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A comment on LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab. Parent comment

Re:LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks ... by cookiengineer on Thursday February 13, 2025 @05:08PM (#43042031)
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.

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Re:LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks ... by ozim on Thursday February 13, 2025 @06:33PM (#43042852)
That’s the example how lawyers would manage open source.
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Re:LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks ... by bee_rider on Friday February 14, 2025 @12:19AM (#43045098)
It is a shame that the OpenOffice name can’t be applied to LibreOffice. OpenOffice was a much better name, imo.
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Re:LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks ... by yellowapple on Friday February 14, 2025 @03:44AM (#43046256)
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.
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Re:LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks ... by iforgotpassword on Friday February 14, 2025 @02:29AM (#43045826)
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being merged back into OO, instead we got that years-long confusion where non-tech people would download the horribly outdated OO and be like "wow this sucks imma go with MSO!"
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Re:LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks ... by cookiengineer on Friday February 14, 2025 @03:27AM (#43046155)
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....

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