OpenOffice Forked As LibreOffice
Today the OpenOffice community made a big decision to break away from Oracle and have formed The Document Foundation.
Development for OpenOffice has been going on form about a decade now under Sun Microsystem. However, after Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystem, the community have decided to fulfill the promise of independence mentioned in the original charter.
This means that the previous OpenOffice community will now be known as "The Document Foundation" and the software suite will be known as LibreOffice, for now. They have also invited Oracle to become a partner of the foundation and to donate the OpenOffice brand.
It is no surprise that this decision has gone down very well with Richard Stallman. This is what he said:
I'm very pleased that the Document Foundation will not recommend nonfree add-ons, since they are the main freedom problem of the current OpenOffice.org. I hope that the LibreOffice developers and the Oracle-employed developers of OpenOffice will be able to cooperate on development of the body of the code
Google, Novell, RedHat, Canonical, the GNOME Foundation and many others have already pledged their support for The Document Foundation.
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, has even said that they may ship LibreOffice in future Ubuntu releases.
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.
A beta version of LibreOffice is already available for download
You can view the press release here.