It is time we had a 'LibreOffice'
A GNU/Linux distribution never misses to carry the OpenOffice in its repertoire. Its role in the ever-increasing popularity of GNU/Linux is also an undeniable fact. Maybe, for the same reason it also one of the most forked one and most of the forks are of proprietary nature. The latest being the one by IBM, called Lotus Symphony.
But then, why this happens in the case of OpenOffice? What I see is that the licenses used in OpenOffice permits such manipulation by some dubious companies which advocates free/open software. They abuse copyleft licenses to their advantage.
The issue with Go-OO is that it is badly influenced by Novell. In the name of interoperability, the dirty M$ technologies are infused to it by them. On the other hand, Sun's OpenOffice is a heavily branded one.
The Gnome Office didn't really take off, yet, and Koffice still has a long way to travel to be used by many people. So, IMHO, I think a fork of Openoffice based of Sun's OO , in the lines of GNU Icecat, would be a nice idea. Meanwhile, don't want to discredit the enormous amount of effort from the part of myriad developers behind OO and companies which promote Free/Libre software. I think both can co-exist like Firefox and Icecat do.
Libre, OpenOffice, Fork, GNU,
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New SUSE failures (one of which claimed serious), Go-OO imperils OpenOffice.org ...



