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OpenOffice 'coup' wrestles control from Oracle

Mat Bettinson

by Mat Bettinson
Wednesday, September 29th 2010 at 9:43AM

OpenOffice 'coup' wrestles control from Oracle

Much of  Open Office development community have split from the Oracle project and forked the office software under the new name of LibreOffice.

Oracle owns the OpenOffice.org brand which it acquired when Oracle bought the open source loving Sun. Since then Oracle has shown rather less interest in open source development which promted the community to creating the Document Foundation and fork a new branch of the software.

"After ten years' successful growth with Sun Microsystems as founding and principal sponsor, the project launches an independent foundation called The Document Foundation", to fulfill the promise of independence written in the original charter," wrote the Document Foundation in a release.

The Document Foundation is backed by Google, Canonical, Novell and Red Hat and it has asked Oracle to join the new foundation and donate the domain OPenOffice.org. The move follows Oracle announcing it would stop working on the Open Solaris in order to concentrate on the company's proprietary commercial version.

The development has been described a 'coup' that effectively wrestles control over the free office suite away Oracle. The mission statement of the Documentation Foundation said that "An independent Foundation is a better match to the values of our contributors, users, and supporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient, transparent, and inclusive Community."

Some of the former Open Office developers were pessemistic that Oracle would take part while others hoped that code contributors that worked for Oracle would still be able to constribute.

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Tags: Linux, Google, sun, oracle, open source, openoffice

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