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Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2011 13:34:15 -0400
From: Ernest Christley <echristley@nc.rr.com>
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Dale_R wrote:
>
>    BTW, Open Office was originally a freeware project of Sun Computer 
> - and Sun, IIRC, was bought by Oracle.  A lot of us were concerned 
> that Oracle would either do like they did to RDB and kill it, or make 
> new versions a profit center.  It looks like they've taken what might 
> be considered the "high road" (for the first time in their existence) 
> and donated it to the Apache development group, as an "open source" 
> project.  So ... future versions will almost certainly remain free.
>
> Best regards,
> Dale_R
> Cozy MKIV #497
> Ch. 13
>
OpenOffice was always open source.  It started life as branch off of 
Star Office which tried to make their money on support contracts, and 
which Sun eventually bought.  When Oracle bought Sun, there was some 
trepidation that Oracle would close up their branch of OpenOffice, so 
LibreOffice was branched off of OpenOffice.  Oracle has decided to play 
nice, so LibreOffice has been slowly dieing, with OpenOffice picking off 
the good parts.

Having had a huge amount of work that was rendered useless when the 
developer of the software abandoned it (ProDesktop, I'm talking to you), 
this is an issue I take seriously.  Let's face it, after 20 years of 
development, is there any sane reason to still be "innovating" 
incompatible ways to store information on how to put letters on a sheet 
of paper?  Microsoft comes out with a bloated and incompatible office 
file format every few years in a bid to force companies to upgrade.  
That is, have companies hand them another $500 in order for secretaries 
to type letters.  OpenOffice is free both as in free beer and as in a 
free beer recipe.  You don't have to worry about it disappearing, 
because anyone can compile the source code and start their own branch if 
Oracle decides to be silly.  The file format for storing your documents 
is also based on a published IEEE specification that anyone can write 
code to interpret and display.  You're not relying on a single vendor to 
be nice to you.