OpenOffice is now LibreOffice

[Anupam]

The developers of OpenOffice were not happy it seems since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems earlier this year. So, now they have set up their own foundation, and will carry on the development of OpenOffice.

The OpenOffice project is now called the The Document Foundation, with their website here :

http://www.documentfoundation.org/

And OpenOffice is temporarily called LibreOffice, because the rights to the name belong to Oracle presently.

Details on this on Ghacks article :

http://www.ghacks.net/2010/09/29/xma...office-revolt/

This is the press release of The Document Foundation :

http://www.documentfoundation.org/co...f_release.html

I think this is a superb move to keep a product free and independent, which has been there for so long.

[George]

Nice one. I wonder why Oracle had rights to the name but not to the product.

Anyways, isn't it cool the they said to Oracle "Go to hell" and with the same breath "Come join our Foundation!"?

[Jojoyee]

Just like Ubuntu can be seen as a fork of Debian, it looks like LibreOffice is going to be an OpenOffice fork... hmm... it is not...yet.

My expectation is that Oracle will quietly let OpenOffice gather dust, and LibreOffice will become the new open-source office suite of choice.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/17058...ffice_fork_yet

I hope that the LibreOffice developers and the Oracle-employed developers of OpenOffice will be able to cooperate on development of the body of the code".

http://www.documentfoundation.org/co...f_release.html

[Anupam]

LibreOffice is OpenOffice at this point of time, and not a fork yet. Just the name is changed presently.

Another good news is that features of Go-oo office, which is an OpenOffice fork, will be incorporated in the new version of LibreOffice, which is in beta right now. Go-oo Office has done many good enhancements to original OpenOffice... but these were earlier rejected by Sun, and so Go-oo was born. But now that The Document Foundation has been formed... the features will be included in LibreOffice.

[Jojoyee]

Wiki has created a page for this development and mentions that info may change rapidly as the event progresses.

In its current page at the moment, it says the Foundation was created by members of the OpenOffice.org community to manage and develop a fork called LibreOffice.

"Oracle was invited to become a member of the Document Foundation, and asked to donate the OpenOffice.org brand to the project."
Hmm... do you think they will donate it, or just keep the brand to themselves for further development?

"The organisation received support from the Open Office community including the companies Novell, RedHat, Canonical and Google. The goal is to produce a vendor-independent office suite with ODF support and without any copyright assignment requirements."
Ahhh... looks like the next release of Ubuntu will definitely replace OpenOffice with LibreOffice.

Further noted that in the LibreOffice beta release notes, which says "The current LibreOffice beta replaces any existing OpenOffice.org installation on Windows. Installations should co-exist in the future."
Huh... does the last sentence look interesting...

[Anupam]

The Document Foundation has been formed by the developers of OpenOffice who wanted the development of OpenOffice to be independent. Reading the articles, I don't believe that Oracle will continue with the development of OpenOffice, and as such, should give the title of OpenOffice to The Document Foundation. But, if they do not give the title, then OpenOffice will start to develop as a fork with the name of LibreOffice by The Document Foundation.

If Oracle decide to keep the name of OpenOffice, and go ahead with future development, then they will develop future versions of OpenOffice, and as such, LibreOffice and OpenOffice will become two different brands and can then co-exist on the same computer. This is what they meant by their statement on the beta page.

As OpenOffice is now LibreOffice, being developed by an independent community, its the one which will remain free as before.. so naturally the other open source communities like Linux will support it.

I have myself removed setup of OpenOffice from my computer, and I will wait for final version of LibreOffice to be released, which should be by the end of this year.

[Jojoyee]

Originally Posted by Anupam

The Document Foundation has been formed by the developers of OpenOffice who wanted the development of OpenOffice to be independent. Reading the articles, I don't believe that Oracle will continue with the development of OpenOffice, and as such, should give the title of OpenOffice to The Document Foundation. But, if they do not give the title, then OpenOffice will start to develop as a fork with the name of LibreOffice by The Document Foundation.

If Oracle decide to keep the name of OpenOffice, and go ahead with future development, then they will develop future versions of OpenOffice, and as such, LibreOffice and OpenOffice will become two different brands and can then co-exist on the same computer. This is what they meant by their statement on the beta page.

As OpenOffice is now LibreOffice, being developed by an independent community, its the one which will remain free as before.. so naturally the other open source communities like Linux will support it.

That's a good summary, Anupam.

[mrpink]

I hope they will offer a portable version when the final build comes out. And a greek language pack too!

[Ritho]

Here is more background on Oracle and why LibreOffice forked and others may do the same.

http://ostatic.com/blog/what-if-you-...nd-nobody-came

[mrpink]

If anyone's interested about a portable version of LibreOffice
here is a pre-release