#/ASP.NET and I know MS SQL Server. Knowing Linux/OpenBSD, PHP and MySQL has earned me a few hundred pounds and I spent a lot more effort learning it.
Edited 2010-09-28 23:18 UTC
Knowing Linux and knowing it well got me my current job and contributing to OpenSource (KDE) got me my previous job.
The ~2000 DKK (~268 EUR or ~365 USD or ~231£) Windows 7 Professional would cost me in Danish, I could make in a few days but why would I? It’s not relevant for me work and it gives me nothing I can’t do now.
That is great.
My comment was more about in rebuttal to the usual “microsoft is expensive, why pay for it when there is free stuff”. I don’t think their tools are that expensive considering the amount of time I spend using them at work and at home.
They don’t provide any value to you, so you don’t buy them … fair enough, I wouldn’t expect you to.
Edited 2010-09-29 19:06 UTC
Damn straight. I had only toyed with OpenOffice until MS Office 2007 came out, with that asinine, Bill-knows-whats-best-for-you “ribbon” interface. It pissed me off so badly that I tried OO again and have not had a need to run the MS version in a VM or under Wine at all since.
I’ve even used OO to fix corruption in MS Office files that the Office 2003 we have at work introduced (I keep the portable version on a fast USB stick solely for that purpose).
“Proprietary standard” is an oxymoron.
A standard is a means via which various separate parties/organisations/companies can each freely implement the same protocol or format in order to facilite their collective ability to inter-operate.
A proprietary protocol or format is a means to entrench a sole-source supplier.
BTW … MS Office 2010 has a major flaw … it has very, very poor handling of a major Office format called OpenDocument Format (ODF), which is a recognised standard format and which is also the native format of another office suite with a 10% to 20% installed base.
Edited 2010-09-28 23:14 UTC
And what if I say you that I use OpenOffice in my MacBook, in my Linux box at home and in my Windows machines at work?
OpenOffice is a very very good product; it does not have all the features that MSOffice ships with, but I actually do not need more than what OpenOffice provides me.
Again, I HATE comments of people bashing some software product: obviously they have never written a line of code and think that writing code is as easier as writing your name in a board.
The names really doesn’t matter. I mean, LibreOffice isn’t that bad – better than “OpenOffice.org” (or just OOo what looks for me like O_O”) Am i right by saying that Libre doesn’t only mean Free, but in latin it is a term for book?
But i think, this is strange… Isn’t Oracle working on a cloud based office system? I think, a lot of companies will use that in future, an doing some fork like that only makes confusion.
But on the other hand: It is more interesting to get involved into LibreOffice for third parties. I think, summa summarum, this is a good decision.
I don’t know anything in Latin, Thom is more likely to give a valid answer here. In French, “livre” means “book”. It’s close to “libre”, but it’s French, not Latin.
As a side note, “libre” means “free” as in “free access”. It doesn’t mean “free” as in “free beer”. We use different words for both cases, “libre” in the former and “gratuit” in the latter, to the point that the phrase “entrée libre et gratuite” (no fee and no restriction to access) exists. In fact, each possible meaning of the English “free” translates to a distinct word in French. But “freedom” and “liberty” both translate to the single “liberté”… that’s the beauty of natural languages.
I don’t care about the name, hell I’ll use LibreOffice or even if it was called “Mangled Baby Ducks”, as long as it works.
I’m also very uncomfortable about Oracle acquiring Sun especially concerning MySQL.
Hell, I would use it for the name if that were the case!
Me too. Please call it Mangled Baby Ducks. It’s brilliant.
And while you’re at it, start from scratch and do a different, original and functional office suite.
Count me in too. I need more reasons to say that in the workplace!
Hum… Using daily a search service called DuckDuckGo, I’ll just shut up on this one… But WTF !
Caution : you’re invoking a common myth of programming that has led many projects to failure.
A rewrite from scratch is to be avoided at all cost, unless the current state of the product is absolutely terrible (not the case with OO. It has its issues, but it does the job that most people are asking from it).
The reasons why it is so is that…
-You spend a lot of time rewriting parts of the code which did work perfectly well.
-You can’t ship a working and satisfactory product for years, so a lot of customers are going to go away.
-You frustrate devs for the same reason, so several ones are going to go away too.
-Newly written code is buggy code. It takes a lot of time to fix it completely. Look at KDE4 for an example : only now it starts to be somewhat stable when doing things that KDE3 and GNOME 2 have been doing for ages.
Rewrite from scratch is good for fun or when you want to bring dramatic changes at the core of the software (e.g. when you want a 64-bit real-time microkernel written in Pascal Object, it’s time to think about writing it yourself). OO doesn’t need either, afaik. Only the UI would deserve some work, in my opinion.
Caution : you’re invoking another myth of computing. “Our product has to be different” is the reason why Flash websites exists and why printer drivers weight hundreds of megabytes thanks to crappy multimedia bundles, coming with non-standard UI widgets that don’t follow system settings.
It’s not good to be different for the sake of being different. Differences hurt usability by breaking the usage patterns of users used to other products. As I mentioned on another topics, it leads people to get angry and blame things which “don’t work” (ie work differently than in software they’re used to) instead of watching the differences with shiny eyes.
It’s nice to see creative products, but the search from differentiation itself is a dangerous thought that must be watched carefully.
How is OO non-functional ?
Edited 2010-09-29 20:04 UTC
Actually “Mangled Baby Ducks” is a much better name.
How about Foie Groffice? National eating disorder of the french..
If this helps speed up development then I’m all for it. It didn’t move that quickly with Sun and after what they did to Open Solaris I wouldn’t expect Oracle to do any better.
So, there is only one other big company do OpenOffice-forks/-whatever it is doing…
IBM, the question then becomes, will they join the list ?
Interresting…
openoffice -> go-oo -> libreOffice
opensolaris -> illumos
java/openjdk -> icetea -> ?
mysql -> ?
mysql -> MariaDB http://mariadb.org/
Edited 2010-09-28 23:48 UTC
It has not yet shown up in any Linux distribution as the ‘normal mysql’ or anything like that yet, but maybe it will in the future, it is possible.
On Gentoo, you can install either mysql or mariadb as a dependency for packages that require mysql.
Perhaps they could contact people to write clear and concise English for their bios?
http://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/
Example:
– to –
– to –
I have two opposite ideas about that:
In one side, you are completely right, they are trying to establish communication with a world wide community and they must do it in the best way using the community’s lingua franca.
In the other side, it is great when someone that does not speak Spanish (my native language), learns it to get communicated with me! just for that, I would forgive all his/her mistakes.
More on the nature of exactly why phrases such as “corporate standard” or “proprieatary standard” are oxymorons:
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20100…
“The Launch of the Document Foundation and the Oxymoron of Corporate Controlled “Community” Projects”
In particular, this quote is important:
This is why any large FOSS project needs to be “owned” by a co-operative rather than any one single corporate entity.
“Proprietary standard” is indeed an oxymoron. Why is this self-evident point, one totally relevant to the topic of this thread, modded down?
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20100…
So what is meant by “standard”? Despite what some people seem to think, it isn’t a popularity contest. Standards are about interoperability. They are about facilitating many separate parties to inter-operate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_%28software%29
What is meant by “proprietary”?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_format
Ergo, the conjunction “Proprietary standard” is an oxymoron.
The two words in the same context mean the precise opposite of one another.
Edited 2010-09-29 03:45 UTC
I think you need to look up the difference between a “de facto standard” and a “de jure standard”. It is possible to draw quite a lot parallels between the concept of a de facto standard and a popularity contest.
Microsoft Office software is a de facto standard. The older Microsoft Office file formats are a de facto standard, but the new formats are now (based on) a de jure standard (since OOXML was, unfortunately, standardised by ISO).
Software standard != standard
Proprietary format != proprietary
Ergo proprietary format software standard != proprietary standard. In fact, even if it did it, software standard (as defined by Wikipedia) is not the exact opposite of proprietary format (as defined by wikipedia) – it is quite possible to enable interoperability whilst retaining exclusive control. Using a motoring metaphor (as all the worst metaphors are), it is possible to accellerate whilst applying the brakes (e.g. whilst travelling downhill).
I know perfectly well what is meant by a “de facto” standard. However, one would only use a de facto standard when a proper dejure standard was not available. Fortunately, when it comes to Office software file formats, we do have a capable dejure standard which is implemented in many software products … OpenDocument standard, or ODF.
Strangely enough, there is also a dejure standard called OOXML that is not implemented in any software product whatsoever, so we can safely ignore that.
Yes, but there is no software that writes OOXML. .docx is not OOXML.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_%28software%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_format
Ergo, the conjunction “Proprietary standard” is an oxymoron.
The two words in the same context mean the precise opposite of one another.
Software standard != standard
How so? Office suites are software.
Proprietary format != proprietary
Sigh! If a proprietary format is not proprietary, what is it?
Ergo proprietary format software standard != proprietary standard.
Say what? My but you have confused yourself somehow, haven’t you?
Office formats are data interchange formats. They either allow interoperability between different Office suite software programs, or they do not. If they do not, and the details of the format are kept as a trade secret by one company, then it is a proprietary format. Pure and simple.
That is not even a good try.
“Proprietary standard” is an EXCELLENT example of an oxymoron. As I said, in the same context, that context in this case being file formats used by Office software, the two words mean the precise opposite of one another.
“Microsoft works” is another oxymoron.
This latter oxymoron is even on the well-known-oxymoron list at uncyclopedia twice!
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Oxymoron#Well_known_oxymorons
Some others you might like:
Fairplay DRM
Civil Engineer
Pretty Ugly
Advanced BASIC
Edited 2010-09-29 14:47 UTC
Probably an oversight, but the “About” dialog:
LibreOffice 3.3.0
OOO330m7 (Build:9526)
ooo-build 2010-09-24
Copyright © 2000, 2010 Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Copyright belongs to the authors of the code, unless it is transferred in writing (i.e. sold). See copyright law.
Therefore, the copyright to the existing code still belongs to Oracle. This code is released under the LGPL_v3, in which the copyright owners (Oracle) give certain permissions to the code to everyone. Some of these permissions are conditional.
Awarding permissions is not transferring copyright.
The Document Foundation will probably request that copyrights for new contributions to the codebase are transferred to it. Even so, this is only copyrights over the new contributions, not the whole codebase.
Certainly not. The copyright assignment required by OpenOffice.org is one very thing that necessitated the fork.
Fair enough.
Often an independent body, acting on behalf of a co-operative collection of parties, will ask for assignment of copyrights simply in order to be in a position to defend said copyrights (not to profit from them).
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/foss-primer.html#x1-1…
It varies from project to project.
Could they use FreeOffice?
An interview with Charles-H. Schultz, of the steering committee of The Document Foundation, can be read here:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100928224103271
I like this quote from the interview: “But enough talking on OOXML, a standard that does not exist. Let’s rather focus on ODF, an existing open standard we support and promote”.
Indeed, OOXML does not exist, because no software implements it, not even one program. So therefore it can’t be used for inter-operation between programs can it? If it can’t be used for inter-operation between programs, then it is not a standard. QED.
I don’t know how involved Oracle still is in the BtrFS development, but as Oracle is moving more and more to a closed-source organization, what will that do for the BtrFS development?
As it seems the development is done for the basic features. That means that debugging and feature expansion is the main focus. But who will take/hold the lead in the project?
Maybe I’m too paranoid and is the ownership and leadership already a done deal, but that’s something I don’t know about.
Anyone does know?
Btrfs is already in the kernel, under the GPL. It’s too late for them to close the source now and AFAIK development on it continues.
Btrfs is a frighteningly incomplete filesystem with no fsck tool at this time (!!) and no 1.0 release yet. People have suffered data loss and I am not touching it until mid-2011.
How about if they port this LibreOffice to Qt?
Edited 2010-09-29 10:14 UTC
That would be nice to see, but I suspect it would be an awful lot of work. I would quite like to see a remake based on OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice – sort of like Seashore, the Cocoa remake of GIMP.
NeoOffice, right?
Am I the only one to be surprised by the boldness of that?
There is something weird in it that I find very unsettling after reading the news and the comments. What I understood:
– there’s the open source product OpenOffice.org owned by Sun, and the copyright to Sun has to be mentioned in all versions. I don’t see any problem there.
– there’s a little amount of contributions to the product outside of Sun
– Oracle buys Sun
– people fork the product based on… what exactly?
– those people, riding the wave of permissions allowed by the license, now ask Oracle to relinquish the copyright thing.
If there’s no mistake in this quick summary, please let me think about whether Oracle would be happy.
Now, I do support open source, but software making pays my bills and my lovely car. I wonder where the greediness of people will stop? What prevented those people, who are now so willing to put efforts into LibreOffice, from contributing to OpenOffice? Why hasn’t IBM joined Sun to make OpenOffice faster, especially the launch time and the reaction time in the menus? The governing board (if such a thing exists for large projects like OOo) could have been hijacked by contributors, whether corporate or not. Why hasn’t that happened? And now I read that there had been a previous fork named Go-OO? God, why are we so inclined to dispersing efforts here and there and over there?
There is a very good reason to fork OpenOffice, and it’s definitely not the company whose name and logo must appear in the copyright notice and splash screen, it’s the damn UI! LibreOffice should have started there.
You were going great until you got to “ask Oracle to relinquish the copyright thing”.
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?443083
“donating the OpenOffice brand” is not “relinquishing copyright”.
Relinquishing trademark, yes OK, it is that, and I agree with you that asking that of Oracle is perhaps a little cheeky … but this is not an act of “relinquishing copyright”.
Awarding permission for others to use your code is not relinquishing copyright to that code.
To relinquish copyrights you would have to put your code in the public domain. Once it is in the public domain, no-one has copyrights over it.
Edited 2010-09-29 11:01 UTC
LibreOffice has been able to fork. As IBM did before, and, as I read on this topic, Go-OO. So the permission (you wrote “Awarding permission for others to use your code …”) is already there.
Hence, my surprise as to “Oracle has also been invited to support The Document Foundation, for instance by donating the OpenOffice brand”; in the light of what you’ve just explained in you last post and that I quoted above, there’s even more gumption to it than I previously thought. Why does TDF also want the OpenOffice brand since the “(c) Oracle” will stay in any (am I correct here?) OpenOffice derived product until Oracle transfers the copyright in writing?
Even before that question, what is “[Oracle] donating the OpenOffice brand” supposed to mean? Does it mean putting “OpenOffice”, the trademark, in the public domain? If so (and also in any case), what difference would it make that OpenOffice falls in public domain in regard to the fact that it’s already fork-able, modify-able and download-able at will?
Or, which appears even more twisted to me, LibreOffice will change its name and be called OpenOffice?
Or (more reasonable I think), as you put it in one previous post of yours you gave the link to, transferring the copyrights to the new code modifications/additions to the foundation ? In this very case, why does the foundation need Oracle’s good will when the foundation has forked the project? Doesn’t the fork mean that all mods are automatically copyrighted to the “forker”?
As one can see, I don’t understand the implications of a company donating a brand name to a non-profit organization.
Anyway, LibreOffice and TDF, change the UI first and continue the good job that’s been done in the recent releases shortening the startup time.
A “brand” comes under trademark law (not copyright law). Oracle owns the OpenOffice.org brand.
http://marketing.openoffice.org/brand/
http://www.openoffice.org/trademark/brandrefresh.html
Mozilla, for example, will only allow people to use the name “Firefox” if they ship Mozilla’s code.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Firefox_3.5_logo.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mozilla_Firefox_wordmark.svg
Debian doesn’t ship Mozilla’s code exactly, Debian modifies it a little. Hence Debian is not allowed, by Mozilla, to call it “Firefox”.
http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/iceweasel.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_rebranded…
http://wiki.debian.org/Iceweasel
So Debian’s Iceweasel browser isn’t called Firefox, but it is almost identical to Firefox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iceweasel307.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iceweasel-icon.svg
You will note that iceweasel has nowhere near the same level of brand recognition that Firefox does.
OK, that is trademark law. It is all about the name, the brand, what you call something.
It is quite possible to allow people to use your code but refuse to let them use your “brand”.
Ergo, Oracle are under no obligation whatsoever to allow the LibreOffice co-operative (aka The Document Foundation) to use the OpenOffice.org name.
If Oracle decide they want to keep OpenOffice.org as a product, and keep the name exclusive to them, then we will have a fork, and LibreOffice and OpenOffice will slowly diverge to become two different programs. Effort will be duplicated.
If Oracle decide they want to allow the LibreOffice co-operative (The Document Foundation) to use the OpenOffice.org name, then there is no fork, OpenOffice.org continues as one product, Oracle have effectively joined the co-operative (aka The Document Foundation), and OpenOffice.org suddenly has significantly larger community, a whole heap more manpower, help and financial backing.
It all depends on what Oracle want to do, but this is not in any sense a theft of OpenOffice (just as Iceweasel is not a theft of Firefox) … either way there are pluses and minuses, choices and consequences, swings and roundabouts, benefits and penalties to be had by Oracle.
The choice is up to them.
Edited 2010-09-29 13:33 UTC
If it works with mingw with a ./configure and no psdk on windows it is fine with me.
The vast majority of the press says that it was a voluntary decision by the open office developers.
It most certainly was not. Oracle cut them off and told them to hit the road.