Given all the recent uncertainty about Open Office since the Oracle take over.
A new organisation to known as The Document Foundation http://www.documentfoundation.org/ has been started by some of the leading lights from the Open Office community and Open office has been forked to become Libre Office.
A number of leading distros makers such as Canonical, Novell and Google have already sponsored the project.
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Technically, it doesn’t "become" Libre Office. It FORKS to Libre Office. In the open source world, teams are known to fork projects…
X.org is a fork form Xfree86
Firefox is a fork from Mozilla
Drizzle and MariaDB are forks from MySQL
Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Linux kernel is a fork from Red Hat’s kernel
Open Office had previously been forked a few times, one of the most known being NeoOffice which aimed to provide a MacOS specifically adapted version… and that project was OK for a few years… it’s running out of breath these days.
But Libre Office… they have a very good team for them. Will it succeede? Who knows. Oracle still owns the vast majority of the IP. The license enables forks. But the code remains copyright Oracle, and the large volume of contributions to the project is still Oracle (nobody has as many resources on Open Office on the planet as Oracle).
So let’s see. The big question is what is Libre Office’s agenda? Are they really trying to make their own successfull, long term, distro? Or are they just trying to get Oracle to move in one way or another.
Time will tell.
Gilles.
Does this mean we are also back to FLOSS?
— In general, my opinions, based on my experience and not a reflection on my employer or any other groups I am associated with *unless explicitly mentioned*.
We were never off FLOSS in many people’s eyes. The reason to call it Libre Office is that Oracle owns the OOo trademark. I had to get their permission to use OpenOffice.org on ITQ certificates for the new certification project. Oracle could still back the Foundation although probably unlikely. Mainly the resources Oracle is putting in seem to be dwindling and collectively Red Hat, Google, Canonical, Novel, IBM and the smaller community members can probably at least match it especially with fund raising initiatives. We will be creating a certification project that could easily fund the current input of engineers from Oracle. With a foundation merchandising is easier. The Foundation can bid for EU grants etc
My understanding is that Oracle have now spoken about the foundation and said what amounts to "good luck with that" they are not going to help the foundation in any way, but don’t have any legal means to stop it (and I bet they looked for one). They are going to continue with OpenOffice.org and hope to keep the Windows share of the market, I think they have already lost all the Linux distros at a minimum. Maybe they will both carry on and grow and diverge, occasionally swapping cool new features as permitted under their licenses. Maybe one or the other will run out of developers, it is just about possible that LibreOffice will end up not bothering to build for Windows if none of the developers use it. In the medium term both will exist, both will build on all platforms, LibreOffice will be the fork going into the Linux Distributions so within 12 months or so will be the most common one on Linux desktops after an Ubuntu and Fedora release. Quite when LibreOffice overtakes OpenOffice.org on Windows is less clear, it all depends on what, if anything, Oracle do with it.