OpenOffice.org Declares Independence From Oracle, Becomes LibreOffice 648
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."
Re:It's all in the name (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Why the new name? (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, OpenOffice trademark is owned by Oracle.
Oracle own the OpenOffice.org trademark (not OpenOffice), OpenOffice.org is OpenOffice,org because another group already owned the OpenOffice trademark.
http://www.openoffice.org/about_us/summary.html
Re:It's all in the name (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Laudable goal, but can it work? (Score:5, Informative)
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:Laudable goal, but can it work? (Score:3, Informative)
There are two enormous reasons OpenOffice has always failed to attract developers outside from Sun:
- Copyright assignment: if you don't assign all copyright of your code to Sun, then it cannot be in OpenOffice.
- Bureaucratic obstruction: Sun's QA had to validate your code through a lengthy process before you could even think about it being accepted.
In short, Sun managed OpenOffice's development the same way any proprietary software's development would have been managed. Is it really surprising then, that Sun failed to attract outside developers?
Re:Why do open source projects pick stupid names? (Score:4, Informative)
it is also spanish... which a significant amount of 'the population' (i assume you mean you americans) do speak.
(also, get over yourself, encountering a single word which isnt in the american dictionary is no reason to panic)
Re:Fold Go-oo back in, please. - already done (Score:5, Informative)
From the FAQ [documentfoundation.org]:
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
Re:Why do open source projects pick stupid names? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why do open source projects pick stupid names? (Score:3, Informative)
Only if you speak US English (Score:2, Informative)
Make the mascot a Zebra, and the English speakers will suddenly pick up on it.
Only the North American manglers of the English language will. (maybe)
I for one don't say Zeeeeeeebra.
Re: Laudable goal, but can it work? Yes it can!! (Score:4, Informative)
As far as I remember, one of the problems OpenOffice always had was that most of the developers were paid developers inside Sun who worked on OpenOffice full-time. I thought the code was kind of a mess and hard to decipher for anyone outside, so the project always fought for more volunteers, but could not get many. Has this changed?
It has been hard for anyone "outside" to contribute a long time, but for other reasons. Great patches have long been rejected upstream for no reason. If you look at http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/ [documentfoundation.org] you see that "We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit. ". This is a big and very important change of attitude. We can at minimum expect that all the currently available patches who are available but have been ignored by "OpenOffice.org" will be added to LibreOffice, and I hope and suspect more developers will contribute now that they can.
Re:Laudable goal, but can it work? (Score:2, Informative)
The go-oo merge has already been confirmed [documentfoundation.org]:
We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately
Re:Laudable goal, but can it work? (Score:4, Informative)
From their FAQ ( http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/ [documentfoundation.org] ):
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
Re:It's all in the name (Score:3, Informative)
Bell Atlantic to Verizon to quote a more well known example.
Re:It's all in the name (Score:4, Informative)
OpenOffice.org is trademarked, which is now owned by Oracle. Making the name OpenOffice could easily be crushed by Oracle if they chose to. Giving it a new name, however, would make it a lot harder for Oracle to get in the way of this move.
Re:Weird sounding name (Score:2, Informative)
Leebray Zeebray? I don't get it.
It works if you pronounce it French-style instead of Spanish-style. Lee-BRUH, not Lee-BRAY. (Do Zebras bray?)
-Gareth
Re:What about Open Office (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's all in the name (Score:3, Informative)
It has been steadily getting better since 2.4 and most importantly getting faster, not slower (as is the case with MS Office). I would not even try to run 2007 on a netbook while OO runs perfectly fine on anything down to around 400MHz.
The problem with it is that import/export filters still suck bricks through a straw sidewise.
If you want to keep your docs in its original format and produce PDFs and distribute finished docs as PDFs it has long been on par with MSFT office. If you are using low spec machines it has long exceeded it.
Re:It's all in the name (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's all in the name (Score:2, Informative)
From Groklaw:
"LibreOffice is being welcomed by Red Hat, Canonical, Google, and Novell, among others, and by both FSF and OSI."
They will not lack for resources with that backing.
Re:Awesome News for Microsoft (Score:2, Informative)
Z:\> apt-get install ms-office
'apt-get' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
Re:It's all in the name (Score:2, Informative)
And the reason it was named OpenOffice.org in the first place was because OpenOffice is/was already trademarked : http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-other.html#7
- Peder
Re:Why do open source projects pick stupid names? (Score:1, Informative)
I am not from USA. French and Spanish has been useless in the last four countries I have been living in.
English is the only language I could use in all of these areas on a daily basis: Scandinavia, South-East Asia, Australia, and the Middle East.
Most of the people I communicate with in English are Indians, Arabs, Pakistanis, Chinese, Filipinos, and so on.
Re:The 63 k question && answer from the FA (Score:2, Informative)
We use Solaris for its ZFS, as no one else has continuous integrity checking in a production-grade filesystem; for hundreds of terabytes, we don't feel comfortable with any other filesystem. FreeBSD is coming close, but ACL support is still very lacking.
Re:It's all in the name (Score:3, Informative)
You should at least attribute that quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org [wikipedia.org]
Re:Death-- or revival? (Score:3, Informative)
Wasn't the whole point of Go-OO fork being a fork that copyright assignment was required for merging it upstream?
From their FAQ [documentfoundation.org] (emphasis mine):
So I'm guessing that was a Sun or Oracle requirement, probably Sun since they also had Star Office under a Commercial License so they probably wanted the copyright assignment so they could do Star Office, where as the Document Foundation seems to be set up so as not to have any kind of commercial offering, more like Mozilla; also from the FAQ [documentfoundation.org] (emphasis mine):
So it looks like that should not longer be a concern, and if that was the only reason for Go-OO then there is no longer a reason for Go-OO to remain. However, I doubt that was the only reason (don't know, just my thought).