On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Billie Walsh <bilwalsh@swbell.net> wrote:
On 11/01/2012 12:26 AM, Basil Chupin wrote:
I don't remember the reasoning, but why was OpenOffice dropped and replaced with LibreOffice?
What I read at the time was that Oracle already had their own office suite and weren't planning on continued development so some of the OO devs took the code, it was/is open source, and rebranded it Libre Office in order to continue with it's development. How much actual truth there is to that..................
Not much truth. In a nutshell.... Sun Microsystems was the main employer/developer of OpenOffice.org. There were several other big players including SuSE. The community was pushing to go with a foundation and to have more say/control. Sun resisted it for various reasons and things were left as is... Oracle came along and bought out Sun. No one really trusted Oracle (with good reason) and you could say that this lit a proverbial fire under the community to get the foundation going - something that had been simmering for several years. The code was forked to LibreOffice while Oracle was still making a mess of things (this happened long before Oracle sent OOo to Apache). Oracle decided to lay off the entire OOo team in Hamburg Germany and threw the OOo code over the fence at Apache. The guys at Apache were left with a HUGE job of sorting out the mess and trying to make OOo a viable project. SuSE put their development effort squarely behind LibreOffice as has pretty much all of the other bug players in the former OOo community. IBM is still active on the Apache OO side as are the few remaining developers who are not 100% LibreOffice focused. There is a group in Hamburg (mostly former OOo developers) still trying to keep the OOo ball rolling. This is the "lite" version of what happened. I was one of the guys in the mess as part of the former Sun OOo team in Hamburg, and had the "privilege" of watching it all unfold in person :-P Oracle did not then, and still do not have their "own" office suite. C. -- openSUSE 12.2 x86_64, KDE 4.9.2 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org