Thursday, December 2, 2010

A Fork In The Open Office Road

The open-source office productivity suite space has gotten turbulent since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems and thus rights associated with the free OpenOffice.org suite. First, several OpenOffice.org developers broke ties to form The Document Foundation and release the LibreOffice productivity suite, reportedly downloaded 80,000 times in its first week. Oracle, which sells a paid OpenOffice version, later stated it will continue “investing substantial resources in OpenOffice.org” and “continue developing, improving, and supporting OpenOffice.org as open source.” TDF took this to mean that “Oracle has no immediate plans to support” TDF or “transfer community assets such as the OpenOffice.org trademark” to TDF, adding that it hoped Oracle would change its tune when it “sees the volunteer community—an essential component of OpenOffice’s past success—swing its support behind the new Foundation.” In late October, however, several TDF members were asked to vacate their OOo Community Council seats due to conflict of interest, with several doing just that via email.

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