Oracle’s OpenOffice Move May Be Too Little, Too Late

It's unenviable to suppose surely what prompted Oracle to do an policy change on Friday and release OpenOffice.org to the community. After all, it was only a few short months ago that the company made top its intentions to keep control of the productivity suite itself, goading the creation of the Written document Foundation and its LibreOffice fork.

LibreOffice, accidentally, is thriving in the meantime, having standard support from the likes of Canonical and Red Lid and inclusion in their respective Linux distributions. Just a few hours subsequently Oracle's announcement, in fact, the Document Foundation released LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 1.

Withal, Oracle now plans to make a motion OpenOffice.org "to a purely community-based open seed project and to no thirster offer a commercial version," it wrote in its press passing.

Unreciprocated Questions

"Minded the breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications and the rapid evolution of physical computation technologies, we believe the OpenOffice.org project would cost best managed by an organization adjusted on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis," same Edward Screven, Oracle's chief corporate designer, in a statement. "We intend to begin working immediately with residential area members to further the continued success of Open Office."

Oracle will "continue to strongly support the adoption of open standards-based document formats, such A the Open Document Initialise (ODF)," Screven added.

It's not yet entirely clear what, exactly, Oracle plans to do with the package. Will it give it to the Papers Cornerstone, for instance? And will it retain rights to the OpenOffice brand? The answers to some questions remain to be seen, and Oracle has reportedly declined to comment almost them.

It certainly seems harmless to assume that the commercial message version of the software hasn't been merchandising too well–not well enough, anyway, to justify Oracle's continuing investment. Prophesier did, after all, bu come into the software and trademark through its acquisition of Solarise early high yr.

The World Has Stirred On

Either way, the interrogative sentence now appears to be World Health Organization, if anyone, will really want to call for OpenOffice and stay working on it at this stagecoach in the game.

Now that the residential area has fairly unanimously moved on to LibreOffice, in other words, Oracle's move could well be insufficient, too late for the computer software rooms. In a conversation this aurora, for instance, Canonic spokesman Gerry Carr told Maine that, while OpenOffice is standing available through its repositories, Ubuntu will continue to put up LibreOffice past default for the foreseeable future.

So, while it may be nice to see Oracle turn the software over to the community–whatever its motivations–IT's departure to be interesting to see where it goes from here. Now that we have LibreOffice, I'm just not sure on that point's a place for OpenOffice anymore.