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Comment by giamma | Hacker News Reader

I think the history recap is somewhat incomplete.

I believe that the death blow which lead to the fork LibreOffice was the lack of trust in Oracle commitment to Open Office and open source in general, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems.

Sun indeed had largely reduced its involvement in the project in the last years, and there was the "Symphony incident" [1]. The death blow was when Oracle arrived, started the trial with Google over Java/Android, inherited MySQL and almost killed it, inherited OpenOffice and the future did not look bright anymore [2, in German]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130927072255/https://lwn.net/A...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20131024094250/http://www.heise....

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At about the same Sun, Oracle, IBM et al were cooling on the idea of developing comprehensive office software suites (~2008–2012), online suites like Google Workspace and Zoho were arriving in force, as were supporting do-business-online-not-on-the-desktop tools like Wrike.

If the OpenOffice kerfuffles weren't sapping enough energy out of the ecosystem, that users could suddenly use free, no-install-ever, not-equivalent-but-still-fine online tools did the rest.

Used to be an enthusiastic OpenOffice and LibreOffice user and developer—not of the core tools, but as part of bigger document processing and publishing workflows. Even presented at the OpenOffice Conference in 2007 (Moit de gust, Barcelona!) But after Google Docs, Sheets, etc. ... have not needed OpenOffice or LibreOffice nor used them in anger for over a decade.

> I believe that the death blow which lead to the fork LibreOffice was the lack of trust in Oracle commitment to Open Office and open source in general, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems.

I mean... can you blame them? I would have forked too, if anything out of caution. The lawnmower has no feeling.

Both your links go to the same article.

Thank you for pointing out, I fixed the first link.

Since when has MySQL almost died? Oracle poured good commitment on it.

Well, my understanding is that right after Oracle acquired Sun it found itself with a free database engine it did not need because it would compete with its own "free" Oracle XE product offering.

There was a lot of uncertainty about the future of MySQL... The original authors forked MariaDB and MySQL for many months did not receive any update.

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