Thursday, September 30

OpenOffice.org being replaced by LibreOffice

The arrogance of Oracle has more than just annoyed people.

The actions of Oracle: in ignoring their responsibilities to OpenSolaris, and casually shutting down the SPARC servers used for testing PostgreSQL without prior warning - sent a clear message that Oracle was not to be trusted to be in charge of any Open Source project.

Not to mention Oracle suing Google over their alleged misuse of Oracle's Java patents (I think Oracle is legally justified, but an action that will backfire, as it has done tremendous damage to people's willingness to use Java for future developments).

So a large number of companies, including Red Hat (who sponsor the free Fedora Linux distribution) and Google, have bandied together to set up a foundation to support the independent development of the 'OpenOffice.org' code base under the banner 'LibreOffice'.

While Oracle has been invited to join the new foundation, I suspect that Larry's ego is too big to allow it (I hope I am wrong!).

Note that LibreOffice is for all the main operating systems, not just for Linux distributions.

OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation
[...]
Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years. Pending this decision, the brand "LibreOffice" has been chosen for the software going forward.

The Document Foundation is the result of a collective effort by leading independent members of the former OpenOffice.org community, including several project leads and key members of the Community Council. It will be led initially by a Steering Committee of developers and national language projects managers. The Foundation aims to lower the barrier of adoption for both users and developers, to make LibreOffice the most accessible office suite ever.

The Foundation will coordinate and oversee the development of LibreOffice, which is available in beta version at the placeholder site: http://www.libreoffice.org. Developers are invited to join the project and contribute to the code in the new friendly and open environment, to shape the future of office productivity suites alongside contributors who translate, test, document, support, and promote the software.
[...]


Charles-H. Schultz of The Document Foundation Answers my Questions About LibreOffice
[...]
Update: H Online is reporting that "The major distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE, will ship with LibreOffice in preference to OpenOffice."
[...]

JavaOne was fun...
[...]
One of the more entertaining lines I heard was at a cocktail party held by some 3rd party partners. "We love the Oracle sales force!" (what?? surprised look on my face) "They're so nasty, their prices are so high, and their tactics so obnoxious that all we have to do is be credible and treat the customer with respect - then the deal is ours!". Yow.
[...]

No comments:

Post a Comment