Big Changes with OpenOffice
Bill Malchisky October 6 2010 11:00:00 PM
As Oracle is less than 100% committed to open source initiatives and now owns Sun's Java and OpenOffice product lines plus killed the open Solaris project this year, people in the open source community are concerned about the future of these popular offerings. Solution? Open source to the rescue! Enter LibreOffice. Created by a group of OpenOffice developers, these individuals decided to form the Document Foundation which is based around OpenOffice.org. In other words, it is the continuation of the OpenOffice project. The Document Foundation group will oversee LibreOffice's creation whose primary objective is to fork OpenOffice so that it will better adhere to the open and free software principles that the original project envisioned.
You might have initially thought, "Oh no, not another office suite?" Well, it turns out that Canonical is one of the main backers of the Document Foundation and already stated that they will use LibreOffice over OpenOffice in future releases. Google, Novell, and Red Hat are all listed as key supporters with the LibreOffice project too. Plus 23 multinational open source focused foundations including GNOME and NeoOffice also stepped-up to support the Document Foundation.
Upon providing the first stable and feature-rich release, although conjecture on my part, I think it is a safe bet that Novell's SuSE and RHEL Desktop plus Fedora would also adopt LibreOffice. The current beta is now available through the Document Foundation's Download site along with LibreOffice Release Notes which include known issues. They also offer a BitTorrent download option too.
The product runs on the following operating system compilations: GNU/Linux i386, GNU/Linux x64, Mac OS X, source code (tarball), and Windows.
If you'd like to keep up with the project updates and releases, then send an empty e-mail to this address. Exciting times lie ahead for OpenOffice. Now...how long till Lotus Symphony uses the LibreOffice core? Hrmm....stay tuned.
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