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OpenOffice.org Declares Independence From Oracle, Becomes LibreOffice
Google85 writes "The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company. From now on, OpenOffice's development and direction will be decided by a steering committee of developers and national language project managers. Driving home the changes, the OpenOffice.org project is now The Document Foundation, while the OpenOffice.org suite has been given the temporary name of LibreOffice."
You're kind of... wrong.
It's taking a vitally important piece of software out of the hands of a commercial company which has not shown a great deal of respect for the principles of free, libre, open source software.
If you RFTA, it states that they have asked Oracle to donate the OpenOffice.org name to the project. Oracle's response to this request will really define Oracle's relationship with the FLOSS community.
That's exactly what TFA says they've done. Actually, they even invited Oracle to join the new community and donate the OpenOffice.org name.
A large number of Sun developers worked on OOo but there was also a large number of other devs willing to work that couldnt' get their patches committed. That's why go-oo.org was created with a huge patchset. Sun had a large "not invented here" mindset that stopped a lot of open source devs from continuing to work on it.
Now that OOo is LibreOffice, perhaps the huge go-oo patchset can be committed and the unofficial "not-a-fork" can end.
I'm looking forward to all the new features and such that will be able to be added.
There are two enormous reasons OpenOffice has always failed to attract developers outside from Sun:
- Copyright assignment: if you don't assign all copyright of your code to Sun, then it cannot be in OpenOffice.
- Bureaucratic obstruction: Sun's QA had to validate your code through a lengthy process before you could even think about it being accepted.
In short, Sun managed OpenOffice's development the same way any proprietary software's development would have been managed. Is it really surprising then, that Sun failed to attract outside developers?
it is also spanish... which a significant amount of 'the population' (i assume you mean you americans) do speak.
(also, get over yourself, encountering a single word which isnt in the american dictionary is no reason to panic)
People, what a bunch of bastards
From the FAQ:
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
That's why they say "temporary". They realize it's important, so they want to get it right and take their time (and possibly even involve some savvy people from the community). So what are you complaining about? OK, this is slashdot, so it's not cool to RTFA. However, not even reading the summary? That's taking it too far, dude (or duderette)...
As far as I remember, one of the problems OpenOffice always had was that most of the developers were paid developers inside Sun who worked on OpenOffice full-time. I thought the code was kind of a mess and hard to decipher for anyone outside, so the project always fought for more volunteers, but could not get many. Has this changed?
It has been hard for anyone "outside" to contribute a long time, but for other reasons. Great patches have long been rejected upstream for no reason. If you look at http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/ you see that "We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit. ". This is a big and very important change of attitude. We can at minimum expect that all the currently available patches who are available but have been ignored by "OpenOffice.org" will be added to LibreOffice, and I hope and suspect more developers will contribute now that they can.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
From their FAQ ( http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/ ):
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
OpenOffice.org is trademarked, which is now owned by Oracle. Making the name OpenOffice could easily be crushed by Oracle if they chose to. Giving it a new name, however, would make it a lot harder for Oracle to get in the way of this move.
Remember to maintain your supply of