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 watches
Oracle has not yet defined publicly its strategy for OpenOffice.org, but the pressure from a community that has moved to LibreOffice is pushing the company to decide what to do with the remaining code.
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 is bound to become the main vector of ODF diffusion as a public exchange format.
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).