28 September 2010

LibreOffice: OOo without Oracle

The OpenOffice public domain community has separated itself from its Oracle head. The body will walk on as The Document Foundation.
Back in the previous millenium Sun Microystems bought a German office suit, called StarOffice, running on Unix as well as Windows.
Sun rebranded the product to OpenOffice and made it a free, public domain competitor for MS Office.
OpenOffice came under the stewardship of Oracle, when it acquired Sun.
Oracle's decision to charge for a previously free MSOffice plugin, that allows it to read the Open Document Format (ODF), created a lot of irritation in the public domain community.
Meanwhile Oracle is continuing work on, Oracle Cloud Office, based on JavaFX technology. Remark that it  does not have the Open word in its name.
Recently Oracle closed up Sun's OpenSolaris OS. In response a community project, OpenIndiana, was created.
In a preemtive strike, the community (FSF, Oasis, Google, Novell, Red Hat, Gnome...)  now has declared it's independance of Oracle. Because Oracle holds the trademark, the suite has been rebranded to LibreOffice.

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