After several months of tensions and controversy, Oracle is now announcing that it will be donating OpenOffice.org in its entirety to the Apache Software Foundation to be part of the group's incubator program. The move comes after Oracle's clear disinterest in the office suite along with some moves which hurt the community around it, determined many of the people involved with the project to create The Document Foundation and fork OpenOffice.org into LibreOffice.
"Donating OpenOffice.org to Apache gives this popular consumer software a mature, open, and well established infrastructure to continue well into the future," Oracle's Luke Kowalski said.
"The Apache Software Foundation's model makes it possible for commercial and individual volunteer contributors to collaborate on open source product development," he added.
It's certainly a good move from Oracle and one that makes sense and benefits everyone. IBM, which has a big interest in Open Office as well, encouraged Oracle to set the project free.
There are still some caveats though, while Oracle is indeed letting the community take over all Open Office assets and code, the way it's doing it is not ideal.
Apache has plenty of great projects under its wing and has been known to take over 'orphaned' ones, but it mostly focuses on server, networking or big data computing projects, not end user products like Open Office.
The Document Foundation, created to start working on the community fork of OpenOffice.org, which became LibreOffice, has welcomed the move, but said that there are still some issues to be solved.
The most obvious one is that there will now be two communities working on pretty much the same thing, which does not make too much sense.
"The step Oracle has taken today was no doubt taken in good faith, but does not appear to directly achieve this goal [of reuniting LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org]," Florian Effenberger of The Document Foundation
writes.
"The Apache community, which we respect enormously, has very different expectations and norms – licensing, membership and more – to the existing OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects," he explained one potential problem.
"We regret the missed opportunity but are committed to working with all active community members to devise the best possible future for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org," he said.
Already, the Apache Foundation and the Document Foundation are having some talks and we may see a reuniting of the two projects soon enough. Continuing with two community-driven projects would be unfortunate so a deal is likely, though the specifics are anyone's guess at this point.
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