Document Foundation forks OpenOffice.org

[Sabre]

Article

A group of key contributors to the OpenOffice.org (OOo) project have formed a new organization called the Document Foundation to manage a community-driven fork of the popular open source office suite. Their goal is to liberate the project from Oracle's control and create a more inclusive and participatory ecosystem around the software.

OOo was originally based on StarOffice, a product that Sun obtained in its acquisition of StarDivision in 1999. Sun opened the source code and invited the open source software community to participate in the project, but sold a closed, commercial version alongside. The project received considerable attention and is among the most widely-known open source applications. Several other major companies are involved heavily in development, including Novell and IBM. It's worth noting that IBM's Lotus Symphony product is based on OOo code.

Despite the significant community enthusiasm for OOo, Sun's leadership and central role in the project have created challenges for other contributors. Critics complain that Sun's bureaucratic development process impeded progress, made it difficult to get patches merged, and discouraged some independent developers from taking a more active role. One of the most controversial issues was Sun's requirement that participants assign copyright to the company.

Some prominent contributors, like Novell's Michael Meeks, have long argued that the OOo ecosystem would be healthier and more attractive to corporate and community contributors if it was managed by an independent nonprofit foundation. Novell has maintained its own variant of the program called Go-OOo which includes a number of patches that Sun was unwilling to accept for various reasons. Several major Linux distributions ship Novell's version instead of Sun's because it offers superior desktop integration, a richer feature set, and better performance and stability.

I'm VERY happy to see this. Oracle can suck my limp d*ck for what they have done to Solaris, Java, MySQL, and OO.

[complacent]

never mind what they're threatening to do with android...

wankers.

[Mr Kleen]

the more I look around, the more reasons I have to dislike Oracle...

[Raven]

I have plenty of reasons to dislike Oracle without even having to think about their business practices.