A year after the fork: LibreOffice is growing and going strong

Found on Ars Technica on Wednesday, 28 September 2011
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TDF and LibreOffice were originally founded in response to the long-standing governance problems that have historically afflicted OOo. Under Sun's leadership, bureaucratic barriers and concerns about the project's copyright assignment policy impeded participation in OOo development. Friction between Sun, independent community members, and other corporate contributors created an unhealthy environment for collaboration. The problems only worsened after Oracle's acquisition of Sun.

In April, after seeing OOo abandoned by many users and contributors, Oracle gave up the fight and made a token effort to spin off OOo as a community project. In a somewhat petty move, Oracle decided to hand off OOo to the Apache Software Foundation rather than TDF—preventing OOo from being reunited with its former community.

So much for Oracle's idea to control every aspect of an open source software and trying to squeeze money out of it. The developers have the freedom to refuse by simply creating a fork.