Note that this story is only half complete.

Oracle stalled development, made the bugtrackers etc private, and kicked out all of the contributors and tried to commercialize the product at the time. The reason for Oracle "dumping" it to the Apache graveyard is that most of the "free" (as in unpaid) contributors switched sides to LibreOffice because of Oracle's hostile behavior towards the development community. And they donated OpenOffice because it was effectively a dead project for a couple of years.

There's probably still some contributor talks about it on one of the old CCC conferences on their media server.

If you want to learn about how to manage open source, Oracle's track record is a prime example of how not to.

That’s the example how lawyers would manage open source.

It is a shame that the OpenOffice name can’t be applied to LibreOffice. OpenOffice was a much better name, imo.

Now that it's in the Apache Foundation's hands, my hope is that OO and LO will make amends and merge back together, like what happened with OpenWRT and LEDE. Given how many years they've diverged that might not be possible from a technical standpoint, but at least from a branding standpoint it'd be an improvement.

Isn't there strong beef between the remaining OO maintainers and the LO folks? It basically prevented LO from just being merged back into OO, instead we got that years-long confusion where non-tech people would download the horribly outdated OO and be like "wow this sucks imma go with MSO!"

Yeah, I would assume that there's still beef between both parties, and I can kind of understand that. If you're getting a cease and desist letter because of some trademark bullshit for your open source forks... then I'd be pissed too. The way Oracle treated the developer community was pretty insane to be honest.

Some links for others to read-up:

Press Announcement for "Oracle Open Office" which wasn't open anymore:

- https://web.archive.org/web/20101217212955/https://www.oracl...

Oracle trying to upsell Standard Editions and Enterprise Editions:

- https://web.archive.org/web/20100924092655/http://www.oracle...

Announcement of the Document Foundation (Oct 2010, before Oracle's announcement in Dec 2010):

- https://web.archive.org/web/20101001004543/http://www.docume...

IBM being the reason that Oracle donates Open Office to Apache Foundation due to them pointing out to Oracle that their copyleft license agreement with Sun invalidates Oracle's proprietary claims:

- https://web.archive.org/web/20131207051759/http://www.h-onli...

- https://web.archive.org/web/20110603142320/http://www.zdnet....

> Sun named it OpenOffice.

Slightly more correct: Sun kept StarOffice as a commercial offering and also open sourced it under the name of OpenOffice.org in parallel. The .org was quite important to them in the name.

> LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle acquired Sun.

The actual forking happens earlier with a patch set living outside Sun and sponsored by some Linux distros for a while. After Oracle's acquisition however the foundation was built and the name LibreOffice was picked.

> The .org was quite important to them in the name.

Apparently because, in some country in which Sun did business, someone else had already trademarked “OpenOffice”, but Sun’s lawyers believed the addition of “.org” was enough to sidestep that trademark.

I think in many jurisdictions, if someone else already has legal claim to a trademark, sticking “.org” on the end may not be sufficient to escape infringement. But, maybe under the laws of whichever country this trademark existed in, it was. Or at least, so Sun’s lawyers believed-hence, they were quite insistent on including the “.org”

It is owned by a Dutch company that offers automation services: https://web.archive.org/web/20130823152257/http://www.openof...

Within Benelux, the company had an agreement with nl.openoffice.org where the latter would include a notice on their website to clarify that they were not affiliated with the trademark holder.

According to https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1372955 it was also used by Orange UK, but that happened after OpenOffice.org was released: https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/orange-laun...

The problem is that Apache Foundation is being stubborn[1] to admit the OpenOffice death, which distracts and prevents users from using so much better software (LibreOffice) that harms an open source image and ecosystem in general.

[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-let...

Yes, and now there are unfixed security issues in OpenOffice over a year old, so the ASF really, really should put it in the Attic ASAP. If more people in the FOSS world raise awareness about this, perhaps it will finally happen, so users become aware of maintained, fixed successor projects:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice#Security