ORACLE TURNS OVER OPENOFFICE TO COMMUNITY GROUP

Last year, the LibreOffice project split away from Oracle’s OpenOffice.org (OOo). More than 30 developers were part of the original exodus, and with backing from heavy hitters like Google, Canonical, Novell, and Red Hat The Document Foundation hit the ground running with its alternative to the already-alternative productive suite, LibreOffice. Those sponsors had previously lent their support to Oracle’s project, and eventually the defections would prove to be more than Oracle could cope with. It became virtually impossible for the company to continue maintaining OpenOffice. With LibreOffice now the default offering in Ubuntu 11.04 and a good number of smaller Linux distributions following suit, interest in OOo seems to be spiraling down the drain.

Fast forward to today, and Oracle has decided to wash its hands of OpenOffice (mostly). Control will be handed over to a community group, and Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven says Oracle will work with supporters in order “to further the continued success of Open Office.”

As Ars Technica points out, it’s little more than a symbolic gesture at this point since the bulk of the OOo community has already moved on and pledged support to the LibreOffice fork. There’s no word yet on whether Oracle will give up the OpenOffice.org branding, though it seems unlikely given that it refused to let the LibreOffice crew have it once already.

Screven does go on to state that Oracle will continue lending a hand with the adoption of standards-based, open formats like .ODF. That’s not a surprise considering Oracle’s history of involvement with open initiatives like Linux and MySQL.