Slashdot Mirror
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."
Some of the supporters: FSF, Google, Novell, Red Hat, and Canonical.
When those guys are with you - it'll happen. My only question is if OpenOffice will become LibreOffice next month with the new releases of Ubuntu, OpenSUSE & Fedora or if it'll wait until spring?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Q: Why are you building a new web infrastructure?
A: Since Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems, the Community has been under "notice to quit" from our previous Collabnet infrastructure. With today's announcement of a Foundation, we now have an entity which can own our emerging new infrastructure.
Basically Oracle told them their lease was up. Yea Oracle! I didn't already have enough reasons to loathe thee.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
There are more people using OpenOffice than what you may think. Just a small example: OpenOffice Tops 21% Market Share In Germany
May I suggest: Liberty Office Suite as a new name.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Tensions between the open source community and Oracle, a big proprietary software company, can hardly be called infighting in the OSS community.
I disagree. Like it or not, Oracle is part of the OSS community. A huge portion of the development done on OSS is done by employees of big companies, most of which also write proprietary, closed source software. Apple, Google, IBM, Nokia, HP... well you get the point. Basically, Oracle dumps enough money and human resources into improving Linux and the userspace that they've earned the title of OSS community contributor.
That doesn't mean they and other companies don't do lots of things counter to the interests of the OSS community in general, when it helps their bottom line; or that this is anything new. It just means maybe you should revise your view of what the OSS community is to be a little more realistic and a little less black and white. Sure there are long haired, bearded hippies working for free in their spare time to make the world a better place. There are also a crapload of on the clock developers getting a paycheck to work on OSS projects used by their corporation to create salable products and services. They're all part of the community.