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."

Comments

Re:It's all in the name

[Anonymous Coward]

Tensions between the open source community and Oracle, a big proprietary software company, can hardly be called infighting in the OSS community.

Re:It's all in the name

[desertrat_it]

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.

The 63 k question && answer from the FAQ

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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.

Re:It's all in the name

[rrossman2]

Sure we do! It's that Zodiak symbol between Virgo and Scorpio, right?

Re:Awesome News for Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

# apt-get install ms-office
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package ms-office

Re:Laudable goal, but can it work?

[loftwyr]

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.

Re:Weird sounding name

[Culture20]

More importantly, by choosing a name that lots of English speakers won't even know how to pronounce, they've isolated themselves even more. They'd have done better if they'd chosen an abstract name like "Firefox" or "Apache."

Lee Bray Office? Sounds like an evangelical preacher's fundraising department.

Make the mascot a Zebra, and the English speakers will suddenly pick up on it.

"I have to finish my book report by tomorrow, but I've only got the files, no Microsoft Word."
"Here, I know where to get a cracked copy."
"Stop right there, children!"
(together)"Wow! It's the Libre Zebra!"
"That's right, and I'm here to tell you about LibreOffice, a free office suite that promotes the gnu values of liberty, justice, and apple pie!"
(together)"Thanks, Libre Zebra!"

Re:It's all in the name

[Junior J. Junior III]

Yeah, really. It was either this, or see the project get scrapped and a new, proprietary "OracleOffice.org" get released a few weeks later. I'm glad to see open source resisting becoming assimilated and crushed because a major backer got acquired.

Re:It's all in the name

[Sir_Lewk]

Well it's not really that I like or use it (I'm a latex guy...), but I enjoyed being able to put "experience in Oracle's OpenOffice.org" on my resume. Helps get it past HR goons who only grep for a few words. ;)

Re:Awesome News for Microsoft

[diegocg]

There are more people using OpenOffice than what you may think. Just a small example: OpenOffice Tops 21% Market Share In Germany

Re:MOOo

[nyctopterus]

I've got one:

"OpenOffice.org/index.html"

Catchy!

Re:It's all in the name

[kmankmankman2001]

Well it's not really that I like or use it (I'm a latex guy...), but I enjoyed being able to put "experience in Oracle's OpenOffice.org" on my resume. Helps get it past HR goons who only grep for a few words. ;)

Well you can still probably garner a lot of attention by just putting "I'm a latex guy" on your resume. :)