Or, as The Register characteristically puts it, “OpenOffice files Oracle divorce papers”.
This is a very interesting development, and the new LibreOffice project looks much more like a normal community-based open-source project than OpenOffice.org ever did, with its weird requirement that contributors surrendered their copyright to Sun (then Oracle). The purpose of that always seemed to me that it enabled Sun/Oracle, as the copyright holder, to skip around the viral nature of the GPL and strike deals with other corporations over the code base (so you won't see the all source code for IBM Lotus Symphony freely available, for example). Another consequence was that some useful work done by the Go-OOo project never found its way back into OpenOffice.org — now though we learn that “that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately”. In particular I hope this will see better support for OOXML in the future – surely a necessity if LibreOffice is ever to succeed in the substitution game.
One wrinkle is the “cease fire” agreed between Microsoft and Sun (and inherited by Oracle) in which OpenOffice appeared to be granted safety from Patent action by Microsoft. Presumably this will not apply to to the new LibreOffice project …
While this development seems like it might be very good news for open source office suites, it is very unfortunate that the brand has been fragmented with yet another new name for would-be users to get their heads round.
Trying to download the latest version of OpenOffice.org™ I typed "openoffice" into Bing, and was surprised to get back a page of results which did not contain the official OpenOffice.org site. Google however, returned it as the top result.
Hmm, maybe not specific enough. I try entering "openoffice.org" into Bing. Same thing. Google again returns the official OpenOffice.org site as the top result.
Curious now, I enter into "free office download" into Google and again get the OpenOffice.org Site. Performing this with Bing I'm given a page for Microsoft® Office™ downloads and add-ins.
Search neutrality? pah - these two search engines have a very different view of the web it seems!