Re: Openoffice.org - has it been replaced by LibreOffice?
On 18/11/11 08:43, Brad Alexander wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 5:09 AM, Scott Ferguson <
> prettyfly.productions@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 17/11/11 20:50, Brad Alexander wrote:
>>> On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 12:37 PM, Sian Mountbatten
>>> <poenikatu@operamail.com>wrote:
>>>
>>>> So what has happened to
>>>> OpenOffice.org? Who has decided that we've all got to use LibreOffice?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Pretty much, Oracle did, when they bought Sun Microsystems and left
>>> OpenOffice to languish with no support.
>>
>> Basically, Oracle alienated many of the developers, who then forked it.
>>
>
> ...as well as most of the community...
Yes.
>
>
>> > LibreOffice is a fork that is
>>> actually being developed under the GPL.
>>
>> OpenOffice.org is now part of the Apache Software Foundation (as a
>> result of the fork). I don't know if it's accurate to say it's still
>> "languishing with no support".
>>
>
> I haven't heard of continued development on OOO, which doesn't mean it
> didn't happen.
I'm probably going to regret this but....
most of the "heavy lifting" on the original OOo project was done by Sun
employees (after Sun acquired it. later IBM, RedHat, Orange, Canonical
and Google etc, also made major contributions).... that's not to say
that the LibreOffice developers aren't capable, only that previously
(with OOo) their roles were less prominent. It also means that many of
the (now unpaid) OOo developers don't have the same amount of time for
developing - and the fork left OOo with a lot less workers.
When the fork occurred the main complaint (valid) from the community
developers was that they were being excluded from decisions. They were
also asked to sign a restrictive license before contributing code to a
project they no longer had a voice in. The user community didn't trust
Oracle management to continue the support that Sun gave the project.
They were right. The truly cynical might think Oracle was deliberately
killing the project... Earlier this year Larry/Oracle pulled the plug on
development.
> The last I heard about OOO, on one of the Linux podcasts, is
> that since it is apache licensed, they LibreOffice changes can flow down
> from OpenOffice, but since LibreOffice is under the GPL3, the reverse is
> not true. I don't even pretend to grok all of the intracies of various
> licenses, but that was my understanding.
>
> --b
>
I don't know how much flows back to OpenOffice.org from LibreOffice (and
variants) - but significant work continues, however their are growing
differences between the two projects. I don't pretend to understand the
morass of licenses either.
LibreOffice is actually a continuation of a much earlier fork of OOo
(GoOo), plus the more recent forking of OOo (and the death of
StarOffice). GoOo was sort of reanimated into the OOo fork...
So you see, and I think you'll agree - it's all very simple (a mass of
squiggly lines) ;-p
Cheers
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