The LibreOffice Community ten years since the project's inception. Ten years ago, leading developers from OpenOffice.org a new nonprofit organization, The Document Foundation, to continue the development of the office suite as a project independent of Oracle, which does not require developers to transfer ownership rights to the code and makes decisions based on meritocratic principles.
The project was created a year after the acquisition of Sun Microsystems due to dissatisfaction with Oracle's strict control over development, which hindered collaboration with interested companies. In particular, Oracle practiced top-down management, imposed decisions, lacked transparency in management processes, and required signing agreements for the full transfer of rights to the code. The LibreOffice project was supported by nonprofit organizations such as the Free Software Foundation, Open Source Initiative (OSI), OASIS, and GNOME Foundation, as well as companies like Canonical, Credativ, Collabora, Google, Novell, and Red Hat. A year later, Oracle distanced itself from the development of OpenOffice.org and its code to the Apache Foundation.
Notably, in two weeks, on October 13, the OpenOffice.org office suite will celebrate its 20th anniversary. On October 13, 2000, Sun Microsystems released the source code of the StarOffice office suite under a free license, which was created in the early 1990s by Star Division. In 1999, Star Division was acquired by Sun Microsystems, which took one of the most significant steps in the history of open source software by transitioning StarOffice to the realm of free projects.
Additionally, it is worth noting that yesterday the GNU project turned 37 years old. On September 27, 1983, Richard Stallman project (Gnuâs Not Unix) aimed to develop system components for creating a free alternative to Unix, allowing complete independence from proprietary software. Under the auspices of GNU, a consortium of free projects has formed, moving toward a common goal and developed according to a unified ideology and philosophy. Initially, the project's central components were , development tools and user environment utilities, including a text editor, spreadsheet, command shell, and even a set of games. Currently, under GNU's umbrella, there are 396 free projects.
Source: opennet.ru
