Re: Was: Re: [school-discuss] Open Source CD distribution - OpenOffice riff

[LM <lmemsm@xxxxxxxxx>]

You can check the http://www.documentfoundation.org/ for more
information since that's the group that's developing LibreOffice.
From what I've read, when Oracle took over OpenOffice, some people
weren't happy with the new policies, so a lot of the main developers
left and started their own forked LibreOffice development project.
OpenOffice was eventually moved to the Apache License (which makes it
easier for closed source developers to contribute or reuse the
product). LibreOffice is under LGPL 3 and MPL.  The LibreOffice
project is also working on new features which will further separate
the two projects.  I also noticed when you download OpenOffice now,
they want a lot more personal information about who's using it.  Since
most of the lead developers from the OpenOffice project are now
working on LibreOffice, I'd personally much rather choose LibreOffice
over OpenOffice.  LibreOffice is available as a backport in Debian
squeeze and the LibreOffice project specifically wrote a portable app
version for distribution by the portableapps.com project.

> Could someone give me a recap of what when down with this? I'm a bit out of
> the loop.

The other interesting thing to watch play out is how Oracle will
handle Java and JRE licensing, distribution, etc.  There may be
similar issues with it as well.  I personally tend to try to avoid
programs that require .Net (Mono) or Java to run because of licensing
issues.  The runtime environments also take up a lot of disk space.
While Just In Time compilation to byte code is supposed to make these
things as fast any other compiled program, I usually notice some speed
issues too.

Sincerely,
Laura
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