open office in another language?

[Ben Finney]

Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 00:17, Sean Wolfe <ether.joe at gmail.com> wrote:
> > hmm I didn't know this, nice to know. Yes, C++ is still enough
> > overhead that I wouldn't want to try extending it ... I bet the code
> > is a whole lot to try and grok.
> >
>
> When Apache got the LibreOffice project they heavily refactored the
> code. As a result, LO is considered less of a monstrosity to hack on
> than Open Office.

You're referring to the Document Foundation, the organisation behind
LibreOffice <URL:https://www.documentfoundation.org/>. The confusion is
understandable, since it's been actively fomented for years.

Apache have the code base named OpenOffice.org (which is why the
Document Foundation had no option but to re-name their project), but
that's not where the action is now for the office suite we know and
love. It's merely where Oracle pushed their officially blessed code
under a different license, though without the majority of developers and
without any free-software operating systems actually using it, the
writing is on the wall for that code.

Oracle are being actively confusing about the name, too. Not only did
they (like Sun before them) act so hostile to the OpenOffice.org project
that the LibreOffice fork resulted, they then chose not to bless that
fork with the OpenOffice name. They also didn't pass the name to Apache,
instead releasing another, different code dump with the OpenOffice name
for more confusion <URL:https://lwn.net/Articles/473355/>, undermining
the Apache *and* Document Foundation projects.

LibreOffice is the one with the large active developer community and the
healthy independent foundation and huge funding from dozens of
organisations and the refactored code base and a new major release and
several versions released in the past year and lots of improvements
every time and adoption by every major free-software operating system.

It's a shame that corporate politics resulted in this legacy of
confusion that needs untangling. The simple take-away is: OpenOffice is
dead, long live LibreOffice.

-- 
 \           “[W]hoever is able to make you absurd is able to make you |
  `\                                                unjust.” —Voltaire |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney