A preemptive fork
OpenOffice.org — open source office suite acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999 from German StarDivision — was the reference choice for open source alternatives to Microsoft Office, with institutional adoption in several European PAs. January 2010: Oracle completes Sun acquisition. In subsequent months the OpenOffice.org community watches with growing concern Oracle’s behaviour toward open projects: Hudson (trademark dispute), MySQL (contested in acquisition), OpenSolaris (effective project shutdown in August 2010).
On 28 September 2010 the community announces the The Document Foundation (TDF), a new independent foundation, and the suite’s fork under the name LibreOffice. Oracle is invited to participate but declines. The fork includes most of the core team (Novell/SUSE, Red Hat, Canonical, Google, individual developers).
LibreOffice 3.3
LibreOffice 3.3 is released on 25 January 2011 as the first stable version. It unifies:
- OpenOffice.org 3.3 beta — starting base
- Go-oo — OpenOffice.org fork maintained by Novell from 2007 with substantial improvements (more faithful MS Office import/export, stability fixes, additional features)
- Patches accumulated by Linux distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian) not integrated upstream
LGPLv3+ licence for new contributions; legacy code remains under LGPLv3/MPL 1.1 dual licence.
Components
LibreOffice 3.3 includes OOo’s historical components:
- Writer — word processor
- Calc — spreadsheet
- Impress — presentations
- Base — database frontend
- Draw — vector diagrams
- Math — mathematical formula editor
Supported formats: native ODF (OpenDocument Format, ISO/IEC 26300), Microsoft Office (DOC/DOCX, XLS/XLSX, PPT/PPTX) in import/export with fidelity improved over OOo thanks to Go-oo work.
Governance
The The Document Foundation is born as a non-profit foundation, legally seated in Germany, structured to avoid the very risks that motivated the fork:
- Board of Directors elected by the community
- Membership open to individual contributors, not just corporate
- No corporate control — member companies (Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, Google) participate but do not govern
- Independent infrastructure (CVS/Git/Bugzilla/Mailing list)
The model will later influence other projects (OpenStack Foundation, Node.js Foundation).
Oracle → Apache
In April 2011 Oracle announces that OpenOffice.org will become an Apache project (process completed with donation in 2011-2012 and the Apache OpenOffice release in 2012). LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice proceed in parallel, but the trajectory is clear: LibreOffice attracts nearly all active developers, Apache OpenOffice declines over time.
Institutional adoption
LibreOffice is rapidly adopted by Linux distributions and European public administrations:
- Ubuntu 11.04 (April 2011), Fedora 15, openSUSE, Debian — LibreOffice as default
- City of Munich (LiMux project) — use in tens of thousands of workstations (the project will have complex political vicissitudes in subsequent years)
- French Gendarmerie — documented migration
- Italy — adoption in various regional and municipal PAs, supported by CAD reuse plan
The meaning
LibreOffice 3.3 represents a precautionary fork — the community acted preemptively, without waiting for explicit damage from Oracle. The choice proved correct: the independent foundation enabled more active development and more aggressive technical choices than Oracle would have tolerated.
From the Italian standpoint, LibreOffice was the main vector of ODF diffusion as a public exchange format, aligned with AgID Guidelines on open document formats published in the following decade. The mature open source alternative to Microsoft Office continues to be a strategic lever for Italian public administration.
References: LibreOffice 3.3 (25 January 2011). The Document Foundation (founded 28 September 2010, Germany). Fork from OpenOffice.org 3.3 beta + Go-oo. LGPLv3+ licence. ODF (ISO/IEC 26300).