Who couldn’t see this one coming. Since the acquisition of Sun by Oracle many people have been critical of Oracle’s handling of its newly acquired open source portfolio. In response to the the takeover OpenOffice project leaders and many contributers jumped ship and created a fork called LibreOffice under the umbrella of a European based non-profit organisation named the Document Foundation.
According to The Document Foundation:
"We believe that the Foundation is a key step for the evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the development of the code and the evolution of the project from the constraints represented by the commercial interests of a single company."
As LibreOffice continues to pick up steam the future looks bleak OpenOffice. LibreOffice has already begun releasing new versions that deviate from the OpenOffice code base. And to add insult to injury all the major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and SUSE will move from OpenOffice to LibreOffice in their future releases.
With the lack of support for the project todays announcement by Oracle comes as no surprise.
From the Oracle press release:
"Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis," said Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect. "We intend to begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office. Oracle will continue to strongly support the adoption of open standards-based document formats, such as the Open Document Format (ODF)."
Are we seeing the end of OpenOffice? And what does this mean for the rest of the open source projects that Oracle continues to control? One thing is certain, and that is that the free/open source model effectively protects community based software projects from exploitation from corporate intrests.