Oracle OpenOffice, once part of Sun Microsystems, has long been the default desktop office suite on Linux systems. However, the takeover of Sun by Oracle has stroked fears that the popular open source office suite may be canceled sometime in the future.
For example, Oracle has released a cloud-based office suite called Oracle Cloud Office. If Oracle felt that it could not financially support two office suites, it may be in Oracle's best interest to terminate the OpenOffice project at some point in the near future On September 28, 2010, some developers from the OpenOffice project decided to move on to a new project called LibreOffice.
LibreOffice was born from the fears and animosity generated by Oracle's takeover of Sun.. It is a fork based upon OpenOffice beta 3.3 version. The main advantage of going to LibreOffice is that there is no more worry about Oracle killing the project, just like what happened with OpenSolaris when Oracle ceased supporting it.
Right now, there is no sign of Oracle abandoning OpenOffice since OpenOffice 3.3 is scheduled to be released shortly since it is already in release candidate status.
Ubuntu and LibreOffice
On January 20, 2011, Ubuntu daily builds started to include LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice during the alpha development testing. Ubuntu has since officially announced that it intends to switch to LibreOffice as of the Ubuntu 11.04 release (also known as Natty Narwhal), which is due to be released on April 28, 2011.
Fedora and LibreOffice
Fedora has also decided to move to LibreOffice as well. As of January 2011, Fedora stated that the implementation of LibreOffice is already complete and targeted for a May 10, 2011 release in the upcoming release of Fedora 15. Fedora even cited the demise of OpenSolaris as one of the reasons why the decision was made.
Novell openSUSE and LibreOffice
Novel openSUSE decided to choose LibreOffice as well. This was annoucned back on October 15, 2010. This was not a big surprise since many LibreOffice developers also work on the openSUSE project as well. The original release date of openSUSE with LibreOffice is expected to be delayed beyond March 10, 2011, making Ubuntu the first major Linux distribution to contain LibreOffice as the default office suite.
Despite these moves to LibreOffice, many developers and users are concerned that the open source software fragmentation that resulted due to Oracle's acquisition of Sun is not a good thing. Lots of duplicate effort is wasted instead of making a single product stronger. The same thing is happening with MySQL called MariaDB. However, the fate of Sun's most important technology, Java, has not yet been decided.
Copyright: John Wu
