Oracle gives up on OpenOffice after community forks the project

Posted by Gary Keorkunian | Monday, April 18th, 2011
Posted in Free Software | comments">1 Comment »

by Ryan Paul | Ars Technica | April 18, 2011

In a statement issued on Friday, Oracle announced that it intends to discontinue commercial development of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The move comes several months after key members of the OOo community and a number of major corporate contributors forked OOo to create a vendor-neutral alternative.

OOo is one of many open source software projects that Oracle obtained in its acquisition of Sun. OOo has long been plagued by governance issues and friction between its corporate stakeholders. Sun’s copyright assignment policies and bureaucratic code review process significantly hindered community participation in the project. Oracle declined to address these issues after its acquisition of Sun and exacerbated the friction by failing to engage with the OOo community in a transparent and open way.

A group of prominent OOo contributors eventually decided to fork the project, creating an alternative called LibreOffice. They founded a nonprofit organization called The Document Foundation (TDF) in order to create a truly vendor-neutral governance body for the software. LibreOffice is based on the OOo source code, but it also incorporates a large number of other improvements driven by its own developer community.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2011 at 9:58 am and is filed under Free Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

http://www.maricopaminutes.com Scott Hamm

That may be a good thing. I’ve tried the OOo suite and I was not impressed. It’s a good start, but still in its infancy. Thanks for the post. I might check out the forked version.