The OpenOffice development community have today announced the launch of a new foundation – The Document Foundation – that will oversee, guide and develop a new fork of OpenOffice named ‘LibreOffice’.
The ‘fork’ seeks to build upon the last 10 years of work that OpenOffice.org and the OpenOffice.org Community have built with the hope that the hand of an independent foundation will guide the software to an even brighter future.
In contrary to OpenOffice.org it is expected that LibreOffice will no longer recommend the installation of non-open-source extensions.
‘LibreOffice to ship in Ubuntu’
‘The Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu’ said Mark Shuttleworth on the launch, describing office software a ‘critical component’ of the open source desktop.
Oracle, whose acquisition of Sun Microsystems last year made it owner of OpenOffice.org’s assets and branding hence the renaming, are not yet a member of The Document Foundation although have been invited to join.
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The OpenOffice.org community, hence forth to be known as “The Document Foundation”, have already made available a beta version of LibreOffice although users expecting a massive make-over already may be disappointed, with the team informing would-be beta users to expect to see old graphics, icons or websites throughout the software suite as the rebranding effort begins.
Thanks to Benjamin Gois