In an announcement today, Oracle announced that it would be discontinuing the well known OpenOffice suite which has been well known for being an open source alternative to Microsoft Office. This comes after a number of the more prominent members of the OpenOffice team forked the project in the form of LibreOffice with some major industry backing from Google and Red Hat amongst others.
For those who are unfamiliar with software development, a “fork” occurs when developers take a legal copy of the source code with the intention of creating a separate piece of software. This has happened quite a bit in the development of many Linux derivatives whilst another notable instance of forming took place with OpenSSH which was forked from the original version of SSH.
In this instance, it was clear that the community that actively supported OpenOffice were disappointed with the way Oracle was handling the project after acquiring Sun. Historically, OpenOffice has had issues with corporate involvement holding up progress and Oracle certainly made little to no effort in resolving any of these problems since the takeover. Understandably, this would do little to maintain community support or encourage it to flourish when it is continually pounded upon and roadblocked.
In essence, Oracle has been left with a lifeless shell of a project given that most of the major contributors have jumped ship to The Document Foundation. It does look like Oracle is going to handover control of the project to The Document Foundation but it looks like the horse has already bolted – the act would be too little, too late.
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