With Oracle taking over Sun micros systems, most of the users are sceptic about the future of the Openoffice suite given the not so well track record of Oracle corporation in the open source field. As the users, the developers are sceptic too. This is what we understand by the latest developments. Some of the developers from Openoffice team break away from the team and founded libre office. Execpt the name, they say all others remain the same.

BROffice, Google, Novell, Canonical and Red Hat are among the sponsors of LibreOffice. LibreOffice is developed under the umbrella of a European based non-profit to be named The Document Foundation. Seeing the list, it seems like its the end of road for OpenOffice. Though Oracle released some versions of OpenOffice after the acquisition of Sun and pledged to go with the project most of the users and developers were sceptic about that.

Significantly, Oracle has been invited to become a member of the new foundation and to "donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years". The Document Foundation identifies itself as follows:

It is an independent self-governing meritocratic Foundation, created by leading members of the OpenOffice.org Community.
It continues to build on the foundation of ten years' dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community.
It was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent Foundation brings out the best in contributors and will deliver the best software for users.

OpenOffice.org originated as StarOffice, an office suite developed by StarDivision and acquired by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The source code of the suite was released in July 2000 with the aim of reducing the dominant market share of Microsoft Office by providing a free and open alternative; later versions of StarOffice are based upon OpenOffice.org with additional proprietary components.

 

LibreOffice is available for GNU/Linux, Mac OSX, Windows.

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