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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.
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