libreoffice, good news or bad news

[der.hans]

Am 28. Sep, 2010 schwätzte Brian Cluff so:

> I just recieved this press release view the openoffice announce mailing list.
>
> http://www.documentfoundation.org/contact/tdf_release.html
>
> After reading it, I don't really get whats going on.  Is Openoffice.org yet 
> another project that Oracle has dropped the ball on leaving people to try and 
> save the project via other means?

It looks like the fork that's been needing to happen for years.

OOo developers had to assign copyright to Sun so Sun could use it in
StarOffice. The legal documents from Sun were ugly. Essentially, there
were barriers to entry for the Free Software community to get involved
with the OOo project.

I read this press release as meaning some of the core community behind
OOo is forking into The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. They're
asking Oracle to join and assign rights to the OOo name to The Document
Foundation.

Looks like The Document Foundation haѕ the support of Red Hat, Canonical,
Novell, GNOME and Google, so this is a fork and leadership group with
acceptance.

> Does this mean that the funding that Sun was previously putting into the 
> project is now gone, and it's all down to volunteers to improve libreoffice.

Don't know about funding from Oracle, but I think the fork will be more
open to funding from other companies and more likely to get it.

More importantly, it'll certainly be more open to developers and community
involvement.

ciao,

der.hans
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