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OpenOffice.org To Be Given Back To the Community
An anonymous reader writes "Oracle has stated they will give back the OpenOffice.org productivity suite to the community. Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect, said the company intends upon 'working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office.' Because there was a 'breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications,' the company believes the OpenOffice.org project would be 'best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis.'"
I have already uninstalled and deployed LibreOffice across our 500 client org.
I will not keep bouncing about.
We now fully back LibreOffice and will continue to do so. We will not backtrack back to OO until the next time Oracle change their mind.
Bye Bye Oracle.
Does it mean we can rename LibreOffice to OpenOffice now? Or are the two forks going to continue separate lines of development?
Actually, more like "wah! guys! please come back! we promise we won't spite the community!"
This doesn't mean shit unless they change the bylaws which give oracle complete control over openoffice with the ability to nullify the community basically.
Heh, no kidding. Every time I see it in dselect (shut up, I'm old), I think "What's lib reoffice, oh wait, that's libre office".
-l
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The first thing I though when I installed it was: woah, these icons look awesome!
Lo and behold, for I am a sig!
the story before this one was "Students Build Life-Sized Trojan Horse For Class Project"
Oracle (and Sun before them) were, prior to the fork that created LibreOffice, able to prevent the additional features that were in their commercial Ooo derivative from being added to Ooo itself and thus had a product that they could monetise. Novel sponsored GoOo and that then offered code Sun (and then Oracle) would not allow into Ooo (mostly to "protect" those additional, commercial derivative only, features) and this was what first put the skids on Oracle's continuing support of Ooo. Once LibreOffice merged the GoOo code into their Ooo fork there was no real point in Oracle attempting to sustain hope for their commercial derivative...it has simply taken them a while to acknowledge its demise. As there's now no money in it for them their "handing to the community" of Ooo means little and may well come with the existing bylaws of Ooo that will preclude a merger with the Libreoffice fork. Out of spite alone (WaaaaaI If I can't play with my ball I'll take it away so nobody can play with it.) I can't see them making a merger of the two into a possibility.
Yeah, it feels like a clingy, manipulative ex-husband. "This time I'll change", etc., etc.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I think this is more like "We really screwed up with the community, and now let's do the only thing possible to make them forget what turkeys we've been".
Bruce Perens.
Perhaps your rant applies in *your* world, but it certainly doesn't apply in mine. The company I work for has been using OpenOffice.org quite happily for years. It does everything we need to do. We've integrated it into a majority of our workflows. We've felt no loss from not having either Microsoft Office or even Windows. Yeah, we're a double conundrum. We're a long-term successful business who doesn't use Microsoft Office or Windows. And we're not even a remotely IT-related business, nor are most of our employees computer experts.
In short, I think you are completely full of it.