OpenOffice files Oracle divorce papers Open sourcers have seized control of the OpenOffice project and product and declared their independence from database giant Oracle. The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company. Oracle had been OpenOffice …
It says in the article, it's a temporary name.
"Office Libre" would be better, but perhaps vulnerable to a lawsuit from Microsoft. Which is probably the key. Now the project is out from under the corporate lawyer-shelter that was provided by Sun, it will have to tread much more carefully.
My guess is that the placeholder may have to be replaced by something not containing "Office" at all.
I'll start the suggestions ball rolling with "FreeDoc". At least it trips off the tongue OK.
Stelios can't trademark "Easy", but it doesn't stop him setting his lawyers on anyone who dares to trade as Easy anything. Not even if they were trading before EasyJet existed.
It costs money to defend a trademark against an infringement accusation. Money that a free project either doesn't have, or can better spend on other things.
When some people read "free", they think "low quality", and not "open". Also, despite the fact that plenty of people like me (and perhaps Paul Slater) have no ability with another language, it's sensible to be seen acknowledging the non-English speaking world in a product that seeks worldwide popularity.
"They'll probably need to charge for it "
From http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/ :
Q: What difference will The Document Foundation make to users of LibreOffice?
A: LibreOffice is The Document Foundation's reason for existence. We do not have and will not have a commercial product which receives preferential treatment. We only have one focus - delivering the best free office suite for our users - LibreOffice.
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This decision is a wise one given that Oracles policies seem to change on the whim of one man, much as Apples do.
With this instability it is hard to do business with these types of personality without catering to the personalities various mindsets.
Please re-read the article -- Oracle has not been a friend to Open Source. Also, note that this actual project, 'OpenOffice' cannot be referred to by the media as OpenOffice because that name is a legally owned trademark by another company. That's why it's actually named, "OpenOffice.org."
Of course there is nothing Oracle can do. The software's source code is freely available and anyone can use it to set up their own office suite, which is what has been done in this case. Oracle have now got a lame-duck software package because the main contributers have left and produced their own version.
At least for the Benelux there is a chance it can be called OpenOffice (not OpenOffice.org) depending on wheter these guys (http://www.openoffice.nl/merkenregistratie) can do something about it. They are the original trademark owners of the name OpenOffice in the Benelux. They had that name years before Sun was thinking of open sourcing star office.
Seeing as they still own the trademark and weren't going to give it to Oracle/Sun, they aren't going to give it to the new group. Seeing as it'll be problematic (and stupid) having the software called two different things depending on the location, it definitely won't ever be called OpenOffice.
Unfortunate that many of Sun's open projects are having to break away like this. But Oracle IS very quickly becoming the next closed-minded, closed-source micr0$haft. }:/
Considering the past actions/inactions of Oracle.. I'm very happy to see The Document Foundation break away from oracle. ;)
Will the domain name of the website change to reflect the organizations new name? So far, no news about any of this on the OpenOffice.org site.
That would be problematic.
OpenOffice is licensed under GPLv3 which confers patent protection, so Oracle cannot sue the producers/distributors/users of the LibreOffice fork.
VirtualBox, on the other hand, is licensed under GPLv2 which does not confer patent protection:
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/GPL
What do you know about marketing? It shows that we're finally at libre to develop those vital missing features that had been holding "Open" (snort!) Office back from mainstream adoption: built-in support for Klingon, and an Emacs look-and-feel.
There seemed to be a distinct lack of links in this article, so here's a couple:
http://www.documentfoundation.org/ - Web site of the new Document Foundation.
http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/ - Download page for LibreOffice. Note the lack of a final version - all the downloads are for the 3.3.0 beta 1 version. A shame they launched the fork without actually having a stable version to download (something missed by the article....).
BTW, am I the only one who doesn't like the LibreOffice name because it's a French word mixed in with an English one, which is very clumsy indeed for an office suite containing a word processor whose English spelling checker rejects the word "libre"...
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