These are exciting days in opensource community. Adding to the excitement, The Open Office development community today announced the setting up of The Document Foundation which will fork (develop its own version from source code of ) Open Office. The foundation will be supported by Open-Source giants like Google, Red Hat, FSF, Canonical (sponsors of Ubuntu project ), and Novell ( Powerhouse driving the openSuse Project ). Oracle, the current owner of OpenOffice has also been invited to join the group. The team currently consists of some of the pioneering developers of OpenOffice itself.
A beta1 release of LibreOffice is also available for download.
Mark Shuttleworth, founder and major shareholder of Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, has declared: “Office productivity software is a critical component of the free software desktop, and the Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu. The Document Foundation’s stewardship of LibreOffice provides Ubuntu developers an effective forum for collaboration around the code that makes Ubuntu an effective solution for the desktop in office environments“.
Lets hope The Document Foundation can come up with an amazing product. [:)]
I’ve been using OpenOffice for who knows for how long, but this move seems kind of strange. Previously OpenOffice was backed up by Sun (which was acquired by Oracle), but who backs up LibreOffice? The developers. Well, it takes more than developers to create good products. I’m a bit confused..
In the world of open source, the development takes place in a community and not in office rooms. Oracle inherited OpenOffice when they bought off the Sun Microsystems. They did not have even a developer’s summit (which is almost a part of opensource culture) after the acquisition.
Clearly the Developer’s community needed a new momentum and direction. Google and Novell are going to drive The Document Foundation. I feel they are in safe hands.
Also its branding does not matter at all. None of the people who were working on the project have quit it. There is nothing to worry about.