Cloud Computing: OpenOffice.org Lives
December 23, 2011
The Apache Software Foundation, where Oracle sent OpenOffice in June after it adjured the stuff, said Tuesday that it will put out OpenOffice 3.4 in the first quarter whose code will all be under the Apache license, resolving lingering incompatibility issues.
It used what was ostensibly an open letter to the Open Document Format community to distance itself from the new German Team OpenOffice.com fork and its fund-raising attempts and warn it about misusing its trademark including "OpenOffice.org and all related marks."
It also said that given OpenOffice’s large ecosystem it’s "impossible to agree upon a single vision" so it’s not going to try and says it doesn’t "seek to be the only player. Instead we seek to offer a neutral and powerful collaboration opportunity." It talked about rising "above political, social and commercial differences" and claimed "Apache OpenOffice offers much more potential for OpenOffice.org than ‘just’ an end-user Microsoft Office replacement" but it’s unclear where it’s going with this happy talk…
It doesn’t seem to be bringing the breakaway Libre Office, supported by Google, Red Hat, SUSE and the Free Software Foundation, into the fold and Team OpenOffice.org put out a release candidate Wednesday based on OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 called White Label Office 3.3.1 that supposed to fix security issues and other problems and "serve as a starting point for creating the best possible version in collaboration with the users."