Recently Oracle corp. acquired SUN Microsystems. Sun Microsystems was a major player in Open Source world with their products like Java programming language, Open Office – Productivity suite, Open Solaris – Operating system, etc. Oracle already buried the Open Solaris for their enterprise product Oracle Solaris and they were also planning to shut down the OpenOffice.org. Even the Java creator James Gosling left oracle for many of such reasons. Gosling didn’t give any reason for his departure and he left company many days before all such Oracles’ actions.
You also must be knowing that Google sued by Oracle over Android operating system. Oracle says Google infringed patents on its Java software while developing its Android operating system
For all such reasons, The OpenOffice.org has been forked under the name of LibreOffice. This new project is supported by many big brands like Google, Novel, Red Hat, Ubuntu (Canonical). One of the most popular Linux flavor Ubuntu already declared that they will ship the future versions with LibreOffice.
According to few sources the LibreOffice i.e. Document Foundation is requesting Oracle to donate the OpenOffice.org trademark to them so that they can continue developing the same software with same name.
Oracle is concentrating more on their enterprise products than Open Source products. It will be interesting to see what the Oracle will do in near future.
Do Visit : DocumentFoundation.org for more information on LibreOffice.
Oct 4, 2010 at 4:14 pm
I can only pray that Oracle keeps OpenOffice competitive and freely available, with ever increasing features to stay ahead of what is offered commercially. This is one powerful product that must not be allowed to die.
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