How Openoffice.org Became Libreoffice

[loramchugh 0]

After Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in 2010, it inherited the OpenOffice.org project. Knowing that Oracle had no real interest in maintaining a free office productivity suite, the OpenOffice team became worried, so they forked OpenOffice.org (in other words, they created a new copy of the source code) to a new project they called LibreOffice, and they started maintaining both OpenOffice and LibreOffice in parallel.When Oracle got wind of this, it gave the OpenOffice developers an ultimatum: the OpenOffice team was to focus their efforts on OpenOffice and remain employed at Oracle, or leave and work on LibreOffice on their own. Almost everyone on the OpenOffice team left to work on LibreOffice on their own. They were funded by user donations and corporate contributions from companies like IBM, Google, and Novell.Soon after, with a shortage of developers to work on the OpenOffice project, Oracle decided to get rid of OpenOffice. At this point, it would have been nice if Oracle had given the OpenOffice trademark to the LibreOffice team, because OpenOffice still had name recognition, but perhaps to spite its former employees, Oracle gave the trademark and code to a competing free software development organization -- the Apache Software Foundation. But OpenOffice had been stagnant for some time before Apache resumed its development. So now OpenOffice has a lot of catching up to do to reach the level that LibreOffice has reached, in terms of added compatibility, performance improvements, bug fixes, and other improvements.

[iGuest 3]

I believe Oracle's main interest for the takeover was to get hold of Java, so OpenOffice was not really a big concern for them. It was good that OpenOffice was forked to LibreOffice even though a lot of the code from OpenOffice remains the same. I am not sure how Apache has helped OpenOffice as since all the changes, etc. I moved away from OpenOffice and stuck with LibreOffice.Most of the information for OpenOffice still applies for LibreOffice. It's quite difficult finding out how to go about developing for LibreOffice, while OpenOffice has a lot more information on the subject. It's usually interchangable as the differences maybe only relate to certain API calls.Cheers,MC

[loramchugh 0]

Java was icing on the cake for Oracle. What they really wanted was the hardware. The company can now make its own hardware and stand up against the two big boys: IBM and HP.

Edited February 25, 2013 by loramchugh (see edit history)

[iGuest 3]

Oracle had been making hardware before the take over and were more known for their software. They even closed one of SUN's manufacturing plants. To stand up against IBM, HP and even Dell. I think that's crazy but I wish them good luck though I don't really have a problem with any of these giants, just hope they continue to do well and not get taken over.Oracle would be focusing a lot on Java as an important tool for getting into more smart devices. Currently Java runs on multiple things, even DVD players. So, the opportunities are endless.Another advantage is that they have MySQL now, as they was also owned by SUN Microsystem at the time, which could play a vital key to their own database.Cheers,MC