LibreOffice Is The New OpenOffice.org

[nanonyme]

They WANT to keep the name OpenOffice. They CAN'T keep the name because Oracle has a *trademark* on it. They are HOPING Oracle will donate that trademark to them so they CAN keep the name.

They could always keep the name if they contributed to Oracle's codebase instead of forking though and went with an Oracle-led project so your claim is not altogether true.

[nanonyme]

Pretty much the key thing here is the community wants to take more power than it ever has had even including the days when it was Sun pulling the strings.

[Plombo]

Right

Pretty much the key thing here is the community wants to take more power than it ever has had even including the days when it was Sun pulling the strings.

Oh, no! The evil OpenOffice.org community is making a grab for power at the expense of the righteous Oracle!

[nanonyme]

Oh, no! The evil OpenOffice.org community is making a grab for power at the expense of the righteous Oracle!

It's not about who's big and who's small or who's good and who's bad. It's about whether people are being practical or not. Killing off a known Office brand to spite Oracle is not being practical.

[Plombo]

It's not about who's big and who's small or who's good and who's bad. It's about whether people are being practical or not. Killing off a known Office brand to spite Oracle is not being practical.

Okay, that's a reasonable opinion. It's not the impression I got from that post, though.

[smitty3268]

It's not about who's big and who's small or who's good and who's bad. It's about whether people are being practical or not. Killing off a known Office brand to spite Oracle is not being practical.

I don't think anyone is doing it out of spite. There have been issues between the community and Sun for a long time, causing efforts like GO-Open Office. Now that Oracle has taken over, I don't think there was any spite, but just a sense that things were likely to get worse rather than better under Oracle. So it was a good time to actually get together and do something about it before that happened.

[BlackStar]

They could always keep the name if they contributed to Oracle's codebase instead of forking though and went with an Oracle-led project so your claim is not altogether true.

Sun (previously) and Oracle (now) require copyright assignment by contributors to OpenOffice. This allows them to close the source at any point without looking back. Add the fact that Oracle is extremely hostile to open-source software and it's no wonder that LibreOffice was born.

Note that LibreOffice does not require copyright assignment and it's backed by pretty much all major players in the Linux world. This is not a random fork from a random bloke but a coordinated effort to protect an important part of the ecosystem.

[KDesk]

no, it isn't

It comes from the Latin, liber

[Apopas]

Well, the problem in Spanish, and probably also in Italian and Portuguese at least, is that it sounds retarded, because it's like a mashup of an existing word, "libre", with a foreign one, with the added problem of the reversed order of the adjective. It sounds awful.

Maybe it's the first time I agree with yotambien.
In Greek even (despite that both words are foreign) it sounds crappy. For sure whoever chose that name, has a very very bad taste...

[yotambien]

Maybe it's the first time I agree with yotambien.
In Greek even (despite that both words are foreign) it sounds crappy. For sure whoever chose that name, has a very very bad taste...

Ah, short memory, Mr. Apopas. It's actually the SECOND (but I'm not going to look up the post : ). And I'm going to give you the third right now (oh, noes!): however horrible the new name sounds, this is a very good move. There weren't good vibrations coming from Oracle for OSS (like not at all). Even with Sun, OO's development wasn't ideal, with contributions finding it difficult to reach upstream, not only because of the copyright assignment. This empowers OO's community and hopefully it'll get more traction and support among the big players.