LibreOffice: OpenOffice.org Liberated

Productivity Sauce

It has been a long time coming, but finally it happened: OpenOffice.org has been forked under the name of LibreOffice. The Document Foundation will oversee the development of LibreOffice. According to the press release, "The Document Foundation is the result of a collective effort by leading independent members of the former OpenOffice.org community, including several project leads and key members of the Community Council." Red Hat, Canonical, Google, and Novell are among the backers of The Document Foundation and the new fork.

The idea of creating an OpenOffice.org fork and creating an independent foundation is not new and it has been discussed several times by the OpenOffice.org community and developers outside Sun Microsystems, the previous steward of the OpenOffice.org project. Sun has been often criticized for the way it managed the project. But apparently the hassle of forking OpenOffice.org outweighed the benefits of such move. The acquisition of Sun by Oracle changed the situation. Despite the criticism, Sun was widely perceived as an open source-friendly company. Oracle has no open source cred to speak of, and the database giant remained vague about its plans for OpenOffice.org. So the decision to fork OpenOffice.org under the umbrella of The Document Foundation comes as no surprise. The good news is that the new initiative doesn't have to start from scratch. The Go-oo project ( a de facto fork of OpenOffice.org maintained by Novell) has laid down the foundation for the fork. Moreover, The Document Foundation is backed by heavy-weights of the open source world like Red Hat and Canonical, which ensures that the new project won't die on the vine. However, creating a fork means that the new project has to find and establish its own identity and position itself as a viable alternative to Oracle's OpenOffice.org. There are other challenges, too. Similar to OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice relies heavily on Java, and as such it remains vulnerable to potential legal attacks from Oracle which now owns the Java technology. Microsoft was also claiming at some point that OpenOffice.org violated several of the company's patents, and it may deem today's announcement a good opportunity to launch a legal offensive against LibreOffice. All in all, the new-born productivity suite may face a few serious challenges, but its birth is welcome news to all users and developers unhappy with how Sun and Oracle have managed the project.

A beta version of LibreOffice is available for download at the LibreOffice Web site. The current release is basically a rebranded version of Go-oo. For now, only RPM binaries are available for both the 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

According to the press release: "Oracle Corporation -- who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems -- has been warmly invited to become a contributor to the new Foundation."

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