Oracle To Give OpenOffice.org To Apache Incubator

Julie188 writes "Oracle has finally officially spilled the beans: It's proposing OpenOffice.org as an Apache Incubator project — and not handing it to The Document Foundation. Oracle had announced earlier this year that it would be passing the torch to the community, but failed to provide any specifics about the ultimate destination. The Document Foundation is the organization behind the OpenOffice fork, LibreOffice."

Choices are good, but...

[Bloodwine77]

I wish OpenOffice and LibreOffice would un-fork and all the brain power stay behind one unified product.

I know Oracle is sketchy so I understand the fork, but if Oracle is trying to offload OpenOffice back to the open source community it would be nice to put politics aside.

Am I missing some underhanded scheme by Oracle that keeps their foot in the door on causing legal or support issues down the road?

Good, now make two versions

[G3ckoG33k]

Good, now make two versions, one International version and one US version.

The international version should be the gold version, with the US version a crippled version which honors all the software patent follies going on in the US.

The rest of the world should just ignore their sissy talk.

Let us hope that Apache don't respect US software patents outside the US.

Interesting move

[MAXOMENOS]

What are the odds that the Document Foundation will voluntarily merge with the Apache Foundation? Is there a licensing issue that might prevent this?

Re:Interesting move

[Migala77]

The article has a reaction from The Document Foundation, and it looks like they are not interested in reuniting; they don't like the Apache license, but say they may change LibreOffice licensing to MPL or LGPL (now that they can thanks to the new Apache license).

Re:Interesting move

[dkleinsc]

That suggests an even better solution:
1. Apache takes OpenOffice off of Oracle's hands.
2. Apache says, "Hey, Document Foundation, you want this? We'll even give you the name back."
3. Document Foundation says "Great, we never really liked 'Libre' anyways," merges anything useful that was added pre-fork and switches back to OpenOffice branding.
4. Users and developers are all happy, because they have all the LibreOffice features, but are back to an easily recognizable, pronounceable, and established name.

There's no way for Oracle to win this round, that's for sure.