> Later acquired by Sun if I remember correctly, then open sourced.
Sun named it OpenOffice. LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle acquired Sun. OpenOffice was subsequently donated to the Apache foundation.
Sun named it OpenOffice. LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle acquired Sun. OpenOffice was subsequently donated to the Apache foundation.
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.
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....
[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-let...
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.
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”
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...