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Oracle gives away Open Office to Apache |
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Oracle has decided to donate the open source office productivity suite, OpenOffice, which it inherited with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, to the Apache Foundation.  In a statement, Oracle Corporate Architecture Group chief Luke Kowalski said donating OpenOffice.org to Apache will provide it with “a mature, open, and well established infrastructure to continue well into the future” as the Foundation's model “makes it possible for commercial and individual volunteer contributors to collaborate on open source product development."Originally set up as an alternative to Microsoft's Office suite, OpenOffice.org is an open-source application suite comprising applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases. It has its origins as Star Office, coming into being around the turn of the century with the acquisition of StarDivision by Sun Microsystems. It was one of the key open source projects that Oracle acquired with its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010. "We welcome highly-focused, emerging projects from individual contributors, as well as those with robust developer communities, global user bases, and strong corporate backing," said ASF President Jim Jagielski in a blog post. "The ASF's organizational, legal, financial, and infrastructure support gives incubating projects the ability to provide valuable software to millions of users without having to worry about liability. Today's submission of the OpenOffice.org code base is testament to our track record for successfully incubating highly-established, well-respected projects such as Apache SpamAssassin and Apache Subversion." OpenOffice, as a project, was already troubled by Sun's copyright assignment policies and bureaucratic code review process. Oracle, after acquiring Sun, made numerous decisions either without consulting or in contravention to the council's recommendations and resultant disputes with the community saw the bulk of independent developers of the project branch out on their own to form The Document Foundation, which now creates a fork called LibreOffice. LibreOffice has since been backed by Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, the Open Source Initiative, the Free Software Foundation, and Google and is now distributed as the default office productivity suite on many open source operating systems such as Ubuntu. IBM, on the other hand, has decided to continue its commitment to the new OpenOffice.org code base submitted to The Apache Software Foundation Incubator by Oracle. The Big Blue said it would contribute staff resources to collaborate with the Apache community during the project's incubation period to further the Open Document Format standard, which it said would help facilitate the long term viability and new innovation for OpenOffice.org development in collaboration with the Apache community. In 2007, IBM introduced Lotus Symphony, IBM's no charge, on premise, office productivity suite based on the Open Document Format standard that is part of OpenOffice. IBM's said its contribution to incubating the OpenOffice.org code base at Apache will further the adoption of office productivity suite alternatives. |
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